Today in 1967, John Lennon took his Rolls–Royce to J.P. Fallon Ltd. in Surrey, England, to see if it could paint the car in psychedelic colors. The result three months later:
The number one single today in 1973:
Michael Smith is …
Posting this as a gigantic “what if” question.The fact that I now personally know two people who fell ill and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 from two different states TRIGGERED me.They both reported feeling bad for about 3-4 days, were really ill for around 5-6 (said it was like the worst flu they have ever had), took about another 5 days or so to feel back to almost normal – roughly a 15 day cycle. Both had flu shots but other than that, had nothing other than natural defenses. Thankfully, those were enough to keep them out of the hospital.
So that gave rise to the “what if”.
What if, like HIV, there is no therapy of vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 viral infection for two or three decades in the future?
Hell, the common cold doesn’t kill us – thank God — but we haven’t figured out how to stop it yet, this variant of the coronavirus might be the same.
The current assumption is that the pandemic would be far worse without the “radical steps” that have been taken — but would it? How do we know?
The reason “flattening the curve” is important is not that self-isolation and social distancing will arrest the virus, it only provides a degree of relief from over-stressing hospitals, medical staff and the supply of medical equipment — so we aren’t fighting the virus with these radical steps, we are fighting scarcity. We’re managing an economic reality, not a medical one.
As many have pointed out, self-isolation, social distancing, masks and medical grade gloves only deprive the virus of fresh skin-covered meat sacks to infect, the virus won’t just die from loneliness.
If NY Governor Nipple Piercings is to be believed, only one in five make it off the vent once they go on, so you have to wonder if putting people on vents is just so we can say we did everything we could even though we know that four out of five are likely too sick to make it.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t – I know if it was my family, I would want every measure taken until running out of options — but there comes a time when we learn what conditions can be reversed and which cannot. We do it all the time with cancer.
If therapies or a vaccine aren’t on the near-term horizon, continuing to isolate will only destroy the economy — and it would seem that the same number of people will die, albeit over a longer period of time.
Like I have said, there are no good answers at present, only less bad ones.
Today in 1956, the CBS Radio Network premiered Alan Freed’s “Rock and Roll Dance Party.”
The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1962, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met someone who called himself Elmo Lewis. His real name was Brian Jones.
Rick Esenberg:
A few observations on the election mess here in Wisconsin:
There is reason to be concerned about in-person voting but it’s not clear how much risk voting will actually present. Much of the rhetoric assumes that voters and poll workers will be facing the equivalent of a free fire zone. That’s understandable. Fear of the virus has lead all of us to feel that it is everywhere. But it’s not true. Unless the virus is largely asymptomatic or causes only mild illness, very few people are infected. There some risk in going anywhere but we’ve decided that risk is worth assuming for a variety of reasons. It’s not clear that the line must stop before voting. It is not clear that the polling places will – or have to be – more crowded than the Sendik’s grocery store I was in twice this week in which it was impossible to maintain social distancing. On the one hand, I have rarely been in a polling place for a spring election that has as many people as the typical grocery store has had during the past week. On the other hand, consolidation of polling places will presumably result in more traffic at each one. How much is unclear. Absentee ballot requests are approaching the average turnout in a typical spring election. While presidential preference primaries increase turnout, I don’t know how likely that is given that the Democrats’ race is over and there seems to be no campaign here. Having in-person voting clearly involves contact without social distancing. How much more is unclear. I guess we’ll see.
Having said that, a reasonable case could be made for a delay (although there are some problems with that case). The problem is that changing the rules in midstream is likely to disadvantage one side or the other. Republicans don’t want to go all-mail voting because they seem to believe that their voters are less likely to vote by mail and because they are concerned about voter fraud. Absentee voting creates more opportunities for fraud, particularly if not accompanied by appropriate safeguards – which the Democrats have been seeking to remove. Democrats, on the other hand, are concerned that fear of the virus is strongest in places where they are strong and that are concerned that ballot security measures discourage their voters who they believe will not or cannot navigate them. Our current election rules are a product of where the conflict between those competing views has come out. Using the virus as a way to adjust the balance that current law reflects was always going to assure that no change in the election could take place. If Democrats and Republicans wanted to delay the election, they should have agreed to do that and only that. They should have agreed that the election would be held in, say, early June without changing any other aspect of the law including the opportunity for in-person voting. Since there was apparently no appetite for that on either side – or guarantee that the situation in June would be much different, it didn’t happen.
