These Journal Times videos of Speaker Robin Vos in WI defending holding an election today are pretty remarkable.
"You are incredibly safe to go out," he says.https://t.co/sbmEcW6AL1 pic.twitter.com/xdOYP40BPe
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 7, 2020
Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thunderstorm with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 05m 13s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session again today via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.
On this day in 1970, the Milwaukee Brewers play their first game.
Recommended for reading in full —
Philip Rotner writes America Is Hostage to the Stories Trump Wants to Tell About Himself:
Trump’s narrative at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis was that by acting before anyone else to ban travel from China, when “everybody said, it’s too early, it’s too soon,” he had reduced U.S. COVID-19 cases to “a very small number.”
But every single thing about this narrative was false.
- There was never a travel ban, only restrictions with gaping exceptions that included Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and every American returning home from China.
- Trump did not act before everybody else.
- His travel restrictions were effective as of February 2. Dozens of countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, also issued travel restrictions in the first week of February, many of which were effective before February 2.
- Trump did not act contrary to the advice of government health care professionals. According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the restrictions were “the uniform recommendations of the career public health officials.”
- And Trump’s limited China travel restriction didn’t hold U.S. COVID-19 cases to a very small number. At most, it bought a little time, which Trump promptly squandered by inaction, resulting in more COVID-19 cases in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. (Though of course it’s possible that China has more cases and is lying about their numbers—justy as they’ve lied about nearly everything else concerning the pandemic they allowed to fester.)
But forget—just for a moment—about the dishonesty of Trump’s narrative and what it says about Trump’s character.
The real problem is that his false narrative shaped the actual, real-world action—or, more accurately, inaction—of the government in response to the crisis. And not just the federal government. Republican governors across the nation—not all of them, but enough to cost many, many lives—adopted Trump’s narrative and acted accordingly.
Alison Dirr reports Milwaukee has just 5 polling places for Tuesday’s election:
The City of Milwaukee on Friday announced five in-person voting centers for Tuesday’s election – just a fraction of the 180 polling sites that are usually open on election day.
Officials had said previously that they expected to have 10 to 12 voting sites, or possibly fewer, open for in-person voting citywide.
A severe shortage of poll workers has forced the city to decrease the number of polling locations. According to a statement from the city Friday, only 350 poll workers are scheduled to work the election, down from about 1,400 the city normally has.
The nightly ovation for hospital workers may be New York’s greatest performance:
more >> So Speaker Vos and Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald want Gov. Evers to allow an exception to the Safer at Home order for Easter Sunday services. (They’ve also included Passover in their request, but they’re either too ignorant or too dishonest to concede that Passover is commemorated traditionally in a home setting. It’s obviously a certain Christian voter they aim to beguile.)
One can put aside for a moment the suspicion that Vos & Fitzgerald simply want to portray Tony Evers – probably the most moderate Democratic governor in America – as somehow hostile to religion.
Instead, even when taking Vos & Fitzgerald as defenders of Christian liberty, one finds that their grasp is weak. The state’s largest Christian religious institution, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, for example, has already decided against in-church mass on Easter. Leading protestant denominations have said the same (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4.)
There is a clear scriptural injunction against testing God’s providence when it need not be tested (Deut. 6:16, Mt. 4:7). If Vos & Fitzgerald read more, perhaps they would speak less on this subject.
And yet, and yet — they have read (or understood) less of the religious tradition they claim to defend than Wisconsin’s prominent religious institutions.
As for a political constituency they aim to incite, well, in that selfish effort they’re more practiced. (Vos’s third wife, conservative pundit Michelle Litjens Vos, thinks the response to this pandemic is an “overreaction.” She’s offered her untrained medical opinions on Facebook, for those gullible enough to take her advice over that of America’s finest epidemiologists.)
Robin Vos & Scott Fitzgerald are, in this and so much else, scheming political men.
Nothing more.
Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a passing shower this afternoon, and a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.
On this day in 1865, the Union Army is victorious at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek.
