Democrats may reach consensus about the future of policing more easily than they reach consensus about what to call that vision.

If the demonstrations set off by the murder of George Floyd (and now possibly extended by the killing of Rayshard Brooks) are going to be more than just a way to blow off steam, they have to lead to substantive change in the ways America enforces its laws. As I laid out last week, some reforms are already happening. Cities and states across the nation are banning chokeholds, instituting new procedures for reporting incidents of excessive force, and making it easier to identify and prosecute police officers who step over the line.

Is that enough? While those reforms are welcome and overdue, it’s hard to be confident that they will solve the problem, which goes to the heart of how police function in America: They are heavily armed, are inclined to escalate conflicts rather than de-escalate them, and reflexively cover for each other when rules are broken. Making more rules may not help, as long as police are motivated to help other police get away with breaking those rules. The pseudonymous author Officer A. Cab of “Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop” testifies:

“All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

… I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

Police also cost a huge amount of money. Bloomberg estimates:

Over the past four decades, the cost of policing in the U.S. has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017

The number of violent crimes peaked in 1993 and is down by more than 1/3 since then, but police budgets have continued to eat up about 3.7% of all state and local spending. That figure does not include the estimated $81 billion spent on prisons or the $29 billion spent processing people through the criminal courts. Some large cities spend considerably more than 3.7%: New York City budgets about $5.9 billion, which is more than 6% of its total spending.

Given all that, a surprisingly wide range of people are proposing a very simple idea: What if we just had fewer police?

The predictable backlash. That suggestion is easy to exaggerate and demonize.

Here’s an obvious attack ad to run against any politician who endorses it: Some white woman reenacts her totally true story of hiding in the closet with her toddler and calling 911 while strange men ravage her home. The invaders run away when they hear sirens approaching, and she and her boy emerge unharmed. She expresses her perfectly genuine gratitude to the helpful and reassuring officers who arrive on her doorstep. (I’d make one of the cops black, just to insulate against charges of race-baiting.)

Then a male narrator says: “Julie and Luke escaped their harrowing experience without a scratch, and the damage to their home was soon repaired. But if Senator Liberal Democrat had his way, no one would have answered her desperate call.” [A busy signal gets louder and louder as the camera slowly zooms in on the window the invaders broke to enter.] “Far-left politicians like Senator Democrat want to fire Officers Good and Noble, and slash the budgets of their departments. Let’s fire Senator Democrat instead, before the call that goes unanswered is yours.” [visual fade to the sound of an annoyingly loud busy signal]

It’s no wonder that people planning to have their names on ballots in the fall — people like Joe Biden and Jim Clyburn — have been running away from the “Abolish the Police” or “Defund the Police” slogans. A recent YouGov poll (scroll down to page 58) says that only 16% of the public favor cutting police budgets, while 65% oppose such cuts. So it’s also no wonder the Trump campaign is already running this ad:

But think about it. The fewer-police proposal isn’t just that we get rid of police and do nothing else. The point is that interrupting crimes in progress and arresting dangerous suspects is a very small part of what police do. If we let them concentrate on stuff like that, and didn’t load them down with every public problem that their cities don’t have covered some other way, we wouldn’t need nearly so many of them. Minneapolis Councilman Steve Fletcher explained the council’s pledge to “dismantle” the MPD.

What we’re trying to change is how we answer 911. So many of the calls that we currently send police officers with guns would actually be better served by mental health professionals, by social workers, by outreach workers, by conflict resolution specialists.

This already happens in certain cases: If you call 911 and say your house is on fire, they don’t send police, they send a fire engine. If you say somebody is having a heart attack, they send an ambulance with EMTs. If a bear is rummaging through your garbage or a rabid raccoon is in your driveway, you might get connected to an animal-control department. There’s no reason cities couldn’t also have specialized emergency responders for many situations they currently handle by dispatching police: drug overdoses, domestic arguments, loud parties, homeless people camping out someplace they shouldn’t, and so on.

Friday night’s shooting of Rayshard Brooks is a case in point: The original problem was that he fell asleep while his car was parked, partially blocking a Wendy’s drive-through. Did someone with a gun need to handle that? If someone without a gun had been sent — the kind of plan San Francisco is rolling out, and a few smaller cities are already trying — Brooks would probably still be alive.

Even most criminal investigation doesn’t really need a policeman, or at least not an armed one. Typically, police show up in the aftermath of a crime: Your car has been stolen, or you came home to find your house had been burglarized. The perpetrators are long gone. Armed police come, but what the situation really calls for is someone with the skills of an insurance adjuster — someone who can take your statement, shoot some photos, collect some evidence, and write a report. Guns shouldn’t be necessary until it’s time to make an arrest, and maybe not even then.

The Washington Post assembled this graphic summary of what police do in a major American city:

In short, the fewer-police proposal is also a more-people-to-handle-stuff-the-police-should-never-have-been-asked-to-do proposal. And police departments’ funding gets cut, not to punish them, but because the money for those other specialists has to come from somewhere.

Some of that work would be preventive rather than responsive. For example, if a city put real resources behind finding each homeless person a home (like they do in Finland), police (or whoever) wouldn’t have to answer so many calls about them. (The homeless are probably a large chunk of that “suspicious person” block in the graphic.)

And one final point from Georgetown law professor Christy Lopez:

Once we begin to undertake this inquiry [of rethinking public safety], we quickly see that there are some things that police are doing that nobody should be doing, such as enforcing laws that criminalize poverty and addiction, arresting people instead of issuing citations, writing tickets to raise revenue rather than protect the public, and using armored vehicles to evict women and children from a home they have occupied to protest homelessness.

Political activism vs. electoral politics. “Abolish the Police” is probably a great slogan if you want to raise energy for a protest, but across most of the country it would be a suicidal slogan for a political campaign.

A good issue-activist slogan is provocative in much the same way that online clickbait is. It draws your attention, maybe shocks you a little, and pulls you into the discussion if only to argue against it. Once drawn in, you may consider ideas you had never thought of before, and the activists may elaborate their proposals in ways that make them more reasonable than they originally sounded.

To a large extent, that’s working. I have lost count of the number of articles I’ve read explaining that “Abolish the Police” and “Defund the Police” don’t really mean “abolish the police” or “cut their funding to zero”: Somebody would still answer 911 calls, and if the needed response was for armed warriors to show up — say, in an active shooter situation — the city would still have some on the payroll. As Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing told NPR:

I’m certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police.

(Then again, some people really do mean “Abolish the Police”.)

Would I have read those articles and considered those ideas if they had just been labeled “police reform” or something equally bland? Maybe not.

But while it makes sense for an issue activist to shock you with a slogan and then explain the nuances later, that’s an insane strategy for a politician trying to get elected. Ronald Reagan was right: If you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Issue-oriented activists tend to underestimate the importance of low-information voters in electoral politics. But those voters are why every campaign works hard to oversimplify its opponents’ positions to the point of absurdity, and then to get those simple absurdities into the minds of voters who can’t be bothered to consider the complicated details.

In 1988, for example, Mike Dukakis had a huge lead in the polls after the Democratic Convention. But George H. W. Bush caught up and won handily on the strength of two “issues”: Mike Dukakis hates the Pledge of Allegiance, and Mike Dukakis will let big black dudes rape your wife. Both were nonsense, but explaining why they were nonsense derailed Dukakis’ whole message. He had to keep explaining, and so he lost. Bush’s 53% of the vote is more than any presidential candidate has gotten since.

Trump and Biden. You can already see Trump pushing a similar oversimplification on immigration policy: Democrats want “open borders“. None of the Democrats running for president in this cycle endorsed “open borders”, and I can’t think of a single Democrat in Congress who has even said the phrase. But nonetheless it’s a staple of Trump rhetoric: If Democrats take over, the Mexican border will be left completely unmanned and unprotected.

He has been helped in this effort by liberal activists who pushed the slogan “Abolish ICE”. Now, “Abolish ICE” doesn’t mean “leave the border unprotected”, but it sounds like it does. If you tell low-information voters that Democrats want open borders, and illustrate with demonstrators waving “Abolish ICE” signs, they’ll be convinced.

Similarly here, “Abolish the Police” or “Defund the Police” doesn’t mean “You’re on your own if a criminal attacks you.” But it sounds like it does. If I tell a low-information voter that Joe Biden won’t protect him from criminals, and then cut to a video of Biden saying “Abolish the police”, he’ll be convinced.

And that’s why Biden will never say, “Abolish the police.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn elaborates:

If you’re talking about reallocating resources, say that. If you mean reimagining policing, say that. If you’re going to reform policing, say that. Don’t tell me you’re going to use a term that you know is charged — and tell me that it doesn’t mean what it says.

California Governor Gavin Newsom explored the limits of how far a mainstream politician can go:

California Governor Gavin Newsom [said] Wednesday that while he’s not interested in “eliminating police,” he’s open to considering how a police officer’s role in a community could change.

“If you’re talking about reimagining and taking the opportunity to look at the responsibility and role that we place on law enforcement to be social workers, mental health workers, get involved in disputes where a badge and a gun are unnecessary, then I think absolutely this is an opportunity to look at all of the above.”

Is there any good electoral slogan here? Personally, I’m frustrated that no simple English verb expresses the idea I want. No everyday verb means “Expand other things so that one particular thing gets crowded out.” I can’t even think of a good metaphor to express that notion.

I agree with the abolition supporters that “reform” is too tepid. We’ve been reforming police for a long time now, and yet we still have George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks. I can’t claim that nothing has changed, because Floyd’s killer is charged with murder when so many killer officers have previously gone uncharged. The Brooks incident has already pushed the Atlanta police chief to resign, and charges against the officer are expected soon. Stuff like that didn’t used to happen. But the unnecessary deaths continue, and (even assuming the reforms currently on the table become law) I can’t say when they’ll stop.

What is stronger than “reform”, but doesn’t have the unfortunate implications of “abolish”? I don’t have a good candidate. Some people are saying “dismantle”. “Reconstitute” might work. I’m tempted to steal a word from the business world, and talk about “downsizing” the police.

Another option might be to talk about “the police state” rather than just “the police”. Americans have ambivalent feelings about police, but nobody likes a police state. (Trump loves to defend the police, but defending the police state would be a gift to his enemies.) “Police state” would capture the idea that black neighborhoods are over-policed, and would also tie in to the idea of mass incarceration. It points to the observation that we currently deal with all kinds of social problems (like homelessness or addiction) through the police rather than through more appropriate institutions.

Downsize the police? Dismantle the police state? End policing as we know it? None of them strikes me as an election-winning slogan, but they’re the best I can do.

Do activists and politicians need to say the same words? Another way to look at this is to let activists advance issues and let politicians win elections. Activists could keep saying “Abolish the police”, and no electoral harm would be done as long as they understood that no national figure could say it with them. The redefinition of police and of public safety is going to have to happen locally anyway. Maybe the best thing the federal government can do is stay out of the way.

Maybe it could be enough for Biden and other major Democrats in the fall election to say things activists could interpret positively, while still holding back from “Abolish the police”, as Governor Newsom did. Maybe it would be enough if Biden could say something like “The beauty of our federal system is that cities and states are free to experiment and try new things. If some of them want to find creative ways to deliver public services, and if they want to develop a new vision of how to ensure public safety, then a Biden administration will try to work with them.”

But maybe it wouldn’t be enough. Trump won in 2016 by pounding two wedges: a “corruption” wedge between Hillary Clinton and the center-right, and a Bernie-was-robbed wedge between Clinton and left. He’s going to try the same thing again. “Abolish the Police” works for him either way: If Biden agrees with the slogan, that becomes a wedge separating him from the center. If he doesn’t, it’s a wedge separating him from the left.

So that’s the question activists will be left with: Is it enough for Biden to indicate a general sympathy with their movement (when Trump is steadfastly against it), or does he have to repeat their words?

Anti-racist and anti-police protests continued this week, and Atlanta police gave the protesters a new martyr: Rayshard Brooks, who drew police attention by falling asleep in his car, and was shot to death while running away. The national conversation about how to stop excessive police violence (particularly against people of color, but occasionally against whites also) continued to progress, ranging from simple reforms like banning chokeholds to more radical proposals that have gathered under the umbrella of the slogans “Abolish the police” and “Defund the police”.

Those slogans themselves are what drew my attention this week. Like many liberals, I support most of the proposals that the police-abolitionists put forward, but I shy away from endorsing the slogans themselves. I was happy to hear Joe Biden refuse to support abolishing or defunding the police, because I believe a Biden blunder like that is one of the few ways Trump could salvage his re-election. So I’ll discuss the divergent interests of issue activists and politicians trying to get elected in the featured post “What’s in a Slogan?” That should be out before 10 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the continued demonstrations, the Rayshard killing, Covid-19’s refusal to go away for the summer, the debate over Confederate monuments and memorials, developments in the Flynn case, and Trump’s moves against the International Criminal Court. Then I’ll close with a musical tribute to a great Confederate general. That should be out somewhere between noon and 1.

What follows is a transcript of the sermon I preached extemporaneously for the Universalist National Memorial Church. Like a flower that’s been pressed into a book, it only gives an impression of what I said: the context and the execution of preaching being lost. But perhaps better a representation of the sermon than none at all, particularly for those who saw it live. I’ve added the occasional bracketed word where the meaning may not make sense.

The texts were from the Revised Common Lectionary: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 and Matthew 28:16-20, but from the Revised Common Version.

Good morning and thank you to Pastor Gatton for asking me back and for welcoming me into your homes and putting up with the fact that sometimes I don’t see the microphone button. But I want you to know that I’ve been thinking about each of you over the last several weeks, and I’ve been praying for you by name. Uh, special things this week to Lee Folia-Brunt who asked me what the sermon title was going to be. Not knowing that that was such a such a loaded and important question, because when she asked I didn’t have an answer, and that’s therefore there is no title today because how can you know what’s going to come? Two days ago, four days ago, a week ago. Who would believe that we would be where we are at this moment? And where will we be a day, three days a week, a year from now. So I didn’t have an answer.

And what do you then call what you’re not going to know what to say? Now I mean. And how can you even conceptualize the life that you’re in when everything is changing so quickly? So the sermon doesn’t have a title. But I’m hoping that it does have some threads which will carry back a day back, four days back. A week back. A year back. Back centuries and likewise centuries forward.

Let’s recap. It has been up until the last couple of days absolutely terrible. I don’t think this is controversial or news to anybody. When I started writing the sermon back when I thought it had a title. There were helicopters whirling overhead through the neighborhood. We were under curfew. And the only thing that would come up on the news — online or on television — were images of people being shot with rubber bullets or tear gas, or who knows what? And everything just seemed like it was going downhill continuously fast. These are not great conditions under which to write a sermon or for to think, or really to live.

So, we could be undercut by despair. We could be undercut by fear or anger or bitterness. We can certainly feel all these things, but to the fear of being pulled down by all these things is what worried me most of all. To think: what can we pull out of our religious lives in order to overcome this? Not just for this moment, because problems have come before.

Our problems are not a week, or a year, or three years old. Some of them go back decades and centuries. And whomever is elected in November, or whatever decisions are made in the next year or two, those problems will continue unless we are able to make systematic, deep-seated, heartfelt and hard-won changes.

We have a lot of resources. They’re not fairly distributed, of course. Some people have wealth and other people don’t. Some people have comfort at home and other people don’t. Some people have large and supportive families and other people don’t. Some people have health and their right minds and other people don’t. But collectively we have a lot of strength and one of the things that we can [also] call upon is our faith, because even though that is also not evenly spread out through the population, it is a resource which keeps giving and will not be exhausted. So I’m not [going to] talk about your wealth, and I’m not going to talk about your families, and I’m not going to talk about your political opinions and not even going to — and this is really rare for Washington — I’m not even going to talk about policy. But I am going to talk about our faith, because that’s something that we can do here and trust one another with. And that will give us some direction where we need to go with everything else.

Faith is not the same thing as religion, after all. Religion is sort of what we’re doing now. It is the customs and the folkways and the language and the texts and the stuff. Now that Zoom has become part of our religion. It’s the doing of the faith. But I want to talk about the faith part. The faith is what draws us into an understanding of the universe and the nature of God. It’s sort of the meta-level over which religion is the day-to-day piece. And it boils down to one question: What do you have trust in? Because sometimes we’ll talk to one another, and will say “I have a lot of faith in you”, or you may get this at a employment review. Or you may hear this among friends or within your families. “I have faith in you.” But in the larger sense, perhaps in the more proper sense, what we have trust in shows what we’re willing to rely on when we have to make those difficult decisions. And one thing that we can have trust in, and one thing Christian should have trust in, is the nature of God to be love.

Now that is so easily brought out that’s almost as bad as “you’re in my thoughts and prayers.” It’s so easily [used], just thrown out with no particular meaning and falls to Earth without a sound. But for us, who should be taking these things very seriously, there can be no greater and deeper guarantee than God’s nature is love, because it builds connections. And we can trust those connections that whatever else happens in the world, no matter what cruelty or power or strength or principalities, to use Paul’s language, we have that connection to the creator of Heaven and Earth who cares for us. And that’s important to remember when other people are willing —whether in your family or in the neighborhood or in government or around the world — who’re willing to say that you are nothing.

And that you were not important and what you care about is not important, you know, and can trust in your heart that the maker of Heaven and Earth cares for you. And the feeling is [ought to be] returned.

Of course it’s not just us, it’s not just a private property to be a member of a church, even the Universalist Church [it] isn’t to say that I have something that you don’t have. It’s not the AAA. you don’t call them up to jump your battery or to your car away, and if you’re not a member, you don’t get those things. But rather we know that based on that relationship — sometimes we forget — but we know that based on that relationship that same thing is true for everybody else as well. Which means that we are in an elastic but very strong network. Jesus had a word for it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So that connection that we have runs all ways.

God, we love to deny it though. We love to deny it in our casual habits and in our systems. The ones that we inherit, the ones that we built and the ones that we suffer under, whether we choose to or not. That’s sort of the one thing I think of: the first pillar of Christian faith that I was to come back to. But the other ones a little sneakier. That in a word the world is not what it seems to be. Because if everybody was decent and forthright and believed this way, or at least kind of fell along with the program, we could rely on God being love and God loving us and that we would love everyone and everything would just be OK wouldn’t it ? But it’s not that way. Never has been.

We know that there is another pillar to Christian faith that we have to rely on and that is knowing that the world has this deep strain of sadness in it. Something’s not right. I’m not going to get into whole doctrine of original sin because I think that’s been so overplayed that it kind of misses the point that we just kind of know that things aren’t right. That suffering continues and life ends. And they’re good people don’t get what they deserve. And that sometimes people, even if they’re not good, just don’t get the basics to keep going. We know that there is something sad and continuous in this world, but that the same faith that we have — the same trust we have in that God is good and loves us knows that the world is not as it seems, and that we just cannot trust everything that comes to us.

Just because someone says that the powerful rule does not mean that they have a right to that that the systems that they exist, even though they are long and inherited, does not mean that they are good. And that we can look and think that there are other ways that we can have dreams. And those dreams as they form in our consciousness can become ideas, and that idea is the basis of hope. I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it. I mean God will flip the script on you really quick. There’s a line that I come back to every once in a while. I’m just going to read it.

This is Saint Mary and her praise of God at the in the first chapter of Luke. And she cries out, sings even. Speaking of God:

He has scattered the proud in their imaginations of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things. And the rich, he has sent empty away.

I mean, you don’t have to agree with me on these things because we’re not that kind of church. But one thing I hope that I can encourage you to think about, or at least engage with is there. There are two pillars of Christian faith that we can rely on. [First,] God’s nature is love, not just some sort of thing that God pulls out every once in awhile to impress us or to get us to think that maybe we should join the club, but that God’s nature is love, and that connects everything.

And that just because things seem to be set in stone doesn’t mean that they are. I can’t promise you policy changes. (I told you I wasn’t gonna talk about policy.) Can’t promise you wealth either, or a long life, or all the dreams that you’d cooked up. But I hope that that something that you can carry away and give yourself a little hope, because hope is the anchor of the soul. And without which it doesn’t matter where else we come up with.

But this is Washington after all, and you don’t think I’m going to [not] talk about something that’s happened in practical terms recently. The president came up with a really good idea on Monday. I mean, you’ve seen it. You watch the news. He was going to make a stand, I guess. I don’t know what goes through his mind. So he had some people clear out [the] people who were protesting, which it was their thorough right to do. Clear them out: horses, tear gas, pushed them away. We saw that we’ve seen that. That would be bad enough, galling enough, abusive enough. Boy, he just took it that much further, didn’t he? (And I know that the tear gas and the horses and all that, that’s the serious thing; that’s the important one. I get that.) But then he came out and used a church and a Bible as a prop piece to remind us that power is the first and most important [thing]. We know that’s not true, but it came out to remind us of this “fact.” And I’ll tell you that just sticks, sticks right here. [Points to throat.]

Um, so it’s sticking so much that I actually decided to pay for a subscription to the Washington Post so I can see some of the photos in more detail. Now when I’m gonna spend money for something you know that there’s a problem. OK. So I was able to get a photo of the president in his photo op. Holding the Bible as, like it was a dead fish. And they gotta close up of it, and I saw it, and I saw the spine. And I just about… I saw it in my heart went cold. It said the Revised Standard Version on it, which is not a new Bible. This was the sort of the mainline favorite between the late 40s. President Truman was given the first copy of it. That might be his copy for all I know. I suspect it was a presentation piece left at the White House at some point. Between the Truman administration and say, though the first, Bush administration. That was sort of the highlight of that of that version and so I decided to redeem it a little bit today, and Alex very graciously read today’s lessons from that version.

Because I think that if we take our religious life. Seriously, we need to reinterpret and understand what corrupt and powerful forces would have us believe. This thing, [gestures a bible] we will open it. And we will find strength from within it. We will look into our hearts. We will open them. And we will know what we have to do. Let’s talk about the readings for a second. These actually are the appointed readings for the day. I didn’t come up with these. I didn’t invent these for the purpose, but there’s something that’s really interesting about both of them.Both the second Corinthians and the Matthew are the last passages from their respective books. And Paul offers council to this unsuccessful little church in Corinth that needed his help remotely. If he had Zoom, he would’ve had a much easier time of it. And in Matthew, on the other hand, you have the departing narrative of Jesus, the his earthly ministry is ending and he is transferring authority to his students that he might be — that what disciple means — to his students, so that he might create new students in a world that might understand this way of God’s relationship with the world. But both of them are parting stories; both of them are endings.

Something, something in our sad world is ending right now. Maybe something better will follow. I don’t know; people have said that a lot, too, over the centuries and generations. I’m not going to make any promises. But when it comes to endings, we know that there’s grief that follows. And there’s a lot of tears that haven’t been shed yet. Not only for these people who were slain and had no.… I just can’t say it … Who should be with us here today.

Not only are there not enough tears for them, but for the ones, for them [for whom] there was no camera nearby. An artificial report was written up, which itself is deception and lies. We have not had enough tears for the dead and not enough truth to address the lies.

Something old is ending. But we cannot step to what is new, even if it’s good, even if it’s holy, and wholesome and beautiful until we properly, accountably, and in a holy way remember the hurt and the dead. We’ve been through these things long, I mean. Years and generations. Of course, we know how the story goes. There will be another disease, or there’ll be another crisis, or the economy will probably tank out from under us and will be caught up in all of that. And people who for whom this is not the first concern. (Those people are largely white people. So let’s put a little bit little flag in that.) We want to move on. We will not move on, right? Because our hearts are not yet open for that love which God has for us. And at which we must have for one another! must have! And we have not yet trusted that the world in its stream of sadness, [which] tells us lies about what is right and wrong. It’s not there yet. But I have faith and I have faith in you, each of you, that you will not let this pass away with the next new cycle in the next distraction or the next possibility of something more pleasant.

There’s this evidence of this. There are signs. Last week was horrible. Early on it got a little bit better, and once again, that’s in part due to you. And for the people who turned out on 16th Street in front of church. Who showed up in the smallest little towns across America and around the world to say no. No. “But my life matters.” And the things are not going to be the same. And that is, tt’s not the new, but it is a foretaste of the new which, like someone looking for food in a time of hunger [would] be a taste to allow us to go forward.

I’ve said too much. Let us mourn. Let us reflect. Let us be open. Do not be forgetful or distracted. But have faith, knowing that God is love. And that we must love one another, and that has responsibilities with it, and duties which we will find in order to address our sad world. To cheer it and to create that city which comes down adorned like a bride and be united with God. Amen.

The police are the armed guardians of the social order. The blacks are the chief domestic victims of the social order. A conflict of interest exists, therefore, between the blacks and the police.

— Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968)

This week’s featured posts are “This Week, Democratic Protest Outlasted Riot and Repression” and “How Should American Policing Change?“.

This week everybody was talking about police and protest

The two featured posts are my attempt to cover that. I did want to add a response to those conservatives (like Tom Cotton) who think the presence of rioters is a reason to unleash the military on protesters:

Whenever there’s another mass shooting, and suddenly 20 first-graders are dead at Sandy Hook, or 58 concert-goers in Las Vegas, or 49 night-clubbers in Orlando — you tell us that nothing can be done about the weapons of mass killing the perpetrators use. All those people who use similar guns legally and responsibly, you say, have Second Amendment rights. We can’t take their rights away just because a few criminals misuse them.

Now we see protesters by the hundreds of thousands across this country exercising their First Amendment rights legally and responsibly. But because a few criminals use those demonstrations as cover to destroy or steal property, you want the the military to take away the rights of the law-abiding majority, and perhaps to kill them if they won’t cooperate.

