FREE WHITEWATER

Frontline‘s Covering Coronavirus: A Tale of Two Washingtons

What the feud between President Trump and Washington Gov. Inslee reveals about federal-state tensions in the coronavirus fight. In his conversation with Gov. Inslee, FRONTLINE correspondent Miles O’Brien discovers that “what should be a partnership with the federal government is like this hostile relationship.”

Inslee describes a scenario in which states are left competing with each other for scarce resources: “We are searching the world for every potential warehouse that has any of this personal protective equipment… and states are bidding against one another,” he tells O’Brien. “It would be much more efficient, economically and otherwise, if the federal government was playing a more vigorous role.”

Listen to the podcast now, and stay tuned for O’Brien’s documentary Coronavirus Pandemic, premiering April 21, which explores the differing responses to the coronavirus outbreak in Washington D.C. and Washington State — where the first known U.S. case of COVID-19 was detected.

Daily Bread for 4.17.20

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 33m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 26.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via teleconference at 3:30 PM.

On this day in 1970, the ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Joel Rose reports Carol D. LeonnigElizabeth Dwoskin, and John Hudson report As U.S. discouraged mask use for public, White House team raced to secure face coverings from Taiwan for senior staff:

The urgent appeal to Taiwan on March 14 highlights a stark conflict between the Trump administration’s stance then on the use of masks and the race behind the scenes to obtain them for key White House personnel. At the time, the U.S. government was discouraging the public from wearing masks, saying that healthy people didn’t need them and that the gear should be saved for front-line medical workers most at risk of infection.

Because of that guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House was not issuing masks to its staff, according to two officials. But inside the NSC, a top deputy was convinced that face coverings should be used more broadly to protect both his team and the public at large.

The resulting arrangement he struck with Taipei made thousands of masks available for White House staff use two weeks before the administration reversed policy and advised that citizens should broadly begin wearing cloth face coverings in public.

The episode reveals how some top White House officials were pushing for a wider embrace of masks early on to help slow the infection’s spread.

President Trump resisted endorsing such guidance, the subject of sharp debate between his advisers and government health experts, and even after doing so, declared that he would not wear one himself.

 David Shribman writes Once a great laboratory, Wisconsin is now a haven for the politics of resentment and revenge:

And so a state where sober and serious-minded voters once strolled to polling places in tidy towns with a sense of duty, a feeling of responsibility and an air of rural rectitude, instead this week found itself convulsed in tumult, conducting perhaps the most physically perilous election in American history, with voters practicing both social distancing and social protest in hopelessly lengthy lines.

The entire dark comedy may have been summarized by a woman in a homemade mask standing in her puffer vest in a line extended by social-distancing protocols. She held a handmade sign proclaiming the only thing Wisconsinites agreed upon this week: ”This is Ridiculous.”

The state’s 2011 redistricting gave the Republicans firm control over the state legislature in a period when Scott Walker, who served as governor from 2011 to last year, had introduced a muscular form of Republicanism into the state; the new GOP battled government-worker unions and liberal redoubts in the huge public university in Madison. Indeed, the University of Wisconsin once was so much a part of the state’s political culture that links between it and the state government were known nationally as the‘’Wisconsin Idea,’’ where knowledge stretched to the borders of the state.

Is it a dog, is it a plane? Dog soars over a farm gate with his tail spinning like a propeller:


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Daily Bread for 4.16.20

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:39 PM, for 13h 30m 25s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1963, Dr. King writes pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Joel Rose reports A ‘War’ For Medical Supplies: States Say FEMA Wins By Poaching Orders

State and local officials are caught up in a fierce global competition for masks, gowns, ventilators and other medical supplies. The White House has told them not to rely on the federal government because it’s just a “backup,” and to find their own gear.

At the same time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is keeping a tight grip on critical medical supplies leaving the country – and coming in from overseas. This new system is disrupting an emergency supply chain that’s been in place for decades.

And now governors, hospitals and local officials say the federal government is big-footing them by poaching the supplies they ordered.

“We had a good lead with a manufacturer on vents, and they got swept up by FEMA, so we’re not getting them,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, in an interview with CNN this month.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, says his state placed an order for millions of N-95 respirator masks — but never got them. “We had our 3 million masks that we had ordered … confiscated in the port in New York,” Baker said at a press conference this month.

