Biden’s lead in the polls has Democrats searching for what could possibly go wrong. But some worries should be taken less seriously than others.

Just about every Democrat I know wants to punish him/herself for being overconfident in 2016. Some of us have practical regrets, and wish we’d done more to put Hillary over the top, while others less rationally feel like we jinxed her by saying too loudly that she was going to win. But whatever we did or didn’t do then, we’re now determined to make ourselves suffer by refusing to accept any good news about Joe Biden’s chances. No matter what the polls say, something is going to go horribly wrong.

For what it’s worth, I think we’re going to win this. Not that there’s nothing to worry about, but some of our worries are less serious than others. Let’s assess them one by one.

Worry #1. The polls are wrong.

Biden’s average margin in national polls is somewhere in the 8-9% range, and has been there since mid-June. More importantly, he has solid leads in the swing states he needs to win: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If he fails in one of those states, polls also give him a good shot at flipping Florida, Arizona, or North Carolina. And even Republican strongholds like Texas and Georgia are not completely out of reach.

But Democrats remember how confident we felt in 2016, and look for reasons to doubt the polls. Republicans, on the other hand, live in constant denial of reality, and doubt the polls because they don’t want them to be true. Poll-skeptics make two related arguments.

• The polls were wrong in 2016, so why should we trust them now?
• There is a “hidden” Trump voter that the polls either can’t count or don’t want to count.

Neither really holds water, as long as you remember that polls are snapshots of public opinion at a moment in time, and not predictions of what people will think or do months from now.

The first thing to understand is that the final polls in 2016 were not far off from the vote totals, and to the extent they were, the more likely explanation is that Comey’s reopening of the Clinton email investigation gave Trump late momentum. The polls probably weren’t wrong at the moment they were taken; but a small shift in public opinion at the last minute put Trump over the top.

Nationally, the final 2016 RCP polling average had Clinton up by 3.3%. Her actual margin in the national popular vote was 2.1%. In Pennsylvania and Michigan the polls were off by a bit more — but still not that much. And in both cases, Trump had been gaining in the final week. The only real surprise was Wisconsin, where Clinton led by 6.5% in the final polls and lost by 0.7%.

But in 2018, the reverse happened: The final general congressional ballot polls had the Democrats up by 7.3%, and their margin in the vote totals was larger: 8.4%.

So if there were “hidden Trump voters” in 2016, were their “hidden Democrats” in 2018? Or is there always a small shift in the final days and hours of a campaign?

For what my opinion is worth, I expect the 2020 last-minute shift to be in Biden’s favor. Late in a campaign, a certain number of voters are just sick of all the noise. This year in particular, those voters will be sick of four years of noise; the thought that the loud, obnoxious Trump Era could be over will just be irresistible.

Assessment: Don’t worry about this. Things could change before Election Day, but Biden really is ahead right now.

Worry #2. Trump will stage a remarkable comeback.

In the Trump Era, when every day brings a a few week’s worth of news, three months is a very long time. A month ago, who was predicting that Portland would be invaded by DHS secret police? So all kinds of things can happen before Election Day, and you can expect Trump to push all the buttons and turn all the knobs as he tries to change the public’s opinion of him.

However, nothing he’s trying right now is working at all, or is likely to work if he just keeps at it and pushes harder. Unleashing his goons on Portland was supposed to produce a wave of support for the “law-and-order President” (who is strangely indifferent when people in his administration break the law). But in the latest Ipsos poll, 52% of Americans say the federal response to protests made things worse, with only 30% saying it made them better.

The not-all-that-veiled racism of his “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” tweet doesn’t seem to be going over all that well either. Suburbs aren’t what they were in the 1950s. Blacks already live there (though still not in proportionate numbers), so they aren’t as easy to demonize. And a suburb anywhere near high-tech industries (like Bedford, Massachusetts, where I live) is going to include lots of residents of East Asian or South Asian ancestry. If you’re looking for the lily-white experience, you have to go to ex-urbs or rural small towns.

A second factor: His ability to change tactics is limited by his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for bad outcomes. So he has to keep doubling down on points that the public already knows are false. Like: the virus really is spreading, it’s not just that we’re testing more. That stopped fooling anyone other than Trump diehards weeks ago, but he can’t stop saying it.

And it’s not just him. The Trumpists who picture a comeback have to engage in such flights of fancy that reading their scenarios makes me more confident, not less. For example, Grady Means published an op-ed Wednesday in The Hill: “Buy the Dip: Bet on Trump“. In Means’ fantasy world, Trump has done a great job and had a great strategy going into this year, but after Covid-19 got rolling “the president has been a complete failure at playing his winning hand.”

The mainstream media and social networks stepped up their withering and relentless Trump-attacks. Statistically meaningless (increased testing and obvious selection bias) COVID-19 “cases” data were weaponized into a strategy of continued lockdowns and sustained school closures.

That’s Trump’s problem — not that America on his watch has objectively screwed up its pandemic response worse than any other rich country, or that people are genuinely hurting economically with no relief in sight. No, it’s that the media has made something out of nothing, and convinced the public to shut down businesses and schools when the virus isn’t really out of control at all. As soon as Americans realize the virus is already beaten, learn to ignore the hundreds of thousands of bodies piling up in the corner, and recognize what a great job Trump has done on the pandemic and everything else, he’ll surge again.

I just can’t picture that plan succeeding.

If Trump is going to stage a comeback, it’s going to have to be through an October surprise: either foreign help (like he got from Russia in 2016 and tried to extort from Ukraine this time around) or some headline-making indictments from the Barr/Durham investigation of the investigators. In either case, whatever anti-Biden “scandal” Trump manages to puff up will probably have little substance, and the public will have been well warned.

Assessment: Worry a little. In particular, worry enough to keep doing whatever you can to ensure a Biden victory. (If we overshoot and wind up with a landslide, that might teach Republicans to give up not just on Trump, but on Trumpist fascism in general — no Tucker Carlson or Tom Cotton in 2024.) But if anxiety about a Trump comeback is causing you to loose sleep or plunge into depression, feel free to put it out of your mind.

3. Trump might lose the election, but refuse to leave office.

It’s important to keep two things in mind:

• The power of the president functions almost entirely through other people.
• The White House is a symbolic place, but has no legal or institutional significance.

So while it’s very easy to imagine Trump barricading himself in the Oval Office on January 20 and tweeting endlessly about voter fraud and how he’s still president, if the people who make up the government stop taking his orders, he’s not president any more. Removing him from the White House would become a problem for the Secret Service, aided by mental health professionals.

The transition-of-power process defined by the Constitution and implemented in various state and federal laws goes like this:

• On November 3, an election is held — or rather 51 separate elections are held in the states and the District of Columbia. This date could be changed, but only by Congress. The Constitution says: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors”. Votes are counted by local officials, until at some point a state official verifies the names of the electors who will represent that state in the Electoral College.
• On December 14 (the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December), the electors cast their votes. Like Election Day, this date was set by Congress and can only be changed by Congress. (The same sentence in the Constitution continues: “The Congress may determine … the Day on which [the Electors] shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”) The electors meet in their own states, vote, and send the vote totals to Congress.
• On January 6, a joint session of Congress meets and the electoral votes are officially counted. (This is the new Congress, with the new representatives and senators elected in November. The new terms start on January 3.) Whatever disputes there might be — rival slates of electors and so on — Congress has the authority to resolve them. The new president will be who the new Congress says it is.
• On January 20, the new president is inaugurated, swearing an oath specified in the Constitution. There are lots of traditions around the inauguration — it happens just outside the Capitol, the Chief Justice administers the oath, the oath is sworn on a Bible or whatever book the new president holds sacred — but none of that is required.

Here’s something I have great faith in: If the joint session of Congress on January 6 recognizes that Joe Biden has received the majority of electoral votes, he will become president at noon on January 20 and the government will obey his orders. Where Donald Trump is at the time, and whatever he is claiming or tweeting, will be of no consequence.

If Trump’s tweets bring a bunch of right-wing militiamen into the streets with their AR-15s, they can cause a lot of bloodshed, but they can’t keep Trump in office. They are no match for the Army, whose Commander-in-Chief will be Joe Biden.

So if Trump wants to stay on as president, he has to screw the process up sooner; by January 6, it’s all in the bag, and probably it’s all in the bag by December 14. Even stretching out the process with legal proceedings won’t help him: The Constitution specifies that his term ends on January 20. If at that time there is no new president or vice president to take over, the job devolves to the Speaker of the House, who I believe will be Nancy Pelosi.

Assessment: Worry about the ways that Trump might screw with the electoral process (which we’ll get to), but not that he will just refuse to leave the White House.

4. Republican state legislators will overrule the voters and give their state’s electoral votes to Trump.

Awarding a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins that state’s popular vote is so traditional that most people think it must be in the Constitution, but it isn’t. The sum total of the Constitution‘s instructions are:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress

So, at least in theory, a legislature could ignore the popular vote and appoint anybody it wants to the Electoral College. However, states have codified their current processes in law, and a new law would have to be passed to circumvent that process. The swing states people are most worried about — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — have been gerrymandered to lock in Republican majorities in the legislatures, but they have Democratic governors who would veto a law to hand Trump the state’s electoral votes. Republicans don’t have enough votes to override a veto.

Assuming Trump wins at least one of those states legitimately, though — or manages to suppress enough Democratic votes to get a majority — Biden could still win if he carries Florida, Arizona, or North Carolina. North Carolina, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, has a Democratic governor and enough Democrats in the legislature to sustain a veto. So Trump needs to win the popular vote there, too.

That leaves Florida and Arizona, where Republicans have unified control of state government. (You could also talk about Texas and Georgia, but if Biden wins the popular vote in either of those states, he’ll have such a landslide that no amount of backroom finagling could undo it.) Would they dare reverse the decision of their state’s voters? This would be a truly outrageous thing to do — even some people who vote for Trump aren’t going to like the idea that their votes don’t count — and the people who do it would risk being villainized for life. So I can only imagine it happening under two conditions:

• They’re sure it will work. This scheme only makes sense if it gives Trump a second term, where he can reward the people who put him in office. So they need to be sure their law will pass and their electoral votes will make Trump president again.
• Something taints the vote-count that says Biden won. You could imagine a legislature legitimately awarding its electoral votes by special law, if it were clear that the popular vote was fraudulent in some way. (Imagine a surprise win by the previously unknown owner of the company that makes vote-counting machines. Wouldn’t you want your legislature to stop that?) Republicans would need to be able to argue that they were following the real will of the voters, which had been undone by fraud.

That, I think, is the point of Trump’s bogus assertions that voting-by-mail-is-unsafe and the polls are skewed. He’s setting up the argument Republican legislators will need if they want to throw the election his way.