We liberals sympathize with the property owners in the same way that you sympathize with the survivors of mass shootings. But there is an enormous hypocrisy in your position. If no drastic steps can be taken to solve the far more deadly problem of mass shootings, then surely they can’t be taken now. We have a Constitution, and you can’t pick and choose when to apply it.

While we’re talking about Cotton, his screed prompted some soul-searching at the New York Times. How, the internal critics wondered, are The Times’ readers edified by hearing window-breakers and looters described as an “insurrection” that requires a federal military intervention overruling local officials? Or that protesters (the vast majority of whom are nonviolently exercising their constitutional rights) should meet “an overwhelming show of force” that includes combat troops?

The official answer is that The Times’ opinion pages should provide a window into the policy debate the country is having, and not just reflect the liberal worldview of The Times’ editors or typical readers. But while that answer seems to make sense at first glance, two responses (picked out by James Fallows) call it into question.

Times columnist Michelle Goldberg notes that The Times has in the past provided space to enemies of liberal democracy like Vladimir Putin and Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, but that neither of them was “given space in this newspaper to advocate attacks on Americans during moments of national extremis.” If The Times’ opinion pages are attempting to define “the boundaries of legitimate debate”, some points of view need to be kept outside the pale.

I could be wrong, but I don’t believe The Times would have published a defense of family separation by former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during the height of that atrocity, or a piece by the senior Trump aide Stephen Miller about the necessity of curbing nonwhite immigration. In both cases, I’m pretty sure the liberal inclination to hear all sides would have smacked up against sheer moral abhorrence.

But Fallows’ second choice is even more insightful: David Roberts‘ charge that the NYT is promoting a false image of conservatism. The Times’ conservative voices — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss — are “alienated from the animating force in US conservatism, which is Trumpism.” Publishing their words “might serve the purpose of challenging liberal thinking”, but they don’t expose Times readers to actual conservatism.

The signal feature of the 2016 election is that it settled the question of whether US conservatism — the actual movement, I mean, not the people in Washington think tanks who claim to be its spokespeople — is animated by a set of shared ideals and policies. It is not. …

[A]nyone who is devoted to the conservative intellectual tradition, anyone who thinks of themselves as a conservative through devotion to small government and traditional morality, has had to peel off. There is no way to pretend that Trump represents that tradition; he himself does not even try. So how many of these “true” conservatives did there turn out to be? Almost none!

What unites conservatives today, he says, are resentments, not ideas.

Not everyone involved is driven by tribal resentment, not every Trump voter indulges in misogyny or racism, but every member of the current conservative coalition has decided that those things are acceptable, or at the very least, not disqualifying — less important than lower taxes or immigration crackdowns.

Even if they do not share Trump’s ignorant, hateful impulses, even if they do not endorse his careening, incompetent governance, even if they do not countenance the grotesque corruption of his family and his administration, they support the coalition that enables those things. They are supporting a tribe with a strongman leader, not a set of ideas.

There’s no argument for that, nothing to plausibly fill an editorial page.

I think Trump’s total unfitness to be president requires Joe Biden to run a different kind of campaign. So many presidential roles are going unfilled that the country needs Biden to be a shadow president instead of a mere candidate. He does a pretty good job of that while discussing the George Floyd murder in this video.

I’d also like to see Biden start appointing a shadow government, so that his appointees could respond similarly when appropriate. Not just a vice president, but an attorney general, as well as secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury.

We’re in one of those weird moments where the big-corporation CEOs seem to be ahead of the conservative politicians who represent them.

I was fascinated to hear this CNBC interview with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. In particular the part where he stands broken-windows policing theory on its head.

There’s a philosophy that Rudy Giuliani made prominent about “broken-windows policing”. And what’s the whole premise of this? You walk into a neighborhood and you see a lot of broken windows; it just sends a signal that we are tolerant of crime. And the question I have is: Do we have policies within law enforcement that send a signal that we are tolerant of discrimination?

And a classic example is racial profiling. If I were to use those kinds of policies within AT&T, I would rightly be terminated, fired, and probably sued. But we allow, we actually have systems, we have procedures that allow for racial profiling. And what does that say? That says — just like broken windows — we have a tolerance for racial discrimination in law enforcement.

and the virus

This week the total stands at 112.6K deaths, up from 106K last week. That increase of 6.6K compares to last week’s 7K increase. So the number of new deaths is still headed downward, but seems to be leveling off.

The number of new cases has at best leveled off and might be increasing. As I’ve pointed out before, that’s a battle between two trends: the sinking number of cases in the states hit early, like New York, and a rising number in states that were initially spared, like Texas.

All of that discussion happens before we see any effect of the crowds gathered to protest George Floyd’s death. Incubation time of the virus is usually 1-2 weeks, and it often takes another week before a person notices symptoms, gets tested, and appears in the statistics.

An NYT editorial on reopening public schools does a better job summarizing the problems than suggesting solutions.

Trump’s demand that his acceptance speech take place in a packed arena has sunk the plan to hold the Republican Convention in Charlotte. As you can see above, North Carolina is one of the states where the number of cases is on the rise, so Democratic Governor Roy Cooper was not willing to approve a big, contagion-spreading event. Florida is the leading contender to get the dubious prize of a thrown-together-at-the-last-minute convention, but speculation that Trump will hold it at one of his own properties seems off-base. Jacksonville is the current favorite, and a decision is needed soon.

and the jobs report

Unemployment went down in May, when many experts were expecting it to go up. It’s still at 13.3%, or maybe 16.3%, depending on how you handle a tricky data problem.

People who are on temporary layoff are supposed to be classified as unemployed. For reasons that we’re not really sure a lot of those people were, in fact, classified as employed.

But the same mistake happened last month, so the drop in unemployment seems real, even if the level is unclear.

and a few Republicans edge away from Trump

A number of military leaders criticized Trump this week, some in very stark terms. His former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wrote:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. … We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.

Former Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said he agreed with Mattis, and then added:

I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should start, all of us, regardless of what our views are in politics, I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter. What is their character like? What are their ethics? Are they willing, if they’re elected, to represent all of their constituents, not just the base, but all of their constituents?

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell:

We have a Constitution. And we have to follow that Constitution. And the president has drifted away from it. … I think he has been not an effective president. He lies all the time. He began lying the day of inauguration, when we got into an argument about the size of the crowd that was there. People are writing books about his favorite thing of lying. And I don’t think that’s in our interest.

Senator Romney will not support Trump’s re-election. Senator Murkowski described General Mattis’ statement as “true and honest and necessary and overdue”. But then she said she was “struggling” with whether to support Trump in the fall election. That’s the fundamental Republican problem right now. It seems bizarre to think it’s “overdue” for someone to say that Trump has “made a mockery of our Constitution”, and yet to have any struggle at all about opposing him. Murkowski seemed to be saying that she knows what to think, and that many of her Republican colleagues think the same thing, but that she and they are still trying to gin up the courage to say publicly what they think and then act on it.

When I saw General Mattis’ comments yesterday I felt like perhaps we are getting to a point where we can be more honest with the concerns that we might hold internally and have the courage of our own convictions to speak up.

I can’t imagine admitting to that level of cowardice. But even that — hinting that you have criticisms, but can’t bring yourself to act on them — is an act of relative courage among the current crop of GOP senators. Many of them seem to be edging up to a line, and then looking around to see if anyone else is crossing it.

In a PBS interview, Senator Thune of South Dakota hinted at criticism, but did not actually voice it: Peaceful protesters should be allowed to speak. The country needs a “healing voice” that is not coming from the White House. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said

there is a fundamental — a Constitutional — right to protest, and I’m against clearing out a peaceful protest for a photo op that treats the Word of God as a political prop.

But he doesn’t go anywhere with that thinking.

Time is running out on them. If they let the election arrive without taking a clear stand, they might as well be gung-ho Trumpists. History won’t care that they had an inner voice of conscience, if they never listened to it. They are not dissidents; they are collaborators.

The American people seem to be shifting, even if GOP senators are not. A CNN poll out today has Trump’s approval rating dropping from 45% a month ago to 38% now. Biden’s lead over Trump is 14%, the highest it has ever been, up from 7% last month.

and you also might be interested in …

Rod Rosenstein testified at the show trial Lindsey Graham is running in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rosenstein took a middle position that I’m sure satisfied no one. He defended the Mueller investigation, and the reasons for launching it. But he repeated the Bill Barr lie that Mueller proved their was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

What Mueller actually said was that he could not prove there was a criminal conspiracy. One reason he couldn’t prove it was summarized in Part II of his report: Trump obstructed justice.

Rep. Steve King, the white supremacist congressman from Iowa, lost the Republican primary Tuesday. Come January, he’ll be out of Congress.

King’s loss might make you think the Republican Party is returning to sanity, but that would be a mistake. In Oregon, a QAnon conspiracy theorist won the Republican primary for the Senate, and will challenge Jeff Merkley in the fall. In a field of four candidates, Jo Rae Perkins got 49% of the vote.

After the George Floyd protests started, she was live on Facebook for an hour and a half, which Right Wing Watch edited down to less than two minutes. In it, she prays:

Lord, these people have no sense of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, Lord God. Not the ones that are causing this mayhem, Lord God, this Antifa, Father God. Shut down George Soros, Lord God. End his reign of terror, Lord God. We know that he is funding this. Lord, we say. “Strip that money, strip that money strip that money.” If there is a way, Father God, that President Trump’s administration can block him from being able to spend any more money, Lord God, then allow that to happen.

Of course, we have the usual right-wing-nut-job ravings about Antifa conspiracies funded by Soros’ dirty Jewish money. But even beyond that, there’s the pervasive hypocrisy about federal power. She spends a bunch of her 90 minutes talking about the principle of limited government and all the federal laws and projects she doesn’t believe the Constitution allows. But Trump taking away Soros’ money or tightly controlling how he can spend it — that would be the answer to a prayer.

A constitutional republic for me, tyranny for thee. And remember: This is not just some crazy woman I picked off of Facebook. This is the Republican candidate for one of Oregon’s two seats in the U. S. Senate.

Trump’s scaremongering about Antifa has real consequences. A family who tried to go camping in rural Washington ran into a town anticipating Antifa “infiltrators”. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

and let’s close with something remastered

If you find it hard to listen to Trump, try letting Sarah Cooper provide the visuals.

“Actually, we’re just getting started.”

This week it’s been easy to assemble video collections of misbehaving police. The current crisis began with a Minneapolis policeman killing George Floyd — not instantaneously, by shooting him in a moment of confusion or fear, but slowly, by kneeling on his neck as his life ebbed away. In the two weeks since, we’ve seen phalanxes of militarized police attack angry but non-violent crowds of protesters on multiple occasions. Friday, the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie put together a list:

Rioting police have driven vehicles into crowds, reproducing the assault that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They have surrounded a car, smashed the windows, tazed the occupants and dragged them out onto the ground. Clad in paramilitary gear, they have attacked elderly bystanders, pepper-sprayed cooperative protesters and shot “nonlethal” rounds directly at reporters, causing serious injuries. In Austin, Texas, a 20-year-old man is in critical condition after being shot in the head with a “less-lethal” round. Across the country, rioting police are using tear gas in quantities that threaten the health and safety of demonstrators, especially in the midst of a respiratory disease pandemic.

That list is sadly incomplete. For example, Bouie’s “elderly bystander” is not the one you’re thinking of. These bystanders are in Salt Lake City, not Buffalo. The video Bouie linked to also shows an old man being pushed to the ground, but he falls on his chest rather than striking the back of his head.

It is tempting to keeping throwing more and more videos at the dead-enders who refuse to see the widespread problem in American policing. But those who are not convinced by now will probably never be convinced, and in the meantime we have let them freeze the conversation. Something similar happens with climate change: A handful of stubborn denialists can freeze a conversation at the is-it-real stage, and prevent reality-based people from discussing what to do about it.

It’s time to ignore the dead-enders and move forward without them.

More than a few bad apples. It also time to start ignoring people who make the few-bad-apples argument, as White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien did recently. If there were no systemic problem, that handful of bad cops would be easy to identify and remove from the force. (Don’t tell me the other cops don’t know who they are.) But the problem is not just the occasional officer who violently abuses his power; it’s all the other cops who cover for him and resist any attempt to hold him accountable.

The initial police statement on George Floyd mentioned nothing about Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, but was titled “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” When Buffalo police shoved a 75-year-old protester — a white man, in this case — who hit his head on the pavement and soon had blood pooling around his ear, their initial statement said:

A 5th person was arrested during a skirmish with other protestors and also charged with disorderly conduct. During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.

In both cases, that false account probably would have stood if not for bystander video, leaving us to wonder how many police assaults and murders are routinely covered up — not just by the “bad apples” who commit those crimes, but by the criminally complicit police around them.

The Buffalo situation demonstrates an even deeper rot. When bystander video showed that the police report was a lie, Buffalo’s police commissioner suspended without pay, pending investigation, the two officers who pushed the man down. (The officers who knowingly allowed a false report to be issued have not been punished.) But even this small move towards accountability was too much: All 57 fellow active members of the Buffalo Police emergency unit resigned from the squad (but not from the police).

“Fifty-seven resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” Buffalo Police Benevolent Association president John Evans told WGRZ on Friday.

Their orders were to clear the square of protesters, not to assault old men. (The two officers were charged with assault Saturday. Over 100 police and firefighters showed up at the courthouse to support them.) But not a single member of the emergency unit looked at that video and said, “Hey, we shouldn’t be doing things like that.” They have chosen their side. There aren’t two bad apples on that squad; there are 57 bad apples. There’s probably no bureaucratic mechanism that can bring about this outcome, but none of them should ever be police anywhere again. (According to the local ABC TV channel, though, two of the 57 claim the union manipulated this outcome by saying they could no longer defend members of the emergency unit under these conditions.)

What can be done? We need to be thinking on multiple time scales. Some significant changes need to be announced immediately, while the crowds are still in the streets. But problems this deep and old resist quick fixes. So the country needs a long-term plan, but that plan has to visibly begin right now.

In Minnesota. In the specific case of George Floyd’s murder, most of what the protesters want has already been achieved: All four officers involved have been arrested and charged. Derek Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, and the other three face aiding-and-abetting charges. Unless we want to see the officers handed over for mob justice, that’s all that can be done right now. The legal process will play out over months, and ultimately a jury will have to decide what happens to them.

More broadly, the Minnesota Commissioner for Human Rights filed suit against the City of Minneapolis and its police department on Tuesday, claiming that

the City of Minneapolis Police Department has engaged in a pattern and practice of race-based policing in violation of the [Minnesota Human Rights Act]

Friday, the Commissioner and the City agreed to a plan that they have asked the Court to impose as an injunction. The plan has six provisions:

• Ban chokeholds and neck restraints of any kind.
• Police officers who witness another officer’s unauthorized use of force have an immediate duty to report the incident to their commanders.
• Police officers who witness another officer’s unauthorized use of force have a duty to intervene “by verbal and physical means“, or face the same punishment as the offending officer.
• Crowd control weapons (chemical agents and rubber bullets are specifically mentioned) can only be used after authorization by the Chief of Police.
• Pending disciplinary actions must be decided within 45 days. Future actions have to be decided within 30 days.
• The City’s Office of Police Conduct Review can audit body-camera footage “proactively and strategically”. (Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucerno explains: “Right now, body cam footage exists. However, it’s only reviewed when there’s a complaint.”)

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his own proposal, which requires action from the legislature:

• Make police disciplinary records transparent
• Ban chokeholds
• Make false race-based 911 reports a hate crime
• Attorney General must act as independent prosecutor for any police murder case

Several other states and cities have announced plans to ban either chokeholds or tear gas or both.

8 Can’t Wait. Campaign Zero is an organization devoted to ending police violence. It put out the “8 Can’t Wait” agenda, of steps any city could take right away. (The “Data proves …” claim in the graphic below is theirs, not mine. I have not tried to evaluate it.)

Matt Yglesias explains the 8 in more detail, and looks at some of the supporting statistics. Some are easy to understand: banning chokeholds and the duty to intervene are already part of the Minneapolis agreement discussed above. The ban on shooting at moving vehicles and requirement to warn before shooting are self-explanatory.

A comprehensive reporting requirement means that officers need to report each time they use force or threaten to use force against a civilian. … The use of force continuum is a specific set of requirements governing what kinds of weapons can be used versus what levels of resistance. And a deescalation requirement mandates that officers try to secure their personal safety through distance and communication before resorting to force.

Medium-term proposals. A number of ideas are included in the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which Democrats in the House and Senate are introducing this morning. It’s hard to imagine Mitch McConnell allowing any of these reforms to be passed in time to bring this season of protest to a successful conclusion, but the problem isn’t going away until we have reforms more significant than anything that can happen quickly.

• a national database of deaths in police custody. It’s hard to believe this doesn’t already exist, but apparently not.
• a national police misconduct registry. So that bad cops fired in one city can’t just get a new job somewhere else.
• ending or altering “qualified immunity”. Qualified immunity shelters government officials from civil lawsuits for violating someone’s rights, “unless the victims of those violations can show that the rights were ‘clearly established’.” In practice, this has made such suits almost impossible for plaintiffs to win.
• changing the standard for police use of force. “victims of excessive force or other violations need only show that officers ‘recklessly’ deprived them of their rights. The current statute requires victims to show that officers’ actions were ‘willful’.”
• formalize the Justice Department’s oversight of police departments with a history of bad practices. During the Obama administration, Justice took oversight of local police seriously, but when Jeff Sessions became attorney general, he abandoned those efforts.

A change more likely to be made on the state level than the federal level: setting up a special prosecutor or special process for investigating killings by local police. In Minnesota, for example, the state attorney general has taken over the prosecution of the George Floyd officers. Some states already have state guidelines for investigating officer-involved deaths that make sure police departments aren’t investigating themselves. All states should.

And finally, cities need to change their relationships with police unions. In general, unions are good, and collective bargaining for better wages and benefits is fine. But too often police unions intent on protecting their members torpedo any move towards public accountability.

Long term: police culture. Welcome as reforms like those mentioned above would be, many doubt they would solve the problem.

Two aspects of the problem are more complicated than just changing a few rules and hiring better people:

• The institutional culture of police departments needs to change.
• The tasks that belong to police departments need to be rethought.

Both of these are too big for a few paragraphs at the end of a long article, but here are some thoughts to get you started.

Friday night, Chris Hayes interviewed Patrick Skinner, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who came home to be a beat cop in Savannah. One of the themes of their conversation was the dysfunction of the “warrior” mentality of police. Skinner said that police would do better to think of themselves as neighbors rather than warriors. In a recent Washington Post op-ed he wrote:

As I got better at being a rookie cop, I kept asking myself this question: “If I didn’t have a badge and a gun, how would I handle this call?” Whatever I came up with that was legal, transparent and kind, I would try.

Hayes reviewed the video of the 75-year-old man being pushed down in Buffalo, and observed that probably none of the officers present would act that way in everyday life: They would not push an old man out of their way, and if they saw an old man bleeding on the pavement, they would stop to help. Somehow, their police training overrode those human reactions.

Long term: defunding. Philip and Thenjiwe McHarris note all the reform efforts by the Minneapolis police — none of which saved George Floyd’s life. They think it’s foolish to expect similar small-scale reforms to end the killing of black people in general.

The focus on training, diversity and technology like body cameras shifts focus away from the root cause of police violence and instead gives the police more power and resources. The problem is that the entire criminal justice system gives police officers the power and opportunity to systematically harass and kill with impunity.

The solution to ending police violence and cultivating a safer country lies in reducing the power of the police and their contact with the public. We can do that by reinvesting the $100 billion spent on policing nationwide in alternative emergency response programs, as protesters in Minneapolis have called for.

In most American communities today, police get called to deal with all manner of disorder, from the homeless man sleeping on your stoop to the loud teen-age party next door to domestic violence to drug overdoses to episodes of mental illness.

But what defines the police is their ability to use force, all the way up to deadly force. Their very presence is a threat of force, and opens the possibility that someone could end up dead. I sincerely doubt that the clerk who called the police on George Floyd intended for them to come and kill him. The store owner now says: “If I was [there] I don’t think the authorities would have been called and we would have policed our own matters.”

Often situations would be better addressed by a civic official with different capabilities, different options, and different training. Or perhaps the disorder would not exist at all if some kind of preventive service had been provided during the previous weeks. But cities don’t have the resources for such alternatives precisely because they’re spending so much money on police.

Moves to cut both the responsibilities and the budgets of police, and to use that money to provide services in alternative ways, are often promoted with slogans like “Abolish the police”. This is poor messaging, in my opinion, and opens itself up to easy caricature from police advocates. (Are cities going to stop enforcing their laws? Should citizens buy more guns and take the law into their own hands?) But what abolish-the-police advocates really want is something far more reasonable: Reduce to the absolute minimum the number of occasions when Americans come into contact with people who could kill them and get away with it.

Fascism got out to an early lead, but a late comeback won the week for democracy.

A week ago, peaceful protests by day were competing with violence by night: violence by protesters, violence by opportunistic looters, violence from mysterious agitators seeking a wider conflict, and violence by police. President Trump seemed to think this unrest worked in his favor politically — perhaps his re-election campaign could ride a wave of white backlash, as Richard Nixon did in 1968 — so he ignored the peaceful protests, denounced the rioters, and focused on “dominating” American streets with overwhelming force.

That cycle peaked Monday. Washington D.C. had no governor with the authority to object, so Trump brought in National Guard units from across the country, and moved 1,600 active-duty troops to nearby bases. (According CNN, those troops were not used; “no active duty forces have entered the city yet to respond to civil unrest.”) CBS News reported a heated meeting at the White House Monday, when Trump demanded that the Pentagon deploy 10,000 active-duty troops in the streets in cities across the country. (To get around the restrictions the Posse Comitatus Act puts on military law enforcement, Trump would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act.) Defense Secretary Esper, Attorney General Bill Barr, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley all opposed the idea.

But if the Army wasn’t deployed, another ominous force was: unidentified federal police, who would say only that they came from the Department of Justice. They had no name tags or other means of identification, and hence zero accountability. One protester nailed the issue:

God forbid if there’s an escalation of violence and there’s a video circulating of an officer using his baton on a protester, and there’s no way to identify who that officer is,

Also Monday morning, after a conversation with his autocratic mentor, Vladimir Putin, Trump berated governors in a teleconference, calling them “weak” if they did not call out the National Guard and “dominate the streets”.

Trump also claimed to know the sinister conspiracy he needed to dominate: Antifa, which Wikipedia describes as “a diverse array of autonomous groups”. Trump is often best answered by laughter, so the satire site Beaverton posted: “ANTIFA surprised to discover it is an organization“.

“All this time all I thought I was doing was taking direct action to fight nazis,” stated self-professed anti-fascist Mattheus Grant of Eugene, OR. “But when I learned that I’m actually a member of an organization, I got so excited! Maybe we can get an office now?”

More seriously, The Nation obtained a situation report on the D.C. protests from the FBI’s Washington field office (WFO):

based on CHS [Confidential Human Source] canvassing, open source/social media partner engagement, and liaison, FBI WFO has no intelligence indicating Antifa involvement/presence.

So either Trump knew more than the FBI, or he just made this up.

The photo op. Trump’s photo-op stunt with an Episcopal Church as a backdrop and a Bible as a prop happened Monday evening.

That PR gimmick began a half hour before curfew with an attack on peaceful demonstrators in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. After the crowd was cleared away, Trump walked from the White House to St. John’s Church to have his photo taken holding up a Bible. Brandishing the Bible like a weapon seemed to be the only use he could think of.

Leaders from The Episcopal Church have condemned the reported use of tear gas and projectiles to clear clergy and protesters from the area around St. John’s Episcopal Church, across the street from the White House, so President Donald Trump could use it for an unauthorized photo op on June 1.

Video of the attack is disturbing in some places and boring in others, but I recommend watching chunks of it, particularly after the 30-minute mark when the police begin moving the crowd.

What I see in that video are angry but entirely non-violent demonstrators, mostly young adults and a surprising (to me) number of whites. Police push them back with gas, exploding projectiles, shields, and horses.

Perhaps even more disturbing was the baldly false statement issued by the Park Police afterwards:

At approximately 6:33 pm, violent protestors on H Street NW began throwing projectiles including bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids. … As many of the protestors became more combative, continued to throw projectiles, and attempted to grab officers’ weapons, officers then employed the use of smoke canisters and pepper balls. No tear gas was used by USPP officers or other assisting law enforcement partners to close the area at Lafayette Park

The video shows none of this, and none of the journalists covering the demonstration saw it. In the video, the police look entirely undisturbed. They do not flinch to avoid projectiles, and nothing bounces off their shields. After the police begin to fire gas and advance, I noticed two or three water bottles hit the pavement in front of them. The bottles hit with a splash — they are not frozen — and do not hit the police. No one appears to be trying to grab police weapons.

As the week went on, more and more people in the administration claimed to have nothing to do with the decision to launch this attack. No one was responsible. Not Mark Esper. Not General Milley. Not even Bill Barr. Success has many fathers, the proverb says, but failure is an orphan. By that standard, Trump’s church-and-Bible photo op was a failure.

Damage to America’s standing in the world. If you think this combination of factors — calling out the military against protesting crowds, blatant lying, secret police, using low-flying military helicopters to intimidate dissidents, attacking journalists, and denouncing imaginary conspiratorial enemies — sound like the kind of autocratic response to dissent that the US usually condemns, you’re not the only ones who noticed. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, who learned about autocracy by studying Putin, described it as “the performance of fascism“.