Recommended for reading in full —
Sarah Kliff and Julie Bosman report Official Counts Understate the U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll:
A coroner in Indiana wanted to know if the coronavirus had killed a man in early March, but said that her health department denied a test. Paramedics in New York City say that many patients who died at home were never tested for the coronavirus, even if they showed telltale signs of infection.
In Virginia, a funeral director prepared the remains of three people after health workers cautioned her that they each had tested positive for the coronavirus. But only one of the three had the virus noted on the death certificate.
Across the United States, even as coronavirus deaths are being recorded in terrifying numbers — many hundreds each day — the true death toll is likely much higher.
More than 9,400 people with the coronavirus have been reported to have died in this country as of this weekend, but hospital officials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners say that official counts have failed to capture the true number of Americans dying in this pandemic. The undercount is a result of inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision-making from one state or county to the next.
Charles Bethea reports What the Coronavirus Is Doing to Rural Georgia (‘Pandemic hits a region that was already struggling to address its medical needs’):
more >>The hospital network’s [Phoebe Putney Health System’s] C.E.O., Scott Steiner, is monitoring supplies in real time. “Surgical gowns, we are three days from running out,” he told me on Tuesday. “N95s, we’re seven days. Surgical masks, the thinner ones, we’re at about six days. Face shields, we’re in good shape. Hand gel—we’ve been going through an incredible amount, but we think we have about ten days on hand.” He went on, “We’re constantly sourcing new products. New sources. Our traditional sources no longer have anything available and haven’t for two weeks.”
Hospital employees have begun sewing their own masks, “MacGyvering things up,” as Steiner put it. “We rolled that out yesterday morning,” he said. “That’s helped extend the life of our N95 masks. Had we not done that, we’d be out of N95 masks now.” (“I’ve almost likened it back to the war effort back in the day, when family members would help with munitions or whatever it took,” Black told me.) Since Tuesday, the hospital has produced twenty thousand fabric masks, allowing them to further stretch their supply of N95s and surgical masks, which Steiner expects will now last about two and three weeks, respectively. They’re down to six days of hand sanitizer and two days of face shields, he said in a follow-up call.“It’s impossible to predict what we’re going to get here and when,” Steiner explained. “Sometimes it comes on a skid from the state stockpile. We’re also sourcing items individually from certain vendors.”
Good morning.
Palm Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 12h 59m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1792, Pres. Washington first exercises a veto of federal legislation.
Recommended for reading in full —
D’Angelo Gore of FactCheck.org writes Trump Falsely Claims He Inherited ‘Empty’ Stockpile:
While the government does not publicize all of the contents of the repository, at the time Trump took office, the Strategic National Stockpile, as it is formally known, reportedly contained vast amounts of materials that state and local health officials could use during an emergency,including vaccines, antiviral drugs, ventilators and protective gear for doctors and nurses.
“The SNS was definitely not an empty shell,” Dr. Tara O’Toole, a former homeland security official during the Obama administration who is now executive vice president at the nonprofit strategic investment firm In-Q-Tel, told us in an email.
At least three times in the past week, however, Trump has sought to blame former President Barack Obama’s administration for the current state of the stockpile, which has been unable to meet the demand for additional supplies expected to be needed to treat people with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, or to protect the doctors and nurses caring for those patients.
But NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce was allowed to visit one facility in June 2016 — only months before Trump was inaugurated in January 2017. In her article about the warehouse she toured, she described the shelves as being the opposite of bare.
“A big American flag hangs from the ceiling, and shelves packed with stuff stand so tall that looking up makes me dizzy,” Greenfieldboyce wrote.