There are a bunch of scenarios where Biden is safe from this:

• He wins the popular vote in enough states that no single state flipping to Trump would reverse the outcome.
• He wins three of these four states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
• He wins Florida and/or Arizona by enough votes that the fraud-made-the-difference argument loses credibility.

There’s also a wild card: If Democrats control both houses of the new Congress, they might decide to not to count the switched electoral votes. It would be an illegitimate, unconstitutional move, but hardball begets hardball. Trump might try to get the Supreme Court to rule against Congress, but it’s not clear they have jurisdiction. And if Congress simply refuses to declare a winner, Pelosi becomes president. (All this would do horrible damage to our political system, but if Republicans don’t care about that, why should Democrats?)

Assessment: Worry moderately. Probably we won’t wind up in a scenario where this is a possibility, and even if we did, it would only take a handful of Republicans with consciences to save democracy. Who knows? There might actually be enough of them.

4. A majority of Americans try to vote Trump out, but between voter suppression and the Electoral College, we fail.

During the impeachment process, Republicans liked to orate on the awesome standards necessary to reverse the choice of the American voters. But of course, the voters did not choose Trump — the Electoral College did. Trump got only 46% of the vote: 66 million votes to Hillary Clinton’s 69 million. His approval has never gone much above that 46% — largely because he has governed as if the other 54% doesn’t count — and is now hovering somewhere around 41%. Quite possibly, there has never been a moment when a majority of the American people supported Trump.

It’s easy to imagine the same thing happening again: Biden piling up millions more votes than Trump in California and New York, while losing by a few thousand in Florida and Wisconsin. With the usual Republican margin in Texas shrinking, the effect could be even more extreme in 2020 than it was in 2016: Biden might get as many as 5 million more votes than Trump, and still not become president.

What’s more, Republican voter suppression efforts are in high gear, and have already shown some success: By a wide margin, the voters of Florida voted in 2018 to re-enfranchise felons who have served their time — nearly 1.4 million Floridians. But yielding to the will of the people is not what the Republican Party is about.

The GOP-controlled Legislature, however, sought to limit the effects of the amendment by passing a law that conditioned the right to vote on payment of all fees, fines and restitution that were part of the sentence in each felon’s case. The state, however, had no central listing of this information, and the Legislature created no system to help felons ascertain how much, if anything, they owed. Even the state ultimately agreed that it would take six years to create such a system. … The estimated 85,000 who are already registered could be prosecuted if they vote and it turns out they have not paid the fees or fines owed.

The Supreme Court, which has consistently favored Republican voter-suppression efforts sincre John Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, thought this was a fine law.

Covid-19 has created new opportunities for mischief, as we saw in Wisconsin in April. The Republican-through-gerrymandering legislature insisted on few polling places and long lines, and resisted the Democratic governor’s attempt to institute vote-by-mail, or even to extend the deadline for submitting an absentee ballot to allow for the fact that many ballots were not mailed out on time. Research indicates that the brave Wisconsinites who came out to vote anyway could not fully avoid spreading the virus.

Nationally, Republicans are doubling down on this yield-or-die strategy for the fall. They are fighting vote-by-mail in states all over the country, trying to force people to brave the virus-spreading crowds if they want to vote. Worse, Trump is intentionally slowing down the mail, which could well result in a Wisconsin-like situation for the whole country: People can’t receive their mail-in ballots and return them soon enough to count. Some of the more obvious suppression tactics include not counting Michigan ballots that arrive late, even if they were postmarked before Election Day (“inherent variations in mail delivery schedules could result in one person having the ballot counted and another not, even if they send them back on the same day”), and trying to stop Pennsylvania from providing drop-off boxes for people who are afraid their mail-in ballots won’t arrive in time. These attempts come wrapped in rhetoric about “election security”, but they’re transparent attempts to keep legal voters from successfully submitting their votes.

I think there’s reason to hope that these efforts will boomerang, and that the more Trump tries to keep Americans from voting, the more determined we will be. In Wisconsin, the people who did risk their lives to vote were pretty pissed off by the time they got to the booth. The Republican Supreme Court candidate this tactic was supposed to save got defeated anyway.

All over the country, people have to be asking themselves: “Why don’t Republicans want me to vote?” Trump is giving Democrats an issue, and we need to run with it. He wants to paint liberals as people who hate America, but this part of Barack Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis sounds pretty fundamental to what America is supposed to mean:

Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better by making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance. By adding polling places and expanding early voting and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are somebody who’s working in a factory or you’re a single mom, who’s got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot. By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C., and in Puerto Rico. They’re Americans. By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering, so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around. And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

Who hates America now, Mr. Trump? Not LeBron James, who together with other NBA stars is donating $100K to pay the fees of Florida felons, so that they can vote. We all need to be looking for ways that we can help our fellow Americans vote, and for ways to call out the anti-American politicians who are trying to stop them.

The ultimate voter suppression would be for Trump to deploy his storm troopers Portland-style in swing-state Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia and Milwaukee, harassing people in front of polling places. We can hope that mayors and governors will not stand for that, and that the police will obey their local orders rather than side with the feds. It could get ugly, and again, could boomerang against Trump. Hopefully his advisors will convince him that it will.

Assessment: Trump can put his thumb on the scale, but only up to a point. It shouldn’t have to be this hard to get rid of him, but it is. I think we’re up to the challenge. So worry enough to take action, but not so much that you paralyze yourself.

5. Trump will lose and leave office, but he’ll trash the country on his way out the door.

Of course he will. This isn’t even something to worry about, just start getting ready for it. It’s going to happen.

Look for a flurry of pardons for all his henchmen (and probably himself, leading to an interesting legal battle), abrupt closures of American bases in any country that hasn’t treated him as well as he thinks he deserves, and at least one more big favor to pay off his debt to Vladimir Putin. (Putin would be crazy not to invade Estonia or something as soon as Trump loses.) And what’s more important: Taiwan’s independence, or a new Trump Tower in Shanghai?

Biden is going to have a historic mess to clean up when he takes office. But I believe he will take office.

We get the worst quarterly GDP report ever, Trump continues to trail Biden in the polls, and suddenly he wants to delay the election. Or move it up. Or something. Whenever the election is, it won’t be legitimate, because he’ll be defeated by fraud — the only conceivable way Trump could ever lose, or admit losing.

Anyway, this gives me a current event to hang the featured post on, even though it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while. When the polls first turned decisively towards Biden, Democrats — who are absolutely terrified of feeling confident — kept telling each other “It’s too early to pay attention to polls.” It’s still a little early, but it’s getting later, and Trump’s attempts to find an issue to capitalize on keep falling flat. The storm troopers in Portland didn’t do it. Demonizing China or Fauci isn’t doing it. Insisting that people worried about a plague send their kids back to school didn’t do it. What’s going to do it?

But instead of expressions of Democratic confidence, I’m seeing articles about all the bad things that could still happen: The polls could just be totally wrong, maybe Trump will refuse to leave the White House, and stuff like that. And while those things are definitely worth thinking about — I don’t expect everything to go smoothly and Trump to suddenly become a gracious loser — it’s more like we’re trying to justify our own inner panic than that we’re checking democracy’s doors and windows.

So I decided to do a doors-and-windows check myself, to see where the bad things might get in. (If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the right things.) The result is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?” That should be out maybe 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has that horrible GDP report to cover, along with Senate Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the continuing economic distress being felt around the country. The time-lag between Covid-19 cases and deaths is continuing to play out; now cases are topping out, but deaths are increasing, reflecting the upward slope of the case numbers three weeks ago. Herman Cain died, causing me to reflect on how hard-hearted this whole crisis is making me. (Maybe I was never really as compassionate a person as I thought I was.) Basketball has restarted more-or-less successfully, while baseball is still wondering if it will have to pull the plug. And I’ll close with that wonderful bit of photo-editing Nike has put together. That should be out maybe noon or 1.

We get the worst quarterly GDP report ever, Trump continues to trail Biden in the polls, and suddenly he wants to delay the election. Or move it up. Or something. Whenever the election is, it won’t be legitimate, because he’ll be defeated by fraud — the only conceivable way Trump could ever lose, or admit losing.

Anyway, this gives me a current event to hang the featured post on, even though it’s one I’ve been thinking about for a while. When the polls first turned decisively towards Biden, Democrats — who are absolutely terrified of feeling confident — kept telling each other “It’s too early to pay attention to polls.” It’s still a little early, but it’s getting later, and Trump’s attempts to find an issue to capitalize on keep falling flat. The storm troopers in Portland didn’t do it. Demonizing China or Fauci isn’t doing it. Insisting that people worried about a plague send their kids back to school didn’t do it. What’s going to do it?

But instead of expressions of Democratic confidence, I’m seeing articles about all the bad things that could still happen: The polls could just be totally wrong, maybe Trump will refuse to leave the White House, and stuff like that. And while those things are definitely worth thinking about — I don’t expect everything to go smoothly and Trump to suddenly become a gracious loser — it’s more like we’re trying to justify our own inner panic than that we’re checking democracy’s doors and windows.

So I decided to do a doors-and-windows check myself, to see where the bad things might get in. (If we’re going to worry, let’s at least worry about the right things.) The result is “The Election: Worry or Don’t Worry?” That should be out maybe 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has that horrible GDP report to cover, along with Senate Republicans’ failure to come to grips with the continuing economic distress being felt around the country. The time-lag between Covid-19 cases and deaths is continuing to play out; now cases are topping out, but deaths are increasing, reflecting the upward slope of the case numbers three weeks ago. Herman Cain died, causing me to reflect on how hard-hearted this whole crisis is making me. (Maybe I was never really as compassionate a person as I thought I was.) Basketball has restarted more-or-less successfully, while baseball is still wondering if it will have to pull the plug. And I’ll close with that wonderful bit of photo-editing Nike has put together. That should be out maybe noon or 1.

I am sleeping on a time bomb,
And I am waiting for the light to come.

– Vertical Horizon “We Are“

This week’s featured post is “The Cancel Culture Debate“.

This week everybody was talking about Portland’s resistance to Trump’s secret police

It’s hard to be sure until we get actual polls on the subject, but I don’t think Trump’s invasion of Portland is turning into the vote-getting stunt he’d hoped for. The plan was to create riveting scenes of heroic police clashing with “violent anarchists” from Black Lives Matter, crush the protests and restore “law and order” to a city whose Democratic officials were too weak-willed to handle these America-haters.

Instead Trump got the Wall of Moms, Dads with leaf-blowers, a wall of veterans, and another one of nurses. Portland grandmothers have adopted the hashtag #Grantifa and joined the protests. The goons from Homeland Security have man-handled all comers.

