These are my observations and opinions from my select news of the day.

CAN YOU IMAGINE how the media would react if President Trump played golf on the day he declared an emergency over the Coronavirus outbreak.  I can.

Yet, in 2009, when President Obama played golf on the day he declared a national emergency with the H1N1, which was four months after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic, and a thousand Americans had died, he was praised for trying not to set off a panic.

“We want to ensure that the worst-case scenario, we can manage the situation appropriately,” Obama said.

“The president’s comments came at the end of week-long balancing at in which his public words and actions were carefully measured to summon a sense of urgency without setting off a panic,” the New York Times reported. “It was no coincidence, his aides said, that he played golf the day his administration declared a national emergency.”

“The Obama(-Biden) administration didn’t take the threat seriously enough to make the tough decisions to reduce the rate of infection, and the media didn’t make it their cause to undermine (Obama) and create panic,” writes Matt Margolis of PJ Media in his flashback.

TRUMP DIDN’T ‘DISSOLVE’ PANDEMIC RESPONSE OFFICE as Democrats and the media would have you believe. Tim Morrison, former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, has refuted that charge in an op-ed published in the Washington Post – “No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office.  I was there.”

“Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission … for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious,” wrote Morrison.

While he confirms that the Trump administration has been reducing the bloat within the NSC that occurred under the Obama administration, recently reported in this blog, Morrison states that reorganization within the directorate was “misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented” by critics.

While the reductions continue within the NSC, Morrison says the “biodefense staff has been unaffected – perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president,” who, in 2018, issued a presidential memorandum “to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.”

Morrison apparently felt impelled to write the op-ed noting that “when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe, because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics, and we are less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.”

APOLOGY JOE BIDEN would have you believe that the Trump administration blatantly turned down the virus tests offered to us by the World Health Organization, as he stated in the Sunday debate.

But the more astute among us just  knew that didn’t sound logical, and when a member of the media questioned that decision during the Tuesday press conference, Deborah Birx, a health care expert on the president’s whole-of-government task force, provided the rationale that it was important not to jump the gun and accept tests that are sub-par.  First and foremost, she said they are making sure the tests they see are “quality controlled,” adding that “it doesn’t help to put out a test where 50 percent are false positives.”

The task force felt obligated to inform the Biden campaign that they refused the testing kits for good reason, and that his debate remark was incorrect.  I would have reminded him that it isn’t the time to take cheap shots.

 IT MAKES SENSE – However, a few members of the media questioned President Trump’s suggestion that if states needing specific medical supplies, like respirators, have their own supply chain for obtaining them faster than the federal government can deliver them, they should do so, by all means, in the interest of expediency for the health of their citizens.

It’s understandable that the liberal-minded media would question this, as they are of a “big government” mindset, that only the federal government can solve and provide their needs.

AS A FOLLOW-UP to my March 12, 2020 piece on our dependency on China for certain medical supplies and much of our pharmaceuticals, you should know that White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told CNBC Monday that he’s working on an executive order that would help relocate medical supply chains to the U.S.

In addition, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have demanded that Democrats schedule a hearing to look into the “threat” of relying on China for medicines used here.  Ohio’s Jim Jordan and Texas’ Chip Roy, along with 12 other Republicans argue that the Coronavirus pandemic has brought this issue to a head.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP – The goofy Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, appearing on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Sunday speculated that more Republicans will die of Coronavirus than Democrats.”

She bases her prediction on the media consumed by supporters of President Trump, including Fox News Channel, for downplaying the threat and keeping their “core viewers” from taking precautions.

Balderdash!  Fox’s virus coverage, with medical advice from a number of doctors, has been non-stop.

“There is a particularly cruelty, irony that it is their core viewers, the Republican older viewers, who are at most risk,” as Rubin adds an attack on the president for delaying the postponement or cancellations of near-term rallies.

THE SANDERS MOVEMENT – During Bernie Sanders long campaign, we’ve heard him tout his movement, his movement of young people, the future of America.

But they haven’t been there to vote in the numbers he had hoped. Exit polls show that voters under 30 made up a smaller share of the Democrat electorate this year than in 2016 in the Super Tuesday states.

In Michigan, for instance, Sanders won 74 percent of those under 30, but that was down from 81 percent in 2016.  In addition, their share of the electorate also declined.

“Young Democrats appear to be aging out of their enthusiasm for Mr. Sanders as they mature and start making money,” reports Allysia Finley in her Wall Street Journal column.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.