A power grab is always a performance of sorts. It begins with a claim to power, and if the claim is accepted—if the performance is believed—it takes hold. Much as he played a real-estate tycoon in the most crude and reductive way, Trump is now performing his idea of power as he imagines it. In his intuition, power is autocratic; it affirms the superiority of one nation and one race; it asserts total domination; and it mercilessly suppresses all opposition.

China noticed too, and gloated. The editor of China’s Global Times tweeted:

The US repression of domestic unrest has further eroded the moral basis to claim itself “beacon of democracy”. The era that the US political elites could exploit Tiananmen incident at will is over.

And Thai Enquirer couldn’t resist an ironic jab at the oh-so-superior United States: “Unrest continues for a seventh day in former British colony“.

The United States has had a long history of suppressing and persecuting its various ethnic minorities since the country gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1776.

The treatment of its indigenous ‘Native Americans,’ its imported Asian and Black communities, and its Hispanic community has long been a source of friction.

American black minority groups were under a program similar to South Africa’s Apartheid policy until as recently as 1964. Today, the ethnic black community is still detained and killed with impunity by the state security forces and black Americans make up the majority of those incarcerated under the country’s archaic judicial system.

Religion also plays a major role in governance with religious beliefs separating key state organs including the country’s highest court where many social laws are passed based on the justices’ personally held religious convictions.

In short, US ambassadors around the world have just seen their moral authority collapse.

In addition to Trump’s proposed misuse of the Army, his unilateral dismantling of America’s soft power is probably a major factor causing previously silent military figures to speak out: Trump’s ex-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, to name two out of many.

Peaceful protest wins out. But if Trump imagined that unleashing police power on the protesters at Lafayette Park would intimidate them, he was wrong. On Tuesday they were back in larger numbers, and have not stopped protesting near the White House since. Friday, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed the section of 16th Street that ends at Lafayette Park “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and painted an enormous “Black Lives Matter” on the pavement. (In the vanishing point of the photo below, you can barely make out the White House.)

Bowser’s move was an institutional version of the well-known protest chant: “Whose streets? Our streets.”

Wednesday, President Obama filled the healing role that Trump has left vacant, urging young African Americans to “feel hopeful even as you may feel angry”. Don’t choose between protest in the streets and action within the political system, he advised. Do both.

This is not an either-or. This is a both-and. To bring about real change, we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable, but we also have to translate that into practical solutions and laws that can be implemented. … Every step of progress in this country, every expansion of freedom, every expression of our deepest ideals, has been won through efforts that made the status quo uncomfortable. And we should all be thankful for folks who are willing in a peaceful, disciplined way to be out there making a difference.

A memorial service for Floyd was held in Minneapolis on Thursday, and another in Raeford, North Carolina (where he was born) on Saturday. Both were surrounded by emotional, but nonviolent, crowds.

That turned into the pattern across the nation. As the week went on, violence faded and peaceful protest gained momentum. The largest protests occurred this weekend unblemished by violence from either looters or law enforcement.

Strikingly, protests occurred all over the country, in small towns as well as big cities, and included many whites as well as people of color. (Mitt Romney marched Sunday in Washington.) In this photo, taken Wednesday a few blocks from where I live in Bedford, Massachusetts, two passing police stop in the Great Road to take a knee in front of the protesters on the town common. The officers were later commended by the police chief, and every protester I’ve talked to was touched by the gesture. (Our local protests continued all week; I attended on Friday.)

There are two ways to interpret the late-week peace. In one narrative, the overwhelming display of force on Sunday and Monday sent the message that protester violence would not be tolerated. As rioters went away, law enforcement withdrew. But in another narrative, it was law enforcement’s lower profile that de-escalated the cycle of violence.

One inarguable point, though, is that the absence of burning buildings and marauding police left the media little to cover other than the substance of the protests. By this weekend, there was increasing discussion of proposals to get America’s police back under control. (See the next article.)

Thoughtful people can disagree about whether the early-week violence was necessary to focus the nation’s attention. But it was clearly necessary for that violence to end so that the message could be absorbed.

In the end, on balance, it was a good week for democracy and for the nation. But we’ll need a lot more good weeks to see change take root.

By the end, it turned into a good week. The violence from looters and police faded, but the protests grew and spread across the country. Without the distraction of burning buildings and troops in the streets, more and more attention went to the substance of the protests: How do we get the police under control?

I’m going to cover this in two separate articles. The first follows the sequence of events, from Trump’s authoritarian stunt at St. John’s Church on Monday to the massive peaceful protests over the weekend. That should be out a little after 8 EDT. The second will look at the proposals for changing how police operate in America, from simple rule changes to “abolishing” policing as we know it. That will be out before 11.

The weekly summary may be a little late this week. It has a pandemic to cover. (Remember that? It’s bound to come roaring back after the massive crowd scenes.) Also the push and pull as the Republican Party decides which way to move. And plans for the return of the NBA. That should be out by 1.

A word to my faithful audience. Tomorrow’s service may be late, but I hope to have it up some time on Sunday. Given the situation, I didn’t want to prepare something too early, and I’m also preaching (on different texts) for Universalist National Memorial Church tomorrow. I’ll have that sermon text posted.

And there’s a good chance I’ll be out in or near the demonstrations, too. Wear your masks and stay as safe as you can be.

Black lives matter.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

President John F. Kennedy (3-13-1962)

If you’re more upset by an athlete kneeling on a sports field than a police officer kneeling on a black man’s neck until he dies, then you are the problem.

– Brian Klaas

This week’s featured post is “The Three Stories of George Floyd“.

This week everybody was talking about George Floyd

The featured post is already too long, but a lot of stuff didn’t get included.

A low point in a week of low points was Trump’s tweets about the demonstrations around the White House and the Secret Service response. First, he just flat-out lied about D. C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) “who is always looking for money & help, wouldn’t let the D.C. Police get involved.” D. C. police did in fact protect the White House.

[The Secret Service] let the “protesters” scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them. The front line was replaced with fresh agents, like magic. Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action. “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice.”

You can just hear the glee in his imagining the protesters being “really badly hurt”. I also sincerely doubt that the young Secret Service agents were chomping at the bit to go hurt protesters, the way Trump makes it sound.

Some of the pleas that black local officials made for peace and an end to the destruction were really moving. Here’s Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Trump’s tweet that

The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.

is based on nothing. Designating a terrorist organization is a legal act based on legislation. There is no legislation that covers domestic groups. His claim that Antifa is promoting the riots is also pretty much vacuous. It’s possible, but Trump has presented no evidence, and he has a history of making Antifa into a general-purpose boogie man.

Finally, it’s not even clear that Antifa is an organization. There are small local groups that use the label, and they share certain ideas and texts and tactics. (The main idea is that fascists are violent, and they need to be met with violence. The subtext is that the police cannot be trusted to protect progressives from fascists.) But it’s not like there’s a Pope of Antifa somewhere sending out orders. Talking about Antifa as an organization is like talking about jazz or yoga as an organization.

Remember: During World War II, Americans were all anti-fascists.

An amazing column in the Washington Post yesterday. A daughter from the family that owns Gandhi Mahal in Minneapolis reports overhearing her father’s reaction to their restaurant burning down: “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served. Put those officers in jail.”

The protests and the violence and the fires will stop once we’re rid of this system that oppresses, and maims, and kills people like George Floyd. So let it burn.

Somebody drove a truck through a bunch of protesters on a bridge in Minneapolis yesterday. The details are still vague.

and 100,000 Covid-19 deaths

Well, not everybody was talking about this death milestone. The President of the United States had nothing to say on the topic.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, said something very moving and appropriate. He posted a 2:21-minute video on Twitter in which he marked the 100,000th death and sympathized with those who have lost loved ones.

I can promise you from experience, the day will come when the memory of your loved one will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.

The video is only briefly political, and does not mention the President’s name.

It’s made all the worse by knowing that this is a fateful milestone we should have never reached, that it could have been avoided. According to a study done by Columbia University, if the administration had acted just one week earlier to implement social distancing and do what it had to do, just one week sooner, as many as 36,000 of these deaths might have been averted.

Biden also does not center his message on himself. That “from experience” is the only allusion to his own losses, particularly his first wife and baby daughter dying in a traffic accident in 1972.

OK, so where are we: Currently at 106K deaths, up from 99K last week. The 7K increase is down from the 8K increase last week.

Desperate for a scapegoat, Trump ended US membership in the World Health Organization Friday.

The Supreme Court denied a California church’s request to throw out the state’s emergency rule that houses of worship only open at 25% of the ordinary building capacity. It was a 5-4 ruling with Justice Roberts siding with the Court’s four liberals. Justice Kavanaugh wrote a dissent for himself and Justices Gorsuch and Thomas.

The established law in such cases was explained well by Vox’ Ian Millhiser:

The general rule when a state is accused of abridging “religious liberty” is that churches and other religious institutions may be subjected to the same laws as everyone else, but they cannot be singled out for inferior treatment. Churches must comply with the fire code, follow most labor laws, obey the criminal law, and so forth. As the Supreme Court explained in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), people of faith must still obey “neutral” state laws of “general applicability.”

Roberts and Kavanaugh disagree about which secular institutions are comparable to a church. Roberts writes:

Similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time.

Kavanaugh wants to clump churches with different kinds of institutions.

The basic constitutional problem is that comparable secular businesses are not subject to a 25% occupancy cap, including factories, offices, supermarkets, restaurants, retail stores, pharmacies, shopping malls, pet grooming shops, bookstores, florists, hair salons, and cannabis dispensaries.

You now know was much as I do, and you can make up your own mind, but I think Kavanaugh is just being ridiculous. A church resembles a movie theater much more than a pet grooming shop.

and Michael Flynn

Summaries and partial transcripts of the Flynn/Kislyak conversations have been released. These are the conversations that Flynn lied about to the FBI. And the transcripts make that lie crystal clear: He told the FBI he didn’t discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador, when he really did.

Marcy Wheeler (who writes the blog EmptyWheel) assesses:

They’re utterly damning. … [F]rom the very start of this Administration, Flynn willingly set up the relationship with Russia such that Russia and Trump’s Administration were allied against Democrats — and anyone else who believed it was wrong for Russia to tamper in our election.

and Twitter

Tuesday, Twitter attached a fact-check warning to a Trump tweet that was full of misinformation about vote-by-mail. This was long overdue. In fact, if Twitter applied the same standards to Trump that it applies to everyone else, his account would have been closed long ago.

Trump’s tweet was still there. He had not been censored in any way. But he claimed — in a tweet — that he had been.

Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election. If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen!

And he spread more threatening disinformation.

Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices. We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.

As he so often does — see the bit about Antifa above — he’s making threats based on powers he doesn’t have.

But he attempted to follow through with an executive order that is itself full of misinformation. It talks about online platforms that “censor content and silence viewpoints that they dislike”. (Again, his tweet is still there. He was fact-checked, not silenced.) And it calls on the FCC to “clarify” the laws that don’t hold online platforms responsible for what users post there.

Lawfare comments:

The key language of Section 230—“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”—leaves no ambiguity to enable FCC rulemaking or FCC action at all. Nor does language about good-faith removals limit this provision in any way. Rather, the statute simply lays out a standard for courts to review intermediary liability claims. Plus, even if the FCC could rewrite Section 230, that would not stop the Trump tweet fact-check—Twitter still enjoys First Amendment protection for what it says on its own platform. Regarding the FTC, the order wrongly interprets platforms’ merely aspirational guidelines on openness as mandatory promises; no one seriously believes that Twitter is totally neutral toward all content, no matter how horrible.

But the likelihood that the order won’t withstand judicial scrutiny misses the point. The threat of the order itself, even as wrong as it is, does exactly the damage Trump wants to do: It pressures companies into giving his content preferential treatment.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Fox News that he disagreed with what Twitter was doing.

I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.

Two Australian satire sites then posted headlines with false info about Zuckerberg. The Shovel posted “Mark Zuckerberg — dead at 36 — Says Social Media Sites Should Not Fact-Check Posts”. And The Chaser posted “Social media sites shouldn’t fact-check posts” says child molester Mark Zuckerberg, then followed with “Child molesters sue The Chaser after being compared to Mark Zuckerberg“.

Twitter did nothing about another Trump disinformation campaign.

In the annals of Trump’s many scurrilous slanders, this one stands out: He keeps pushing a conspiracy theory that accuses MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough of murder. A Scarborough congressional staffer, Lori Kaye Klausutis, died in the office 2001. She “died when she suffered a heart condition that caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk”. Scarborough “was 800 miles away at the time and the police ruled her death an accident.”

The woman’s husband, Timothy Klausutis, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He quoted three Trump tweets, and then made a request:

Please delete these tweets.

I’m a research engineer and not a lawyer, but I’ve reviewed all of Twitter’s rules and terms of service. The President’s tweet that suggests that Lori was murdered — without evidence (and contrary to the official autopsy) — is a violation of Twitter’s community rules and terms of service. An ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform for such a tweet but I am only asking that these tweets be removed.

… I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain. … My wife deserves better.

But Twitter has not removed the tweets or banished Trump. When reporters asked Trump about the tweets Tuesday in the Rose Garden, he substituted his own imaginings about the family for the husband’s expressed wishes:

I’m sure that, ultimately, they want to get to the bottom of it and it’s a very serious situation. As you know, there’s no statute of limitations. So, [reopening the investigation] would be a very good, very good thing to do.

As usual, Trump has no new evidence that challenges the conclusions of the original investigation. He’s just stirring up trouble for Scarborough, who he views as an enemy. Tim Klausutis and the rest of the dead woman’s family are just collateral damage.

A handful of Republicans in Congress have denounced this unscrupulous attack on one of their own, but the great majority have remained silent. There seems to be literally nothing Trump could do that would result in widespread criticism from his party, much less any substantive discipline.

The WaPo’s Brian Klaas calls the intransigence of Trump cultists “the Fifth Avenue problem” and comments:

American democracy is badly broken if few people change their minds about a president who falsely accuses someone of murder or boasts about his TV ratings while 100,000 Americans lose their lives and nearly 40 million lose their jobs. And that says as much about the dysfunctional state of our country as it does about Trump.

and you also might be interested in …

SpaceX successfully launched two astronauts into space and then docked their vehicle with the International Space Station.

The National Hockey League has a plan for going straight to playoffs and crowning a champion in early autumn: 24 teams would play in two hub cities. The cities, the dates, and the final decision about whether this will happen at all are still pending.

Some for-profit colleges run a scam where students are conned into maxxing out their student loans, but are left without the marketable credentials or skills the college’s pitch promised. Fraudulent colleges find veterans particularly attractive because of their GI benefits.

The Obama administration made rules that forgave these student loans, but the Trump administration rolled those rules back. Congress passed a bill re-establishing the Obama rules, but Trump just vetoed it writing:

[The bill] sought to reimpose an Obama-era regulation that defined education fraud so broadly that it threatened to paralyze the nation’s system of higher education.

Unsurprising, I guess, that the founder of Trump University would have so much sympathy with education fraudsters.

Mitch Daniels was the Republican governor of Indiana before Mike Pence, and is now president of Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Last Monday, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about why Purdue will reopen its campus in the fall.

I have too much to say about this, which I hope to get to next week. The gist of his argument is that most Purdue students are young and young people mostly don’t die from the virus, so “failing to reopen Purdue University this fall would be an unacceptable breach of duty”.

In other words, he’s using the magic of averages to make the victims of his policy — older students, janitors, secretaries, professors — go away. I can imagine a sound and anguished weighing of risks and benefits that concluded with opening Purdue. But this isn’t it, and the president of an institution of higher learning should be ashamed to give his students such a shoddy example.

The Lincoln Project is a group of never-Trump Republicans who have been making anti-Trump TV ads. This week they branched out and started going after Mitch McConnell as well.

and let’s close with something squirrely

Mark Rober apparently is something of a YouTube sensation, with 11.8 million subscribers, but I hadn’t heard of him before this video. He started out trying to protect his bird feeder from squirrels, but as they foiled one device after another, he came to have first a grudging admiration for their persistence and athleticism, and then a real fascination with them. At 20 minutes, his “Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder” video is longer than my usual closing, but well worth it.

And while we’re talking squirrels, Christopher Moore’s new novel Shakespeare for Squirrels is an amusing way to pass the time while sheltering at home. This is the third Moore novel to follow King Lear’s former fool, Pocket of Dog Snogging upon Ouze. Pocket was introduced in Foole, which retold King Lear in a way that made Pocket the hero. He then moved on to The Serpent of Venice, and now shows up in the timeless Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The George Floyd story is really three separate stories: how he died, how he fits into the larger story of police brutality against black people, and the demonstrations and riots that have happened around the country since his killing.

His death. The first story is the most difficult to watch, but the easiest to tell: Last Monday in Minneapolis, police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck “for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, with 2 minutes and 53 seconds of that occurring after Floyd was unresponsive”.

We know the timing that exactly because a bystander uploaded a video to Facebook. It shows Floyd repeatedly complaining that he can’t breathe, and then becoming motionless while bystanders plead with police to “check his pulse” and ask the policeman who was keeping the growing crowd away “You going to let him kill that man in front of you?”. Chauvin doesn’t get off Floyd’s neck until an ambulance has arrived and a stretcher is ready to receive his (possibly already lifeless) body.

The police account, from a few hours before the video went viral, tells none of that. The New York Times summarizes:

Minneapolis police said they were investigating an accusation of forgery on Monday night in the southern part of the city. They confronted a man who was sitting on the top of a blue car. The police said the suspect had “physically resisted officers” as he was placed in handcuffs. He appeared to be “suffering medical distress,” according to the police statement released on Monday night after an ambulance was called to the scene.

That account is true, as far as it goes. Floyd was being arrested on a complaint that he had tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill at a local grocery. NBC reconstructed the arrest from a number of video sources. At times Floyd struggled with the police arresting him, but he presented no weapons and was always greatly outnumbered. (According to the criminal complaint against Chauvin, the struggle you can barely make out in the NBC video is Floyd resisting being put in the squad car.) At no point did he seem to be getting away. When Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck, Floyd was already handcuffed.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey commented:

The technique that was used is not permitted; is not a technique that our officers get trained in on. And our chief has been very clear on that piece. There is no reason to apply that kind of pressure with a knee to someone’s neck.

The four police officers involved in the incident were fired on Tuesday. On Friday, Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. [1] According to the local Star Tribune, he is the first white police officer in Minnesota to be charged in the death of a black civilian.

The other officers have not been charged with anything, but the county attorney says they are under investigation and charges are expected. Local Channel 9 speculated on what those charges might be:

The most serious charge the other three fired officers could face is aiding and abetting the murder. “That could be giving him a tool or weapon, it could be keeping people away from interfering with that was going on,” Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor, told FOX 9.

Friday, a Washington Post editorial expressed dissatisfaction with the official response:

Minneapolis’s own police have done little to suggest they can earn the trust of the community they are sworn to serve. They have not released body-cam footage of Mr. Floyd’s arrest, nor apologized for the specious statement they published about the incident, which elided the fact that Mr. Chauvin’s knee choked Mr. Floyd. The head of the city’s police union, Lt. Bob Kroll, said “now is not the time to rush to judgment” on Mr. Chauvin or the other officers at the scene, who did nothing to interfere as Mr. Floyd begged for his life.

Racism and American police. Excessive violence against black people accused of crimes is a very old story in America. By various accounts, thousands of blacks were lynched between the Civil War and the 1930s, often on little more than a false accusation. By definition, a lynching is an extra-judicial killing, but local law enforcement officers commonly either participated or looked the other way. (For example, the local sheriff was identified as a conspirator in the Mississippi Burning murders of three civil rights activists in 1964.) I don’t know any estimate of the number of African Americans who have died in police custody since the end of slavery. Such killings were easily attributed to the suspect resisting arrest, attempting to escape, or committing suicide in prison.

For most of my lifetime, whites have regarded police brutality against black people as a they-said/they-said story. Blacks almost universally complained that police treated them more harshly than whites, and statistics showed that blacks were arrested, charged, and convicted far more often. But police said that blacks committed more crimes and were more likely to have a bad attitude towards police. Most white people never saw police arresting or otherwise accosting blacks, so the problem was easy to deny, ignore, or minimize.

The advent of ubiquitous video has changed all that. In recent years, the whole world has seen police choke Eric Garner to death while arresting him for selling untaxed cigarettes, shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice dead for playing with a toy gun, shoot Walter Scott in the back while he was running away from an officer who had stopped him for having a bad brake light, and many similar incidents.

Those videos made us see other incidents differently, even if the actual death was off-camera: John Crawford III was shot dead in a WalMart for carrying a toy gun he was thinking of buying. Stephon Clark was shot dead in his grandmother’s back yard when police mistook his cellphone for a gun. Philandro Castille was riding with his girl friend and her four-year-old daughter when a policeman stopped the car. Castille informed the officer that he had a legal gun in the car, and the officer shot him dead. Freddie Gray died from a “rough ride” that police gave him back to the station after arresting him for carrying a knife.

The great majority of these incidents — even the ones caught on video — resulted in no jail time for the police involved. No one was indicted for Garner, Rice, Crawford, or Clark’s deaths. The officer who killed Castille was acquitted. Gray’s death resulted in a mistrial, some acquittals, and dropped charges. Walter Scott’s killer was convicted on federal charges, eventually, after his trial on a state murder charge ended in a hung jury.

Police have also tended to look the other way when white civilians kill blacks. Trayvon Martin was shot dead by a neighborhood watchman as he returned to his father’s fiance’s house after buying Skittles at a convenience store. Rather than treating the shooting as a crime, police returned the shooter’s gun and sent him home. Massive protests pushed local authorities to indict the shooter eventually, but he was acquitted.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the American justice system doesn’t regard the killing of a black person as a big deal. The anti-brutality movement is called Black Lives Matter in response to the apparent reality that they don’t. [2]

Recent events. By the time Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, outrage had already been building for some while.

In late February, Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Brunswick, Georgia by two white men (a retired police detective and his son) while he was out jogging. The killers told police they suspected him in some local burglaries. For months the police took no action and the case got no attention in the press. But in early May, a video of the incident (which police seem to have known about all along) went viral. It showed Arbery being chased down and shot by three men in two trucks. It looked a lot more like a lynching that the resisting-citizen’s-arrest story the killers told.

Within two days of the video’s release, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had gotten involved and arrested the two men in the lead truck. The third man, who videoed from the second truck, was arrested later.

How, the nation wondered, could police have sat on this video for months without making an arrest? If the video hadn’t leaked, would the killers have gotten away with it?

Another recent case generating outrage: Breonna Taylor, a Louisville EMT. Plain-clothes police with a no-knock warrant burst into her home (her boyfriend claims without identifying themselves as police), setting off a gun battle in which Taylor was killed and her boyfriend wounded. The warrant was to look for drugs, which they did not find. The boyfriend’s story — that he thought he was defending against a home invasion by armed criminals — seems pretty credible.

Echoes of Ferguson. Before we get into this week’s demonstrations and riots, I want to talk about the last time something like this happened.

In 2014, after the Michael Brown shooting in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, demonstrations erupted and sometimes turned violent. I commented at the time on the coverage from Fox News and other conservative media, which framed the community reaction as a great mystery: Most of these people never knew Michael Brown and had no idea whether the police were telling the truth or not about his killing. What riled them up so much that they had to go break windows or burn down a store?

If you came to the Ferguson story with that question in mind, racist stereotypes provided an obvious answer, which Fox didn’t need to spell out (though some right-wing voices did): The Brown shooting was just an excuse for young black men to indulge their inherently lawless nature.

I addressed this “mystery” in “What Your Fox-Watching Uncle Doesn’t Get About Ferguson“, a piece that I think holds up pretty well after nearly six years. What Fox did wrong was present the Brown shooting as a one-off event, when the real story was the ongoing predatory behavior of the Ferguson police towards the black community. [3]

The right story begins not with Officer Wilson’s bullets, or even with Michael Brown in the convenience store, but with a community where lesser forms of police abuse are an everyday occurrence. … So it’s no mystery at all why people who never met Michael Brown have been out on the streets. Brown’s death is part of a bigger issue that they all have a stake in: How can the police be gotten under community control, and disciplined to treat the community with respect? …

What’s rare about the Brown shooting isn’t the shooting itself, but how visible everything is: The body was lying in the street for hours. The eyewitnesses have been on TV. Nothing in the autopsy or other available evidence contradicts their testimony. If the police don’t have to answer for this, then what are the limits? Is there anything they can’t sweep under the rug?

This week’s responses. That’s the context to keep in mind as you think about the sometimes-violent demonstrations that we’ve seen around the country since Floyd’s killing. It isn’t that thousands of people have suddenly decided to care about a guy they’d never heard of a week ago, and it’s not that lawless animals have been turned loose. The anger being expressed in these demonstrations, by both peaceful and violent demonstrators, is largely personal anger. George Floyd symbolizes that anger, but it’s much bigger than him.

Very large numbers of black people have had their own bad experiences with police, incidents where they felt humiliated or threatened or disrespected. (One young man in Ferguson schooled a condescending Fox News reporter: “We go through this shit every day.“) And for the most part they have had no recourse; no one who had the power to demand justice would take their complaint seriously.