Paramilitary thugs dragging away terrified women who resemble somebody’s Mom from across the street — maybe that’s not the best optics for a federal police action. (Many of the Moms are annoyingly white, which wasn’t in the script at all.) So Trump has been driven to his ultimate defense against reality: declaring it all to be Fake News.

The “protesters” are actually anarchists who hate our Country. The line of innocent “mothers” were a scam that Lamestream refuses to acknowledge, just like they don’t report the violence of these demonstrations!

Reporters on the ground — those from The Oregonian/OregonLive, for example — tell a different story.

Thousands of Portland moms have come together over the past week to join nightly demonstrations in downtown.

They stand arm-in-arm at protests, placing themselves between federal officers and younger protesters in an act of protection. As the number of moms turning out in Portland grew with each protest, mom protest groups began to spring up across the nation in places like New York City, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

I’m a little skeptical of the “thousands” claim, but I have friends here in the suburbs who are searching their closets for yellow t-shirts (the Wall of Moms’ uniform of choice) in case Boston is next on Trump’s list. They’re real moms, and I don’t recall any of them ever mentioning their hatred of America.

The Guardian’s take:

If Trump’s intent was to calm things down, he has failed. But if, as some suspect, the president wanted to ratchet up confrontation for political gain, then it is not clear that it has been a success either.

“It’s a power play by Trump. He thinks he’s going to get his base all riled up by pitting the forces of law and order against the anarchists,” said Josh O’Brien, who travelled from Seattle to join the protests. “But he’s fucked it up like he fucks everything up. Look who’s here with us. Grandmothers. Doctors. Because like most Americans they don’t think people should be abducted from the streets by the president’s secret police.”

Acting Deputy DHS Secretary Ken Cuccinelli tried to push the violent-anarchists narrative by tweeting a picture with this comment:

Here is a shield and a couple of gas masks from a rioter arrested in Portland. Not a sign with a slogan that someone expressing their first amendment rights might carry, but preparations for violence. Peaceful protester? I don’t think so.

Cooch clearly didn’t think this out (or is trying to appeal to people who don’t think clearly): You carry a shield and gas mask when you expect to be a victim of violence, not a perpetrator.

Former Celebrity Apprentice staffer turned stand-up comedian Noel Casler paints a different picture:

If you’re dressed up like a soldier and you’re tear-gassing a mom wearing a bicycle helmet to protect her from your batons, you are not an American soldier or a Patriot. You are the kind of person American soldiers killed to protect us from. Stop it now @DHS_Wolf.

If you wonder what the Portland attack is for, Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn gives a hint: It’s for scary campaign messages aimed at voters far away from Portland. He tweeted video of a violent clash between police and demonstrators with the message “This would be @JoeBiden’s America. It’s a very scary place.”

As many other tweeters pointed out, the video is quite literally Donald Trump’s America. His three years of presidential race-baiting exacerbated the racial tensions that exploded in the George Floyd protests, and the brutality of his secret police increased the violence in Portland.

And if you don’t find all that disturbing enough here’s Thomas Friedman’s take:

when I heard Trump suggest, as he did in the Oval Office on Monday, that he was going to send federal forces into U.S. cities, where the local mayors have not invited him, the first word that popped into my head was “Syria.”

and what might happen in other cities

Over the weekend, protests broke out in several other cities, some of which had been quiet for weeks.

It’s hard to know whether provoking those protests was part of Trump’s plan or not. Certainly, he has talked about sending his DHS police to other cities. More than 200 federal agents have already been in Kansas City long enough for Attorney General Barr to lie about their accomplishments.

Barr said Wednesday that Operation Legend had netted 200 arrests in two weeks as the Department of Justice announced plans to deploy additional federal law enforcement agents in Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

So far, federal authorities have announced one arrest — a 20-year-old KCMO man wanted for warrants and allegedly spotted in a stolen vehicle, where two stolen handguns were found — though it has not been connected to a homicide or shooting investigation.

Similar numbers of agents are supposed to be heading to Chicago, Albuquerque, Cleveland, and possibly Philadelphia and Baltimore, but what they’ll do there is not at all clear. What problem are the agents trying to solve, and what will they do about that problem that local police aren’t already doing?

Operation Legend is named for LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old boy shot and killed in his bed in Kansas City on June 29. How exactly federal agents would prevent similar crimes has never been spelled out.

Of all those cities, Chicago is the one that I know best, so I’ll focus there.

It’s worth remembering that policing was a serious issue in the 2019 Chicago mayoral campaign. So if the federal government changes the way Chicago is policed, or stops Chicago from making its own changes, that raises a democracy issue: Do the people of Chicago get to decide how their city will be policed, or is that up to Trump?

Channel 5 asked all the candidates for mayor the same seven questions; the second one was about policing and the consent decree the city had recently negotiated with the State of Illinois to reform the Chicago Police Department. Lori Lightfoot answered:

I am the only candidate in this race that has a broad depth of experience in dealing with issues related to police excessive force and abuse, accountability and reform. My perspective on these issues stems from my roles as a federal prosecutor and the head of the former Office of Professional Standards, in which I made countless recommendations to terminate police officers who failed to properly perform their duties, including in police-involved shootings. More recently, I led the Police Accountability Task Force (PATF), whose report served as the underpinnings for both the Obama DOJ report and recommendations on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the consent decree. There would be no consent decree without the PATF. I also served as the president of Chicago Police Board, where I held officers accountable for misconduct. Before resigning from the police board to run for mayor, I significantly increased the number of officers that were terminated for serious misconduct or received lengthy suspensions.

In the first round of the multi-candidate race, Lightfoot was the leader with 17.5% of the vote. In the runoff between the top two candidates, she got 73.7%. I think it’s fair to say that the voters of Chicago want a policing approach like Lightfoot’s, and not a tear-gassing baton-swinging approach like Trump’s goons have implemented in Portland.

It’s not clear how Lightfoot’s approach will affect the frequency of violent crime in Chicago over the long term. But doesn’t the city have a right to find out?

Really American describes itself by “We believe it is our duty as patriotic Americans to stand up against fascism in all of its forms.” They’ve been making some really biting anti-Trump videos. Like this one.

A number of voices are expressing disappointment that the militia-Right or libertarian-Right, after decades of warning us about the threat of government tyranny, has so totally failed to notice the rise of real authoritarianism, and at times has even applauded it. But if you’ve been paying attention, you shouldn’t be surprised. Anti-government rhetoric has long been applied only in very particular ways: If the government is using its power to counter either white supremacy or the dominance of the super-rich, that’s tyranny. But if it’s using its power to keep the lower orders in their places, that’s OK.

Jonathan Korman has altered the Gadsden flag to capture what it really means these days.

and the next stimulus package

Back in May, Democrats foresaw that the virus would not be gone by summer, and that the economy would not have a V-shaped recovery. So they passed the next stimulus bill, the $3 trillion HEROES Act. Mitch McConnell reacted by denouncing it as a “liberal wish list”. He predicted that if more stimulus was needed “the President and Senate Republicans are going to be in the same place. We’ll let you know when we think the time is right to begin to move again.”

But as so often happens in this post-policy era of the Republican Party, the time has come and the President and Senate Republicans are not in the same place. That’s the problem when a party focuses on marketing to the exclusion of policy. When they do realize they need to do something, it’s hard to figure out specifically what, because up until that moment they have only been thinking about how to spin an issue, not how to resolve it. The White House in particular has been completely focused on the spin of the V-shaped recovery. (On June 5, Trump responded to a positive jobs report by saying that the economy is “not on a V-shaped recovery, it’s a rocket ship.”)

But there is no V-shaped recovery. Like so many Trump policies, reopening the country produced only a short-term effect. He got his good jobs report in June, but the subsequent surge in Covid-19 cases has states shutting down again, and layoffs are rising. So we’re back to the same problem as in March and April: People need to eat and pay the rent, but there are few jobs, and no jobs at all that many people with Covid risk factors can do safely.

The extra $600 per week of unemployment insurance, which was part of the previous Covid-response package, the CARES Act, expires Friday. In practice, that means that many people have already gotten their last increased unemployment check. This extra money has been key, not just to keeping those 20 million households afloat, but the entire economy. For example, August rent or mortgage payments might be hard to scrape together for many families — a problem that will cascade to real estate companies and banks.

McConnell is still predicting a new bill, but now says it will take “weeks“, and began his statement with “hopefully”. He wants a $1 trillion bill, with maybe $200 a week in additional unemployment, rather than $600.

and the rising Covid-19 death rate

After not having a thousand-death day since June 4, the US had four this week, not counting the 993 on Saturday. By WorldoMeter’s count, which runs a little higher than some others, the US had its 150,000th death today. Other counts are lower, but in all versions of the stats we’ll probably pass 150,000 this week.

If you squint at the graph just right, it looks like the US Covid-19 case count might have peaked this week. I wouldn’t count on that, but that’s the appearance at the moment.

Trump’s cancellation of the Republican Convention’s events in Jacksonville led to a series of sarcastic ” … but it’s safe to send your kids to school” social media posts. In addition to the convention,

• Barron Trump’s school won’t be fully opening, and won’t decide whether to offer any in-person classes at all until August 10, but you should be planning to send your kids to school five days a week.
• Florida Senator Rick Scott’s grandchildren will be “focused on distance learning right now” to “make sure they’re safe”, but schools should be open for your kids, especially if you’re poor and looking to cash in on “a subsidized meal”.

and AOC

I had been resisting paying attention the the AOC/Ted Yoho flap, because it looked like one of those somebody-said-a-bad-word kerfuffles that get people upset but never go anywhere.

But it eventually got my attention, because AOC gave a truly epic speech on the floor of the House. The provocation was not just Yoho arguing with her rudely on the steps of the House, and then walking away saying “fucking bitch” (as overheard by a reporter). But when his remark came out in the press, Yoho took to the floor of the House to offer one of those I’m-didn’t-really-do-anything-but apologies. His was particularly self-righteous, concluding that “I cannot apologize for … loving my God”, as if the Ancient of Days Himself had whispered “fucking bitch” into Yoho’s ear.

AOC’s response was masterful. She avoided all the usual ways such complaints are type-cast and pushed aside: It wasn’t that Yoho said a bad word or that her feelings were hurt. She spoke not with the attitude of someone pleading helplessly for justice, but as a person wielding moral authority. The question is not what Yoho’s judgment has done to her, but what hers does to him.

Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter too. … What I am here to say is that this harm that Mr. Yoho levied, tried to levy against me, was not just an incident directed at me, but when you do that to any woman, what Mr. Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters.

He — in using that language, in front of the press, he gave permission to use that language against his wife, his daughters, women in his community, and I am here to stand up to say that is not acceptable.

… What I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man. And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize. Not to save face, not to win a vote. He apologizes genuinely to repair and acknowledge the harm done so that we can all move on.

