As of early March, there were fewer than 200 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States. Nonetheless, Congress passed, and US president Donald Trump signed, an $8.3 billion "emergency funding" bill theoretically related to containing the disease. Had the federal government done nothing at all, the "beer flu" might have conceivably have ended up killing a tiny fraction of the number of Americans who will die of influenza during the same period.

WASHINGTON DC (March 5, 2020) — In a case before the US Supreme Court that could determine how far the courts may go in shielding police from being held accountable for wrongdoing, The Rutherford Institute is challenging a lower court ruling that prevents victims of police shootings for suing police for violations of their civil rights 

On March 3, US president Donald Trump spoke (via telephone) with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, chief of the Taliban's Doha diplomatic office and signer, on behalf of his organization, of the recently-concluded Afghanistan "peace deal." "The direct contact between an American president and a top Taliban leader would once have been unthinkable," writes Michael Crowley at the New York Times.

Writing at the Florida Politics blog, AG Gancarski reports on three sales-tax "holiday" bills working their way through the state's legislature. Two of the bills would lengthen existing holidays on school supplies and storm-preparedness products. The third would expand the holiday habit to hunting and fishing items. According to the Sales Tax Institute, at least 16 states have sales-tax holidays scheduled this year on goods ranging from clothing to school supplies to generators to guns.