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

APRIL’S IMPORTANCE cannot be overstated.  I’m serious.  President Trump was hopeful that we could reopen the country by Easter, however, accepting the advice of those health and medical experts on his virus task force, he announced the extension of his prevention guidelines with a revised aspirational goal of the end of April.

Now, more than ever, it is critical that Americans practice social distancing by staying at least six feet away from others, and to follow his published guidelines for practicing good hygiene: wash your hands frequently, avoid touching your face, sneeze and cough into a tissue, or the inside of your elbow, and frequently disinfect regularly used items and surfaces.

CONSIDER THIS – Most of the people who have died of the virus were infected prior to the introduction of the coronavirus prevention guidelines two weeks ago, and many had other pre-exiting conditions, including lung disease and diabetes.

We must all recognize the virus’ dangerously infectious properties – how they primarily enter the membranes of our eyes, nose and mouth – and understand that only through their full cooperation can we mitigate those dangers.

And, adhere to the guidance of local and state authorities.

WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER it is said, and I have heard a number of heart-warming stories about neighbor helping neighbor.  I have one of my own.

While leaving my pharmacy, where I had inquired about purchasing masks, only to learn that they are going to hospitals, a woman, wearing a mask, called to me in the parking lot.  “Sir,” she said, “I heard you speaking with pharmacist about masks.  Someone your age should be wearing one,” she added as she proceeded to take one out of a bag on her front seat.  She ignored my offer to pay her for it.

After weeks of disappointment in people who were hoarding toilet paper, clean wipes, hand-sanitizer and whatever else they thought they would need for the end of the world as they know it, the woman who gave me a mask was heart-warming, indeed.

On March 23, 2020, I devoted my entire blog to the president’s comment that “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” addressing the thought made by Washington Post columnist Charles Lane, “economic prosperity is a matter of public health, too.”  While I rarely agree with Lane or the Post, I agree with that statement.

I quoted Newt Gingrich, who noted that by ignoring the economy in favor of an overreaction to health concerns we run the “real risk of tipping us not into a recession, but a depression,” wrote Gingrich. “We have to find a strategy that lets us distinguish the healthy from the at risk.”

We have now witnessed the first shock wave to hit our economy, as businesses are closing and employees furloughed or dismissed.  The feds have thrown a couple trillion at the problem, but things are going to get worse.  We are looking at a 10 percent unemployment figure today, just weeks after hitting a record low.

“Poverty kills as surely as Covid-19, and it may be the one thing where we are producing as fast as virus particles,” wrote the editor of Blueberry Town, a blog.

I REMINDED YOU that I was not an economist, but clearly, I believe we need to make some difficult trade-offs as we assess the economic impact of the response to the outbreak.  Even as one of those at an age considered vulnerable to the virus, I seriously believe that we must be considering what we have already done to the health of our economy.

Does the reduction of the spread of the virus need to take place before the cost of an economic shutdown is considered?  I know, it’s a delicate balancing act of weighing the public health benefits of additional virus restrictions, shelter-in-place, against the economic pain that those measures are causing.

“The sooner we can start, the better,” wrote Lane. “Resolving the coronavirus threat to public health is the necessary precondition.  Yet, just as we shut down economically on the basis of unavoidably imperfect information about the threat, we will probably lack clear, agreed-upon criteria for when it’s safe to blow the all-clear.”

I urge you all to do your part to help mitigate the virus, wherever you live.

APRIL SHOWERS – Decades ago, Al Jolson recorded the song, April Showers. With apologies to the lyricist B.G. De Sylva, I have I adapted it to our current dilemma.

Though April showers (the virus) may come your way, they bring the flowers (solutions) that bloom in May;

So, if it’s raining have no regrets, because it isn’t raining rain you know, it’s raining violets (an open economy).

And where you see clouds (infections and deaths) upon the hills, you soon will see crowds of daffodils (successful medications). So, keep on looking for a blue bird (a vaccine), and listening for his song (our return to normalcy), whenever April showers come along.

As I write this, I am listening to the president reiterate the importance to reopening our country, repeating his concern that we allow the cure to be worse than the problem itself.  “We have to get back,” he said.

I’VE HAD IT UP TO HERE with New York’s Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and his daily ramblings on the needs of his state to fight the virus.

“Our governor is a folk hero,” writes a duped Peggy Noonan in her Saturday Wall Street Journal column.  With a story out there about Cuomo’s failure to purchase ventilators in 2015, Noonan writes, “Andrew Cuomo has the latest, most pertinent information and knew a month ago what a ventilator is.” Oh, really, Peggy.

She went on to write that “He prioritizes problems, has command of the subject matter, is human, eloquent, tireless.  By rising to the moment, he has become a unifying force,” wrote the Kool Aid drinking Noonan.

You will recall how he complained about not receiving ventilators when they were found in a warehouse.  Daily we hear him cry for more masks, as we hear stories from nurses and first responders that they are working without them.  And there the pompous governor sits on television with cases upon cases of masks stacked up behind him when they could be sent to those hospitals and medical centers where they are needed.

The president pressured the Navy to expedite work on the hospital ship “Comfort,” that was in drydock because Cuomo expressed the need for more beds.  It was meant to handle patients without the virus to take the load off New York City’s hospitals.  I understand that just 20 patients were served by the Comfort two days after it opened at the port. Some urgency.

CASS SUNSTEIN REVISITED – You may recall reading my account of how Cass Sunstein, a confidant of former President Obama, flip-flopped from his opinion that we were exaggerating the threat of the virus on February 28, 2020 to telling us that we can’t be too careful on March 26, 2020.

I mentioned that I would share more about Sunstein in a future blog when I had the space to do so. He was named by Obama to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009, where he was responsible for overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality and statistical programs.

Just 18 months earlier, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo “independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups, which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the government, according to Glenn Greenwald’s piece, “Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal,” published by Salon, January 15, 2010.

Sunstein advocated that the government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into chat rooms, online social networks, and elsewhere.  He proposed that the government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the government’s messaging.

“There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein,” Greenwald wrote, “though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.”  Keep in mind, this was 10 years ago.

Greenwald makes the point that this wasn’t a bizarre paper written in college 30 years ago.  This was written 18 months ago at a time when his ascendancy as a close friend of Obama looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.

You may recall the name of Jonathan Gruber.  Greenwald suggests that Gruber, an MIT professor, was brought on by the Obama administration under a “lucrative arrangement,” to consult and offer public justification for Obama’s health care plan.  “Obama’s allies in the media constantly cited Gruber’s analysis to support their defenses of the President’s plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed,” wrote Greenwald.

FLASH FORWARD – That process was the same one used by the Deep State during the Russian collusion investigation.  Information was leaked to certain friends in the media, and when that was published, it was used by the FBI as fact.

BACK TO GRUBER – In November 2014, years after ObamaCare became law, an embarrassing quote by Gruber surfaced.  He suggested that many lawmakers and voters didn’t know what was in the law or how its financing worked, and that this helped it win approval.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”

I thought it was important to share this bit of history with you.

MY LAUGH-OF-THE-DAY – Sean Davis of The Federalist, noting that MSNBC’s Joy Reid complained that her viewing of Netflix to pass the time of day was interrupted by the “My Pillow Guy” at the presidential briefing, tweeted @seanmdav:  “While you were watching Netflix, he retooled his entire company to make tens of thousands of masks every day to protect the people from getting the Wuhan coronavirus.”

                 May God continue to bless the United States of America.