Lastly, what I want to express to Mr. Yoho is gratitude. I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women. You can have daughters and accost women without remorse. You can be married and accost women. You can take photos and project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity. It happens every day in this country. It happened here on the steps of our nation’s Capitol. It happens when individuals who hold the highest offices in this land admit, admit to hurting women, and using this language against all of us.

More and more I’m coming to believe that AOC is a once-in-a-generation political talent. Whether you agree with her positions on particular issues or not, her abilities are on a par with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Whether she’ll achieve what they did is still up in the air at this point in her life. But she has the talent.

and you also might be interested in …

It can’t be complete week without a Trump corruption story. Tuesday, the NYT reported:

The American ambassador to Britain, Robert Wood Johnson IV, told multiple colleagues in February 2018 that President Trump had asked him to see if the British government could help steer the world-famous and lucrative British Open golf tournament to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to three people with knowledge of the episode.

NPR adds:

Lewis Lukens, the embassy’s former second-in-command, confirmed in a text to NPR that Johnson told him about the president’s request. “I advised him that doing so would violate federal ethics rules and be generally inappropriate,” Lukens wrote.

But Johnson apparently went ahead and raised the matter with David Mundell, then secretary of state for Scotland, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

The State Department inspector general — presumably the one Trump fired in May — investigated and wrote a report, which has not been released.

538 has a fascinating breakdown of why Florida was a bellwether in 2008, 2012, and 2016, but resisted the blue wave in 2018. Some factors that helped Republicans in 2018 won’t be there this year. Meanwhile, CNN observes that Trump hasn’t led in a Florida poll since March. The RCP polling average has Biden up in Florida by 7.8%.

The best explanation of defund-the-police I’ve seen so far:

The baseball season launched (finally) on Thursday, with the Yankees beating the Nationals 4-1 in a stadium with no fans. An interesting compromise: Both teams knelt on the field prior to the national anthem, but no one knelt during the anthem.

It’s a 60-game season. If anybody is going to hit .400 in our lifetimes, this is the year to do it. And then we can all argue about whether it should count.

The Miami Marlins have postponed their home opener because 11 players and two coaches have tested positive for coronavirus. That this has happened already raises doubts about the plans for the whole season.

and let’s close with something realistic

People are having fun with photo-realism software.

Dutch photographer and digital artist Bas Uterwijk shines a light on what iconic figures from history might have looked like in real life. By using various digital manipulation tools, he is able to create photorealistic portraits of famous artists, leaders, mummies, philosophical thinkers, and even the models of paintings.

I’m not sure exactly what he bases this on, but this is his Jesus of Nazareth:

Doesn’t he look like he would forgive your sins?

And somebody else has used Roman statues to produce photorealistic images of the Roman emperors.

Expressing views out of step with the common sense of your era has always been risky. But now, as cultural power shifts and common sense changes, it’s harder to know what’s safe.

It has long been a staple of conservative thought that good people should have nothing to do with bad people. The very first verse in the Book of Psalms says: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” And in 2 Corinthians 6:14 the New Testament echoes: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?”

This conservative idealization of purity is currently playing out in the treatment of the Never-Trump Republicans, who are seen as heretics rather than wayward brethren. Justin Amash had to leave the Republican Party. Mitt Romney was dis-invited from CPAC. Even Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz is under fire for her occasional criticisms of the Great Leader.

But those incidents are dogs biting men. What really has drawn public attention is the man-bites-dog phenomenon of liberals casting people out. Liberals define themselves as open-minded and tolerant, and yet now they are often the ones who get people expelled from social media or dis-invited from speaking engagements or even fired from their jobs.

Such incidents have led to much bad-faith criticism from conservatives, and the popularization of the label “cancel culture”. But it has also resulted in introspection among liberals, most recently and publicly in “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” signed by around 150 intellectual heavyweights and published in Harper’s.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

This intolerant-climate rhetoric has predictably played into the both-sides-do-it narrative that mainstream media uses to establish its objectivity. But what exactly is the “it” that both sides do? The Harper’s letter is vague and sloppy about this, and the coverage the letter generated has often talked about “free speech”, when that is not the issue at all.

So let’s start at the beginning and try to get this right: What exactly is “cancellation”, and why might people of good faith want to do it?

When cancellation is merited. Judy Mikovits has a theory: She thinks Covid-19 was created in the United States by public health officials led by Dr. Anthony Fauci. They shipped it to Wuhan where it was either released or escaped, starting the current pandemic. Mikovits also holds Fauci personally responsible for destroying her career in science; she says he distributed millions of dollars to cover up the conspiracy that persecuted her. She has also made several other bizarre claims about Covid-19 in the video Plandemic, which went viral in right-wing circles until it was removed from most social media platforms: Flu vaccines have distributed coronavirus, which is activated when you wear a mask. Bill Gates was part of the plan to spread Covid-19, so that he can profit off the eventual vaccine. And so on.

Actual evidence for these claims is virtually non-existent.

So what should happen to Mikovits and her theories? In my ideal world, not much. She would be free to run around making whatever claims she believes, but no one would take her seriously, either. Groups would not invite her to speak. People who stumbled across her video online would say “Really?” and do some checking before deciding not to pass it on to anyone else. If Facebook, Twitter, et al. discovered “Plandemic” gaining popularity on their platforms, they would remove it, exactly as they did in the real world, but maybe sooner. And of course, being a distributor of wild misinformation about science would make Mikovits unemployable by legitimate scientific institutions.

In short, I think Mikovits deserves to be canceled — not imprisoned, not fined, not punished in any discernible way, just removed from the national conversation — not by government edict, but by the shared standards and good judgment of society in general.

Instead, Sinclair Broadcasting, the Trumpist network of local TV stations, decided to give her a platform. [1] Eric Bolling (who you may remember from his time as a Fox News host, until he left under a cloud of sexual harassment accusations) has a TV show America This Week, which Sinclair distributes to its stations. This week’s episode includes interviews with Mikovits and with her lawyer Larry Klayman.

For balance, Bolling also interviewed a Fox News medical contributor who describes Mikovits’ claims about Covid and Fauci as “unlikely”. But for much of the episode, the chyron asks the question: “DID DR. FAUCI CREATE COVID-19?” Many of Bolling’s viewers — especially the ones who might be cooking dinner or paying bills and only looking up at the TV occasionally — will probably come away thinking that “yes” is a plausible opinion, one that reasonable people should consider.

Is Sinclair’s decision to air Mikovits’ views a defense of free speech? I don’t think so. I believe it’s irresponsible and does a disservice to viewers who trust their local news stations.

Legal vs. acceptable. I bring Mikovits up not because I want to spend significant time debunking her, but for the sake of her example: Widespread rhetoric about “cancel culture” professes to be about “free speech” or censorship, but it really isn’t. [2] We’re not discussing what speech should be legal. We’re discussing what speech should be acceptable in various forums. And the answer to that question should not be “whatever anyone wants to say”. Failing to cancel someone can be irresponsible management of an information forum. [3]

The acceptability question is not absolute; it is forum-dependent. Suppose I agree with Mikovits and say so. What should happen depends on where I say it or try to say it.

• If I’m talking to my friends at a bar (assuming it’s ever safe to go back to bars), they should scoff at me, but the conversation should move on with no further consequence.
• If I submit an article to a general-interest newspaper or magazine, they should reject it; but maybe I could get away with raising the question of whether the virus was created in a lab, and suggesting that maybe it was.
• If I’m writing for Scientific American or some other popular magazine with scientific respectability, I should only be able to make claims that I can support with significant scientific evidence. The created-in-a-lab theory probably couldn’t pass muster.
• A scientific journal like Nature should require not just evidence, but proof. Otherwise, my opinion should not be heard.

If I am employed by Scientific American or a scientific journal, and I develop a reputation as a promoter of the Fauci-created-Covid conspiracy theory, they should fire me, because my reputation would conflict with the reputation the magazine wants to maintain.

None of this would constitute a violation of my free speech. I can say whatever I want, but other people are also free to react to what I say. No one has to offer me a platform or lend me their respectability.

Zack Beauchamp makes this point in more detail.

Contrary to the original letter signers’ claims, what’s actually happening here is more subtle than a war between free speech’s defenders and its opponents. It is, as the University of Illinois’s Nicholas Grossman writes, an argument over “drawing the lines of socially acceptable expression and determining appropriate responses to transgressing those norms.” That’s not a conflict over the principles of a free society but the rules that govern its operation in practice.

Before we called it “canceling”. If there ever was a moment in American history when all speech was acceptable and any idea could be advocated in any forum, it hasn’t been in my lifetime. I grew up during the Cold War, an era when it went without saying that no major newspaper or magazine would have an openly Communist columnist. [4] Slightly before my time, the Hollywood blacklist banned movie people suspected of Communist sympathies. One famous victim was the black singer/actor Paul Robeson, who you may have heard sing “Ol’ Man River“.

The range of opinions acceptable on major-network TV may have expanded somewhat in the 21st century, but is still quite narrow. Bill Maher ran into the limits shortly after 9-11. At the time, he hosted ABC’s Politically Incorrect, a comic-but-serious discussion of the news similar to his current Real Time show on HBO. But Maher made the mistake of responding to President Bush’s characterization of the 9-11 hijackers as cowards by saying something fairly obvious:

We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.

Soon, local ABC affiliates were refusing to air Maher’s show and sponsors were dropping it. It was not renewed for another season, after having been on ABC for five years.

In 2003, the Dixie Chicks (now just “The Chicks”) faced retribution after singer Natalie Maines told a London audience that the band opposed the upcoming invasion of Iraq: “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” In response

The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. On May 6, Colorado radio station KKCS suspended two DJs for playing their music.

So “cancel culture” may be a relatively recent term, but the phenomenon is not at all new.

Moving the boundaries. If cancel culture isn’t new, why is it suddenly getting so much attention? It’s hard to argue with the assertion that something feels different now. But what and why?

For one thing, more and more people are unsure about where the boundaries are, and so they withhold opinions they might previously have expressed. In a poll by Cato Institute — not an unbiased source, but faking a poll is not their style — 62% of Americans agree with the statement: “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe, because others might find them offensive.” That’s up slightly from 58% in 2017.

The question is why. I think Beauchamp has this right: It’s not that the bounds of acceptable speech are getting narrower, it’s that the range is shifting. Activists on the left are succeeding in moving the range leftward, and some would like to shift it further.

That may sound partisan and even nefarious in the abstract, but there is justification for it: The range of acceptable speech has never been natural or God-given; it arises out of a society’s power dynamics. [5] We are emerging from a centuries-long era when power belonged exclusively to upper-class straight white Christian men. So the bounds we are used to — ones that seem “normal” to us — unfairly favor upper-class straight white Christian men.