So when they see the tape of Chauvin killing Floyd, their response isn’t, “Oh my God, can you believe that?” but “There! Look at that! That’s how they are!” Not “I can’t believe stuff like that happens in America” but “Finally somebody got the goods on them.” [4]

And at the same time, there’s the fear that even with this kind of evidence, nothing will change. Maybe Chauvin will be tried and maybe he’ll even be convicted, but maybe he’ll get off somehow, as so many others have. Maybe the other cops have been fired, but probably somebody — maybe even Minneapolis again — will hire them and put them back on the street. Or maybe they’ll be the rare cops to pay some kind of price for their racism, but the racist policing system as a whole will rumble on.

There is no reason for the demonstrators to have faith that something else will happen, that America finally gets it now. That’s why they’re on the street.

For comparison, think about school shootings. Again and again — Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland — an event is so shocking that it rises above the usual platitudes. And for a moment you think: “Now. Now something will change, because things like just can’t go on.”

But they do go on. Sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes there’s some incremental change in how we sell or track guns. But before too long there’s a new shooting, one even more horrible than the last one. And we go through it all again. Remember how that feels?

Riots. What we saw rising through the week and then reaching a crescendo over the weekend was a pattern of peaceful demonstrations by day and violence by night — not just in Minneapolis, but in cities across the country.

I don’t know how to cover the destruction, or even how to grasp it. A news network may show you a store being looted or a police station being burned, but are all the stores being looted? Is the whole city burning? The destruction seems widespread, but I don’t know how to get a handle on it.

I think it’s important, though, that riots not become the story. The original injustice — both specifically in the Floyd case and generally in the racial bias of our law enforcement — needs to be the story. Yes, the riots need to stop. Yes, people who use the cover of the chaos to commit crimes should be arrested and punished. And we need to take a hard look at crowd-control policing to see whether its tactics set off people who might otherwise disperse on their own. But just returning to the status quo is not a solution, because before long there will be another George Floyd, and then it will happen all over again.

I think it’s important to remember that peaceful protest was tried and it failed. Remember Colin Kaepernick? What he was protesting when he knelt during the national anthem was precisely the racist nature of policing in America. The main result of Kaepernick’s protest was to end his NFL career, largely because Trump wouldn’t let up. LeBron James reminded us of this by posting this photo with the comment “This is why”

When you suppress peaceful protest against legitimate injustices, and punish the people who do it, you make violent protest inevitable.

And I don’t want to hear the platitude that violence never changes anything. In fact it does, and I think we’re seeing that now. The riots are sending white America the message that this can’t go on. It could have heard that message when Eric Garner said, “I can’t breathe.” It could have understood that message when football players knelt. But it refused. Now the message is being sent with fire and broken glass.

This can’t go on.

The agitators. Finally, there’s the mystery of the Umbrella Man, and an indeterminate number of others like him. A white man dressed in black, hiding his face behind a gas mask and an umbrella, got the Minneapolis riots started by calmly and methodically smashing the windows of an AutoZone with a hammer. He then walked away. He does not seem to be either a protester or a looter; he’s just there to catalyze the transition from protest to riot.

There are many similar stories of mysterious people, many of them white, who perform some initial act of violence and then vanish. Sometimes they arrive in trucks with no license plates.

So far, a lot more is being said about these mystery men than anyone actually knows. Some say they’re white supremacists trying to set off the race war that their rhetoric says is coming. Trump says Antifa is behind it. [5] A number of protesters in Minneapolis suspect undercover police of agitating the violence to discredit the peaceful protests. (In the Umbrella Man video, bystanders keep asking “Are you a cop?”)

Any of those stories might have been false originally, and then become true. If you’re an isolated white supremacist or a left-wing anarchist, and you hear a false report that people like you are trying to turn the protests into riots, maybe you go out and do it without orders from anyone.

All those explanations need to weighed against the need of local officials to deny that their own constituents are so disillusioned that they’re ready to start burning stuff down. Blaming it all on “outsiders” is an easy out for them.

My advice: Pay attention to actual cases and the observations of specific witnesses, but don’t take anybody’s conclusions seriously yet.

[1] A local TV station summarizes what Chauvin was and wasn’t charged with.

A person commits third-degree murder when the person does not intend to kill another person but does so by acting recklessly, or “without regard for human life.”

It can lead to as many as 25 years in prison. The manslaughter charge carries a sentence up to 10 years, and is easier to prove.

A person commits second-degree manslaughter when their negligence causes another person’s death. Manslaughter only requires the person to create “an unreasonable risk,” while third-degree murder requires the person to act “without regard for human life.”

The more serious charge of second-degree murder would require establishing that Chauvin intended to kill Floyd, and first degree would mean that he planned the killing.

So it depends on what Derek Chauvin was thinking. If he walked into the situation thinking “I’m going to kill that guy”, it’s first degree. If in the moment he realizes “I’m killing this guy” and continues, that’s second degree. If he just thinks “Eh, if he dies he dies”, that’s third degree. If he should have known that Floyd’s life was at risk, it’s manslaughter even if he didn’t know.

In my personal opinion, the Floyd killing is second-degree murder. But if I wanted to give myself the best chance to win in court, I’d do what the prosecutor has done. I’m not sure I could prove to a jury that the thought “I’m killing this guy” went through Derek Chauvin mind (though being surrounded by people yelling “You’re killing him” should have given him a clue). Proving that Chauvin acted recklessly and should have known Floyd might die seems much easier.

[2] That’s why the response “all lives matter” is so off-base. If all lives really did matter, there would be no need to assert that black lives matter.

[3] That behavior was laid out in detail months later in a Justice Department report. One key quote:

Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.

In other words, the police went into the community looking for things to fine people for, not to protect life or maintain order. The racial attitude of the police was characterized by things like this:

A November 2008 email stated that President Barack Obama would not be President for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

[4] The Trump administration is still in denial about this. Sunday on CNN, White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien rehashed the full a-few-bad-apples story.

No, I don’t think there’s systemic racism. I think 99.9% of our law enforcement officers are great Americans and many of them are African-American, Hispanic, Asian. They’re working in the toughest neighborhoods, they got the hardest jobs to do in this country. … There are some bad cops that are racist, there are cops that maybe don’t have the right training,. There are some that are just bad cops and they need to be rooted out because there’s a few bad apples that are giving law enforcement a terrible name.

What the administration sees is a PR problem, not a race problem. The thing to fix is not black people getting killed, but police getting “a terrible name”.

A lot of people on social media are sharing this Chris Rock quote:

Some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, “Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.”

[5] Over the years, Trump has said a lot of nonsense about Antifa, which is not even an actual organization so much as a collection of local groups who share some ideas and tactics. The general idea is that fascists are violent, so anti-fascists need to be prepared to match their violence. But Trump needs a left-wing group to distract from white supremacist violence, so Antifa is it.

Here’s where we’ve gotten to: The coronavirus epidemic in the United States officially passed the 100,000-death mark this week, and that’s not the lead story.

George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police last Monday, and by the weekend local protests had turned into nationwide riots. There’s a lot to untangle here, and I’m going to do my best. In my mind, this is really three, or maybe four, stories knotted together. First, there’s what happened to Floyd: what the police did when, who’s been charged with what, and so on. Second, there’s the long, sorry history of racist policing in America, and why this is a festering wound that almost every black American feels the pain of. Then there’s the story of angry protests turning into riots, with local officials (many of them black) struggling to calm things down while the President almost gleefully makes them worse.

Finally, and this fourth story I don’t know enough about to discuss intelligently yet, is the extensive anecdotal evidence that something sinister is going on behind the scenes, that agitators — many of them white — are doing their best to catalyze violence out of an already tense situation. Many people are speculating about who these bad actors are: white nationalists hoping to start the race war they’re always talking about, antifa anarchists, undercover police trying to discredit the protests — but nobody really knows. It could be Putin’s “little green men” for all I know. So far, all the sweeping statements made about this look irresponsible to me, and I’ll try not to muddy things up worse.

Everybody has their own particular ax to grind in discussing a complicated situation like this, and here’s mine: Racist policing was the issue that Colin Kaepernick was kneeling about before football games, and the main result of that peaceful protest was that he got drummed out of the NFL. When you suppress peaceful protests of longstanding injustices, you can’t really be shocked when violent protests break out.

So anyway, I’m planning a long article broken into sections to try to cover all those bases. That should be out by 10 or 11 EDT, and I haven’t picked a title yet.

Stuff that was happening before our cities started to burn seems like ancient history now, but it isn’t, and in a few days it will seem important again. So the weekly summary will discuss news about the pandemic, including the 100,000th American death. (And who knows how many people caught Covid-19 during the demonstrations and riots this week?) Also: Trump’s attempt to strike back at Twitter for fact-checking him, his heartless abuse of a woman’s death to make trouble for Joe Scarborough, the SpaceX launch, and release of the Flynn/Kislyak transcripts. And we’ll close this week with video of an attempt to protect a backyard birdfeeder from squirrels that turned into something much more. It’s hard to predict when that will appear, but let’s say before 1.

It occurs to me that most white people don't identify with their latent racist thoughts and assumptions because they don't identify with the word "hate". For the middle-class white person, "hate" is too strong a word. 

Instead, what we experience is labeled "distrust": A black person in a white neighborhood must be up to no good. Two black people, and they're definitely up to no good. A black person knocking on the porch door -- a danger. A group of black children -- disruptive. A black person in power -- must have a racial agenda. A black person reaching for his drivers' license -- a threat. A group of black people congregating in the street -- a riot. A group of black people arming themselves and standing in front of the state capital -- an insurrection. Distrust may be more dangerous than hatred here, because it's easier to justify to ourselves.

We have to face ourselves and question the assumptions we make every day. We have to question the reflexive fear of the Other. Would we react that way to a white person in a similar interaction?

Our distrust is digging people-sized holes in the fabric of society and nullifying our fellow humans in this world. It feeds into the hatred of the people we're comfortable with calling racist. 

We must address our daily mistrust. Humanity is at stake.

The full text of the service for Pentecost Sunday follows. Low bandwidth users might want to download and unzip the lower-quality audio file.

Higher-quality audio:

Download: Lower-quality audio file, zipped (2.1 Mb)

Welcome

Greetings. This is a service of worship for May 31, 2020, Pentecost Sunday.

Sentence and Votum (Psalm 124:8)

Because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ [Galatians 4:6, NRSV]
Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

Collect for the Day

Let us pray:
God, who at this time did teach the hearts of your faithful people, by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit; grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in your holy comfort. Amen.

Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray, as Jesus taught, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm

Let us praise God with words from Psalm 68. [68:4-10, NRSV]

Sing to God, sing praises to his name;
lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds—
his name is the Lord—
be exultant before him.

Father of orphans and protector of widows
is God in his holy habitation.
God gives the desolate a home to live in;
he leads out the prisoners to prosperity,
but the rebellious live in a parched land.

O God, when you went out before your people,
when you marched through the wilderness,
the earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain
at the presence of God, the God of Sinai,
at the presence of God, the God of Israel.
Rain in abundance, O God, you showered abroad;
you restored your heritage when it languished;
your flock found a dwelling in it;
in your goodness, O God, you provided for the needy.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Lesson

A reading from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. [2:1-11, NRSV]

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own [native] language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, [and] residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’

Here ends the reading.

Address

On Pentecost, which we commemorate today, the Holy Spirit descended upon the assembly, forming the new Christian church. That alone should attract our attention. But delving into its meaning offers further rewards.

Pentecost was a pre-existing Jewish pilgrimage holiday, and so it makes sense that a global representative group would be present in Jerusalem, and others besides. The Jewish holiday, Shavuot, is still observed. Originally, it marked the wheat harvest. That’s no small thing to celebrate, particularly this year of sourdough and banana bread, and difficult grocery store runs and price increases. I can imagine the wheat harvest being an emblem of the provision of life itself. Jesus certainly made the connection, as we pray “give us this day our daily bread.” Bread is shorthand for what we need; the harvest, the means of receiving it. But Shavuot’s meaning spread to become a commemoration of bestowing of the Law to Israel, thus its religious importance. I’m sure the participants that Pentecost — the Greek alternative name — got the parallel of the descent of the law and the descent of the spirit in their own time.

But let’s not wallow in that common Christian habit of contrasting law and spirit, so often to the denigration of Jews; rather, look at both law and spirit at their best: as a way to know the will of God, and do it. And at Pentecost of all holidays, clarity of understanding is of highest importance. “‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?” How is the spirit of God calling you to? What it is empowering you to do?

If God’s promises do not speak to you in a way that you can understand them, then you might think that those promises aren’t made for you. Which is why we must be careful to consider our message to others: what we say and how we say it. We Christians have our own culture, folkways, custom and jargon, or rather many sets of these. And the more we want to distinguish ourselves from other Christians, or from others in the society, the more tempted we are to use distinct, even obscure, ways. A former sign of good preaching, for instance, was the “stained glass” voice which was supposed to suggest other-worldliness or piety, but now would just seem odd. Or worse, using prayer as a weapon, as in the phrase “I’ll pray for you” from someone who’s clearly angry or adversarial.

And yet we can also lose our way by surrendering to the local, dominant culture and using its ways. I want to overcome the violence, delusion and cruelty that our culture assumes is normal. We need a new and renewing language of the spirit, and to make the connections with the global church, and with the historic church to give us the perspective and moral force to not be co-opted. Doing that, and still being understood by people who have no experience or interest in either, is a difficult, but essential balancing act. Failing to do so makes the life-giving way of Christ’s church into a kind of cipher, useful only to a diminishing, self-referential few.

Let the Pentecost blessing come upon us, so that we may have a clear, empowered, holy and loving way of speaking — and the capacity to receive the same words from wherever they come.

Winchester Profession

Let us profess our faith:

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind.

We believe that there is one God, whose nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.

We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men.

Prayer

Let us pray:

You who called us out into your marvelous spirit, bind us in one fellowship with the helpers of humankind that we may be children of the spirit. Take from us the love of ease and the fear of power, and show us the simple things that we can do to help our neighbors. Brighten the daily rounds of tasks that we have undertaken and are tempted to neglect; make us faithful to the trust that life has put upon us; hold us to the humblest duty. Prepare our hearts in sympathy to be partners in suffering with the weak, partners in eager service with the strong. Reveal to us the wavering ranks of those that are struggling upward, that we may cheer and support our comrades unknown. Remove from us the love of glory and the thirst for praise. Give us in weariness refreshment, and in struggle peace; but when we are idle, send chastisement, and when we are false, send fear, to bring us back to you. By your love restrain our censorious speech and teach us to commend; by your wisdom enlighten our plans and direct our endeavors for the common weal. Give us the vision of that bright city of God on earth where all shall share the best in thought and deed, and none shall harm or make afraid; and establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands, establish thou it. Amen. [Adapted from Unity Hymns and Chorales.]

God of all nations, we pray thee for all the peoples of thy earth: for those who are consumed in mutual hatred and bitterness; for those who make bloody war upon their neighbors; for those who tyrannously oppress; for those who groan under cruelty and subjection. We pray thee for all who bear rule and responsibility. We ask you to teach humanity to live together in peace, no-one exploiting the weak, no-one hating the strong, each kindred working out its own destiny, unfettered, self-respecting, fearless. Teach us to be worthy of freedom; free from social wrong, free from individual oppression and contempt, pure of heart and hand, despising none, defrauding none, giving to all, in all the dealings of life, the honor we owe to those who are your children and heirs, wherever their home on our common earth. Amen.

Concluding prayer

Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication to you; and you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them: Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us; granting us in this world knowledge of your truth, and in the age to come life everlasting. Amen. (1979 Book of Common Prayer)

Benediction

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all forevermore. Amen.

Notices

For more information about these services, visit revscottwells.com. The portions of scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version.

This is Scott Wells. God bless.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110143810/https://www.revscottwells.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-31_audio-service_good-quality.mp3

Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them.

– Archibald MacLeish, “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak“

There are no featured posts this week.

This week everybody was talking about Memorial Day

It takes on a somewhat different meaning this year, as the official total of coronavirus deaths approaches 100,000 Americans. (The actual total is almost certainly much higher.) The New York Times created a haunting graphic in an attempt to capture the scope of the loss.

Traditionally, Memorial Day honors those who have died serving our country in the military. (And the NYT’s Elliot Ackerman reminds us of the number of veterans dying from the coronavirus.) But the current crisis reminds us that the military is not the only place where people risk their lives to defend the rest of us. Right now, healthcare workers are on the front lines, but I can’t find any up-to-date estimate of the number who have died. Business Insider profiled six of them a few weeks ago.

To a lesser extent, many hundreds of thousands of people are taking on risk for the rest of us. As a 60-something whose 60-something wife has multiple risk factors, I try to remain aware of all the people I send into the world in my place: the InstaCart shopper who gets my groceries; the Amazon workers who make packages appear on my porch; the meat packers, field workers, truck drivers, and others up and down the supply chain. Our system makes most of these people invisible to us, but we should never forget them. If they get sick, it is not just their problem; we bear responsibility also.

Like soldiers, some of those risk-bearing people have intentionally sought out the mission of defending us, while others faced a situation with no other acceptable options. The pandemic has highlighted a division in our society that we usually ignore: Some of us can choose to stay safe, while others don’t have those choices.

Memorial Day is also the traditional beginning of summer. Beaches are open in most states that have them. And it should be relatively safe to use them, as long as you can keep your distance from other people. Two problems to watch out for: choke points leaving the parking lot and public restrooms.

Restrooms are going to be a problem in a lot of back-to-normal plans.

and the virus

Nationwide, the numbers continue to improve. As I write this, the US death total is 99,396, up from around 91K last week. That increase of 8K or so is lower than the increases of 10K and 13K the previous two weeks. The deaths-per-day graph the Washington Post updates shows US deaths peaking in mid-April at over 2,000 per day, then trending downward to about 1,200 a day now.

But those national numbers hide an evolving story of how the epidemic is shifting. The big drops are happening in the previous hotspots around New York City, while totals are rising in many other parts of the country. Like the latest fashions or slang, coronavirus is showing up late in rural America, but it’s getting there. TPM describes the case numbers for the non-New-York states as a plateau.

Imperial College of London reports on the state-by-state outlook for the virus. The key variable the report considers is the “reproduction number”. In other words: On average, how many new people does each infected person infect? Since all cases eventually resolve (via recovery or death), a reproduction number of less than 1 indicates that the number of infections will decline, but greater than one predicts growth.

Our results suggest that while the US has substantially reduced its reproduction numbers in all states, there is little evidence that the epidemic is under control in the majority of states. Without changes in behaviour that result in reduced transmission, or interventions such as increased testing that limit transmission, new infections of COVID-19 are likely to persist, and, in the majority of states, grow

The report shows an epidemic in transition. Most of the states with the highest number of cases and deaths (New York, for example) have gotten the reproduction number below 1. Meanwhile, states not hit as hard so far (like Texas) have the highest reproduction numbers.

New York, New Jersey, and the other hard-hit states got their reproduction number down via “changes in behaviour”: hand-washing, wearing masks, and staying indoors. But the states where the virus is growing are also relaxing their behavioral restrictions. The next few weeks will answer a key question: Will the virus “run its course” in Texas the same way it did in New York? Or will it keep spreading until Texas implements the same kind of measures New York did?

One result of Trump’s divisive manipulations is that mask-wearing has become a political issue rather than a non-partisan matter of public health. Refusal to wear a mask has become an act of “vice signaling” in right-wing circles.

these people are proud to say that their passing discomfort is more important than the lives of others, or of others’ loved ones. They are vice-signaling to get accolades from their conservative peers, who think that it is the height of morality not to care about other people at all.

North Dakota’s Republican Governor Doug Burgum could barely get his words out as he pleaded with Dakotans to

just skip this thing that other parts of the nation are going through, where they’re creating a divide, whether it’s ideological or political or something around mask versus no-mask. … I would ask people to try to dial up their empathy and understanding. If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a five-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their lives.

… I would love to see our state, as part of being North Dakota smart, also be North Dakota kind.

Apparently, some Republicans still think of “North Dakota nice” as a a virtue, and believe that virtue isn’t just for losers. In my opinion, they need to realize that their style of Republicanism has lost out, and they’re now in the wrong party.

and its effect on the economy

Georgia was the first state to start reopening its non-essential businesses, beginning on April 24. Observers on one side predicted a spike in infections and deaths, while those on the other pictured a quick economic recovery. So far, reality is not working out in either of those ways. Imperial College’s estimates of Georgia virus-reproduction rate look like this:

Both the 50% and the 95% confidence intervals stretch across the R=1 line, so the virus might be either spreading or retreating. There might be a slight upward trend since April 24, but it’s not clear.

Similarly, the Georgia economy is not showing a rapid recovery. To start with, Georgians are still spending a lot of time at home. The amount of time outside the home has increased somewhat since April 24, but it’s nowhere near its pre-pandemic levels.

Steve Rattner writes:

Consumer spending in Georgia has tracked the national average even more closely. It fell sharply from mid-March until it hit bottom about a month later, at more than 30% below early January levels. Coincidentally or not, the nadir of spending coincided almost exactly with the first of the $1,200 stimulus checks going out. From there, spending has been slowly recovering but is still down about 15% in both Georgia and the country as a whole. Other, even more recent data (like OpenTable restaurant reservations) show a similar picture. … Notwithstanding its short shutdown and early reopening, the falloff in job listings in Georgia has been identical to the national decline, down more than 36%. Other statistics, like new claims for unemployment insurance, paint an even grimmer picture of the employment situation in Georgia.

The gist is that while Georgia has relaxed its restrictions on business, it still hasn’t convinced consumers that it’s safe to come out. That’s keeping both infection rates and job growth in check.

The Payroll Protection Plan passed by Congress at the beginning of the lockdown may not keep about half the nation’s small businesses from closing. The PPP was

tailored to what the crisis looked liked when shutdowns first took place in the olden times of March 2020, when it seemed that business closures would be a short-term blip and everyone might be able to get back to normal by summer. … For loans made under the program to be fully forgiven, an employer must maintain pre-crisis employment levels. Now it’s clear many businesses will permanently shift to smaller staffing levels to remain viable, such as restaurants operating at partial capacity.

The biggest reopening question is still one of the most uncertain: Will schools open in the fall? And if so, how will they adjust to the infection risk?

Colleges and universities are a bit ahead of K-12 schools in announcing decisions, but many of them are still on the fence as well.  Here’s a rundown of what we know so far.

and churches

I wonder if other people are having the same response I’m having to a lot of what Trump says these days: His pronouncements are becoming so divorced from reality that they’re not even worth getting upset over.

That was how I felt Friday about his insistence that houses of worship are “essential”, and his threat to “override” state orders that don’t allow them to open “right now this weekend”. Trump has no authority to override state orders, and in fact the weekend passed without any action on his part. (In his defense, the criticism Trump took for going golfing Sunday morning was unfair. The President practices the same faith as Snow White’s stepmother, and attended services in front of his favorite mirror before teeing off.)

But anyway, ignoring Trump’s role in the discussion, is opening churches a good idea? No.

Church services commonly share a number of factors that make them dangerous during an epidemic: large numbers of people indoors for an extended period, the temptation to touch other people or stand close to them, and singing, which projects virus-laden particles much further than ordinary breathing. (Six feet is not nearly enough social distance if people are singing.) A number of local outbreaks have been traced to Sunday services, funerals, and even choir practices.

Massachusetts started allowing churches to reopen (at 40% capacity) last Monday, but my Unitarian Universalist church in Bedford has no plans to do so anytime soon. (UUs don’t believe that our religion exempts us from epidemiology.) Social-media chatter among my fellow parishioners was universally negative about Governor Baker’s decision. Holding services over Zoom may be a poor substitute for being together, but if staying apart is how we can best take care of each other, that’s what we should do.

I wouldn’t want to belong to a church where people didn’t feel that way.

Trump and Attorney General Barr have made a lot of noise about First Amendment issues. (Now they believe in separation of church and state.) But constitutional issues only arise if churches are treated differently from other organizations that pose a comparable risk to public health. Church buildings have long been subject to zoning rules, building codes, and maximum occupancy limits. Quarantine rules should be no different.

Trump cited the injustice of liquor stores being open when churches are not, but that’s just silly. When hundreds of people start singing together in liquor stores, his argument will begin to make sense. (If you know of such a liquor store, please leave a comment. Testify!)

and Mike Pompeo

In any other administration, he’d have resigned or been fired by now.

In this administration, the inspector general investigating him got fired at his request. It’s hard to say exactly why he was fired, because three different Pompeo scandals were brewing on three different scales: one is personal, one is related to abusing his office for political gain, and one involves abuse of emergency powers to circumvent the will of Congress.

Walk the dog. The simplest scandal is the personal one. Pompeo reportedly used a State Department staffer to “walk his dog, pick up his dry cleaning and make dinner reservations for Pompeo and his wife, among other personal errands”.

This kind of abuse has become just the way things work in the Trump administration. Trump himself doesn’t even pretend to be upset by it.

I have you telling me about dog walking, washing dishes and you know what, I’d rather have him on the phone with some world leader than have him wash dishes because maybe his wife isn’t there or his kids aren’t

This gets back to a basic failure in Trump’s thinking: He has never understood the difference between himself and his office. He thinks the powers and perks of his office belong to him as a person, and there makes no separation between their legitimate and illegitimate use. Here, he has extended that vision to Pompeo: If you work for the Secretary of State, you work for Mike Pompeo personally. There’s no distinction.

BTW: It shouldn’t matter, but the dog is adorable.

Madison dinners. Since taking over the State Department in 2018, Pompeo and his wife have hosted about two dozen “Madison Dinners” on the taxpayers’ dime, to the tune of “several hundred dollars per plate”. NBC News estimates the total cost of the dinners running “into the six figures”.