Conservative evangelical Michael Gerson writes We’ve officially witnessed the total failure of empathy in presidential leadership:
Someday presidential historians will fully explore the defects of heart and character that led Donald Trump, in the midst of an unprecedented national crisis threatening hundreds of thousands of deaths, to brag that the television ratings for his afternoon briefings rivaled the “Bachelor” finale or “Monday Night Football.” This is not mere pettiness. It is clinical solipsism. Exploiting this type of tragedy in the cause of personal vanity reveals Trump’s spirit to be a vast, trackless wasteland. Trump seems incapable of imagining and reflecting the fears, suffering and grief of his fellow citizens. We have witnessed the total failure of empathy in presidential leadership.
….
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fireside chats convinced people in the bread lines of the Great Depression that an aristocratic president had their back. Following the March on Selma in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress. He compared Selma to the sacrifices of the American Revolution and the Civil War. And he concluded: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” In that moment, Johnson assured the civil right protesters that the American “we” encompassed their cause and that the president himself would be their advocate.
The Origin of Bagel Bites and Hot Pockets:
more >>Karin Brulliard reports The next pandemic is already coming, unless humans change how we interact with wildlife, scientists say:
The new coronavirus, which has traversed the globe to infect more than 1 million people, began like so many pandemics and outbreaks before: inside an animal.
The virus’s original host was almost certainly a bat, scientists have said, as was the case with Ebola, SARS, MERS and lesser-known viruses such as Nipah and Marburg. HIV migrated to humans more than a century ago from a chimpanzee. Influenza A has jumped from wild birds to pigs to people. Rodents spread Lassa fever in West Africa.
But the problem is not the animals, according to scientists who study the zoonotic diseases that pass between animals and humans. It’s us.
Wild animals have always had viruses coursing through their bodies. But a global wildlife trade worth billions of dollars, agricultural intensification, deforestation and urbanization are bringing people closer to animals, giving their viruses more of what they need to infect us: opportunity. Most fail. Some succeed on small scales. Very few, like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, triumph, aided by a supremely interconnected human population that can transport a pathogen around the world on a jet in mere hours.
One might have titled this post necessary human changes, but sadly change is not necessary – it’s possible that people will imprudently continue as they have been, and inflict future pandemics on others. Change seems necessary only for those with a moral sense; the ignorant might continue with their destructive habits to the detriment of countless innocents across the globe.
It will not be enough to ban wet markets in exotic animals (note the distinction between wild & exotic and domesticated animals). A mere ban would not prevent some sellers from moving underground. (Prohibitionists often erroneously believe that if they ban a practice, it will disappear.) Instead, societies will have to choose, as a matter of widespread belief, against an easy connection to, and consumption of, exotic animals.
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a few scattered morning showers, and a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 12h 56m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, shortly after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, President Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.
Recommended for reading in full —
Shawn Boburg, Robert O’Harrow Jr., Neena Satija and Amy Goldstein report Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help:
On a Jan. 15 conference call, a leading scientist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assured local and state public health officials from across the nation that there would soon be a test to detect a mysterious virus spreading from China. Stephen Lindstrom told them the threat was remote and they may not need the test his team was developing “unless the scope gets much larger than we anticipate,” according to an email summarizing the call.
“We’re in good hands,” a public health official who participated in the call wrote in the email to colleagues.
Three weeks later, early on Feb. 8, one of the first CDC test kits arrived in a Federal Express package at a public health laboratory on the east side of Manhattan. By then, the virus had reached the United States, and the kits represented the government’s best hope for containing it while that was still possible.
For hours, lab technicians struggled to verify that the test worked. Each time, it fell short, producing untrustworthy results.
That night, they called their lab director, Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner in the New York City health department, to tell her it had failed. “Oh, s—,” she replied. “What are we going to do now?”
In the 21 days that followed, as Trump administration officials continued to rely on the flawed CDC test, many lab scientists eager to aid the faltering effort grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government’s actions, according to previously unreported email messages and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as exclusive interviews with scientists and officials involved.
CREW – Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington – Requests Records on Strategic National Stockpile Coronavirus Response:
The Trump administrations’ unequal responses to states in supplying medical equipment to fight the coronavirus raises questions of whether President Trump is biasing the Strategic National Stockpile’s distribution of supplies.