Social justice advocates think the bands of acceptable opinion and arguments shouldn’t be narrowed, precisely, but rather pushed to the left — shifted to include formerly excluded voices from oppressed communities and to sideline voices that seek to continue their exclusion. Their critics think the traditional bands of debate are, broadly speaking, correct, and that we’d all be worse off if the social justice advocates succeed in moving speech norms in their direction.

Consider, for example, the Me-Too movement. Abusive men like Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby used to be confident that their female victims would not be listened to or taken seriously, but now at least some of those voices are being heard. And if uncertainty about the new boundaries prevents men “from saying things I believe, because others might find them offensive”, that isn’t always a bad thing. I don’t doubt for a minute that Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida was saying what he believes when he called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes a “fucking bitch”. But if he restrains himself in the future (because he doesn’t want to be eviscerated again on the floor of the House), I don’t see the loss.

As a professional-class straight white brought-up-Christian man myself, I have often been corrected for running afoul of the new boundaries — by  commenters on this blog, for example. I have been called out for using the verb “bitch” for a certain style of complaining (done by men and women alike), or for referring to someone as “transgendered” (as if it were something that happened to them) rather than “transgender” (something they are). Occasionally someone observes that my attempts to write about privilege are themselves tainted by a privileged viewpoint. Of course it stings to be criticized for something I did without conscious malice, and that no one would have mentioned ten or twenty years ago. But I also recognize that a world where people like me get criticized for giving offense is better than one where the people we offend are not heard.

Who decides? A glance at the list of signers of the Harper’s letter reveals that they aren’t all upper-class straight white Christian men: Margaret Atwood, Atul Gawande, Michelle Goldberg, Khaled Khalifa, Dahlia Lithwick, John McWhorter, Gloria Steinem, Fahreed Zakaria, and many others. So why is this their issue?

For some, the motivation is obvious: Salman Rushdie had to spend years in hiding because his writings offended a powerful Muslim cleric. J. K. Rowling has faced a huge backlash to her opinion that transwomen are not “real” women. But not all the signers have some clear personal ax to grind. What’s up with them?

Let’s go back to Beauchamp:

What’s new in the modern era, according to [York University philosopher Regina] Rini, is that the mass public has gained an unprecedented ability to influence and reshape those rules [defining acceptable speech] — a process that used to be the province of the elite. … [Intellectual elites] believe that social media, and Twitter in particular, is starting to exercise a kind of veto over editorial judgment — running roughshod over editors and forcing journalists to be subject to the new activist rules of political discourse. The objection here is not just that activist speech norms are bad, but that those speech norms are being imposed on the intellectual elite by the loudest voices on social media — that a silent majority of conventionally liberal journalists are being silenced by radicals.

Here’s what the Harper’s letter says:

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

A response letter from a collection of generally less famous intellectuals points out that the examples vaguely alluded to in the paragraph above are both less unjust and less representative than they appear.

The content of the letter also does not deal with the problem of power: who has it and who does not. Harper’s is a prestigious institution, backed by money and influence. Harper’s has decided to bestow its platform not to marginalized people but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard. Ironically, these influential people then use that platform to complain that they’re being silenced. … Their words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism that still pervades the media industry, an unwillingness to dismantle systems that keep people like them in and the rest of us out.

For years, the people at the top of the intellectual pyramid have been insulated from the disapproval of the lower orders. [6] Now they are less insulated. Some problems may result from that trend, but it’s not obvious that the trend itself is a problem.

What is common sense? In David Graeber’s The Democracy Project, he defined the success of revolutions not by the the new governments they establish, but by “planetwide transformations of political common sense”. [7] We seem to be in such a revolutionary period now. Just a few months ago, for example, defunding or abolishing the police were ideas outside the bounds of acceptable discussion in most popular forums. Now the idea is openly discussed in The New York Times and other establishment forums. On the other side of the spectrum, the President is floating the possibility that he might refuse to accept an election that he loses.

No one can really say what “political common sense” means right now; it’s in flux. Similarly, “acceptable speech” is in flux. That is not the fault of anybody in particular. It’s just an uncomfortable feature of this historical moment.

In this situation, mistakes are going to be made. We’re all going to say things that we’ll regret after standards settle down. And some of our responses to other people’s transgressions will turn out to be inappropriate — sometimes too harsh, sometimes too lenient. It will be so obvious in hindsight.

What can we say? Recognizing that our current sight suffers fog-of-war-type limitations, how much can we say? Here are a few incomplete conclusions I’ve come to.

Disagreement is not censorship. Back on May 26, when Twitter attached a fact-check link to one of Trump’s lying tweets, the President tweeted back:

Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!

Trump was so stifled that a week or so later (June 5) he tweeted 200 times. But this complaint has a long pedigree in conservative circles. When she was John McCain’s running mate in 2008, Sarah Palin claimed that her rights had been violated by media accounts labeling her paling-round-with-terrorists rhetoric as “negative campaigning”.

If (the media) convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.

The same observation holds for liberals, moderates, or anybody else: If you say something and somebody disagrees with you, your rights have not been violated. If they label what you say as racist or sexist or some other ist-word, that’s their opinion and they have as much right to it as you have to your opinion.

Reserve your sympathy for people suffering real consequences. Someone surprised to be criticized for what he says or does should never be lumped together with others who have lost something real, like a job. If your house is getting vandalized and your inbox is full of death threats, that’s different that just “somebody called me a homophobe”. Hannah Giorgis made the point like this:

Facing widespread criticism on Twitter, undergoing an internal workplace review, or having one’s book panned does not, in fact, erode one’s constitutional rights or endanger a liberal society.

Michelle Goldberg objected:

This sentence brought me up short; one of these things is not like the others. Anyone venturing ideas in public should be prepared to endure negative reviews and pushback on social media. Internal workplace reviews are something else. If people fear for their livelihoods for relatively minor ideological transgressions, it may not violate the Constitution — the workplace is not the state — but it does create a climate of self-censorship and grudging conformity.

However, a review is not a firing. And that leads to the next point.

Responsibility belongs to the decision-makers. If you say something innocent that unfairly provokes (in the words of the Harper’s letter) “calls for swift and severe retribution” on Twitter, and then your boss fires you, the problem is with your boss, not with Twitter or the people who complained. Storms of public opinion are going to be a regular feature of public life, and institutions are going to have to learn how to weather them. People in positions of responsibility are going to need to have the courage of their convictions.

Universities are a good example: Students can ask for whatever they want; the university doesn’t have to give it to them. If some student group calls for the scalp of a professor who offended them by doing something that is well within the terms of ordinary academic freedom, and the university gives in, that’s on the university. Universities who make a habit of this kind of cowardice should be shunned by the kind of intellectuals they would otherwise try to recruit.

Saying anything substantive requires courage. This much has always and everywhere been true: It’s risky to express opinions that are out of step with the common sense of your time and place. [8] The problem now is that, since common sense itself is in flux, nobody can be sure what opinions are safe, or will continue to be safe when people a few years hence look back with new eyes.

This situation is regrettable. But at the same time, I have limited sympathy for intellectuals who are trying to be inoffensive and failing. The point of intellectual life should be to state your truth. If your truth turns out to be popular and make everybody happy, how fortunate for you. But nobody should go into intellectual life expecting that.

What goes around comes around. Everybody needs to remember that revolutions eat their young. Robespierre died on the same guillotine that he had sent many other people to. The more harsh judgment we build into the system, the more likely we are to be judged harshly when our time comes.

We need to always keep in mind the point of shifting the boundaries of acceptable thought: to bring in new voices, ones that the old distribution of power had shut out. Bringing in those new voices sometimes requires squelching old voices who are telling the new voices to shut up, or intimidating them out of speaking at all. Making new space on the platform may require asking some people to step aside. Creating a safe workplace or discussion space for a wider group of people may require that previously acceptable speech become unacceptable. [9]

But squelching old voices should never become an end in itself, even if they are obnoxious voices.

It would be nice to have a big finish for this post, but for all the reasons explained above, I don’t have one. As I said, someday (in hindsight) how we should have handled this will all be obvious. But right now, it isn’t.

[1] This description is based on the version of the episode that was posted online. After it caused an uproar, Sinclair decided to pull the episode back for re-editing to give it more “context. Presumably, however, its distribution to Sinclair’s stations has only been delayed.

[2] In the current news, I know of only one example of actual censorship: When Michael Cohen was furloughed from prison due to the risk of coronavirus, the Federal Bureau of Prisons conditioned the continuation of his furlough on an agreement not to write a book critical of President Trump. Cohen refused to sign and was sent back to prison, but was soon released by a federal judge. The judge said, “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this … unless there was a retaliatory purpose?”

Telling someone: “If you write a book you’ll go to jail” — that’s censorship.

[3] Another good example of a viewpoint deservedly canceled is Q-Anon.

[4] That’s still true today. For all the charges of “socialism” that get flung at pundits and politicians these days, when was the last time you heard somebody advocate public ownership of the means of production? That idea hasn’t gone away; you just don’t hear it.

[5] That’s the 21st-century version of Karl Marx’ dictum: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”

[6] However, even world-famous philosophers have occasionally lost jobs because they were too liberal. In 1940, City College of New York tried to hire Bertrand Russell to teach classes on logic, mathematics, and the metaphysics of science — three areas in which he was among the world’s foremost authorities at the time. That appointment was challenged in court because of his criticism of religion and advocacy of unpopular sexual practices. (Wikipedia lists “sex before marriage, homosexuality, temporary marriages, and the privatization of marriage”.) Ultimately the New York Supreme Court ruled against his appointment, claiming that Russell was morally unfit to teach at CCNY.

[7] The French Revolution is a good example. The government it established was a disaster, but afterwards monarchy became hard to justify.

[8] Even if you were white, being an abolitionist in the Old South could get you horsewhipped.

[9] Sara Robinson pushed back against Cato’s implication that it was political bigotry to be skeptical of hiring Trump supporters.

As an employer, I have a legal obligation to provide my workers with a safe workplace where they can do their jobs free of harassment and bigotry. If I fail, I can be sued, so there’s serious liability attached here.

If I hire a Trump follower, that liability goes straight to 11. How can I convince my female employees that they’ll be safe if I hire someone who thinks it’s fine for a man to grab a woman by the pussy? How do I look my Iranian clients in the eye after I bring in an employee who approved of the Muslim ban? What can I say to reassure my Jewish staffers when I’ve put their futures in the hands of a supervisor who agrees that the Charlottesville mob included “some very fine people”? What do I tell our Mexican-American vendors when they have to deal with someone who’s cool with seizing their nieces and nephews and sticking them in baby cages? … You don’t need to be a bigot to steer clear of these people.