After federal officials took those masks, Baker says Massachusetts scrambled to arrange a new shipment from China. But this time, state officials used a private plane that belongs to the New England Patriots.

So where did that first order of masks end up?

“I don’t have any specific information on that,” said Captain W. Russell Webster, who is in charge of FEMA’s coronavirus response in New England, in an interview with member station WBUR.

Robert Faturechi reports Senator Richard Burr Sold D.C. Townhouse to Donor at a Rich Price:

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, has come under fire in recent weeks for unloading stock holdings right before the market crashed on fears of coronavirus and for a timely sale of shares in an obscure Dutch fertilizer company.

Now the North Carolina Republican’s 2017 sale of his Washington, D.C., home to a group led by a donor and powerful lobbyist who had business before Burr’s committee is raising additional ethical questions.

Burr sold the small townhouse, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, for what, by some estimates, was an above market price — $900,000 — to a team led by lobbyist John Green. That is tens of thousands of dollars above some estimates of the property’s value by tax assessors, a real estate website and a local real estate agent. The sale was done off-market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.

Green is a longtime donor to Burr’s political campaigns and has co-hosted at least one fundraiser for him. In 2017, the year of the sale, Green lobbied on behalf of a stream of clients with business before Burr’s committees.

Dogs Enjoying Steak

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District Administrator Search Community Forums: 4.21 and 4.22

The Whitewater Unified School District, the public school district for Whitewater and several smaller towns nearby, is searching for a new district administrator. There will be community forums via videoconferencing with the two finalists, Dr. Caroline Pate-Hefty, Executive Director of Student Services for District #89 in Melrose Park, Illinois, and Ms. Kellie Bohn, Superintendent for Genoa City Jt. 2 School District in Genoa City, Wisconsin. The electronic forums are scheduled for the evenings of April 21st and April 22nd.

The district’s announcement appears below —

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/WUSD-DA-Finalists.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

 

 

 

Daily Bread for 4.15.20

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 6:10 AM and sunset 7:38 PM, for 13h 27m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 44.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets tonight at 6:30 PM briefly in open session, then entering closed session until returning in open session at 7:00 PM. The 7:00 PM open session will be available via Zoom Online.

On this day in 1861, Wisconsin receives a call to send soldiers: “Governor Alexander W. Randall received a telegram from Washington requesting one regiment of 780 men to serve the Union for three months in the Civil War. Within a week ten companies, from Kenosha, Beloit, Horican, Fond du Lac, Madison, and Milwaukee were ready.”

Recommended for reading in full —

 Emily Badger reports Cities That Went All In on Social Distancing in 1918 Emerged Stronger for It (‘They had lower mortality rates from the influenza pandemic. But their economies also appeared to fare better’):

As the first local influenza deaths were counted in the fall of 1918, officials in Minneapolis moved quickly — more aggressively than even state health officials thought was wise — and shut down the city. They closed schools, churches, theaters and pool halls, effective midnight on Oct. 12.

Across the Mississippi River, St. Paul remained largely open into November, with its leaders confident they had the epidemic under control. Fully three weeks after Minneapolis — with The St. Paul Pioneer Press pleading “In Heaven’s Name Do Something!” — St. Paul ordered sweeping closures, too.

Both cities, relative to the worst-hit parts of the country, escaped steep death tolls. But the mortality rate in Minneapolis was considerably lower than in St. Paul. And as researchers today look back on those interventions, it appears the economy in Minneapolis emerged stronger, too.

The comparison between the Twin Cities is instructive today not just for what it tells us about the health benefits of social distancing, but also for what it says about any economic costs that come with it.

In 1918, cities that committed earlier and longer to interventions like banning public gatherings and closing schools didn’t fare worse for disrupting their economies for longer. Many of those cities actually had relatively larger gains in manufacturing employment, manufacturing output and bank assets in 1919 and into the next few years, according to a new study from researchers at the Federal Reserve and M.I.T. This is particularly clear among Western cities that had more time to prepare for a pandemic that hit the East Coast first.