As the pandemic has grown, the Strategic National Stockpile has received an overwhelming number of requests for supplies, and the disparity in response to different states has been suspect at best. For example, Michigan—whose governor has been outspoken in her criticism of the federal response—has received far less from the stockpile than the state needs to combat the coronavirus, while Florida—whose governor has been praised by the president—received everything it requested. Additionally, HHS Secretary Azar reportedly anticipated the need before the coronavirus had spread to the U.S. and sought $2 billion to buy emergency medical equipment—a request OMB cut to $500 million in a supplemental budget request it sent to Congress.
CREW requested records on the FEMA and HHS criteria used to make distributions to states from the Strategic National Stockpile to address the coronavirus pandemic.
Connecticut National Guard Converts Sports Arena Into Covid-19 Field Hospital:
more >>
Updated with a longer – and so more revealing – video of Kushner’s vapidity.
When Jared Kushner is finished impairing America’s response to a pandemic, he’ll need something else to do.
Wisconsin still has the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, and in small Wisconsin towns like Whitewater one finds development hucksters, business leagues of landlords & bankers, self-described public relations experts, and assorted media relations types.
A platitudinous, lightweight man like Kushner would fit right in with such local groups. If anything, he’d probably be inspirational to them.
These groups should ring Kushner soon – he’s likely to be in high demand as a guest speaker among such organizations.
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with scattered showers, and a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 7:24 PM, for 12h 53m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, the Union Army captures the Confederate capital: “The brigade containing the 19th Wisconsin Infantry was the first to enter Richmond on the morning of April 3rd. Their regimental flag became the first to fly over the captured capital of the Confederacy when Colonel Samuel Vaughn planted it on Richmond City Hall.”
Recommended for reading in full —
and report Commander of confusion: Trump sows uncertainty and seeks to cast blame in coronavirus crisis:
In the three weeks since declaring the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, President Trump has delivered a dizzying array of rhetorical contortions, sowed confusion and repeatedly sought to cast blame on others.
History has never known a crisis response as strong as his own, Trump says — yet the self-described wartime president claims he is merely backup. He has faulted governors for acting too slowly and, as he did Thursday, has accused overwhelmed state and hospital officials of complaining too much and of hoarding supplies.
America is winning its war with the coronavirus, the president says — yet the death toll rises still, and in the best-case scenario more Americans will die than in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
The economy is the strongest ever and will rebound in no time, he says — yet stock markets have cratered and in the past two weeks a record 10 million people filed for unemployment insurance.
As Trump has sought to remake his public image from that of a skeptic of the pandemic’s danger to a savior forestalling catastrophe and protecting hundreds of thousands of people from a vicious contagion, he also has distorted the truth, making edits and creating illusions at many turns.
Jeremy Peters reports Alarm, Denial, Blame: The Pro-Trump Media’s Coronavirus Distortion:
Talk show hosts and prominent right-wing writers criticized other conservatives who took the threat seriously. “Drudge has a screaming headline,” Rush Limbaugh announced on Feb. 26, referring to Matt Drudge and his website. “Flight attendant working L.A.X. tests positive. Oh, my God, 58 cases! Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” For years, Mr. Limbaugh has encouraged his audience to be suspicious of science as one of his so-called Four Corners of Deceit, which also include government, academia and media.
On Feb. 27, Mr. Hannity opened his show in a rage. “The apocalypse is imminent and you’re going to all die, all of you in the next 48 hours. And it’s all President Trump’s fault,” he said, adding, “Or at least that’s what the media mob and the Democratic extreme radical socialist party would like you to think.” His program would be one of many platforms with large audiences of conservatives — 5.6 million people watched Mr. Hannity interview the president on Fox last week — to misleadingly highlight statistics on deaths from the seasonal flu as a comparison.
On Feb. 28, Mr. Limbaugh read from an article from The Western Journal, a website that was blacklisted by Apple News last year for promoting articles Apple determined were “overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community.”
An ancient Antarctic rainforest:
more >>