But a delay would have presented problems. Many local offices have terms expiring in April. While the legislature could have extended the terms, it could not create incumbents to hold over where such incumbents did not exist. Legislators could hope that, for example, Chris Abele would stay on as County Executive in Milwaukee, but could not make him do it. Delaying the election was going to create vacancies during a challenging time for local government. In addition, asking local units of government to safeguard a million ballots for two months without having them misplaced, mishandled or tampered with may have been too much to expect.
The order entered by Judge Conley on Thursday accomplishes a de facto extension of the election by enjoining the requirement in state law that absentee ballots be received by 8 pm on Tuesday while not requiring that they be postmarked by election day. This extends the voting by a week, making election day April 13 for those who requested absentee ballots. While he later amended the order to prevent WEC from disclosing unofficial results, it does appear to apply to everyone who will be privy to them and, of course, will not prevent them from leaking. We are now looking at a situation where both sides will ballot harvest after voting is over and may know what they “need.” Information regarding who has returned a ballot may not be uniformly available. If the election is close, litigation – and suspicion – may break out all over.
May?
Richard Nixon’s attack dog, Spiro Agnew, described the late 1960s news media as ”nattering nabobs of negatives.”
Five decades later, former presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer:
If President Trump is a wartime president, does that make Washington reporters wartime correspondents?
Even before coronavirus, I often wondered if today’s press corps had covered the allied landing at D-Day in June 1944, if their stories would have led with the disastrous American landing on Omaha Beach, the paratroopers who dropped miles away from their targets and the submersible tanks that sunk to the bottom of the English Channel before ever touching land.The media’s job is to cover all sides of a story. They are not.Indeed, if each of these genuine military setbacks had been the lead story, the American people might have lost the will to fight the rest of the war.
Which brings me to today’s press corps.
Since Vietnam and Watergate, the Washington press corps has earned its chops by taking on those in power, relentlessly questioning what they are told, particularly when they’re told it by a Republican President, and doing their best to expose mistakes, misstatements and problems. When something goes wrong, the press shines a light on it.
“It’s not news when an airplane lands” goes the old journalistic saw. “It’s only news when a plane crashes.”
This helps explains NBC reporter Peter Alexander’s now infamous clash with President Trump over the efficacy of a drug meant to treat malaria for which the president expressed hope that it might (not will, but might) be able to treat the coronavirus as well.
Reporters, who routinely publish worst-case estimates about the impact of coronavirus, took a firm stand against the president’s hopeful point of view, led by Alexander, who took particular umbrage.
“Is it possible — it possible that your impulse to put a positive spin on things may be giving Americans a false sense of hope, and misrepresenting the preparedness right now?” Alexander asked.
After the president again, even-handedly, said the drug might work and it might not, Alexander’s pessimism peaked.
“Nearly 200 dead. What do you say to Americans who are scared, though? I guess, nearly 200 dead; 14,000 who are sick; millions, as you witness, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?”
To which the president in his usual subtle style replied, “You’re a terrible reporter.”
On March 25, the Gallup organization released a poll that was good for the President and bad for the press.
60% of the American people approve of the way President Trump is handling his response to this crisis and only 38% disapprove. But only 44% approve of the way the news media is handling its response, with 55% disapproving.
As the president’s approval goes up, several prominent columnists and talking heads have called for the televised briefings to come down. Don’t show the briefings live, cried MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, along with the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan and Karen Tumulty. In WW II, the government censored reporters. Now, these reporters want to censor the government.
NBC’s Chuck Todd sunk to a new low when he asked Joe Biden on “Meet the Press” if Biden thought there was “blood on the president’s hands considering the slow response.” He caught himself mid-sentence and added, “or is that too harsh a criticism?”
In all times, reporters have a vital role to play in keeping our country free. The First Amendment gives reporters the right to ask whatever they want, however they want.
Too many journalists are fighting the last war, and they’re only hurting themselves. Many reporters do ask tough, non-accusatory questions about how to fix problems, fight the illness and get America back on its feet.