Weeks like this raise a difficult question for anybody trying to summarize the news: Is Trump’s fascism supposed to distract us from his incompetence and corruption, or is it the other way around? Whatever I lead with, I wonder if I’ve taken the bait and missed the more important story.

The most eye-catching thing this week has been Portland’s resistance to the tear-gassing, stick-wielding secret police Trump has sent to crush dissent. The protests continue to grow, as Moms, Dads, veterans, nurses, and even grandmothers flip the script on our would-be strongman: It is the protesters who now look like America, and Trump’s goons who look like the violent America-haters.

But as the number of Americans dead from coronavirus closes in on 150,000 and Trump’s insistence that the schools have to open collides with his lack of any plan for opening them safely, it’s hard to ignore the incompetence theme. All of the countries we usually compare ourselves to are handling this pandemic, and we’re not.

And it’s hard to go a week without a major corruption story. This week we found out that Trump pushed our ambassador to the United Kingdom to try to get the British Open moved to a golf course Trump owns in Scotland. Supposedly there’s an inspector general’s report on this incident, which is conveniently classified.

But instead, the featured post is something more broadly cultural: After raising the subject of “cancel culture” in the weekly summary two weeks ago — and getting a lot of thoughtful objections from my commenters — I’m back with a longer article, which I haven’t titled yet. That should be out around 11 EDT. This week’s summary will address the fascism/incompetence/corruption trifecta, as well as Senate Republicans’ inability to put together a new stimulus package, the rising Covid-19 death rate, and a few other things, like AOC’s epic evisceration of Ted Yoho on the floor of the House. That should be out around 1.

Listen, I don’t mean to be partisan and all,
but I think that unidentifiable federal agents yanking people off the streets
and throwing them into unmarked vans is bad.

– Jared Holt, Right Wing Watch

“Our whole reason for lobbying for looser gun laws and amassing huge personal arsenals of weapons these past years was so that we could ensure the security of a free state and protect the people from an oppressive government. And then it actually happened, and the whole rising up against a tyrannical government thing just totally slipped our minds, which is a little embarrassing,” a sheepish NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said.

– “NRA Accidentally Forgets to Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government”
The Shovel (a satire site)

This week’s featured post is “Who Are Those Guys?“

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s secret police

Unidentifiable federal agents working for no agency in particular have been jumping out of unmarked vans and abducting people off the streets in Portland. I’ve gotten used to a lot of things since Trump became president, but this seems like a big deal to me.

I’m fairly proud of the featured post. It’s way long, but it tells the complete story, from the Pentagon’s reluctance to suppress protesters in DC in early June through the creation of federal law enforcement units that are willing to do just that. And for those of you who worry about Trump refusing to leave office after he loses in November, this is a key component of that scenario: I don’t believe the Army would support a coup, but what about these Little Green Men?

and the virus

Things keep getting worse. Last week it was debatable whether or not we had 70,000 new cases in a single day. This week we did it more than once. Deaths continue to rise, peaking at 963 on Friday. I will be surprised if we don’t break 1,000 deaths in a day this week, something that hasn’t happened since June 4.

One model has us hitting 224K deaths by November 1.

When you sort the world coronavirus data by “deaths per million population” the US is currently #10 at 433. We’ll probably eventually pass most of the European countries ahead of us (France, Sweden, Italy Spain, United Kingdom, Belgium), all of whom have done a much better job controlling the virus recently after initially being overwhelmed by it. But Latin American countries behind us (Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Panama) are gaining, and Chile is already #9. So even as things get worse for us, we could move down the list.

A big study from South Korea has answered a number of questions about children’s role in the potential spread of Covid-19. Children under 10 are less likely than adults to spread the virus, but they do spread it. And older children may be even more likely to spread the virus than adults.

Both results should make communities think twice about reopening schools. If you’re somewhere with very few cases — Vermont, say — it might make sense to open schools full-time (with some new rules), test frequently, and see what happens. But in a hotspot like Florida or Texas, it’s crazy.

Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway dodged a question about whether 14-year-old Baron Trump will attend classes in the fall. “That’s a personal decision,” she said.

Apparently Trump really wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted to “slow the testing down“. As the next stimulus bill is being written in the Senate (the House passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act back in May, but Mitch McConnell has been sitting on it), the White House is objecting to $25 billion to help the states do more testing, as well as an additional $10 billion for the CDC. Trump isn’t fighting with the Democrats here, he’s fighting with Republican senators.

The two political parties are far apart on a number of contentious issues, such as unemployment insurance, but the conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way.

Trump’s attacks on testing — which every public-health expert says is basic to controlling the virus — have been getting more and more demented in recent weeks. A week ago he told a reporter: “When you test, you create cases. So we’ve created cases.” He has refused to acknowledge that the leap in the national case-count (from 20,000 a day in early June to 76,403 on Friday) means that the virus is spreading.

In addition to impeding testing, the administration is also seizing control of the data. The Department the Health and Human services sent a memo to hospitals and acute care facilities on July 10:

As of July 15, 2020, hospitals should no longer report the Covid-19 information in this document to the National Healthcare Safety Network site. Please select one of the above methods to use instead.

NHSN is run by the CDC. The replacement methods go directly to HHS. Various critics have claimed that NHSN needs to be improved, but it’s hard to come up with a motive for moving it to HHS, other than to sideline the “Deep State” civil servants at CDC and allow political appointees at HHS to play games with the data. The NYT:

Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the C.D.C.; four of the agency’s former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears.

MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace observed that it is “quite a coincidence” that Trump is trying to control the data at a moment when the data is publicly demonstrating his failure.

Josh Marshall provides a sobering graph: If you look at the daily new cases of Covid-19 in the 49 states other than New York, the curve flattens at about 20,000 per day from early April to mid-June, and then takes off. Without New York, national case-counts never did start going down.

Hundreds of people rallied at the Ohio statehouse Saturday to protest against mask mandates. Ohio doesn’t even have a statewide mandate, but some counties do.

and the economic consequences of the virus

The extended benefits in the CARES Act (that passed in March) will expire at the end of July, less that two weeks from now. Unless Congress acts, some people will lose benefits completely, while others will lose the extra $600 per week the CARES Act provided.

The House passed the next stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, back in May. But Republicans in the Senate have held on to the fantasy that the virus would go away and the economy would have a V-shaped recovery. By the end of July, they imagined, jobs would be plentiful and that extra $600 would just encourage lazy people to stay unemployed.

Now it’s getting down to the wire, and Mitch McConnell still has a lot to negotiate with his own caucus and the White House before he can start dealing with Nancy Pelosi. Paul Krugman comments:

My sense is that Republicans have a delusional view of their own bargaining position. They don’t seem to realize that they, not the Democrats, will be blamed if millions are plunged into penury because relief is delayed; to the extent that they’re willing to act at all, they still imagine that they can extract concessions like a blanket exemption of businesses from pandemic liability.

Maybe the prospect of catastrophe will concentrate Republican minds, but it seems more likely that we’re heading for weeks if not months of extreme financial distress for millions of Americans, distress that will hobble the economy as a whole. This disaster didn’t need to happen; but you can say the same thing about most of what has gone wrong in this country lately.

and John Lewis

Lewis died Friday at the age of 80. He had announced in December that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. His NYT obituary is a good summary of his long career in the civil rights movement and in Congress.

Testimonials have poured in from all directions. Barack Obama’s ended like this:

It’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was at a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who were helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Afterwards, I spoke to him privately, and he could not have been prouder of their efforts — of a new generation standing up for freedom and equality, a new generation intent on voting and protecting the right to vote, a new generation running for political office. I told him that all those young people — of every race, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — they were his children. They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it. They had understood through him what American citizenship requires, even if they had heard of his courage only through history books.

Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did. And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders — to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise.

The most embarrassing testimonial came from Marco Rubio, who posted a picture of himself with Elijah Cummings. I guess old bald black guys all look alike to Marco. The tweet was taken down, but not before Rubio was roundly pilloried.

Truthfully, I’m not sure I could have correctly identified pictures of Lewis and Cummings. But I never met either man, and if I were going to post a photo of myself with one or the other, I’d stop and think about when that photo was taken and what we might have been talking about. Rubio clearly did not, and neither did his staff — which testifies to a certain sloppiness in thought and action.

Follow-up: Apparently Alaska’s Senator Dan Sullivan made the same mistake.

CNN lays out what happens next in Georgia’s 5th congressional district: Lewis had already won renomination, but the Democratic Party can replace his name on the ballot. It has to be done quickly or not at all, so there’s no time for a convention or primary. The state Democratic Party’s executive committee is meeting at noon today to pick a nominee. The district is solidly Democratic, so whomever they pick will probably go to Congress.

As for the remainder of Lewis’ current term, Republican Governor Kemp would have to declare a special election. That may or may not happen in time for Lewis’ replacement to be sworn in before the term ends.

and you also might be interested in …

The  home of a Latina federal judge in Newark was attacked yesterday afternoon. Her 20-year-old son was killed and her husband wounded, but Judge Esther Salas was not hurt. The shooter hasn’t been caught, and no one knows if Salas was the target or if so, why. But I have to wonder if the right-wing diatribes against “liberal judges” will eventually lead to more of this.

Mary Trump telling Rachel Maddow that she has heard Trump use the n-word and anti-semitic slurs got way more attention than I would have given it. It would be more amazing to me if she hadn’t heard him use that kind of language in private settings. I mean, we know he has referred to African nations and Haiti as “shit-hole countries” in front of members of Congress. And we know he has a long history of racism, which he appears to have inherited from his father.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson (a man sometimes pitched as the next leader of the Trumpist movement) took a previously unannounced fishing vacation after his top writer, Blake Neff, was caught making racist and sexist social-media posts under a pseudonym. (Apparently he’d been doing it for years.) Neff was the guy who wrote Carlson’s scripts, which Carlson only edited. I have to wonder how much input Neff had into rants like the one where Carlson claimed white supremacy is “not a real problem in America” and “a hoax”.

Carlson’s show, like a lot of Trump’s speeches, specializes in walking the line between deniable racism and undeniable racism. He has become the primary voice of white grievance on television, and white supremacist groups are among his biggest fans. That the guy writing Tucker’s scripts would take his bigotry off the leash anonymously on social media is about as shocking as Trump saying the n-word in private.

After they were exposed, Carlson acknowledged that Neff’s posts were “wrong”. The Bleeding Cool blog then assesses the rest of his statement:

Now for those of you who think Carlson then went on to further criticize Neff, followed by acknowledging that FOX News really wasn’t news and that his show profits from creating and stoking division along racial, ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual orientation lines? Either check your respective prescriptions to make sure you’re taking the right dose or the back of your neck to make sure you’re not an alien pod person. Oh no, the brunt of Carlson’s attempt at “righteous anger” was aimed at this who (wait for it)… would actually take joy in someone who posts racist, sexist, and other offensive messages having to resign from a news program that has heavy, cult-like influence over others. Shocking, right? …

“We should also point out to the ghouls that are beating their chest in triumph at the destruction of a young man that self-righteousness also has its costs,” said Carlson, who clearly sees anyone who has issues with someone who posts racist, sexist, and other offensive messages as being “self-righteous.”