State Department officials involved in the dinners said they had raised concerns internally that the events were essentially using federal resources to cultivate a donor and supporter base for Pompeo’s political ambitions — complete with extensive contact information that gets sent back to Susan Pompeo’s personal email address.

Guests include billionaire conservative donors, media figures (skewed “heavily toward conservative TV personalities, with 39 percent of them from Fox News”), members of Congress (all Republicans), lobbyists, and celebrities like country singer Reba McEntire and NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Pompeo has also been criticized for his frequent trips back to Kansas paid for by the State Department. Kansas is not noted for its extensive foreign policy significance, but Mitch McConnell wants Pompeo to run for the Senate there.

Saudi Arabia. The Trump administration has long faced bipartisan pushback in Congress against its pro-Saudi positions. One way this manifested was in congressional resistance to selling arms for the Saudis to use in their bloody war in Yemen. Almost exactly a year ago, Trump pushed an arms sale through by declaring an emergency. This exploited a loophole in the Arms Control Act.

“President Trump is only using this loophole because he knows Congress would disapprove of this sale,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said in a statement. “There is no new ’emergency’ reason to sell bombs to the Saudis to drop in Yemen, and doing so only perpetuates the humanitarian crisis there. This sets an incredibly dangerous precedent that future presidents can use to sell weapons without a check from Congress.”

It was particularly odd that the entire $8 billion sale was considered an emergency, including weapons that were not even built yet. Pompeo went against the advice he had been getting from career State Department diplomats, but

“They seemed to have a game plan and it had to be justified,” said a State Department official who told CNN they had communicated what happened to the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General during an interview late last year, as part of the watchdog’s investigation into Pompeo’s move to fast track the sale.

“The attitude was very Trumpian,” the official added.

Pompeo’s demand meant State Department officials had to reverse engineer the situation to provide the justification for a decision which was made in an aggressive and unconventional manner, the sources said.

The fired inspector general was known to be looking into this sale. Pompeo had refused to meet with the IG for an interview, but agreed to answer written questions.

Wired spells out just how completely Pompeo has changed his tune since leaving Congress to take over the CIA and then the State Department. In Congress, he believed that Congress had a responsibility to watchdog the Obama administration. But now he thwarts congressional oversight at every turn.

and Hong Kong

The coronavirus pandemic interrupted a series of confrontations between Hong Kong democracy protesters and the Beijing-supported government. In April, several leaders of the democracy movement were arrested.

The Chinese National People’s Congress began meeting on Friday.

Beijing’s 3,000-member rubber-stamp legislature is poised to usher in controversial “national security” legislation that would ban treason, secession, sedition and subversion in the former British colony.

There’s mounting fear that Beijing would use the new laws to subvert semi-autonomous Hong Kong’s remaining rights, which include freedom of speech and assembly, and the city’s independent judiciary. If that happens, it would be a death knell for the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that officially guarantees Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy until 2047.

The Trump administration “strongly urges Beijing to reconsider its disastrous proposal“, but Trump’s record supporting Hong Kong has been spotty. (He once described the democracy protests as “riots“, echoing Chinese government propaganda.)

The administration’s China policy has been all over the map. Trump has alternately flattered President Xi and talked about getting tough with China. It’s never been clear whether he was taking national-security issues with China seriously, or just using them for leverage in a trade deal. Recently he’s been attacking China to divert attention from his own failure to respond to the coronavirus crisis, and trying to tie presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden to China.

Whatever he ends up doing or saying about Hong Kong will probably have more to do with those factors than with Hong Kong itself. Xi will undoubtedly read it that way and respond accordingly.

and Joe Biden

Joe Biden appeared on CNBC Friday morning and answered questions from their hosts. You might think that being a sister of MSNBC would prejudice them in Biden’s favor, but CNBC is the business network in the NBC stable, so its programming is pitched towards investors who lean more conservative. It’s more of a Tory conservatism than Tea Party conservatism, a little like “The Economist”.

So it was a polite interview (the hosts were never aggressive or hostile with him) but also a challenging one. Biden was asked difficult questions (with occasional follow-ups) about taxes, China, healthcare, energy, re-opening the economy, and what kind of further stimulus or support the economy might need. (He wasn’t asked about issues unrelated to investments, like the Tara Reade accusation or who his running mate will be.)

Nothing in the interview surprised me from a policy standpoint. For example, he repeated the healthcare position he has held for some while: He doesn’t support Medicare for All, but he does want to expand ObamaCare and give it a Medicare-like public option. He thinks the government’s fiscal response to the current economic crisis should be aimed at Main Street rather than Wall Street.

Realizing I wasn’t going to hear policy changes, I started trying to evaluate Biden’s mental processes, since Trump wants to make that an issue. The main thing I noticed was that Biden’s mind — unlike Trump’s — seems flexible. He can shift contexts and subjects when necessary, but he can also stay on a subject when that’s appropriate. He doesn’t blather — as Trump often does — to hide the fact that he can’t place what the questioner is asking. (This is speculation, but I believe that a lot of Trump’s insults happen when he has talked himself into a corner and doesn’t know how to finish whatever he started to say. Insulting the questioner interrupts the conversation and sets it on a new path.)

Late in the interview Biden starts to miss words, creating sentences that look bad in the transcript. (At one point he talks about “a system nationwide that can transmit coal and wind across the country”, which doesn’t make sense. I suspect he’s talking about long-distance load-balancing on the electrical grid, to compensate for the unpredictability of wind and solar production. But the subject goes by too fast to be sure.)

This is a kind of mental glitch I’m familiar with, because my father had fairly severe aphasia as he got older: He didn’t have any trouble thinking, but it became increasingly difficult for him to find the right words to express his thoughts. (One telling example: Dad needed to buy something to complete a household project, but he couldn’t tell me the name of the store he wanted to go to or what street it was on. So we just started driving, and he told me to turn here and turn there. He guided me straight to a paint store, got the thing he wanted, and went home to finish the project. His mind was perfectly clear and never wandered; he just couldn’t communicate what he was thinking.)

Biden’s word-loss problems aren’t nearly as bad as Dad’s were, but they seem similar. To me, it sounds like he quickly revises sentences in his head when he realizes he’s not coming up with a word he wants. As a result, he often interrupts himself, and occasionally the sentence he says is some unfortunate combination of the original and the revised sentence.

What I don’t see is any evidence of an impairment in his thinking process. To the extent that there’s a problem at all, it’s in his words, not in his thoughts.

Biden also did a long interview with Stephen Colbert.

I suppose I have to mention Biden’s flip comment on the Breakfast Club radio show that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

I think the best take on that statement came from The Root’s Michael Harriot: Biden proved once again that he’s a white man in America. The facial expression I read into Harriot’s article is an eye-roll, not shock or horror.

Like most Biden “gaffes”, it’s clear what he meant, and there’s an accurate thought back there that he should have expressed better: He doesn’t understand why a black voter should have trouble picking between Barack Obama’s vice president and a guy who thinks white supremacists are “very fine people”. Neither do I.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza put Biden’s statement into perspective by pointing out that Trump says or tweets something that bad or worse literally every day, and supported his claim by finding eight more outrageous Trump comments from the previous 48 hours.

and you also might be interested in …

Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker writes an NYT op-ed “Don’t Bail Out the States“.

Workers and small businesses need help more than government bureaucracies.

In Walker’s universe, people who get their paychecks from governments — i.e.,  teachers, firemen, police, EMTs, and the people who fill potholes and keep the traffic lights working — they’re not “workers”, they’re “bureaucrats”. All the scrambling the governors have been doing to get masks for nurses and ventilators for critical patients in the ICU — that’s “bureaucracy”.

And here’s an interesting retelling of history:

federal funding is likely to diminish over time, creating further holes in state budgets. Shortfalls created by the disappearance of federal stimulus funds was a primary reason for the budget crisis that many state governments faced after the last recession.

That was kind of the point: delaying state budget crises until after the recession, rather than forcing states to lay off thousands and thousands of workers (yes, they are workers) at the same time everybody else was laying off workers.

And if the pandemic has shown anything, it’s that when a deadly crisis hits, somebody has to be able to do what needs doing without checking with the accountants first. At the moment, the only entity that has that power is the federal government; states eventually have to balance their budgets. But Walker recommends we give that option up too.

Even without bailing out state governments, federal spending levels are unsustainable. It is exactly why we need a balanced-budget amendment to force politicians in Washington — in both parties — to get serious about balancing the federal budget.

If Walker worries about the deficit, he must have been really horrified when the Trump tax cut was passed, blowing $1.9 trillion hole in the country’s 10-year budget projection. Well, no. He liked that. Running a deficit to support executive bonuses and stock buy-backs — that’s just great. It’s only running a deficit to save lives that bothers him.

You can expect to see lots more of this deficit hypocrisy after Biden takes office in January.

Finally, Walker never answers the question his proposals raise: Who should we let die of the virus rather than borrow money to treat them? Who should we let go without food or shelter, so that they can die in our streets?

The Trump administration has used the coronavirus emergency to make its border policies even more cruel than they already were.

Historically, young migrants who showed up at the border without adult guardians were provided with shelter, education, medical care and a lengthy administrative process that allowed them to make a case for staying in the United States. Those who were eventually deported were sent home only after arrangements had been made to assure they had a safe place to return to.

That process appears to have been abruptly thrown out under President Trump’s latest border decrees. Some young migrants have been deported within hours of setting foot on American soil. Others have been rousted from their beds in the middle of the night in U.S. government shelters and put on planes out of the country without any notification to their families.

Grist looks at how much the lockdown has decreased carbon emissions, both worldwide and in the US. The drop is significant, but maybe not as large as you might have hoped.

A new analysis in the science journal Nature Climate Change … found that the world is on track for the biggest emissions drop since World War II, or maybe even the biggest drop in history, depending on how long global lockdowns stay in place. (The study estimates that by the end of the year emissions could decline anywhere between 2 to 13 percent overall, depending on the nature and duration of governments’ lockdown policies.) During the peak of global lockdowns in early April, average daily emissions decreased by 17 percent compared to the 2019 average, hitting their lowest point since 2006. Nearly half of those emissions were from “surface transport,” like car rides.

In a 2018 report, the IPCC called for much steeper reductions by 2030 and 2050.

The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.

The lesson I draw from this is that we can’t get there just by cutting back. We need big changes to how major systems work, not just restraint in how much we use them.

Binyamin Appelbaum wrote an article on homelessness whose title says it all: “America’s Cities Could House Everyone If They Chose To“.

Homelessness is often blamed on mental illness or drug addiction or some other individual failing. But while those problems might be contributing causes in specific cases, the main cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.

 According to one analysis, a $100 increase in the average monthly rent in a large metro area is associated with a 15 percent increase in homelessness. Consider a simple comparison: In 2018, eight out of every 10,000 Michigan residents were homeless. In California, it was 33 per 10,000. In New York, it was 46 per 10,000.

Other countries do better with a different approach.

Countries confronting homelessness with greater success than the United States, including Finland and Japan, begin by treating housing as a human right. In the United States, by contrast, politicians decry the problem but aim for more modest goals. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s promise to New York last December “to end long-term street homelessness as we know it” is a classic of the genre; most homeless people in the city live in shelters, not on the street.

Rather than blaming homelessness on psychological or substance-abuse problems, we should begin treating the other problems by getting people off the streets. Other countries do this, as do some veterans programs here.

This is cheaper than leaving people to remain homeless and then intervening intermittently. One study found that in the two years after a person entered supportive housing in New York, he or she spent on average 83 fewer days in shelters, 28 fewer days in psychiatric hospitals and four fewer days in prison.

“The first painting I ever loved was probably a cliche. Now I understand why it moved me so.” This beautiful piece of introspection and reminiscence by Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott doesn’t connect to any current news story, but read it anyway. At the time — when he was 10 or 12 — he didn’t care who painted the scene of an old French town or when it was painted. In adulthood he can’t find his old poster or identify the painting. And if he did, what then?

I want to see it as I was then, not as I am now. I want to see it with the eyes that needed it.

This is one of the lessons grief teaches us, the futility of that desire to possess the world as it once was, even if art keeps trying to tell us the opposite: that the old place is just there, round the bend in the road, and it’s always waiting for you.

and let’s close with some stress reduction … maybe

With so much stress in our lives these days, we could all use some relief. Though, this Dalek relaxation tape is maybe not the way to get there.

You might have better luck with a different mantra.

I don’t know where people get all this time to read; I’m lucky to scratch out ten pages a day. So that prompts me to shorter books and that reminded me of an article I wrote in 2008 about a set of eleven Universalist handbooks, written at the end of the nineteenth century. And if you can read through the breathless optimism and pre-Einstein, pre-Freud thought, you can learn a thing or two. I just finished Heaven and got some food for thought about what the kingdom of heaven means.

Back in 2008, I used Google Books; now I prefer Internet Archive, both to reduce my “Google footprint” and because Internet Archive has a better reading experience, and a wider variety of download options. So, I’m reprinting a period advertisement, with links to the Internet Archive, with two exceptions. Also, I’ve not reviewed these for bad scanning, so leave a comment if you find a book that’s a skew. The Internet Archive often has different versions of the same book so it’s worth a re-search. Enjoy.

It’s been one of those kind of weeks: A lot of things deserve a little of your attention, but nothing jumped out at me as demanding a long article. So there will be an extra-large helping of notes in the weekly summary, but no featured post — unless one of the notes unexpectedly expands as I get into it.

Some of what to expect in the summary: reflections on a Memorial Day where the people risking their lives to defend us are mostly not in the military; states continue to reopen, even though virus cases are still rising in about half of them; Georgia, the leader in reopening, is proving nobody’s point so far; reopening churches at this stage is a bad idea; the Mike Pompeo scandal; China’s Hong Kong crackdown; my assessment of Joe Biden’s mental acuity; Scott Walker re-emerges as a deficit scold; and a few other things.

I’ll try to get that out by about noon, eastern time.

The full text of the service for the Sixth Sunday after Easter, follows. low bandwidth users might want to download and unzip the lower-quality audio file.

Higher-quality audio:

Download: Lower-quality audio file, zipped (1.9 Mb)

Welcome

Greetings. This is a service of worship for May 24, 2020, the Sixth Sunday after Easter.

Sentence and Votum

Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the Lord! [Psalm 27:14]

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. [Psalm 124:8]

Collect for the Day

Let us pray:

O God, the King of Glory, who hast exalted your Son Jesus Christ with great triumph into your kingdom in heaven; we ask you to not leave us comfortless; but send to us your Holy Spirit to comfort us; and exalt us into the same place where he has gone: your own blessed and glorious presence, there to dwell in fullness of joy forever and ever. Amen.

Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray, as Jesus taught, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm

Let us praise God with words from Psalm 77 [77:1-12, NRSV]

I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me.
In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted.
I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints.
You keep my eyelids from closing; I am so troubled that I cannot speak.
I consider the days of old, and remember the years of long ago.
I commune with my heart in the night; I meditate and search my spirit:
“Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable?
Has his steadfast love ceased forever? Are his promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?”
And I say, “It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.”
I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord; I will remember your wonders of old.
I will meditate on all your work, and muse on your mighty deeds.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Lesson

A reading from the fourth chapter of the first letter of Peter: [1 Peter 4:7-11, NRSV]

The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received. Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ. To him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.

Here ends the reading.

Address

Today’s reading from the first letter of Peter is good pastoral care in the broader sense of the term: loving-kindness, set in a theological framework.

The letter, whether or not from St. Peter, was written to menaced and derided Christians in what’s now central Turkey. But it was probably not what we think of as organized, official persecution. From the context earlier in the chapter, the blow back comes from people they knew, who did not approve of their new way of life. As Peter puts it, “They are surprised that you no longer join them in the same excesses of dissipation, and so they blaspheme.” Perhaps, the angry people wanted their old party buddies back. And perhaps — this is my imagination — these new Christians were, as we’d say today, preachy and judgy. A revised way of life sometimes does that to you, so be on alert for a spirit of superiority or condescension. But even if you’re minding your own business, living in a healthy, kind, wholesome or moral way can bring out the worst in others, especially if your new life pulls you away from old friends and their hurtful lives. And if that’s the case, the best we can do is say no, firmly but kindly.

Kindly is not optional. Christianity cannot sanctify rude, pretensious or overbearing behavior, or make it acceptable. Peter counseled them to “maintain constant love” and “be hospitable to one another without complaining.” Something had gone wrong; perhaps there was some bad behavior shown by Christians to their former friends, and, and if so that was a mistake.

Remember: we all will be judged, and “for this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead” (that’s in verse six, just before our lesson) and which has long been a source of hope for Universalists. The plan includes everyone. Judgment follows justice, but in seeking the last and the lost, ends in divine mercy. So we starts with carefully kept humility. “Maintain constant love for one another,” to finish the thought, “for love covers a multitude of sins.” We live, not as judges, but as those who are and will be judged. Don’t make your behavior harder for yourself or anyone else.

Let us then be “good stewards” of God’s love, and from it draw courage and goodness to bear up in hard times with courage and goodness. God bless.

Winchester Profession

Let us profess our faith:

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind.

We believe that there is one God, whose nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.

We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men.

Prayer

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things we know not to desire or for which we are not worthy to ask. And this we ask for your infinite mercy’s sake. Amen. [Based on Book of Common Prayer]

Holy and eternal Spirit, source of life and light, you are our helper in every need, you fulfill all our joy. Be this day the present help of all who turn to you, here and everywhere, whether hurt or ashamed, whether sick or disheartened. And when we are strong, be a light beyond our present thoughts and pleasures, to guide us into ways of larger right and nobler blessedness. Amen. [Von Ogden Vogt, edited]

Eternal and ever-blessed God, who hast made us heirs of many ages and set us in the midst of many brothers and sisters; deepen our gratitude for your blessings as we have received them from our fathers, our benefactors, and our friends. May we never forget the kindness that surrounds us in the present, nor be careless to the treasures we inherit from the past; but in having a lively sense of debt to our brothers and sisters, and a loving remembrance of departed generations, may we reverently carry forward the work of the ages. We thank you for the fellowship of the living; for partners in duty; for comrades in the good fight; for all who feel with our joys and our sorrows; and especially for those by whom we are beloved and whom we love. We also bless your name for the laborers; for the succession of prophets, apostles, and martyrs, continued even to this day; for leaders and commanders of the people, who have made themselves great by becoming the servants of all; and for the nameless multitude of the loyal and devoted, who have fallen asleep in their generations, leaving their memorial with you. Make us of one heart with all these your worshippers; of one purpose with all these your servants; of one communion with all these your saints; and of one will with thine. Amen. [Orders of Worship for Manchester College, Oxford]

Concluding prayer

Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication to you; and you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them: Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us; granting us in this world knowledge of your truth, and in the age to come life everlasting. Amen. [1979 Book of Common Prayer]

Benediction

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.

Notices

For more information about these services, visit revscottwells.com. The portions of scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version.

This is Scott Wells. God bless.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110143137/https://www.revscottwells.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-24_audio-service_high-quality.mp3

• Are you isolating? 
• Are you wearing a mask when you go out in public? 
• Is your country doing well in fighting back the outbreak? 
• Are you safe? 
• Do you have your job? 
• Are you hanging on? 
• Are you fighting depression?

The full text of the service follows, and low bandwidth users might want to download and unzip the lower-quality audio file.

Download: Lower-quality audio file (MP3) (1.9 Mb)

Welcome

Greetings. This is a service of worship for May 21, 2020, Ascension Thursday.

Sentence and Votum

Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. [Hebrews 4: 14, 16]

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. [Psalm 124:8]

Collect for the Day

Let us pray:

Grant, we ask you, Almighty God that as your best-beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, has ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind follow, and with him continually dwell in your glorious presence, world without end. Amen.

Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray, as Jesus taught, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm

Let us praise God with words from Psalm 150:

Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament!
Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!
Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Lesson

A reading from the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the end of the gospel. [Luke 24:49-53 (end), NRSV]

Jesus said to his disciples:

“And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Here ends the reading.

Address

The Ascension of Jesus, which we observe today, is not a greeting-card holiday with its own cultural, festive trappings. But it is a natural fit with Universalism, for as we heard in the opening collect, we pray that we “may also in heart and mind follow [Christ] and with him continually dwell.”

Yet many faithful Christians give it less than it deserves. The Universalist point aside, Ascension is an important if bittersweet, moment in Jesus’ life and ministry. His time with his disciples after his Easter resurrection has come to an end. He would no longer be seen on Earth in the flesh. Jesus would return to the heavenly realm, and there prepare a place for us; in his place, the Holy Spirit would come and give life and power to the believers, which we mark in ten days on Pentecost.

I think one reason Christians neglect Ascension comes from the art that depicts it (and in a larger sense they way it gets described) which undercuts the spiritual message and seems rather silly. Here we see Jesus in white robes, blown like a kite out of reach. Or worse, painted stiff as a Saturn rocket, half out of the scene as if he’d just sprung off a trampoline. It’s hard not to smile, even laugh and that’s a problem.

If you’re likely to think that Jesus Christ is some kind of deep space probe, it’s hard to take his departure very seriously, and you’ll miss the point of what’s being communicated: a promise of continuing divine care and connection, even when it’s not standing plainly in front of you. So much of the Gospel comes with this dynamic: “you have heard it was this way, but really this is what happened.” The Gospel frees us from the cruelty of wrong, and gives us hope that God will break decisively into our live as a blessing, countering the hardness and sadness of the world.

So, you have heard that Christ was put up – risen up – on the cross and died. Yet he lives, and now rises himself to glory. You have heard that earthly power establishes what we must believe, but we have seen that might does not make right. You have heard that everyone has a price, but we have seen that some acts of love and courage have no price. You have heard that some people are important, and others aren’t, but we have seen that the Lord of heaven and earth first lived with us, and suffered as we do, and will draw each of us up. Where he goes, we shall follow, and where we live, his promise of the Spirit shall yet dwell.

My blessing at Ascension to you.

Winchester Profession

Let us profess our faith:

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind.

We believe that there is one God, whose nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.

We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men.

Prayer

O God, the Protector of all who hope in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy, multiply your mercy upon us, that, being our governor and guide, we may so pass through things temporal so we do not lose the things eternal. Amen. [Services of Congregational Worship]

Inspire our thoughts of a higher life, that we may feel how divine a thing it is to rise above ourselves, by out-growing selfish aims — and how we may be lifted into peace though sharpest suffering — and how the kingdom of heaven comes down to the heart, when the affections are set upon things above. [The Gospel Liturgy for Ascension-Exhaltation]

O Thou Guiding Spirit of the souls of men, whom all worship under many names and diverse forms, we pray for thy blessing upon the great company of those who fain would know thy law and do thy will. Grant unto thy Church Universal, wheresoever it may be found, an increasing knowledge of the truth, a deeper understanding of human need, a more generous spirit of sacrificial love. Where it is weak in the presence of evil, strengthen and upbuild it in the hearts of human beings; where it is in error, re-establish it in the right way; where it is corrupt, purify it, though it be by fire; where it is divided by misunderstanding, jealousy or suspicion, bring it into one spirit of good will. Draw together in one accord the spirits of all thy children until each shall labor in his or her appointed way for thy kingdom of righteousness and love; until the discords of earthly strife and clamor shall be lost in one great hymn of praise. So may thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen. [Composite, in Services of Religion]

Concluding prayer

Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication to you; and you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them: Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us; granting us in this world knowledge of your truth, and in the age to come life everlasting. Amen. [1979 Book of Common Prayer]

Benediction

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.

Notices

For more information about these services, visit revscottwells.com. The portions of scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version.

This is Scott Wells. God bless.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110142816/https://www.revscottwells.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-21_service_good-quality.mp3

It’s always interesting to me to see how much patience some people have with the pain and suffering of other people.

– Speaker Nancy Pelosi (5-15-2020)

It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die.

– Jonathan Ashbach, “Is Social Distancing Saving LIves or Ruining Them?”
The Federalist (3-23-2020)

This week’s featured post is “Trump Has No Endgame“.

This week everybody was weighing economic risks against health risks

Current total: 91K dead. That’s up about 10K from last week, representing a slow decline. The two weeks before both had 13K increases. We’ll see what happens going forward as states relax their anti-virus restrictions in some well-considered and poorly-considered ways.

Probably the worst reopening situation is in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court abruptly threw out the state’s stay-at-home order. The leaders of the state’s heavily gerrymandered legislature (Democrats get more votes from the people, but Republicans get more seats in the legislature) won even more than they asked for: They had asked for the ruling to be stayed for six days so that they could work out a plan with the governor. Instead, the Court just ended the order immediately.

Reading the judges’ opinions is sobering. The majority opinion is an unlikely reading of the law, in which the stay-at-home order is technically a “rule” and not an order, so it should have gone through the emergency rule-making process. The dissenting opinion by Rebecca Frank Dallet shreds that opinion, pointing out that

The emergency rulemaking process set forth in Wis. Stat. §227.24 includes 11-13 steps which the briefing indicates takes a minimum of 18 and a maximum of 49 days.

when the law empowering the Department of Health Services to respond to epidemics uses the word “immediate”. She goes through the history of such orders, going back to the 1918 flu, and finds nothing resembling the “rule-making” the majority sees here.

As opposed to legal analysis, the concurring judges wrote polemics about tyranny and freedom, and made comparisons to the Japanese internment of World War II.

The result is dangerous chaos:

For weeks, Republicans had argued that their lawsuit against the order was needed simply so the legislature could have some say in the reopening plan. … But now it appears their plan all along was to thwart any plan. Now that they’ve been granted a seat at the table, Republicans have set the table on fire and thrown it out the window. …

The ruling leaves Wisconsin without any statewide rule or guidance in place for businesses, citizens and local governments. After the decision, Republicans said they didn’t see any need for any new rules, instead turning the state into a patchwork of local COVID-19 regulations, stretched throughout nearly 2,000 counties, cities, villages and towns.