Eswar Prasad and Ethan Wu write Anatomy of the coronavirus collapse:

But there is good reason to worry that the world economy is heading into a deep, protracted recession. Much will depend on the pandemic’s trajectory and whether policymakers’ responses are sufficient to contain the damage while rebuilding consumer and business confidence.

But a rapid recovery seems highly unlikely. Demand has been ravaged, there have been extensive disruptions to manufacturing supply chains, and a financial crisis is already underway. Unlike the 2008-09 crash, which was triggered by liquidity shortages in financial markets, the COVID-19 crisis involves fundamental solvency issues for firms and industries well beyond the financial sector.

Institutions Look for Creative Solutions to Ventilator Shortage:

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Local Voting & Voting Locally in Whitewater

The spring election, conducted during a pandemic, is now behind Wisconsin. There’s little question that statewide, it was a good night for Jill Karofsky and Lisa Neubauer. (I supported both candidates.)

Whitewater – the city proper – also supported these candidates. A majority of the city’s voters did, in fact, prefer these voters even while campus was out-of-session. There have been few elections where the campus is out-of-session, so it is notable that the city’s voters tended left without a full student population that old-timers feel is the source of left-of-center voting.

There is, however, a significant difference – key to understanding Whitewater’s local politics – between how the city votes for national or statewide candidates and how the city votes for local candidates.

It’s true that local races are non-partisan, but they are not – and by law need not be – non-ideological. There is a difference of kind between a partisan designation (e,g., Republican, Democrat, etc.) and an ideological one (left, center, right, libertarian, etc.).

At the local level, Whitewater’s preferred candidates are not anywhere so progressive ideologically as the candidates the city routinely selects for statewide or national offices.

At the local level, Whitewater mostly advances candidates who outwardly espouse a kind of boosterism.

Boosterism is an ideology that accentuates the positive regardless of actual conditions. It is close to a secular religion for (too) many local figures, and is very much the dominant ethos of Old Whitewater. It ignores the disabled and the disadvantaged for the sake of a happy tale. In this, it manifests sins of commission and omission.

Boosterism is an ideology narrow in thought and small of heart.

In Whitewater, this preference for happy talk has allowed smarmy rightwing development hucksters – landlords, bankers, a public relations man or two – to push their junk economics on the city.

The officeholders of the city are – almost to a person – servile in the face of these sort of men. Heads down, eyes averted, like children being scolded whenever a business-type with a head full of bad economics shows up.

So deep is this hold that these men look upon a public institution like the Community Development Authority as if their own private clubhouse.

Even after the Great Recession, most – but not all – of Whitewater’s officeholders have adhered to boosterism as a paradigm. There is the sadness of Whitewater – even in the worst times – the city’s leaders mostly held to this mendaciously ignorant depiction of the city.

What a shame, truly, that men and women who as children graduated from crawling to walking would so quickly, and so needlessly, resume their former means of locomotion in the presence of a few selfish schemers.

Left, center, and right do not matter locally in a community if boosterism is a faith, puffery is a liturgy, and public relations is a sacred tradition.

There will only be a New Whitewater – a prosperous and well-ordered community – when the city breaks locally, outwardly, and decisively from this false faith.

Daily Bread for 4.14.20

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see a bit of rain or snow with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:37 PM, for 13h 24m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 54.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1865, Pres. Lincoln is shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth; Lincoln passes away the next day.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Jonathan V. Last writes How High Is the Real COVID-19 Death Toll?:

Most localities seem to be ascribing deaths to COVID-19 only in the presence of a positive test. And since we’ve had a persistent shortage of tests, many patients in serious condition are admitted without being tested, since they are presumed positive cases and the test can be better used on someone else.

Also we have home-deaths, in which case no testing is performed.

This problem is not unique to America, and has been observed in other poorly-governed countries which were unprepared for the disease, such as Italy.

We’re now starting to get a sense of just how big this group of uncounted COVID-19 deaths might be.
….

Since 2000, the annual monthly variance in deaths [in New York City] has stayed within a very small and relatively stable band: within a few hundred, plus or minus, the monthly average. There’s one big outlier, of course, for September 2001.

Now look at the 30-day period ending on April 4, 2020: 5,330 more deaths than the monthly average. And of those, only 3,350 have been officially ascribed to COVID-19.