Like a lot of cancel-culture “victims”, Neff hasn’t been “destroyed”. He just lost a job he never should have had in the first place. Now that his name is out there as a white-racist martyr, I’m sure he has a big future on openly racist sites like VDare or American Renaissance.

Trump’s lie that “Biden wants to defund the police” was too much for Fox News’ Chris Wallace to let go by. Wallace in fact caught Trump in a number of lies.

The Trump campaign is a big moneymaker for Donald Trump personally. David Fahrenthold reports:

In just two days, @realdonaldtrump’s campaign pumped $380K into Trump’s private business, in 43 separate payments. Trump Org says this was for a weeklong “donor retreat,” held in early March at Mar-a-Lago. Campaign donations turned into private revenue for POTUS

The Open Secrets web site says that overall $4.1 million has been paid to the Trump Organization by Trump-related political committees, the Republican Party, and the campaigns and PACs of other Republican candidates.

and let’s close with something encouraging

Let’s take a moment to entertain an idea suggested by The Muppets and James Corden. Maybe, even during this pandemic, we really can get by with a little help from our friends.

Customs and Border Protection has finally claimed the anonymous federal law enforcement agents who have been abducting people off the streets in Portland. But it still won’t say who they are or exactly what they’re doing.

Often, when the Trump administration is described in totalitarian terms, it’s hyperbole, or at least debatable.

So, for example, describing ICE as a “Gestapo” is hyperbole. They violate civil rights and are out of control in a lot of ways, but comparisons to the Gestapo are overblown. Similarly, there has been debate (yes and no) about whether the detention facilities that hold legal asylum seekers and unauthorized border-crossers qualify as “concentration camps”. (My opinion: Yes, as long as we remember that concentration camps are not always death camps. Concentration camps isolate unpopular and dehumanized groups in harsh conditions outside of public view; death camps target them for extermination. Dachau was a concentration camp when it opened in 1933, but it didn’t become a death camp until much later.)

However, the federal law enforcement agents who have been roaming around Portland this last week are literally “secret police” — no hyperbole, no exaggeration. Their uniforms say POLICE, but do not identify what federal agency they are from or who the individual officers are. They cover their faces, drive unmarked vehicles, and grab people off the street without identifying themselves, their unit, the reason for the arrest, or where they are taking their victims. If right-wing militia groups start putting POLICE patches on their camo uniforms and kidnapping protest leaders, no one will know the difference; neither their appearance nor their behavior will give them away.

So that’s where we are: We’ve crossed one more bridge on the road to fascism, and it’s arguable that we’ve already arrived. Let’s think about how we got here.

Lafayette Square. On June 1, after the peaceful protests of George Floyd’s murder had also spawned looting and property damage in cities across the nation, President Trump called for law enforcement to “dominate the streets“. He urged governors to call in the National Guard, and made the following threat:

“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said, referring to himself as “your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters.”

He said he was already dispatching “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” to Washington to stop the violence that has been a feature of the protests here.

While he was speaking, federal law enforcement agents of various stripes attacked peaceful protesters near the White House, pushing them out of Lafayette Square so that Trump could have his infamous hold-up-the-Bible photo op at historic St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile, active-duty troops were being deployed to the DC area. Unnamed sources claimed Trump wanted to deploy 10,000 troops. Fortunately, generals and Pentagon civilians all the way up to Defense Secretary Esper pushed back, arguing that suppressing domestic dissent is not the military’s role. (I’m guessing the 10,000-troop story was leaked by a military person who wanted the plan stopped.) In the end, active-duty troops were never used against protesters and were withdrawn, but not before the incident “badly strained relations between Mr. Trump and the military”.

From Trump’s point of view, though, the week had one bright spot. The regular military might be reluctant to take the field against American protesters, but he did identify a force he could use: a motley assortment of armed federal law enforcement agents temporarily commanded by Attorney General Bill Barr.

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily-armed riot police around Washington in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or name badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for.

In the words of Butch Cassidy: “Who are those guys?”

It turns out that the federal government has something like 132,000 law enforcement officers spread out over dozens of agencies in multiple departments. Yahoo News called the roll:

The show of force outside the White House is a task force operation that includes U.S. Secret Service, National Guard, Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Park Police, … Federal Protective Service, … elite SWAT teams from the Border Patrol and sniper-trained units from ICE have also descended upon Washington. TSA’s air marshals arrived too, and three of the agency’s “VIPR teams,” which have previously faced criticism for not coordinating well with local law enforcement. Eight Coast Guard investigators were deputized by the Department of Justice upon arrival in Washington, though it remains unclear how they are being deployed.

Which raises an obvious question: What kind of rules apply to people from one agency deputized by another? The rules of their home agency? Their temporary commander’s? None? There are all kinds of restrictions, both legal and institutional, on what the President can or can’t do with the military inside our borders. But these guys, apparently, not so much. Through the years, whenever Congress increased the budgets of the Bureau of Prisons or ATF or one of the dozens of other armed law enforcement agencies, who realized they were helping build a 132,000-man Praetorian Guard?

As democracy-threatening as this seemed in June, though, comforting speculation held that DC’s special relationship with the federal government made it unique. (That even became an argument for DC statehood.) Surely these little green men could never be deployed in a state over the objection of its governor.

After all, this is America.

The Portland protests. The George Floyd protests have had remarkable longevity, challenging the conventional wisdom that the Powers That Be can always wait these things out. But nothing lasts forever, and by July 1, even Seattle’s famous CHOP autonomous zone had been reclaimed by local authorities.

In Portland, however, the spirit of resistance is still very much alive. Friday marked the 50th day of protest. OregonLive describes the situation like this:

Portland has experienced weeks of daily protests since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police. The largest of them, involving thousands of people chanting and marching for racial justice and police non-violence, have been peaceful.

But almost like clockwork, tensions flare late at night between law enforcement officers stationed at the Justice Center and courthouse and a crowd of 20- and 30-something demonstrators, a small number of whom toss projectiles at police, shine lasers in their eyes or otherwise poke and prod officers to engage.

… Although the Justice Center and federal courthouse are covered with angry graffiti decrying police, evidence of other demonstrations in the city are scarce.

But you get a different sense from local journalist Robert Evans, who has been covering the nightly clashes, which he describes as “as close up to the line as you can get to actual war without live rounds”.

The craziest night so far was July 4, where kids stockpiled thousands of dollars in illegal fireworks. They were in the center of downtown where the bulk of the protests happened around the Justice Center.

It started as drunken party, more or less. At random, cops began shooting into the crowd. Protesters coalesced around the idea of firing commercial-grade fireworks into the Justice Center and Federal Courthouse. You had law enforcement firing rubber bullets, foam bullets, pepper balls and tear gas as crowds circled in around the courthouse firing rockets into the side of the building. That went on for a shocking length of time — there was this running three-hour street battle. I couldn’t tell whose explosions were whose.

Trumpist media and administration spokespeople have been desperate for something to talk about other than Trump’s failure to control the coronavirus pandemic, and so they have seized on “mob rule” as a theme, with Portland as a prime example of a city “under siege”. But OregonLive pushes back against that narrative: “A tour of the town shows otherwise.”

The images that populate national media feeds, however, come almost exclusively from a tiny point of the city: a 12-block area surrounding the Justice Center and federal courthouse. And they occur exclusively during late-night hours in which only a couple hundred or fewer protesters and scores of police officers are out in the city’s coronavirus-hollowed downtown.

Daily life in Portland is greatly restricted by the virus, but is barely affected by the demonstrations. Evans agrees:

One of the things I think people get wrong about this place, though, is that they see the protests and the right-wing coverage and the city is depicted as convulsed and collapsing. It’s just not true. You go three blocks from the center of downtown and life goes on as normal. Where I live, you could go every day and see no real signs of the protests.

Having totally given up on doing anything to combat the virus, though, Trump had to be seen doing something about something. And so he intervened in Portland.

DHS’ little green men. If you get your view of the world through Fox News, you understand that the biggest current threat to the United States and the American way of life is not the virus that has killed nearly 140,000 of us with no end in sight. No, it is the wanton destruction of our historical statues and monuments. Any time I have channel-scanned through the Fox News evening line-up in the last month, that’s what they’ve been talking about.

To combat this scourge, on June 26 President Trump heroically signed the “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence“. If you read past the polemics all the way to the end, you’ll find this authorization:

Upon the request of the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Administrator of General Services, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, personnel to assist with the protection of Federal monuments, memorials, statues, or property.

He’s talking about the 132,000 federal law enforcement agents, the Little Green Men. And unlike in a riot or a natural disaster where a governor might ask for the help of the National Guard, here one part of the federal government asks another part to send the Little Green Men. The Secretary of Homeland Security, you might notice, is authorized to ask himself for assistance.

As it happens, we don’t have a Secretary of Homeland Security, and haven’t since Trump forced Kirstjen Nielsen to resign in April, 2019 because she “pushed back on his demands to break the law“. Since then we’ve had acting DHS secretaries, because Trump says “I like acting. It gives me more flexibility.” (In fact, Josh Marshall observes that every DHS official who figures in this story is acting: “acting secretary, acting deputy secretary and acting head of CBP. Not one of these men has been confirmed by the Senate to act in this role.” Having avoided confirmation hearings where senators might demand promises or commitments, all three get their authority from and owe their allegiance to no one but Trump.)

So Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf responded to Trump’s executive order by creating the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT) “a special task force to coordinate Departmental law enforcement agency assets in protecting our nation’s historic monuments, memorials, statues, and federal facilities”. The PACT announcement quotes Wolf: “We won’t stand idly by while violent anarchists and rioters seek not only to vandalize and destroy the symbols of our nation, but to disrupt law and order and sow chaos in our communities.” (“Violent anarchist” is a phrase you’ll hear again. It is to the Trump administration what “terrorist” was to the Bush administration: a term stripped of all its original meanings until it is simply an insult, i.e., “someone we don’t like”.)

Notice the subtle shift: We’re not talking about statues of Andrew Jackson any more, as Trump was when he signed the executive order. We’re talking about “federal facilities” like the Mark Hatfield Courthouse in Portland, the courthouse mentioned above. PACT’s mission also extends beyond “protecting” those facilities to the much more nebulous goal of maintaining “law and order” and fighting “chaos in our communities”. But the Hatfield Courthouse is more than just a center of “chaos”, it is also the scene of a heinous crime: graffiti.