Bars in various parts of the state opened immediately, producing scenes of no social distancing like the one below.

I was surprised to see this report from my home town, Quincy, Illinois: A bar — I’ve never been inside, but I’ve walked past it many times — defied the state’s stay-at-home order and opened for a day, producing similar scenes of folks standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the bar. The owner is a woman with oxygen tubes in her nose.

The top British medical journal “The Lancet” posted a rare political editorial about the importance of a strong CDC that is able to lead global efforts to fight pandemics. Final paragraph:

The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.

The economy-versus-public-health dichotomy we so often hear from the administration and see in the media is a frustrating misframing of the situation. Even though I am liberal — and so presumably pro-health and anti-economy — I would like nothing better than to hear some clever ideas to safely re-open the businesses that I frequented before the crisis. I want to go to restaurants, get my hair cut, attend baseball games, and hang around in coffee shops as much as any conservative. I just don’t want to kill people to do it.

What I’d really like to see is a Mythbusters approach to coronavirus risk. The TV show Mythbusters, if you remember, used to regularly do extremely dangerous things: They blew up a cement mixer, dropped a car from a helicopter, and demonstrated how defective water heaters might blast up through a house’s roof. But the ethos of the show wasn’t to flaunt danger and cheat death, it was to understand risk, analyze it, and find ways to protect against it. One of the show’s operating principles was: Anything can be made safe with enough precautions.

So Adam and Jamie never told each other that it wasn’t risky to blow up a cement mixer; they just figured out a safe way to do it. And after they had a safety plan that worked, they had the courage to carry it out.

But on the right these days, we hear a lot of talk about “courage” and not “living in fear” of the virus — usually from people who reject even easy safety measures like wearing masks or maintaining social distance. But what they’re promoting isn’t courage at all, it’s a combination of denial and self-centeredness. Most people don’t die of the virus, so we should tell ourselves that we’ll be in the lucky majority. Millions of other people might not be, but that’s just their bad luck. It couldn’t possibly happen to us, and that’s all that matters.

For example, here’s Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin:

I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population. But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this. But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu … getting coronavirus is not a death sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4 percent of our population (and) I think probably far less.

In other words, he’s OK with the possibility that more than 11 million Americans (that’s what 3.4% works out to; his lower estimate of 1% is about 3 1/3 million) might die horrible deaths, not to mention the millions of others who will survive but suffer long-term damage.

The Republican Party describes itself as “pro-life”, but clearly it isn’t. That claim should never again go unchallenged.

Speaking of clever ideas for safely reopening, here’s how a German cafe enforces social distancing: Customers wear pool noodles on their heads.

There’s no reason (other than Trump’s divisiveness) that safety measures ever had to become a political issue. Yes, pool noodles are goofy, but what’s wrong with looking a little goofy to protect each other from a deadly disease? Looking silly together could be a bonding experience, like karaoke.

But Trump cultists don’t see it that way. In Indiana, a 7-11 clerk was scalded with hot coffee and beaten for telling a customer to wear a mask. In California, two men broke the arm of a Target employee. In Texas, armed men defended a hair salon that had illegally re-opened. The NYT reports:

In at least a half dozen cases around [Texas] in recent days, frustrated small-business owners have turned to heavily armed, militia-style protesters like Mr. Archibald’s group to serve as reopening security squads.

Michigan State professor Matt Grossman explains:

The public doesn’t polarize on its own. It polarizes when political leaders and different parties send different messages. That is happening more in the U.S. than in other countries.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Jess McIntosh, host of the “Signal Boost” show on Sirius XM’s Progress channel, makes a good point. It’s probably not completely true, but I’ll bet it’s mostly true.

It’s not about “reopening the economy.” People aren’t protesting for the right to BE waitresses and hairdressers, they’re fighting for the right to HAVE them. This is about white people demanding service.

Eric Trump accuses Democratic governors of banning large-crowd gatherings just to hurt Trump’s re-election campaign.

After November 3, coronavirus will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen. They’re trying to deprive [President Trump] of his greatest asset, which is … that he can go out there and draw massive crowds.

You can see where this is going, right? Very soon now, Trumpist governors will have to sign off on stadium-sized gatherings, regardless of the very real health risk to their citizens. And Trump cultists will have to attend to prove how committed they are. Because the virus is all a Democratic hoax, and 90K Americans (and many more by November) aren’t really dead.

and corruption

Last week I had a special post to catalog the Trump administration corruption that had come to light during that week. But corruption is just how this administration operates, so each week produces new corruption stories. This week Trump fired another inspector general — his fourth in the last few months. This one was the State Department IG, Steve Linick.

Representative Eliot L. Engel and Senator Bob Menendez, from the House and Senate committees that oversee the State Department, wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

Reports indicate that Secretary Pompeo personally made the recommendation to fire Mr. Linick, and it is our understanding that he did so because the Inspector General had opened an investigation into wrongdoing by Secretary Pompeo himself. Such an action, transparently designed to protect Secretary Pompeo from personal accountability, would undermine the foundation of our democratic institutions and may be an illegal act of retaliation.

Their letter does not discuss the substance of the investigation, but the New York Times fills that in:

a Democratic aide said that Mr. Linick had been looking into whether Mr. Pompeo improperly used a political appointee at the State Department to perform personal tasks for him and his wife. … Since starting his current job in April 2018, Mr. Pompeo has come under growing public scrutiny for what critics say is his use of the State Department’s resources for personal endeavors. Mr. Menendez has called for Mr. Pompeo to explain how he can justify frequent trips to Kansas, his adopted home state, using State Department funds and aircraft. He has brought his wife, Susan Pompeo, on many trips abroad, telling others she is a “force multiplier” for him. And CNN reported last year that congressional officials were looking at potential misuse of diplomatic security personnel for personal errands.

Former Moderna executive Moncef Slaoui is leading the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, which is supposed to deliver large quantities of a Covid-19 vaccine by the end of 2020. He also

still holds over 156,000 Moderna stock options, worth over $10 million at the company’s current stock price, creating a potential conflict of interest if the company’s vaccine is the first to be proven effective.

Moderna announced encouraging Phase 1 results on its vaccine candidate today. But there’s still a long way to go.

The WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning David Fahrenthold is back at it: The US government has paid for more than 1,600 nights at Trump-owned hotels and clubs since Trump took office. Federal records show at least $970,000 of government money has been paid to Trump’s company.

Eric Trump has previously claimed that the Trump Organization gives the government a good rate “like fifty bucks”. This seems not to be true.

But in the 1,600 room rentals examined by The Post, there were no examples of a rate that low. Instead, the lowest room rate was $141.66 per night, for each of the rooms in a four-room cottage in Bedminster. The highest rate was $650 per night for rooms at Mar-a-Lago.

This practice is not just shady, it might also be unconstitutional. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution says:

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

The foreign money going into Trump’s businesses is also an issue, since the Constitution also forbids any federal official from receiving “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” without the consent of Congress.

Lawsuits based on those constitutional principles have had trouble getting traction in the courts, but Thursday a federal appeals court ruled that a suit filed by Maryland and the District of Columbia could go forward.

and Ahmaud Arbery

I should have mentioned this case last week. By now you probably know about it. Two white men in trucks chased down a black jogger and killed him, claiming that he resembled a suspect in a string of local burglaries.

That happened back in February, and the local police interviewed the whites and pretty much accepted their story. A video of the moments leading up to the shooting was posted by a local radio station and went viral. Only then were the shooters arrested.

All the basic themes of the black-lives-matter movement are here: A black man was assumed to be dangerous and killed. Police didn’t seem to care until a public outcry made them care.

That second part is the key point. Whites sometimes kill blacks and blacks sometimes kill whites; that’s not the major issue. The point is that when whites kill blacks, often the police aren’t interested.

and the Reade accusation

PBS Newshour tried to talk to 200 or so people who were on Joe Biden’s Senate or White House staff at one time or another, and they managed to get in touch with 74 of them, including 64 women, to see what they thought about Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault and digital penetration.

The staffers corroborate some of the superficial details of Reade’s account: She did work in Biden’s Senate office. She was let go. Where she says she was assaulted is a real place. The errand she says she was on (taking Biden’s gym bag to him at the Capitol gym) is a credible thing someone in her position might have been asked to do. A supervisor (not Biden) did reprimand her for dressing inappropriately.

And no one, of course, claims to know for a fact that the assault didn’t happen or couldn’t have happened, (though many volunteered that they believe the claim is false).

But that’s about where the corroboration stops.

None of the people interviewed said that they had experienced sexual harassment, assault or misconduct by Biden. All said they never heard any rumors or allegations of Biden engaging in sexual misconduct, until the recent assault allegation made by Tara Reade.

… Female staffers who spent countless hours with Biden, including in one-on-one settings, like his small private office in the U.S. Capitol, known as a “hideaway,” said he never made passes at them or behaved in other ways that suggested sexual impropriety.

… “I traveled with him all over the world, all over the country. I was alone with him all the time,” said Elizabeth Alexander, a former Senate and White House aide. “Never, ever, ever did I feel uncomfortable.”

… “You got to know which senators you didn’t want to be on an elevator alone with,” said Liz Tankersley, who was Biden’s legislative director from 1985 to 1993. “No one ever said Joe Biden was one of them.”

A few of the details of Reade’s account were challenged: As a Senate staffer, she would not have been asked to serve drinks at a fund-raiser.

“Never would have happened,” said Melissa Lefko, who was a staff assistant in Biden’s office during the time Reade was there. “We all knew there was a very hard line there.”

The site of the alleged assault would have made it “a brazen attack in an area with a high risk of being seen” by lobbyists, staff, and even tourists.

In response to last week’s summary post, pro-Bernie commenters put forward the theory that the media delayed covering Reade’s sexual assault accusation until it was too late for the issue to help Sanders get the nomination. As best I can tell, though, the timing of the story was due to Reade, not the media. The Newshour story says explicitly: “Reade did not publicly accuse Biden of sexual assault until March of this year.” (The South Carolina primary, which turned the race in Biden’s favor, happened February 29.) Also, pro-Bernie media outlets existed and could have picked up the story, if it had been out there.

The Washington Post’s never-Trump conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin debunks the “If you believed Christine Blasey Ford, you have to believe Tara Reade” fallacy.

and you also might be interested in …

The House passed an additional $3 trillion stimulus plan, the HEROES act. It includes direct payments to states, more money for individuals, and a variety of other provisions. Republicans are dead set against it, so it’s unlikely to pass the Senate.

But it does put the ball in Mitch McConnell’s court. Lots of states — and not just blue states — are facing big budget shortfalls. And the virus is still picking up momentum in places like Arizona.

Trump’s latest conspiracy theory, “ObamaGate”, is one he couldn’t even explain himself when a reporter asked what crime it alleged. Vox’ Sean Illing explains it as an example of “flooding the zone with shit”.

The goal of zone-flooding is simple: introduce bullshit stories into the information bloodstream, sit back while the media feverishly covers them (from all sides), and then exploit the chaos that results from the subsequent fog of disinformation.

It’s an approach that thrives on conventional journalistic norms around objectivity and fairness. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, a sharp observer of this process, explained it well in a recent piece. His point, like mine, is that reporting on deliberately misleading stories in ostensibly objective ways serves only to reward the bad-faith actors spreading the nonsense in the first place.

Mikel Jowllett, who I am not cool enough to have heard of before, is the front man of Airborne Toxic Event and author of the just-released memoir Hollywood Park. He tweets:

The President is tested every day. Every single person he comes into contact with is also tested. If anyone tests positive, they are immediately quarantined and their contacts are tested. See? He DOES understand how to stop the virus. He just doesn’t give a shit about YOU.

Try to imagine what it would be like to have been at sea by yourself for the past three months.

and let’s close with something both old and new

Denis Shiryaev has come up with impressive techniques for bringing very old film back to life. Here, he produces remarkably crisp and colorized images of Paris in the 1890s.

Stop stressing yourself trying to anticipate the masterstroke in his nefarious plan.

Both in the mainstream media and among my social-media friends, I see people who ought to know better switching back and forth between two divergent and contradictory images of Donald Trump: the Magical Thinker and the Master Planner. Recognizing that the president is a magical thinker makes them despair over how our country will deal with the current crisis. But at the same time they have nightmares about the master planner who will find a cunning way to stay in power.

In everything else, Trump is the Dunning-Kruger poster child. But when the subject changes to the election, or to everything that happens between the election and the inauguration of a new president, they suddenly see him as the genius he claims to be. An evil genius, perhaps — a Lex Luthor or a Victor von Doom — but a genius all the same.

Magical Thinker. When we’re talking about practical governing or attempting to solve the problems of the nation, it seems obvious that Trump indulges in magical thinking: He believes he can make the world be what he wants it to be just by insisting that it already is. What he wants to happen will happen, because he says so: The virus will go away “like a miracle”. It’s no worse than the ordinary flu. Anybody who wants a test gets a test. We lead the world in testing. There is no shortage of PPE for hospital workers. The country is ready to reopen, and when it does, the economy will come zooming back. Everyone should be grateful to him for the great job he’s been doing.

His magical thinking is made even worse by his childlike inability to consider the future. His entire focus is on looking good right now, even if it will hurt him in the long run. During February and early March, for example, his happy talk about the virus seemed to be aimed at keeping the stock market high, because that was the core of his re-election pitch: The market is high, unemployment is low; I promised a great economy and I delivered.

There was never any chance he could keep that scam going until November, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. If the market stayed high today, that gave him a talking point today, and improved his poll numbers today. November was November’s problem.

His daily coronavirus briefings (which he continued until wiser heads made him stop) were full of short-term image-building that could never hold up over time. The hospitals have plenty of masks and ventilators, no matter what they say. And Trump is a genius who has genius ideas nobody else thinks of: Hydroxychloroquine is a miracle drug. Bleach can kill virus inside the body.

It’s obvious now that it was always in Trump’s best interest to do a good job fighting the virus. Imagine if he had sounded the alarm early and started emergency preparations back in January and February (as the disease experts inside the government were pleading for him to do). The death total would be lower by tens of thousands and the economy really might be in a position to reopen. What if the US anti-virus efforts were one of the world’s success stories rather than the cautionary tale of neglect and incompetence it is now?

He could have benefited from the we’re-all-in-this-together wave that has boosted the approval numbers of Democratic and Republican governors alike, even in the states that have the highest death totals. If he had met the crisis head-on and given the American people straight talk combined with the steady reassurance of realistic hope (like Andrew Cuomo did in New York), Covid-19 might have been the tailwind that pushed an otherwise unpopular president across the finish line to re-election.

But that strategy would have required a months-long time horizon, which he doesn’t have. He’d have needed to sacrifice the immediate satisfaction of bragging about how wonderful he is and what a perfect economy he has made. He just couldn’t do it.

He still can’t. With another month or so of lockdown, combined with a well-funded, well-organized national test-and-trace program and some realistic guidelines for gradual reopening, the worst of the crisis might yet be in the rear-view mirror by Election Day. But pushing the states to relax restrictions while the virus is still spreading is the same short-term magical thinking all over again. It feels good right now to tell upbeat stories about restaurants and barber shops reopening, and to imagine schools and baseball stadiums opening soon. But how will that look in the fall, when people start voting?

By November, another few weeks of boredom and struggle in May and June would be long forgotten. But a pandemic that in November is still killing thousands of Americans (but not thousands of Germans or Koreans or Canadians) every week will be hard to wish away.

Master Planner. When it comes to politics, though, many people who otherwise see Trump’s cognitive, intellectual, and psychological shortcomings imagine the existence of a Master Plan that ultimately makes it all work in his favor. If he seems to be charging towards a cliff, that can only mean that he has a parachute, or that a military helicopter is waiting to pluck him out of the air.

I mean, he couldn’t just be stupid or delusional, could he? He couldn’t possibly imagine that the cliff will go away because he wants it to, or that he will sprout wings and fly when he gets there? That would be as crazy as … well, all the other stuff he’s done.

But from this point of view, he’s not blundering his way through the virus fight; he wants the virus to be raging in November so that he can use it to suppress the vote. Or maybe he plans to declare martial law and cancel the election. Even if he loses the election, he must have a plan for that too.

Heather Cox Richardson, who usually strikes me as very level-headed, sees an ominous portent in Trump’s “ObamaGate” maneuvers.

It suggests that the Trump administration really is contemplating legal action against F.B.I. officials who were investigating the attack on the 2016 election. This is unprecedented. More, though, it suggests that the Trump administration does not anticipate a Democratic presidency following this one, since it could expect any precedent it now sets to be used against its own people. That it is willing to weaponize intelligence information from a previous administration suggests it is not concerned that the next administration will weaponize intelligence information against Trump officials. That confidence concerns me.

Gee. Inventing a talking point that helps him today creates a scenario where it all backfires somewhere down the road. Who could imagine Trump doing such a thing?

Apply the model of Trump that we see validated every day in every other part of his administration: He doesn’t “anticipate a Democratic presidency” because he doesn’t anticipate anything. Imagine being a Trump aide and raising the question “What are we going to do if Biden beats you?” Do you think you’d get an answer? Would you expect him to tell you to assemble a team and construct a Biden-beats-me contingency plan? Or would he just take your head off and replace you with somebody who doesn’t ask questions like that?

We need a plan even if he doesn’t have one. Trump never looks ahead, but once he gets into a bad situation he looks around. He isn’t bound by moral scruples or political norms or even the law. All options are on the table.

So I expect him to keep denying his poor prospects for re-election until at least mid-October. In the same way that Hitler in 1945 kept promising “miracle weapons” — like the V-2 rocket or jet fighter planes — that would turn the war around, Trump will always have some reason to project success: a last-minute vaccine announcement, a surprise uptick in the economy (or maybe just forcing the Labor Department to publish fake numbers), war with Iran, or a final ad blitz that will destroy Biden once and for all.

As the election approaches, though, it will eventually dawn on him that he’s really losing. As in the Reagan/Carter race of 1980, the voters who make up their minds at the last minute will ask themselves whether this president deserves another term, and they’ll say no. At that point — and not a second before — he will ask, “How can I stop this?” How can I stop people from voting? How can I discredit the vote count? How can I steal votes in the Electoral College? Can the Senate or the Supreme Court declare me the winner even though I lost? Can I just refuse to leave?

At that point, he’ll thrash like a fish in a net. But whatever he does won’t be well prepared or well planned. A military coup is a bit more complicated than just calling the Pentagon and ordering them to keep you in power. Politicians and bureaucrats and judges who cooperated with you when you seemed invincible may decide they don’t want to go to jail for you now that you’re on your way out. And those bands of overweight yahoos with AR-15s may be willing to get violent on his say-so, but who will they shoot and what will they accomplish? All that would require a plan, and there is no plan.

Democrats should not get complacent going down the stretch, because at the last minute Trump will be ready to try anything. But he won’t suddenly become a master strategist.

He’ll thrash and he’ll bluster and he’ll try crazy things. But like most things he tries, they won’t be well thought out. And like most things he tries, they won’t work.

After I focused on corruption last week, I thought I might be able to ignore it for a while. But no such luck. This week we saw another inspector general get fired to protect another Trump crony. And a guy with Big Pharma stock options is running the “warpspeed” vaccine effort. And David Fahrenthold revealed that the federal government has spent nearly a million dollars on Trump properties.

But the featured post is something I’ve been putting off week-to-week for some while now, because there was always something more immediate to pay attention to. I keep noticing otherwise sensible people (who usually appear to understand Trump’s cognitive and psychological limitations) raising their blood pressure fretting about the Master Plan that is going to keep him in power. I mean, it may look like he’s blundering his way towards November — making the virus worse, screwing up the reopening of the economy, letting the elderly voters who put him in office realize just how little he values their lives, and so on — but it’s all part of an ingenious scheme to steal the election or declare martial law or something.

I don’t think so. So the featured post this week is “Trump Has No Endgame”. The impatient spoiled child you see trying to make the virus go away by shutting his eyes and holding his breath until he turns blue — that’s the only Trump there is. He doesn’t turn into Lex Luthor or Victor von Doom as soon as the subject changes to his re-election. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to worry about weird things happening later on, when he finally realizes that the electorate is going to vote (or already has voted) to throw him out. We have to be ready for the poorly planned tantrum he’ll throw then. But his screw-ups in the meantime are real screw-ups; they aren’t steps leading up to some final fiendish maneuver.

I expect that piece to appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary has the new corruption stuff to cover, the debate over easing anti-virus restrictions, Ahmaud Arbery, and some other things. That should be out around noon.

The full text of the service follows, and low bandwidth users might want to download and unzip the lower-quality audio file.

Download: Lower-quality audio file (MP3) (1.5 Mb)

Welcome

Greetings. This is a service of worship for May 17, 2020, the Fifth Sunday after Easter

Sentence and Votum

Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. [Matthew 7:7, NRSV]

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. [Psalm 124:8, NRSV]

Collect for the Day

O Lord, from whom all good things come; grant to us your humble servants, good things by your holy inspiration, that by your merciful guidance we may perform the same, as true followers of your Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray, as Jesus taught, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm

Let us praise God with words from Psalm 20: [NRSV]

The Lord answer you in the day of trouble! The name of the God of Jacob protect you!

May he send you help from the sanctuary, and give you support from Zion.

May he remember all your offerings, and regard with favor your burnt sacrifices.

May he grant you your heart’s desire, and fulfill all your plans.

May we shout for joy over your victory, and in the name of our God set up our banners. May the Lord fulfill all your petitions.

Now I know that the Lord will help his anointed; he will answer him from his holy heaven with mighty victories by his right hand.

Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the Lord our God.

They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright.

Give victory to the king, O Lord; answer us when we call.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Lesson

A reading from sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of John [NRSV]

Jesus said to his disciples:

Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete. “I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, but will tell you plainly of the Father. On that day you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and am going to the Father.” His disciples said, “Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech! Now we know that you know all things, and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believe that you came from God.” Jesus answered them, “Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you, so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world!”

Here ends the reading.

Address

We have inherited problematic ideas from today’s passage from the gospel of John, particularly the phrase, “if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” Too many Christians have take this as a license to desire anything, claim anything, want anything, expect anything. If you have entertained a variety of television evangelists, or their hearers, you will have run across this line of thinking. But when you consider the person of Jesus Christ and the promises of the Gospel, it is a strange attitude and devastating both to the hope of the Gospel, and the spiritual health of the believer. Be on guard against it, even when it tempts you in subtle ways.

First, it runs against the commandment, repeated by Jesus in the wilderness, that you shall not tempt the Lord, your God. God is God, and not some particularly well-connected benefactor. And in the wilderness, it wasn’t God who promised Jesus all things, but the Tempter. Lord: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”! Second, if this was the chief benefit of Christianity, then Jesus Christ is himself a bad example. There’s little evidence he owned much, not even having a place to lay his head. He and his disciples relied on the support of their hearers. He had no tomb of his own, but was lain in one given to him. There’s nothing in Jesus’ ministry that suggests his blessing will provide you earthly riches. He could not spare himself the betrayal of friends, the jeering of the crowds or a painful, public execution. This is not the path to a big house, a luxury car or even a quiet life.

But the passage means something. I suspect it’s a call to learn what is truly valuable, and to rely on Jesus Christ to receive that call. We are, by this same passage, to call on God in his name to receive what we ask. But what then ought we to ask for, dare to ask for? And this isn’t just my bourgeois aesthetic sensibility speaking. The thinnest fraction of Christians who have ever lived have known opulence and wealth, many knew no peace, and there’s no just reason for thinking that these are false and unfaithful believers. Which makes me think that the deepest prayers and desires of the Christian faithful lie somewhere else. Again, this makes demands on God, when God makes demands on us. What then to ask of God, in Jesus’ name? That’s a lifetime’s meditation, but there are some hints.

Christian faith, well practiced and — even more — well lived, redirects our desires. We might want and not simply obey that commandment that Jesus gave his disciples: that you shall love one another, as he loved them, and he loves us. We might want the fulfillment of the Golden Rule: trusting in God’s will “on earth as it in is heaven.”

Such things last when fortunes fall, when passions cease, when wishes end, and God will be with you. Friends, think on these things.

Winchester Profession

Let us profess our faith:

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind.

We believe that there is one God, whose nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.

We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men.

Prayer

Let us pray:

Almighty God, we bless and praise you: we have awakened to the light of another earthly day; and now we will think of what a day should be. Our days are yours, let them be spent for you. Our days are few, let them be spent with care. There are dark days behind us, forgive their sinfulness; there may be dark days before us, strengthen us for their trials. We pray that you shine on this day — the day which we may call our own. Lord, we go to our daily work; help us to take pleasure therein. Show us clearly what our duty is; help us to be faithful in doing it. Let all we do be well done, fit for your eye to see. Give us strength to do, patience to bear; let our courage never fail. When we cannot love our work, let us think of it as your task; and, by our true love to you, make unlovely things shine in the light of your great love. Amen. [George Dawson]

O God, who puts into our hearts such deep desires that we cannot be at peace until we rest in you: mercifully grant that the longing of our souls may not go unsatisfied because of any unrighteousness of life that may separate us from you. Open our minds to the counsels of eternal wisdom; breathe into our souls the peace which passes understanding. Let our hunger and thirst be for righteousness, that we may be filled with the bread of heaven. O Lord, give us grace to seek first your kingdom; and we know that you will add unto us all needful things. Amen. [Services for Congregational Worship]

Almighty and ever living God, who has taught us to make prayers and supplications and to give thanks for all persons, we pray that you would inspire the universal church with the spirit of truth, unity and concord; that all they who do confess the name of Christ may live in peace and in godly love. Give grace, O heavenly Father, to all ministers of the gospel, that they may, both by their life and doctrine, set forth your true and living word. And to all your people give your heavenly grace, that with meek heart and due reverence they may serve you in holiness and righteousness all the days of their life. Comfort and succor in your infinite goodness, all those who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any adversity. And we also bless your holy name for all your servants departed this life in your faith and fear; praying you to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of your heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O God, for your infinite mercy’s sake. Amen. [Book of Common Prayer]

Concluding prayer

Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication to you; and you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them: Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us; granting us in this world knowledge of your truth, and in the age to come life everlasting. Amen. [1979 Book of Common Prayer]

Benediction

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.