But if this becomes a fight between a president who realistically represents hope and reporters who reject it, that’s a fight the press can’t win.
Today in 1956, Elvis Presley signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Studios.
The movies won no Academy Awards, but sold a lot of tickets and a lot of records.
The number one album today in 1968 was the soundtrack to “The Graduate”:
The number one album today in 1980 was Genesis’ “Duke”:
Today in 1985, more than 5,000 radio stations played this at 3:50 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, which is 9:50 a.m. Central time (but Standard or Daylight?):
Michael Smith:
There sure seems to be an undercurrent of worry that the more sparsely populated areas of this country might advance economically while the more densely populated cities languish as a result of the physical reality of disease transmission.Cities have a transmission modality that simply cannot be overcome absent a vaccine for this virus. The reality is that the only reason any “curve flattening” is happening today is that the virus is being deprived of fresh victims, that solution provides little more than a temporary respite and a false sense of security – because the underlying condition promoting spread – the population density – has not changed.
National policy is being driven by a fear that originated in our major population centers.
I get it. Nobody wants to spread this disease – but the fact is that New York state’s 2900 deaths would have to increase by 27 times to equal the 79,000 annual deaths due to heart disease and cancer the CDC reported for the state in 2017 (the latest I could find at the CDC website).
At 7900 deaths nationwide so far, this pandemic doesn’t crack the top 50 for mortality classifications in the nation.
I understand the pandemic deaths are concentrated in a short period of time and when things happen over a short period, they have more impact – but I still question the need for Kansas or Utah to be driven by situations in New York.
The real pandemic is not the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it’s fear.
Wisconsin is a perfect example of what Smith is talking about. As of Friday out of Wisconsin’s 1,916 cases, 955 are in Milwaukee County and 244 are in Dane County. Some counties have not had a single case, and other counties’ measure in the single digits. Yet state government is stupidly treating every part of Wisconsin the same, mandating, for instance, statewide school closings when school administrators could have told you that was a really bad idea.
If politicians weren’t being profiles in cowardice maybe after this ends they could figure out that the state should not treat, for instance, Milwaukee and Marathon the same. And perhaps small towns could market themselves as superior places to live over crime-plagued and now disease-riddled urban areas.
Today in 1960, RCA Victor Records announced it would release all singles in both mono and stereo.
Today in 1964, the Beatles had 14 of the Billboard Top 100 singles, including the top five:
Politico Thursday:
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ refusal to push for a delay of his state’s Tuesday primary has infuriated fellow Democrats in the state, who are now openly accusing him of failing to prevent an impending train wreck.
As the nation hurtles toward 5,000 coronavirus deaths and governors across the country take extreme steps to keep people at home, Wisconsin is forging ahead with the election despite having its own stay-at-home order. The likely outcome is that Wisconsinites will wake up on election day being told to stay put at the same time they’re greenlighted to head to crowded polling sites.
Other Democrats in the state say the conflicting signals will disenfranchise voters. Already, the sanctity of the vote has been called into question by snafus with early voting: In Milwaukee, some voting sites were closed for a period of the designated voting before being reopened.
“There’s this enormous conflict between what we need to do in a democracy in the midst of a pandemic. You can’t have a stay-at-home order but then tell millions of people to go stand in line and congregate near one another across the state,” said Racine Mayor Cory Mason. “Having an election in the middle of a stay-at-home order makes no sense. It did not have to be this way.”
The intraparty conflict in Wisconsin is a bad look in a state that’s central to the party’s hopes of beating President Donald Trump in November. It also doesn’t bode well for a unified message in the run-up to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, an event that was just pushed back a month to August.
While Democrats across Wisconsin have called for postponing the election, pointing to health concerns and the inability to staff polling sites, Evers has cited his limited authority to impose a delay against Republican resistance in the Legislature.
Evers has advocated that residents vote by mail and called on lawmakers to ease up on election day requirements to allow more flexibility on when ballots could be turned in and counted.
On Thursday, a federal judge provided some relief. While refusing to move the primary, U.S. District Judge William Conley extended the deadline by one day to request absentee ballots and is allowing voters six additional days after Election Day to return them. Conley in a Wednesday ruling said his hands were tied to postpone the election and called out both Evers and the legislature for not taking the action themselves.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 