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

THE INEVITABLE REOPENING OF OUR COUNTRY has drawn comments from a number of corners.

One of the more interesting approaches came from Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, one of my favorite writers and commentators, who cites the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in his unusual analogy.

He writes how our men and women in uniform grew from about 2.1 million in 1941 to more than 12 million by 1945, and our force of seven fleet aircraft carriers and one escort carrier increased to 27 fleet and 72 escort carriers.

“More incredible, by the end of 1944, the American gross domestic product exceeded the economic output of all the major belligerents on both sides of War II put together; the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Italy and Germany,” he notes.

With that lead-in, Davis Hanson writes that “As we struggle to defeat the coronavirus, an aroused America is talking grandly of restructuring the U.S. economy.

Not only to reopen businesses and putting people back to work, but to follow through on those who promise that major industries – pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, rare earths, military technologies – will return home to create millions of new jobs and better protect the population in times of crisis.

“Does the U.S. really need almost 15,000 people flying in from China every day?  At a time when American students owe $15 trillion in student loans, is it smart to have some 360,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges?  Is it safe to fund hundreds of labs on university campuses that conduct joint research with Chinese academics?” are questions he believes need answer in our recovery.

“Our other choice is to keep bickering and suffering amnesia, remaining as vulnerable as we were in the past,” declares Davis Hanson, “The choice is ours whether America awakens as a roaring giant or as a crying baby.”

WE CANNOT CONCEDE TO THE VIRUS with fecklessness and surrender, comments Roger Kimball in his Spectator USA feature, “The case for reopening the country now.”

In his piece he cites the observation of writer Alex Berenson, who stated, “Nobody says COVID-19 is not real, that it can’t tax hospitals or kill people, especially if they are over 75 or have co-morbidities.  But right now, the best current projection is for 61,000 U.S. deaths.  That was the 2017 flu season.  Why have we shut the country?”

“We must reopen the country,” says Kimball. “We must start today.”

AND FROM THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, a reference of the lockdown measures as “draconian” was made by Attorney General Bill Barr, who presented his thoughts on “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News Channel in a two-part interview Wednesday and Thursday.

“I’m concerned about the slippery slope in terms of continuing encroachments on personal liberty,” he said. Commenting on the prohibition of large group meetings, like attending church, Barr said, “A free society depends on a vibrant religious life by the people.  So, any time that’s encroached upon by the government, I’m very, very concerned.”

When the decision is made to reopen the country, Barr said, “I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed; allow them to use other ways – social distancing and other means – to protect themselves.”

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who’s always looking for something negative to pin on Barr, said I don’t know what it means to “adapt,” as he says.

Can you believe it? “When we’ve been hearing the words ‘social distancing’ every time we turn on the TV or read news reports on-line, and we hear sport figures and celebrities remind us of the new rules in PSAs during commercial breaks, Lim Hirsh of Victory Girls responded, and yet she (Maddow) doesn’t know what that means.

YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP, but MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did, and the way he went about it is typical of the “fake news” media.

When he learned that President Trump suggested that if the death toll from the virus ends up “substantially under” 100,000 deaths, that would mean his administration did a very good job, Hayes couldn’t help himself.  He floated the idea that the administration inflated its death projection so that the president could take a “victory lap” when the final total came in lower.

While the leftist media has a habit of covering themselves with the line – ‘It isn’t known if the story is true, but …’ – we’re going to publish this anyway, on this occasion, you will note that Hayes used a different approach in his tweet @chrislhayes:

“The most cynical interpretation of all this, one I can’t quite bring myself to accept, is they rolled out the model showing 100k deaths after they knew it would be less than that so they could anchor everyone to that number and take a victory lap when ‘only’ tens of thousands died.”

When Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner and Nate Silver of 538 challenged him on his theory, he clumsily tried to walk it back by saying, “I said I can’t bring myself to accept it!” according to Caleb Howe of mediaite.com.

CECILLIA VEGA, White House reporter for ABC News, broke what she thought was a big story on “Good Morning America,” that President Trump was given an intelligence briefing about the outbreak of a virus in Wuhan in November 2019 citing unnamed sources. Of course.

“As a matter of practice, the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on particular intelligence issues,” said its director, Col. (Doctor) R. Shane Day in a rebuke to ABC. “Nonetheless, in the curiosity of transparency through this present general public well-being disaster, we can assure that media reporting about the existence/release of a NCMI coronavirus-similar item/evaluation in November 2019 is not accurate.  No such NCMI products exist.”

Bill Kristol, still trying to prove he’s relevant, retweeted the ABC story as truthful.

GOOFY JENNIFER RUBIN, who still bills herself as a conservative columnist with the Washington Post, decided to offer advice to Apology Joe Biden on how to defeat the president in November.

“If Biden is serious about winning he needs to accuse Trump of his willingness to kill people,” she tweeted @JRubbinBlogger.

Among the responses to her advice was a tweet from Nick Searcy, international film and television star, who wrote @yesnicksearcy: “Check out Jennifer Rubin, murderously hoping for more deaths to Biden can beat Trump.  These leftist never-Trump haters are sick, sick puppies.”

AS A FORMER GOLFER – I haven’t played since March 5, 2020 because I have been practicing social distancing – I was curious when I heard about Michigan’s Democrat Attorney General Dana Nessel drawing the ire of citizens of Wolverine land.

Annoyed because of the volume of requests she had received to reopen the state’s golf courses after including them in the state’s stay-at-home order, she said, “if your game is anything like mine, the temporary break won’t really matter much.  You’ll still be terrible at golf when you get back onto the greens.”

When the complaining continued, Nessel tweeted an unrelated thought: “The high rates of infection and death within our African-American population from COVID-19 is staggering and horrific.  It further establishes how AA’s are treated like garbage when it comes to equal opportunity and access to health care, housing, education and employment.”

How’s that for political correctness?

The next day, she tweeted “I just can’t hear about one more black health care worker, police officer or bus driver die while getting a barrage of complaints from white folks outraged because they can’t go golfing.”

Like there are no whites working in health care, on the police force or driving buses.

Conservative Detroit News columnist Ingrid Jacques had enough and tweeted: “Why is our attorney general turning a pandemic affecting all of us into a racial issue? ‘White folks outraged because they can’t go golfing.’  Seriously?  White folks are dying, too.”

It didn’t end there.  Nessel answered with “Because when you advocate against universal health care, a living wage, paid sick leave, public education and environmental regulations, the virus disproportionately impacts communities of color and black Americans get sick and die at exponentially higher rates.”

Jacques concluded with “right now we are all in this together, and it affects all of us.”

“This should be a time for politicians to remind the people they serve that they represent all of them,” suggested C. Douglas Golden, who wrote of this account for The Western Journal.  “Instead, Nessel decided to own the white golfers and smear conservatives as oppressors of black front-line workers.  Nice work.”

Kramerontheright thought you should know that Nessel, who preaches unity, is the state’s first openly gay politician elected to statewide office.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.