Notices

For more information about these services, visit revscottwells.com. The portions of scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version.

This is Scott Wells. God bless.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110142400/https://www.revscottwells.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-17_audio-service_48kbps.mp3

The Justice Department’s new position isn’t that Mr. Flynn didn’t lie — that couldn’t be its position, because he did lie, and he admitted in federal court that he lied. Instead, the new filing argues that it was wrong for the F.B.I. to interview him in the first place. Look carefully at who the villain becomes in that narrative: not Mr. Flynn for lying, but the F.B.I. for asking the questions to which he lied in response.

– Neal K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer
“The Appalling Damage of Dropping the Michael Flynn Case“

This week’s featured posts are “What’s Up With the Stock Market?” and “This Week in Corruption“.

This week everybody was talking about the virus

As I said last week, the curve seems to have flattened, but isn’t going down. Nationally, we now have about 81K deaths, up 13K from the 68K we had last Monday, and another 13K from the 55K the week before that. The numbers jump up and down a lot from one day to the next, but they average out to a little less than 2,000 deaths a day.

The worrisome thing is that the flatness seems to be hiding two different trends going in opposite directions. Deaths in the New York City area are headed down, while deaths in the rest of the country are headed up. Given the way exponential growth works, I would expect the rising trend to eventually overwhelm the falling trend. It would not surprise me if deaths overall started trending back up in the coming week.

The CDC prepared guidelines for businesses planning to reopen safely, but the White House shelved them.

The document, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen. It included detailed “decision trees,” or flow charts aimed at helping local leaders navigate the difficult decision of whether to reopen or remain closed.

And that seems to have been their mistake: The official Trump spin is that reopening is NOT a “difficult decision”. You just do it. If the CDC guidelines made reopening seem like a process that requires forethought and accommodation, it couldn’t go out. And if any node in the decision tree said “stay closed”, that’s anathema.

Trump began by insisting the coronavirus wasn’t serious and wouldn’t be a problem in the US. Then he had to acknowledge that people were dying, but kept moving the goalposts so that any death total could be claimed as a success.

Apparently that’s not working either, so the new strategy is to insist that the death totals are wrong. By November, he will be telling people that their loved ones are not dead, and dismissing those who insist otherwise as “Trump haters” who are only mourning to make him look bad.

The virus is penetrating the White House inner circle. In the last few days, it has shown up in a presidential valet, the VP’s press secretary, and Ivanka’s personal assistant. Pence press secretary Katie Miller also happens to be the wife of the white nationalist White House adviser Stephen Miller (who was once described by an “outside White House adviser” as “Waffen-SS“.) Eleven Secret Service agents are infected.

The White House response to this problem is that Trump, Pence, and the people who come into regular contact with them are tested every day. Apparently, that’s what it takes to make an crowded office building safe. Don’t you wish you worked with someone important, so that your building could be made safe too? Vox considers the “Trump double standard” on testing.

“The notion that everyone needs to be tested is simply nonsensical,” press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said during Wednesday’s press briefing, in response to a question from NBC’s Peter Alexander about why all Americans can’t get tested like the president before they go back to work.

Before you go back to work, read this article about what we know about the risks and how to avoid them.

Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf makes an anti-lockdown argument that is still wrong, but at least makes its assumptions transparent.

If we knew that a broadly effective COVID-19 treatment was imminent, or that a working vaccine was months away, minimizing infections through social distancing until that moment would be the right course. At the other extreme, if we will never have an effective treatment or vaccine and most everyone will get infected eventually, then the costs of social distancing are untenable.

The we-will-all-get-it-eventually assumption, if you make a conservative .5% estimate of the fatality rate, implies that at least 1.6 million Americans will die. But, you know, if millions of deaths are inevitable, we might as well get them over with.

Here’s what’s wrong with that: Other countries look to be avoiding that scenario. New Zealand, for example, seems to have a shot at eliminating the virus. Iceland has also seen a drastic plunge in new cases. In both countries, they’re doing the work our government has avoided: huge amounts of testing and contact tracing. It’s not rocket science, it’s just hard.

It would also cost a lot. But imagine if we took a JFK-esque “pay any price, bear any burden” approach to this crisis, rather than just accept more than million deaths.

In contrast, Jay Rosen sums up where we’re headed now:

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible … [T]he plan is to default on public problem solving, and then prevent the public from understanding the consequences of that default. To succeed this will require one of the biggest propaganda and freedom of information fights in U.S. history, the execution of which will, I think, consume the president’s re-election campaign.

Talking about Katie Miller, Trump questioned the test result:

This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily right. The tests are perfect, but something can happen between the test, where it’s good, and then something happens and all of  a sudden. She was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason she tested positive.

His first response to bad news is always denial. The idea that this is how infectious diseases work — one day you don’t have it and the next day you do — doesn’t seem to register with him.

Huffington Post reports that Friday 20 Republican congresspeople met with Trump at the White House. No one wore masks (but the media) and social distance was not observed. CNN has a similar story about Trump meeting with military leaders.

Trump demonstrating how much smaller than Abraham Lincoln he is.

And now he’s saying that the virus will “go away without a vaccine“.

and birth control

The Supreme Court is considering another case where a religious organization objects to ObamaCare’s birth-control mandate.

I know it sounds bad to be sued by the Little Sisters of the Poor, but in this case the Sisters are just wrong. Worse than that, they’re being jerks about it.

For [religious] nonprofits, the Obama administration enacted rules providing a work-around to accommodate employers’ religious objections. The workaround was that an employer was to notify the government, or the insurance company, or the plan administrator, that, for religious reasons, it would not be providing birth-control coverage to its employees. Then, the insurance company could provide free birth-control options to individual employees separately from the employer’s plan.

But some religiously affiliated groups still objected, saying the work-around was not good enough, and sued. They contended that signing an opt-out form amounted to authorizing the use of their plan for birth control.

In other words, they’re being passive aggressive about this; any concession at all is too much for them, so the world just has to work around that.

There is a very simple principle that would avoid all these cases (including the horribly-decided Hobby Lobby case): What employees do with their health insurance is not the employer’s business. The Little Sisters are not providing their employees with birth control, they’re providing health insurance. If employees choose to use that health insurance to get birth control, that’s not the Sisters’ business — just like it’s not their business if employees use their paychecks to buy birth control.

but I wrote about corruption and the stock market

Check out the two featured posts. “What’s Up With the Stock Market?” tries to explain how the stock market can diverge so extremely from the economy. “This Week in Corruption” discusses the Michael Flynn fix, Dr. Rick Bright’s whistleblower complaint, and the upcoming Supreme Court case testing Trump’s claim of “absolute immunity”.

and you also might be interested in …

Six Harbors Brewing Company on Long Island has adjusted to the lockdown by delivering beer to customers’ doors, using two beer hounds to do it. Golden retrievers Barley and Buddy do not actually carry the beer themselves — the cans around their necks are empty. But deliveries are up since the dogs have been coming along.

Vox’ Laura McGann relates her history of investigating Tara Reade’s accusations against Joe Biden. When she talked to Reade in April 2019 about her original charge (“This is not a story about sexual misconduct; it is a story about abuse of power. It is a story about when a member of Congress allows staff to threaten or belittle or bully on their behalf unchecked to maintain power rather than modify the behavior.”), “I wanted to break this story. Badly.” But McGann couldn’t assemble the kind of corroboration she felt the story needed (“Reporters who’ve succeeded in forcing powerful men to be held to account relied on an incredible amount of reporting to do it.”) in time to beat other reporters Reade was talking to.

In March 2020, Reade upped the stakes, charging sexual assault including digital penetration. And McGann was back on the story. People who knew Reade at the time (1993) said she had told them about the assault at the time. They were, however, the same people who had corroborated her no-sexual-assault claim a year before. And she referenced an official complaint no one can find.

If Reade had told a consistent story and shared all of her corroborating sources with reporters, if those sources had told a consistent story, if the Union piece had shaken loose other cases like hers, or if there were “smoking gun” evidence in Biden’s papers, her account might have been reported on differently in mainstream media a year ago. It is not fair to an individual survivor that their claims require an extraordinary level of confirmation, but it’s what reporters have found is necessary for their stories to hold up to public scrutiny and successfully hold powerful men accountable. So we are here.

… All of this leaves me where no reporter wants to be: mired in the miasma of uncertainty. I wanted to believe Reade when she first came to me, and I worked hard to find the evidence to make certain others would believe her, too. I couldn’t find it. None of that means Reade is lying, but it leaves us in the limbo of Me Too: a story that may be true but that we can’t prove.

Sabrina Orah Mark studies and writes about fairy tales. But this lovely piece of writing pulls a fairy tale theme into our current quarantine experience. Too often, we identify with fairy tale princesses and heroes, who can live happily ever after if only they can do three impossible tasks. So we look around for our own impossible tasks, hoping that we will deserve happiness if we accomplish them.

Back on April 21, somebody posted a link on Facebook to a story about plans for the Republican Convention. And I made this comment:

I have a fantasy that some prankster hijacks the convention soundtrack, and Trump takes the stage to the strains of “Live and Let Die”.

Well, Trump was touring a mask-making factory in Arizona Tuesday, and guess what happened?

RIP, LIttle Richard.

Baseball comes back to South Korea, but without fans. The stands of Happy Dream Ballpark in Incheon contain placards of fans rather than actual people. The games are televised, and some show up in the middle of the night on ESPN.

and let’s close with something musical

The Phoenix Chamber Choir stays home, but comes together to do a quarantine version of Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time”.

Also worth your time: On April 16 Cyril Ryan posted her brother Dermot’s quarantine version of the Irish folk ballad Lanigan’s Ball.

Even by the standards of a historically corrupt administration, this week stood out.

Corruption is an ongoing story in the Trump administration, dating way back to Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns or distance himself from his business empire. The Trump International Hotel, whose building is rented from the federal government, places Trump in the position of being both the renter and the landlord. His cabinet has been riddled with scandal and conflicts of interest. His impeachment by the House was essentially a corruption story, as he tried to extort a personal favor from Ukraine in exchange for doing his duty as president. And as the Senate considered his fate, he raised millions of dollars to re-elect the Republican senators standing in judgement over him.

This week, though, at least three serious corruption stories were current at the same time:

• The Justice Department dropped its prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
• The recently-deposed director of BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) filed a whistleblower complaint alleging “cronyism” and political pressure to ignore the scientific merit of proposals — including (but not exclusively) proposals related to the current pandemic.
• Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear Trump’s claim of “temporary absolute immunity” that shields him and his business empire and business associates from any form of investigation.

But at the same time we can’t lose sight of the constant low-level corruption we’ve gotten used to. Like this tweet, in which Trump uses the same Twitter account in which he sometimes announces major government policy changes or personnel moves to promote the re-opening of his Los Angeles golf club. Or putting a crony in charge of the Post Office, which he has long been trying to pressure into raising rates on Amazon, as a way to strike back at Jeff Bezos for owning the Washington Post, which Trump feels mistreats him. Stuff like that happens almost every week.

Flynn. For months we’ve been expecting Trump to pardon Michael Flynn, his first National Security Adviser, who lasted only two weeks in the job before resigning; he had lied to Vice President Pence and to the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Flynn pleaded guilty to the charge, and also acknowledged being an unregistered foreign agent while he was working as an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. (Flynn famously led a chant of “Lock her up!” at the Republican Convention.) He later sought to withdraw his guilty plea and attack the Mueller investigation that indicted him. The judge had not yet ruled on that motion.

Pardoning Flynn would tie up one of the remaining loose ends in Trump’s obstruction of justice in the Mueller probe. But now Trump may not have to commit that particular impeachable offense, because Attorney General Bill Barr is trying to accomplish the same thing: Thursday the Justice Department has asked the judge to drop the indictment of Flynn, despite his guilty plea. Former Solicitor General Neal Katyal and fellow Georgetown law professor Joshua Geltzer write:

The Justice Department’s new position isn’t that Mr. Flynn didn’t lie — that couldn’t be its position, because he did lie, and he admitted in federal court that he lied. Instead, the new filing argues that it was wrong for the F.B.I. to interview him in the first place. Look carefully at who the villain becomes in that narrative: not Mr. Flynn for lying, but the F.B.I. for asking the questions to which he lied in response.

Barr’s move is worse than a pardon, as Jeffrey Toobin explains in the New Yorker:

A pardon would have been outrageous but within Presidential prerogative. Instead, the Justice Department manufactured a phony pretext to pretend that Flynn’s guilty plea was illegitimate.

The pretext is based on the recently released documents concerning the FBI’s preparation for the interview in which Flynn lied, which it claims shows the agents planning to entrap Flynn. Further, it claims that the investigation under which Flynn was interviewed — the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — had already concluded. The closing communication had been written, but not yet approved.

Consequently, the Justice Department motion holds

Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements that were not “material” to any investigation.

This contention was disputed in the NYT Sunday by Mary McCord, who had been acting assistant attorney general for national security at the time. The Justice Department’s motion is in part based on an interview with her. She claims it has “twisted my words”.

But the report of my interview is no support for Mr. Barr’s dismissal of the Flynn case. It does not suggest that the F.B.I. had no counterintelligence reason for investigating Mr. Flynn. It does not suggest that the F.B.I.’s interview of Mr. Flynn — which led to the false-statements charge — was unlawful or unjustified. It does not support that Mr. Flynn’s false statements were not material. And it does not support the Justice Department’s assertion that the continued prosecution of the case against Mr. Flynn, who pleaded guilty to knowingly making material false statements to the FBI, “would not serve the interests of justice.”

Trying to dismiss the Flynn indictment echoes Barr’s previous corrupt move: his interference a few months ago in the sentencing of another obstruction-of-justice loose end, Roger Stone. (Interim US attorney for D.C. Timothy Shea signed off on both.)

The case was thrown into disarray last week when Attorney General William P. Barr overruled a sentencing recommendation by four career prosecutors, who then quit the case in protest. Mr. Barr said he decided on his own that the prosecutors’ request for a prison term of seven to nine years was too harsh. But his move coincided with Mr. Trump’s public complaints about the prosecutors’ recommendation and elicited widespread criticism that he had bent to the president’s will.

Similarly here, lead prosecutor Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the case Thursday, apparently so that he would not have to submit the request to withdraw Flynn’s indictment.

What happens next in the Flynn case is not clear. It’s up to the judge whether or not to accept Barr’s motion to dismiss, but ultimately what else can he do? If he allows Flynn to withdraw his guilty plea, then there would have to be a trial. But he can’t force the Justice Department to mount a prosecution.

The judge could hold a hearing on the dismissal motion, including asking Van Grack why he withdrew rather than present it. That might embarrass the government, but wouldn’t convict Flynn. He could dismiss the indictment “without prejudice”, which could allow a Biden Justice Department to pursue the case next year. Barr is asking for a dismissal “with prejudice”, which would prevent any future Justice Department from restarting the case.

Meanwhile, both Trump and Barr are hinting that reprisals are coming against the people who investigated the Trump/Russia connection. Barr said:

I mean, it’s not going to be the end of it. We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened. … We also are seeing if there are people who violated the law and should be brought to justice, and that’s what we have our eye on

and Trump said:

I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a lot of things happen over the next number of weeks. This is just one piece of a very dishonest puzzle. … [Flynn] was targeted in order to try and take down a president. I hope a big price is going to be paid. A big price should be paid. … It’s treason.

Now, Trump says a lot of things that never go anywhere, they just sound good to him in the moment. But he could also be planning some kind of show trial against someone like James Comey.

I’ll give the last word to Steven Hall, the retired CIA Chief of Russian Operations:

I’m no lawyer, so I won’t comment on Flynn from that perspective. But I was an intel officer, and I can tell you there are serious counterintelligence issues. Flynn should never have a clearance again.

And another thing: I’ve met with many foreign intel chiefs, most of whom at one point or another expressed admiration for American rule of law. Some begrudgingly. It’s going to be much harder now to make the case for that, and as a result, the US has been weakened.

Dr. Bright’s complaint. The part of Dr. Rick Bright’s whistleblower complaint that got headlines was the conflict over hydroxychloroquine that seems to have been the immediate cause of Bright losing his directorship. But the complaint is worth reading in full as a horror story. The part that I found most agonizing happened in January, as Bright tried to get his superiors (Trump political appointees) interested in procuring more N-95 masks.

Secretary Azar and Dr. Kadlec responded with surprise at Dr. Bright’s dire predictions and urgency, and asserted that the United States would be able to contain the virus and keep it out of the United States. Secretary Azar further indicated that the CDC would look at the issue of travel bans to keep the virus contained. Dr. Bright responded that virus “might already be here. We just don’t have the tests to know one way or the other.” Dr. Bright’s comments were met with skepticism and were clearly not welcome. … As a result of the critical concerns raised by Dr. Bright in the January 23, 2020, meeting with Secretary Azar, HHS leadership excluded him from the next COVID-19 meeting, even though the agenda listed Dr. Bright as a participant.

He had similar frustrations over Covid-19 tests, swabs, reagents, syringes, and just about everything else that we now wish the government had prepared better. But the administration had bet all its chips on keeping the virus out of the country, and didn’t want to draw attention to the possibility that it might get in.

There is, of course, nothing inherently corrupt about lack of foresight and bad decisions, even if those bad decisions get many people killed or infect healthcare workers with a deadly virus. But Bright also tells a series of stories in which some drug company employs John Cherici as a consultant, and then Clerici deals directly with Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Kadlec, who puts pressure on BARDA to ignore the recommendations of its scientists.

from approximately the spring of 2017 through the date of his involuntary removal as Director of BARDA, HHS leadership pressured Dr. Bright and BARDA to ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism. Dr. Bright repeatedly clashed with Dr. Kadlec and other HHS leaders about the outsized role played by John Clerici, an industry consultant to pharmaceutical companies with a longstanding connection to Dr. Kadlec, in the award of government contracts.

Bright’s complaint does not explain exactly what the deal with hydroxychloroquine was: Did somebody stand to make a lot of money, or was Trump’s prestige the thing at stake? (Bright may not know.) But for whatever reason, Bright was under pressure to sign off on a protocol that would make hydroxychloroquine “available for the treatment of COVID-19 outside a hospital setting and without close physician supervision” — despite the lack of scientific evidence of the drug’s effectiveness and concerns about its safety.

Absolute immunity. Remember Stormy Daniels? That whole scandal seems almost quaint now, being about nothing more serious than illicit sex and campaign finance laws. No deaths, no undermining of US foreign policy or the rule of law, no hundreds of millions of dollars, no Russians choosing our president for us. But Michael Cohen is in jail, in part because his pay-off of Daniels on Trump’s behalf constituted an illegal campaign contribution.

An issue that was never resolved in Cohen’s trial is whether the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen for those illegal campaign contributions, and how it reported those expenses on its tax filings. The Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a county official, appears to be investigating whether any New York state laws were violated. In the course of his investigation, he subpoenaed eight years of Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns. The subpoena was issued not to Trump, but to his accountants.

Trump has sued to block that subpoena, arguing not only that he is personally immune from indictment under state as well as federal laws, but that he cannot be investigated either. Law professors Claire O. Finkelstein and Richard W. Painter explain in the New York Times:

Mr. Trump claims that a president has “temporary absolute immunity,” meaning he cannot be criminally investigated while in office. Indeed, in oral argument before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, his lawyers said that if the president were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, he could not be investigated or indicted until after he left office.

Apparently, this immunity also extends to any underlings at the Trump Organization who might have fudged the business records, as well as to his accountants.

Finkelstein and Painter do a pretty good job laying out how Trump’s claims contradict what the Supreme Court held in the Nixon tapes case and in the Paul Jones case. George Conway (Kellyanne’s husband) wrote of the briefs in the Paula Jones case. He explains that while a President may have a variety of immunities when he is acting in his official capacity, what he does as a private individual — like pay off troublesome porn stars before taking office — is not protected.

The law seems clear, so the corruption question moves to the Supreme Court, which begins hearing the case tomorrow: Will its five partisan Republican justices enforce the law against a Republican president? Or will they find some way to twist the law to give him what he wants? If they do, Finkelstein and Painter warn, the Republic is in real trouble.

If the justices endorse this extreme view, they will make it impossible to hold this president, and all future presidents, answerable in courts for their actions.

Conway seems confident that the Court will “teach the lesson” that the President is not above the law. But even if it doesn’t, I’m not that worried about future presidents, at least not if they’re Democrats. The five Republican justices are perfectly capable of reversing themselves once a Democrat takes office.

Unemployment has hit levels not seen since the Great Depression. More than 10,000 Americans are dying every week with no end in sight. And the Dow is up 33% since March 23.

Friday morning, the April jobs report came out, and it was horrific: The economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, and the unemployment rate soared to 14.5% — territory not seen since the Great Depression. And there’s no reason to think it won’t go higher. (If you can’t read the graph below, click on it to go to the CNN article where I found it.)

So naturally, the Dow Jones average proceeded to go up 455 points. That jump was weirdly typical of how the market has been behaving lately. In March, when the economy was being shut down, the Dow plunged in a way that seemed appropriate to the unfolding disaster: from its all-time high of 29,568 on February 12 down to 18,213 on March 23. But since then the market has had a nice rally, making up more than half its losses and getting back to 24,331.

Another way to look at it is in time rather than dollars: Friday the Dow closed 1,000 points higher than it was at the start of 2019. Can you remember back 16 months or so? Unemployment was 3.7% then, not 14.5%. Did that strike you as a less promising time than right now? Did you have more confidence in the economy? Less uncertainty and fear?

Among people who don’t study investing, facts like these are usually taken as signs of collective insanity, or maybe evidence of a vast market-manipulating conspiracy of the super-wealthy. And while collective insanity has been known to strike the market from time to time, and I’ve never regarded the super-wealthy as entirely trustworthy, there are some reasons why the market is where it is. Several recent articles (Emily Stewart’s in Vox is my current favorite) review those reasons, which I will try to summarize in my own way.

Forward-looking? I need to start by debunking a bad explanation. One old saw you will hear repeated at moments like this is: “The market is forward-looking.” In other words, things may look bad right now, but the market is looking ahead to conditions six months or a year down the road, when the situation will be much better.

Really? If that’s what investors are thinking as they bid prices up to this level, then I’m thrust back into the collective-insanity explanation. It’s definitely possible that some of our current uncertainty will resolve in a positive way over the coming months: Maybe phase-two vaccine trials will look promising. Maybe remdesivir or some other anti-viral drug will turn out to be an effective treatment, or just limit the lethality of the disease. Maybe curve-flattening will keep working even as we start to open more businesses, so that we hit some sweet spot of a better economy without a worse public-health situation.

None of that is unreasonable to hope for. But it’s also not assured. So far, the death numbers have stayed stubbornly high, and a lot of states’ opening-up plans have lacked the care and thoughtfulness many of us expected. (The Trump administration decided not to publish the CDC’s guidelines for opening various kinds of businesses safely. My guess is that Trump’s people thought they would be too discouraging. If that’s what it takes to open safely, lots of businesses might just stay closed. Much better, the Trumpists think, just to go ahead and encourage them to open unsafely.) The virus appears to be making the transition from urban areas to rural areas. If there is a weather effect, and infection numbers go down in the summer, they might snap back in the fall. There’s still no good plan for re-opening the schools, and how are you going to get parents back to work until their kids have somewhere to go?

In short, pessimism has its case too. And in addition to the epidemiological pessimism, you might also have economic pessimism: There could be a vaccine tomorrow, and the economy still might not recover right away. As we saw in years after the 2008 collapse, economies are like that. If something causes a depression, the depression doesn’t automatically go away once the cause is removed.

So no, the market is not predicting that something wonderful will happen between now and the fall or winter. Maybe it will, but maybe it won’t.

So what are the real reasons the market is so high?

Publicly traded businesses are not typical of the economy. It’s not hard to think of publicly traded companies that are doing badly right now. The big retailers are almost all close to bankruptcy. The real-estate trusts that own the malls are in bad shape. So are the cruise lines, and the hotel chains, and the movie theaters. Even as its new streaming-subscription service is booming, Disney suffers under the twin blows of closed parks and movies it can’t release. And whenever other businesses do badly, banks suffer, because a lot of loans may never be repaid.

But it’s an ill wind that blows no one to good. Lots of businesses are doing OK during the plague, maybe better than ever. Zoom is benefiting from the boom in online meetings. Gilead could have a blockbuster drug in remdesivir. Quest and LabCorp have developed home Covid-19 tests. What’s bad for the gyms is great for Peloton, which pulls isolated stationary-bike riders together into classes or even communities. The money people aren’t spending on restaurants is going to grocery chains like Kroger. What’s killing Macy’s is boosting Amazon. The business models of Google and Facebook are unaffected by the virus. Netflix is well positioned. Stocks like that are up for good reasons.