So what about those other 1,980 dead New Yorkers?

There are a few theoretical possibilities:

(1) As we saw in Bergamo, the official numbers undercount the real COVID-19 toll by a very large percentage: In this case, it’s a 60 percent increase over the official number.

(2) A large number of non-COVID-19 deaths occurred among people who suffered other medical events—strokes, overdoses, undiagnosed aggressive cancers—because they could not get access to healthcare because the virus has overwhelmed hospitals.

(3) New York just happened to have the unluckiest month in modern history at the exact same time that a pandemic was ravaging the city.

Like I said, anything is possible. But if I was going to bet $100, I’d put it on (1).

(Emphasis added.)

William J. Broad reports Putin’s Long War Against American Science (‘A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses’):

On Feb. 3, soon after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, an obscure Twitter account in Moscow began retweeting an American blog. It said the pathogen was a germ weapon designed to incapacitate and kill. The headline called the evidence “irrefutable” even though top scientists had already debunked that claim and declared the novel virus to be natural.

As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information — an “infodemic,” according to the World Health Organization.Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.

Idris Elba reads ‘Don’t Quit’:

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Distracted

Trump says his own impeachment “distracted” him from the #Coronavirus response. Let’s be clear: He was never distracted. He just didn’t care.

(Note well: The loss of life is already far greater than the number cited in the video.)

Foxconn’s ‘Innovation’ Centers: Still Empty a Year Later

 Over at the national tech website The Verge, Nilay Patel reminds that a year later, Foxconn has still done nothing with the ‘innovation’ centers that foreign corporation promised it would open around the state. They’re still empty: 

 

See FOXCONN’S BUILDINGS IN WISCONSIN ARE STILL EMPTY, ONE YEAR LATER.

In Whitewater, the ‘Greater Whitewater’ Committee – the business league of a few local men (a landlord and a public relations man, mostly) – touted Foxconn at one of their meetings. See A Sham News Story on Foxconn.

One can make lemonade from Foxconn’s lemons. If the promoters of corporate welfare are looking for a new clubhouse for their organization, they need only contact Foxconn’s Taiwanese ownership.

There’s plenty of available space, suitable for immediate occupancy.

Previously: 10 Key Articles About FoxconnFoxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family HomesFoxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair BudgetThe Man Behind the Foxconn ProjectA Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the TroughEven Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) WorkforceFoxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace ConditionsFoxconn’s Bait & SwitchFoxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying JobsThe Next Guest SpeakerTrump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away“Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & FraudFoxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition,  Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re StupidLost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn,’ Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…, The Amazon-New York Deal, Like the Foxconn Deal, Was Bad Policy, Foxconn Roundup, Foxconn: The Roads to Nowhere, Foxconn: Evidence of Bad Policy Judgment, Foxconn: Behind Those Headlines, Foxconn: On Shaky Ground, Literally, Foxconn: Heckuva Supply Chain They Have There…, Foxconn: Still Empty, and the Chairman of the Board Needs a Nap, Foxconn: Cleanup on Aisle 4, Foxconn: The Closer One Gets, The Worse It Is, Foxconn Confirm Gov. Evers’s Claim of a Renegotiation DiscussionAmerica’s Best Know Better, Despite Denials, Foxconn’s Empty Buildings Are Still Empty, Right on Schedule – A Foxconn Delay, Foxconn: Reality as a (Predictable) Disappointment, Town Residents Claim Trump’s Foxconn Factory Deal Failed Them, Foxconn: Independent Study Confirms Project is Beyond Repair, It Shouldn’t, Foxconn: Wrecking Ordinary Lives for Nothing, Hey, Wisconsin, How About an Airport-Coffee Robot?, Be Patient, UW-Madison: Only $99,300,000.00 to Go!, Foxconn: First In, Now Out, Foxconn on the Same Day: Yes…um, just kidding, we mean no, Foxconn: ‘Innovation Centers’ Gone in a Puff of Smoke, Foxconn: Worse Than Nothing, Foxconn: State of Wisconsin Demands Accountability, Foreign Corporation Stalls, Foxconn Notices the Noticeable, and Journal Sentinel’s Rick Romell Reports the Obvious about Foxconn Project.