More ominously, in the long run the big chains stand to benefit if their smaller competitors get wiped out. The family that runs your local diner might go bankrupt, but Denny’s will probably survive. Your barber might lose his shop, but Supercuts will make it. Who knows what will happen to your friendly neighborhood coffee shop, but Starbucks isn’t going anywhere.

The local coffee shop is not on the New York Stock Exchange, but Starbucks is. A lot of the economic pain in the country is happening outside the view of the NYSE. And the demise of businesses off the stock exchange is raising the prospects of the businesses on it.

The Fed Put. For several years, the United States’ single biggest exporter has been Boeing. The aircraft manufacturer employs 161,000 people. The company was already under stress before the pandemic, due to the safety problems of its 737 MAX airliners, which have been grounded for more than a year. And now its main customers, the airlines, can’t fill the planes they have. The maps below — again, click to find a more legible version — show the decline in air traffic between March and April.

But there’s more to that story: “We’re not letting Boeing go out of business,” Trump told Fox News on March 24. The CARES Act included $17 billion that could have been loaned to Boeing.  As it turned out, the company didn’t take the money, choosing instead to float a $25 billion bond issue. But that also might turn out to be government money in a more roundabout way. The bond market is so cooperative because the Federal Reserve, fearing a liquidity crunch, has announced its intention to buy huge quantities of corporate bonds.

And even if Boeing’s money doesn’t come directly from the Fed, wouldn’t you feel more confident owning its bonds, now that you know Trump won’t let the business fail?

I pick out Boeing just for clarity, but it illustrates a wider phenomenon. The Fed has been creating money at a fierce rate, both to cover the federal budget deficit and to prevent a credit crunch or a collapse in demand. Inevitably, some large chunk of that money eventually flows into the investment markets, driving up prices, or at least keeping them from collapsing. Among traders, this is known as “the Fed put” — the belief that the downside risk in the stock market is limited because the Federal Reserve will intervene if things start to collapse.

Interest rates and stock prices (1). But the biggest reason stock prices are as high as they are is interest rates, which are historically low right now. (Again, due to the intervention of the Fed.) It’s practically axiomatic that low interest rates lead to high stock prices.

There are two ways to see that. The first is just simple comparison shopping. Imagine that you’re a big investor. Say you manage the investments of a big pension fund. The model under which your pot of money funds the pensions it’s supposed to cover says that you have to make a certain average return year after year. Let’s make up a number and say it’s 4%. If you average 4% over the next 20 years, the teachers (or whoever) get their pensions and everybody’s happy.

Now imagine interest rates are such that you can buy well-rated 20-year bonds that pay 6%. You’re done. Just buy them and you’ll exceed your goal.

But if you’re in an environment like we see today, a 20-year bond won’t pay much over 1% unless it’s pretty risky. So if you’re going to make your goal, you’re probably going to have to invest in stocks and hope for growth.

When a lot of investors come to that conclusion at the same time, they bid up the price of stocks.

Interest rates and stock prices (2). The second way to see how interest rates affect stocks is more theoretical. In theory, what a stock is worth is the present value of the sum total of all the future earnings per share. The “present value” of $1 of earnings in 2050 — what somebody should be willing to pay today to get $1 in 2050 — is usually quite a bit less than $1. But how much less is determined by the long-term interest rate. What an interest rate is, in essence, is a measure of how the value of money changes through time.  If the long-term interest rate were 0%, that would mean that $1 in 2050 is worth $1 today. At higher rates, that future dollar might only be worth fifty cents today or twenty-five cents or ten cents.

So when interest rates go down, the fundamental value of a stock goes up — even if the economic prospects of the company have not improved.

What investors are thinking. It sometimes comes up on this blog that I buy and sell stocks. I’m far from a tycoon, but my wife and I do have a retirement nest egg that needs to be invested somewhere. So while I don’t operate on the scale of someone who manages a big pension fund or hedge fund, I do go through some of the same thought processes.

And yes, that thinking has to start with the recognition that the economy is historically terrible right now. People disagree about what kind of recovery we can expect over the next year or two, but I expect it to be slow. If the states roll back their lockdown restrictions in a sensible way, we should eventually get to an economy that is just very, very bad rather than apocalyptic. (I think it was Matt Yglesias who imagined a recovery where 80% of the population does 80% of what they used to do. That would still constitute a huge drop in GDP.) If they do it badly (and I think some are), the virus could spike again and start a new lockdown.

At the same time, there will be winners in that world, and we’re all competing to figure out who they will be. For example, I’m betting that most people will continue to pay their phone bills, and that many of them will want to up their data plans. So I own stock in Verizon.

Assuming that you’ve picked a company that will weather the storm, you then have to decide what you think their stock is worth. Is the current price a bargain? Or is it so overvalued that you should sell the stock you own?

And that’s where the question of competing investments comes in. If I sell, what do I do with the money I get? If I leave it in a money market account, it will earn near zero interest. Lots of stocks pay dividends that don’t sound like much by our previous standards, but that look pretty good compared to zero. (Apple currently pays about 1%. Coca-Cola pays 3.5%.) Maybe I wouldn’t buy them if I could get 4% from a CD at my credit union. But I can’t.

On the other hand, maybe the economy’s prospects are even worse than my fellow investors think. (There’s a good chance of that. Investors tend to be professional-class folks or higher up the pyramid. They’re likely to know a lot of people who can work from home and think of the lockdown as an inconvenience. They likely don’t know many people who can’t work and are defaulting on their rent or mortgage. They probably underestimate how many such people there are.) Maybe as we get into summer, the real state of things will filter into the statistics they pay attention to, and we’ll see another crash. In that scenario, I would be happy that I had kept money sitting in a fund paying .01%. Then I could swoop in and buy Apple and Coke at much lower prices (and higher dividend rates).

But back on the first hand, the Fed has created a lot of money, and so have the central banks in other countries. Wherever that money starts out — like the federal government borrowing a bunch of it to send people those $1,200 payments — eventually it’s going to pool up somewhere. And whoever owns that pool is going to want to invest it somewhere. Wouldn’t it make sense to be in the market now, before all that extra money arrives and bids prices up higher?

It’s a conundrum. But on the whole, the lack of competing investments and the fear of missing out pushes me into the market, the same way it pushes a lot of other people. I hold back a little, and I try to be careful about what I buy, but I’m not sitting out.

And that’s why the market is so high.

Week after week, the pandemic has dominated the news. That’s what happens when you kill 80K Americans in two months.

But this week, the pandemic has competition: new highs in the corruption of the Trump administration. Bill Barr once again made a mockery of the Justice Department’s independence by serving Trump’s political interests; the Department moved to drop the indictment of Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. As in the Roger Stone case, a prosecutor resigned rather than have his name tainted by this dirty deed.

Also, the recently removed director of BARDA, a biological research organization inside HHS, filed a whistleblower complaint. In that complaint, he describes a history of political “cronyism” overruling the judgment of BARDA’s scientists, culminating in a corrupt move to push hydroxychloroquine, the drug Trump was promoting as a miracle cure for Covid-19, but which had not been proven to be either effective or safe.

And tomorrow, the Supreme Court considers Trump’s claim to have “absolute immunity” against any form of investigation, either federal or state. If the Court signs off on that, there’s really no limit.

So one of this week’s featured posts will be “This Week in Corruption”. I still have some work to do on that, so it probably won’t be out until around 11 EDT. Before that, I want to examine something I know a lot of people are wondering about: how the stock market can be so high when the economy is so awful. “What’s Up With the Stock Market?” should be out before 9.

The weekly summary still has a lot to cover after that, most notably that Covid-19 deaths seem to have leveled out, even as states start relaxing their shelter-in-place restrictions. Deaths are dropping in the New York City area, but rising elsewhere. Meanwhile, the virus has reached the White House. Baseball is back, but in South Korea, not here. The Tara Reade conversation continues. And I’ll close with a quarantine version of Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time” performed by the Phoenix Chamber Choir. Let’s say that gets out before 1.

This is the first of seven audio services; as you will see, I’m still getting used to the software and the microphone, but I hope it’s a blessing for you.  (Onward and upward, right?) The full text follows, and low bandwidth users might want to download and unzip the lower-quality audio file.

Download: Lower-quality audio file (MP3) (1.3 Mb)

Welcome

Greetings. This is a service of worship for May 10, 2020, the Fourth Sunday after Easter

Sentence and Votum (Psalm 124:8)

This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24)

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

Collect for the Day

Let us pray:

Almighty God, who unites the minds of all the faithful: grant your people love for what you command, and desire for what you promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely be pointed to where true joys are to be found, the kingdom and promises of your Son Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lord’s Prayer

Let us pray, as Jesus taught, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Psalm

Let us praise God with words from Psalm 34 (1-7, NRSV)

I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad.
O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together.
I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.
Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed.
This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord, and was saved from every trouble.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Lesson

A reading from the first chapter of the letter of James (1:17-21, NRSV)

Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.

Here ends the reading.

Address

Our passage from the letter of James ends on a hopeful note: “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” The same power which saves us, and all persons, in the span of creation comes to help us in the trials of our daily life. As in fact it must. We don’t profess a faith that only has benefits in an unseen future state. God implants a desire to hope, not just for a string of “perhaps tomorrow, perhaps tomorrow” but also that we might live fully today. Spiritually deep living proves the value of faith more than any turn of logic or theological dispute. From it comes the gift of God “from above” granting us power to be generous givers ourselves, to enjoy good times and to bear up with hard times.

While the virus sickens and kills many people, threatens livelihoods and inconveniences everyone, it is not correct to say that the days before the outbreak were good and today is bad. For many people, perhaps most people on Earth, life was hard before and is harder now. There was death, loss, hunger, sickness and violence then and now. But the burden is lighter on those with more resources. Typically, we speak of these resources as financial or material: money to not worry about lost work or medical bills, a bigger house to shelter in or the means to have food and resources delivered to you. There are other, intangible resources, say, taking comfort in the company of family and friends, but these too are limited, and the pandemic is a special burden for those who live alone. And we also have spiritual resources that give us a context and response to that crisis. Spiritual resources, unlike material resources, can be re-charged by their use. How often do we feel refreshed by being kind, and see that kindness returned, but weary from demanding indulgences from others. Don’t think it comes automatically, or that’s it’s a fraud to put yourselves in an attitude valuing goodness, service and care over, as James puts it, sordidness and wickedness.

This particular pandemic will some day pass, but other challenges will come instead. Prepare yourself — not just with canned food and toilet paper — but with an approach to life that values goodness, and “has the power to save your souls.”

Winchester Profession

Let us profess our faith:

We believe that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament contain a revelation of the character of God, and of the duty, interest and final destination of mankind.

We believe that there is one God, whose nature is Love, revealed in one Lord Jesus Christ, by one Holy Spirit of Grace, who will finally restore the whole family of mankind to holiness and happiness.

We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men.

Collects

For peace

Let us pray for peace:

O God, who is the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom stands our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom; Grant us, your servants, we humbly ask you, that peace which the world can neither give nor take away; that we, who in all our dangers rely on your goodness, may under your parental protection be defended against all adversities, and rejoice evermore in your blessed service, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

For grace

Let us pray for grace:

O Lord, our heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, who has safely brought us to the beginning of this day; Defend us with your mighty power; and grant that we fall into no sin, nor run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings may be ordered by your governance, to do always that which is righteous in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

For healers and caretakers

Let us pray for healers and caretakers

Almighty God, who inspires the hearts of all who would serve you, we ask you to give your special blessing to all healers and caretakers who attend to the sick and afflicted. Give faithfulness and skill to their work, efficiency to the means they employ, and guide them to the understanding that in their best service, they also serve you. In the name of the Divine Physician, Christ our Lord. Amen.

For all conditions of humankind

Let us pray for all people

O God, the Creator and Preserver of all humankind, we humbly ask that you would make your ways known unto the breath and width of the human family, your saving health to all nations. More especially we pray for the good estate of the Church Universal; that it may be so guided and governed by your Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians may be led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life. Finally, we commend to your tender goodness all those who are any ways afflicted or distressed, in mind, body, or estate (particularly sick people and those close to death); that you would comfort and relieve them according to their various needs, giving them patience under their condition, and a happy result from all their afflictions. And this we ask for your mercy’s sake in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Concluding prayer

Almighty God, you have given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplication to you; and you have promised through your well-beloved Son that when two or three are gathered together in his Name you will be in the midst of them: Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us; granting us in this world knowledge of your truth, and in the age to come life everlasting. Amen. (attributed to St. John Chrysostom)

Benediction

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us all evermore. Amen.

Notices

For more information about these services, visit revscottwells.com. The portions of scripture are from the New Revised Common Version.

This is Scott Wells. God bless.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110141459/https://www.revscottwells.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-10_service_good-quality.mp3

If you expect elementary school children to endure the trauma of active shooter drills for your freedoms, you can wear a mask to Costco.

– Heidi Freymiller (5-1-2020)

This week’s featured post is “Things We’re Finding Out About the Pandemic“.

This week everybody was talking about states reopening

On Tuesday, NBC News made the same claim I’ve been making here:

no state that has opted to reopen has come close to the federally recommended decline in cases over a 14-day period.

This Fox News clip where Chris Wallace interviews Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves is illuminating. Wallace posts the last week of new-case numbers from Mississippi, noting that Friday was a new high of 397 (compared to 281 the previous Friday, and higher than anything in between) and asks “Why are you reopening Mississippi at all when you haven’t met the White House guideline of a steady downward trajectory for two straight weeks?” Governor Reeves replies:

You have to understand that Mississippi is different than New York and Mississippi is different than New Jersey. … They had a huge spike of cases in a very short period of time. But Mississippi is not like that. What we have seen is for the last 35 or 40 days, we’ve been between 200 and 300 cases without a spike. Our hospital system is not stressed. We have less than 100 people in our state on ventilators. … Sometimes the models are different for different states. … We believe that particular gating criteria just doesn’t work in states like ours, who have never had more than 300 cases in any one day, with the exception of Friday.

If you look at their daily death totals, Mississippi has been losing about 10-12 people a day since mid-April, with extremes of 2 (April 27) and 20 (May 1). Reeves is saying, essentially, “We’re OK with more deaths than that.” He’s also ignoring how infectious disease work: New York had 2 deaths on March 18 and 4 on March 19. Mississippians have no special immunity.

This is an example of the peculiar myopia that makes conservatives such poor guardians of public health. Public health is necessarily social, and conservatives see only individuals. (As Maggie Thatcher put it: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”) It may be true that an individual Mississippian going to a bar or restaurant right now faces a much different risk than a New Yorker. But that doesn’t mean Mississippi isn’t at risk.

and the meat-packing order

It’s easy to get overcome by righteous anger at workers being ordered to risk their lives. But at the same time it’s hard to figure out what is actually real in this story.

Start with this: Meat-packing plants have been the sources of several of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks in the country, especially among those in rural areas or small towns. Several of them have had to close down, at least temporarily. Management has promised that workers will all be tested, but a lot of them actually haven’t been. Mother Jones reports about a JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado:

Those who have returned talk about improved conditions, including temperature monitoring before each shift and staggered lunch breaks, but there’s a looming fear that the virus is still spreading silently among the workforce. The company still hasn’t implemented all-employee testing and contact tracing or provided sequestration housing for sick workers, two strategies that the health department deemed necessary before the plant should reopen. Yet the Republican-controlled board of Weld County Commissioners is not only allowing JBS to remain open but encouraging all businesses in Greeley to reopen this week.

Into the middle of this, the White House says that Trump is ordering all meat-packing plants to stay open. Except, that’s not quite what the executive order says. The order isn’t addressed to the meat-packers, or anybody other than the Secretary of Agriculture. The order delegates to the Ag-Sec the president’s power to invoke the Defense Production Act “to ensure the continued supply of meat and poultry, consistent with the guidance for the operations of meat and poultry processing facilities jointly issued by the CDC and OSHA.” Whatever that means.

The meat-packing plants have not all reopened yet, though Secretary Perdue (no relation to Perdue Chicken) expects them to in “days, not weeks“. Whether he has actually invoked the DPA is unclear. Exactly what has been done to make the workers safer is iffy. Whether the workers will show up when the plants reopen is also unclear.

“I don’t see it having much effect,” said Stephen Meyer, an economist at Kerns & Associates working with the pork industry. “You can tell anybody to open up a plant, but if the workers don’t show up, it doesn’t work.”

“It’s nice of the President to think we’re important and everything, but I don’t think it’s going to cause very many plants to open,” he added.

So, Trump got his on-camera moment looking all decisive and presidential, but it’s not clear what he actually accomplished for good or ill.

BTW: As I revealed last week, I owned Tyson stock for a few weeks, but sold it when I noticed the infection stories.

and Joe Biden

This week Biden released a statement and took questions about the Tara Reade accusation that he sexually assaulted her when she was a staffer in his Senate office in 1993. He made a full denial: “This never happened.”

Democrats and other liberals have been having a fairly calm and sensitive discussion of the issue, especially compared to the foaming at the mouth we saw from conservatives during the Kavanaugh hearings. There’s a general consensus that Reade’s story needs to be heard and examined, but also that we shouldn’t automatically assume it’s true.

Reade was one of several women who came forward last year to talk about how Biden touched them in ways they found inappropriate, or stood too close to them, or otherwise made them feel uncomfortable. She told The Union, a California newspaper:

“He used to put his hand on my shoulder and run his finger up my neck,” Reade said. “I would just kind of freeze and wait for him to stop doing that.”

None of the accusations against Biden at that time were overtly sexual; Biden sounded like a lot of guys of his generation who hadn’t gotten the memo about how to treat women in the workplace in this era. If you wanted to be generous to him, you could assume no bad intent on his part.

But in March, after Biden had all but clinched the Democratic nomination for president, Reade began to tell a more damaging story: Biden pushed her against a wall, put his hand up her skirt and pushed a finger into her vagina.

Like most stories of this type, there are no uninvolved witnesses to the act itself. Reade’s brother and a neighbor say she told them about the assault soon afterward. Reade claims she complained to her supervisors at the time, but they say she didn’t.

Reade now says she made claims of sexual harassment, but not assault, to her supervisors in Biden’s office; they vehemently deny hearing any such complaint. She says she was told to find a new job by a supervisor, but she has also changed her recollection of which supervisor it was when speaking to reporters in recent weeks (all of the people she named deny it). The AP contacted 21 former Biden staffers, none of whom remember any Reade complaint against their boss. Reade also claims she complained to the Senate personnel office; there is no record of it.

Biden has asked the National Archives to look for Reade’s complaint.

My point of view on this is skewed by a prior prediction. (I’m not sure whether I made it on this blog or just in social media.) Early in the primary campaign I argued that the Democrats should nominate a woman (I ultimately endorsed Elizabeth Warren), and one of my reasons was that after the Kavanaugh battle, Republicans would find an accuser for any man the Democrats nominated. (BTW: I still believe that is true, and that abandoning Biden won’t fix it. If he’s replaced by Cuomo or any of the other men whose names have been floated, an accusation against the new candidate will surface as well.)

I’m not saying Reade was put up to this by the Republicans. But if Reade didn’t exist, she would have to be invented. I have no special reason not to believe her account, but I was anticipating somebody’s accusation and prepared not to believe it.

Several Obama staffers have made the same point: We investigated Biden pretty thoroughly back in 2008, and we didn’t find any trace of this.

Biden’s request to the National Archives has gotten subsumed by the idea that he should open the collection of his Senate papers that he gave to the University of Delaware, on the condition that they not be available to scholars until after he had left public life. Biden has refused this, claiming that (1) records about Reade or her complaint wouldn’t be in there anyway; and (2) the collection contains a lot internal office memos and things that would be embarrassing to numerous people, not just him.

The what-should-Biden-reveal issue is a separate thing from the Reade accusation itself. Heather Cox Richardson wrote about it at length on Saturday, and I think she nailed it: This is Hillary’s emails all over again.

Trump and his GOP enablers are controlling today’s political narrative, just as they did before the 2016 election.

… The files will contain the sausage making of various political issues that can be cherrypicked to destroy careers (not just Biden’s). Of course Trump people want to expose everything Biden did as a senator. Media outlets are salivating to get into the papers for their own reasons: can you imagine the stories detailing rivalries from the thirty years Biden was in the Senate? It would rival the hay made off the stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 which, after all, revealed nothing illegal, but embarrassed Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

The pressure on Biden to release his papers strikes me as the bad faith use of an important political conversation to score political points. It is vital to uncover the truth of what happened between Biden and Reade, but that’s not what’s going on here. Observers are demanding the release of material that has been donated in good faith for future researchers, to uncover information that we know full well would not be stored there. But it would certainly weaken Biden as a candidate.

At the same time, Trump simply refuses to show anyone anything. Once again, the media is dancing to his tune, making Biden’s reluctance to open his Senate records look nefarious while giving Trump a pass

Whatever Biden reveals, it will not be enough. And meanwhile, Trump will have revealed nothing. Still no tax returns. Nothing about his Russian investors. All conversations related to his obstruction of justice or his Ukraine extortion remain privileged.

and Trump’s brownshirts

I know they’re not calling themselves brownshirts — and Trump is calling them “very good people“, similar to his characterization of the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville as “very fine people” — but when you “protest” with an AR-15, you’re not protesting, you’re trying to intimidate and terrorize.

A person carrying a gun to go hunting or target shooting is transporting the weapon to use for its lawful and intended purpose. Whether armed protesters admit it or not, gun-carrying to a political rally serves a different, disturbing and unnecessary purpose: intimidation. It is inherent in the act, putting it squarely at odds with vigorous, open and lawful political dissent.

This woman at an Illinois rally gives the game away with her “Arbeit Macht Frei” message to Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker. The slogan “Work Makes Free” comes from the Nazi concentration camps. Pritzker is Jewish.

It’s important not to tar everyone with the same brush. I’m sure a lot of people who protest the lockdowns just want to go to the beach. But white supremacist or neo-fascist groups like the Proud Boys are at the core of these protests, and are using them to recruit.

Rule of thumb: If you’re at a protest and the people around you have AR-15s or are quoting Nazis, go home.

So many people have made this point already that I won’t belabor it, but only white men could do this. Black or brown people who tried to enter a state capitol with military-style weapons would be ordered to the ground, and if they didn’t comply fast enough they’d be killed. It’s that simple.

When the Black Panthers took guns to the California state capitol in 1967, they were disarmed, despite the fact that they were breaking no laws. California subsequently passed a gun control law, with the support of the NRA. The Second Amendment isn’t an issue when black people are being disarmed.

and you also might be interested in …

It looks like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un is fine. There’s no official explanation of why he didn’t appear in public for about three weeks, but maybe it had something to do with coronavirus.

George W. Bush released a three-minute video to encourage the nation in this time of crisis. In it, he strikingly demonstrates the human qualities that Trump lacks.

Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat. In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.

Bush was never known as Mr. Empathy, but nothing about being a Republican forces a person to be callous and self-centered. Trump is doing that on his own.

Naturally, Trump viewed this example of leadership as an attack, and struck back.

@PeteHegseth “Oh bye the way, I appreciate the message from former President Bush, but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside.” @foxandfriends He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!

Actually, Trump should be thanking Bush for staying silent during impeachment. The ex-president could have been pointing out the obvious fact that Trump was guilty. If partisanship had been put aside, and if Congress had responded only to the facts, Trump would have been removed from office.

Last Monday I wrote about “Why the Country isn’t Rallying Around Trump’s Flag“. Thursday, Vox’ Roge Karma took on the exact same topic, but added an international angle: “Many world leaders have seen double-digit polling surges amid coronavirus. Trump isn’t one of them.”

Like me, Karma observes that Americans are rallying around their governors, many of whom have seen large increases in their approval ratings. But his data about other world leaders is also illuminating.

But ultimately he came to the same conclusion I did: Unity is just not what Trump does.

There’s been a lot of focus on how the Trump administration was technically and strategically unprepared for this crisis — and that’s true. But there’s also a way in which Trump himself was not temperamentally or ideologically prepared for it either. Trump built his political career atop fracture, conflict, and polarization. But he’s just collided with a crisis that demands solidarity, unity, and mutuality.

James Hamblin wonders:

I’m curious how psychiatrists diagnose people with depression now. Usually if people come in saying they’ve stopped leaving home, feel like every day is the same, are constantly overwhelmed by the plight of humanity, stopped getting dressed, stopped showering … typically a yes.

Now that’s all normal behavior.

I try to minimize the these-people-are-assholes anecdotes, because I could fill the whole Sift with them every week. I’m not sure who would benefit from reading them.

But the Mike-Pence-face-mask thing stands out, though, because it’s got all the elements: (1) the original assholery: Pence toured Mayo Clinic and ignored their regulations about wearing a face mask. He even let himself be photographed barefaced. (2) the lie: After a bunch of bogus excuses didn’t impress anybody, his people lied: They said Pence didn’t know about the rule. Also, Pence is apparently too dense to look around, see that everyone else is wearing a mask, and ask a question. (3) claiming victimhood: When a reporter caught them in the lie — pointing out that Pence’s staff had told reporters planning to go on the trip that they’d need to bring masks — Pence’s people called a foul on the reporter: That pre-trip notification was off the record, so the reporter owed Pence an apology.

and let’s close with nine good minutes

Just because school is out and they’re scattered to the winds, that doesn’t mean that over 100 Julliard musicians and dancers couldn’t work together on this amazing performance of Bolero. Be sure to check out the making-of article.