Maybe the Trump administration will stand idly by while American coronavirus deaths once again approach a thousand a day, and maybe it will do nothing when Putin puts bounties on the lives of our soldiers in Afghanistan, but graffiti on a federal courthouse is an affront up with which it will not put.

Send in the Little Green Men.

The federal invasion of Portland. Sometime after the Fourth of July — no one seems to know exactly when, because there wasn’t an announcement — unidentified federal law enforcement agents from no particular agency began battling protesters alongside the Portland police. And they did not just support the local officials, they significantly escalated the violence. Here’s Robert Evans again:

Since the feds got involved with police it’s gotten really brutal. I’d argue we’ve seen more police brutality in the last 50 days from Portland Police Department than anywhere else in the country. It’s brutal but it’s also predictable. There are rhythms to the way police work. It’s become an orchestrated dance with both sides.

There are warnings and kicking people out of the demonstration area. But the feds have deliberately defied the rhythms. Last Saturday [July 11], the crowd was 100 or so. It was very chill — nothing going on beyond the now-normal occupation of the Justice Center. And feds came out grabbing people seemingly at random and beating people with sticks. There was the kid who got shot in the head and his skull was fractured. The federal law enforcement violence is unpredictable violence.

The “kid shot in the head” was Donovan LaBella, and we have the shooting on video. The Oregonian summarized in a tweet:

Video shows nothing suggesting that La Bella, 26, who was standing across the street from the federal courthouse holding a speaker over his head, was a threat to anyone.

What appears to be a tear gas canister bounces in front of him. He kicks at it, bends down to toss it underhanded into the street, and lifts up his speaker again. Then he goes down, apparently struck by a sponge grenade or some other “less lethal” projectile that is never supposed to be aimed at someone’s head. (LaBella’s sister says he’s making a “remarkable recovery“, but the photo of his stitched-up forehead looks pretty gruesome.)

Who shot LaBella? Hard to say. Some unmarked federal agent in camo with a mask on, from some unnamed federal law enforcement agency.

How actions like this protect federal facilities is hard to figure. And then the abductions started.

Unmarked vans. NPR reports:

Federal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least Tuesday. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation about why they are being arrested, and driving off.

To the people being kidnapped arrested, it’s not obvious that their abductors the officers are police at all.

“I see guys in camo,” O’Shea said. “Four or five of them pop out, open the door and it was just like, ‘Oh s**t. I don’t know who you are or what you want with us.'”

See any identifying marks?

And again the question: Who are these guys? As this widely shared video shows, two agents in camo with no label other than POLICE grab somebody off an empty street and throw him into a van. They are repeatedly asked who they are and what they’re doing, but they do not respond.

For hours no one knew who the masked kidnappers were working for. But eventually, Customs and Border Protection took responsibility for that particular “arrest”. (In an interview, though, Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli identified Federal Protective Services as the lead agency; CBP is assisting them.) Their statement is a series of lies wildly inconsistent with the video, or with numerous accounts of similar abductions.

CBP agents had information indicating the person in the video was suspected of assaults against federal agents or destruction of federal property.  Once CBP agents approached the suspect, a large and violent mob moved towards their location.  For everyone’s safety, CBP agents quickly moved the suspect to a safer location for further questioning.  The CBP agents identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia during the encounter. The names of the agents were not displayed due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.

In fact, the street is virtually empty. The officers do not identify themselves, and if you can spot any insignia other than POLICE on their uniforms, you’re sharper than I am. I’m also struck by the “suspected of assaults against federal agents OR destruction of federal property”. The “or” suggests that this is a generic explanation rather than the specific reason for this particular arrest. Whoever wrote the statement probably has no more idea why the suspect was arrested than we do.

Robert Evans reports:

I’ve seen them rolling around in the vans and tackling people. My partner has watched them do a few snatch and grabs. The difference is they’re not cops. They go after people like soldiers, where the goal is to be unpredictable.

Acting Secretary Wolf’s justification of the entire operation, which didn’t appear until Thursday, is ridiculous. The phrase “violent anarchists” appears 72 times, along with a list of their “violent” crimes, which mostly consist of tagging the Hatfield Courthouse with graffiti. One “violent anarchist” was caught with a loaded weapon, but there is no report of the weapon being brandished or fired. (Compare to the AR-15 toting conservative protesters at the Michigan State House in May, whom Trump supported by tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN”.)

OregonLive responded:

It’s telling that in Wolf’s extensive listing of incidents over the past several weeks, he neglects to mention the most violent act of these protests – a deputy U.S. marshal’s shooting of Donavan La Bella in the face with an impact munition. … That Wolf would fail to even acknowledge such a severe injury exposes how suspect his definition of “violence” is.

(OL appears to just be guessing who the shooter works for; I don’t believe the Marshals have claimed responsibility.) To repeat: “violent anarchist” has no meaning. It’s just an insult; it tags someone as an enemy.

Remember federalism? One hallmark of the Trump Era is that any principles conservatives used to claim — free trade, standing by allies, fiscal responsibility, the importance of character — have been exposed as hollow. One such relic of the age of principled conservatism is federalism: the doctrine that states share sovereignty with the federal government, and are not just subjects of federal rule.

Under federalism, policing is a state responsibility. In this case, it’s important to bear in mind that no local official asked for the federal government’s help in dealing with the protests. Acting Secretary Wolf did not even make a courtesy call to tell Oregon Governor Kate Brown or Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler what he was planning to do. This whole episode began not with an offer of help, but with Trump’s threat: “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

That’s how this all came about: Trump and/or Wolf came to the conclusion that Portland was not treating protesters harshly enough, so Wolf asked himself to intervene.

Now that they have had a chance to see what DHS is doing, local officials at all levels have asked the federal agents to leave. Governor Brown tweeted:

This political theater from President Trump has nothing to do with public safety. The President is failing to lead this nation. Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government. I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets. His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.

And Mayor Wheeler acknowledged the government’s right to protect its buildings, but called for it to pull its agents off the streets:

I have no problem with the federal government and federal officers inside their facilities protecting their facilities. That’s what they do. That’s what they always do. What I have a problem with is them leaving the facilities and going out onto the streets of this community and then escalating an already tense situation like they did the other night.

Subsequently he made a stronger plea:

Their presence is neither wanted nor is it helpful and we’re asking them to leave. In fact, we’re demanding that they leave.

We don’t have any plans to do that. When the violence recedes, then that is when we would look at that. This isn’t intended to be a permanent arrangement, but it will last as long as the violence demands additional support to contend with.

Also:

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a federal lawsuit against Homeland Security and its subagencies Friday alleging the federal government had violated Oregonians’ civil rights by seizing and detaining them without probable cause during protests against police brutality in the past week.

Oregon’s senior Senator Ron Wyden:

The Trump administration’s claim that DHS police are needed to enforce the president’s executive order to protect statues is laughable. Terrorizing peaceful protesters and arresting people for graffiti and other nonviolent offenses has nothing to do with securing federal property. My colleagues and I in the Oregon delegation have demanded that these occupying troops leave Portland, demanded answers from the administration and called for an independent investigation. And this week, my fellow senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, and I will introduce a measure to require Trump to remove these unwanted forces from our city.

Senator Merkley made his own comment:

Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters. These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end.

As Governor Brown’s tweet indicates, Acting Secretary Wolf has refused to withdraw his Little Green Men. Acting Deputy Secretary Cuccinelli also refused to pull the LGM back to the federal facilities whose protection is the pretext for their presence.

And I fully expect that as long as people continue to be violent and to destroy property that we will attempt to identify those folks. We will pick them up in front of the courthouse. If we spot them elsewhere, we will pick them up elsewhere. And if we have a question about somebody’s identity – like the first example I noted to you – after questioning determine it isn’t someone of interest, then they get released. And that’s standard law enforcement procedure, and it’s going to continue as long as the violence continues.

Results 1. Sometimes when you break the rules, the results will give you an after-the-fact justification: The problem is solved now, so who’s going to complain? But that’s not the case in Portland. Instead, DHS’ authoritarian overreach has drawn increased local attention to the protests and raised local sympathy for the protesters.

While President Trump on Sunday described the unrest in Portland as a national threat involving “anarchists and agitators,” the protests have featured a wide array of demonstrators, many now galvanized by federal officers exemplifying the militarized enforcement that protesters have long denounced. Gatherings over the weekend grew to upward of 1,000 people — the largest crowds in weeks.

Saturday, mothers (some wearing bicycle helmets in case federal agents would decide to club them) formed a human chain between police and demonstrators and chanted: “Feds stay clear. Moms are here.” Sunday night, a similar group of mothers was in fact dispersed with clubs and gas. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, one woman had a creative response to the threat of police violence.

In one extraordinary moment, a woman, completely naked except for a face mask and a hat, strode through the protests and squared up to federal agents and did a series of ballet and yoga moves. The striking moment was captured on social media and the unidentified woman has been dubbed “Naked Athena.”

Police apparently didn’t know what to do next. OregonLive reported:

About 10 minutes after she arrived, the officers left. The woman left soon after without any additional fanfare. “She was incredibly vulnerable,” [Oregonian/OregonLive photographer Dave] Killen said. “It would have been incredibly painful to be shot with any of those munitions with no clothes on.”

One good place to get a play-by-play of the weekend demonstrations is the Twitter feed of journalist Donovan Farley.

On the whole, it’s hard to argue with Governor Brown’s assessment:

It’s simply like adding gasoline to a fire. What’s needed is de-escalation and dialogue. That’s how we solve problems here in the state of Oregon.

Results 2. How you judge results depends on what your goal is. If the goal is to end the nightly conflicts between police and protesters, and to restore “law and order”, then the federal intervention has been an abject failure.

But when has Trump ever tried to end conflict? Trump thrives on conflict. Arguably, it’s in his political interest to make things worse. The violent federal escalation and abuse of civil rights may annoy Oregonians, but Trump was never going to carry Oregon in November anyway. The more interesting question to him is: How is this playing in swing states? Governor Brown has it right:

Trump is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa.

If Fox News can spin this as the President taking strong action to preserve law and order in a city where Democratic officials are unwilling to get tough with the violent anarchists, that’s all he wants. Even better if his “toughness” takes headlines away from his Covid-19 failure. And the more violence, the more headlines.

In short, he’s doing on the ground what he often does on Twitter: provoking a conflict with somebody his base doesn’t like in order to change the narrative from a story where he’s failing. Violent anarchists and feckless Democratic officials are playing the role usually reserved for black athletes like Colin Kaepernick or LeBron James, or charismatic women of color like AOC or Ilhan Omar.

Judged by that standard, Trump may think his intervention in Portland is going quite well.

Where it goes from here. PACT was not created to be a one-off, so Portland can be thought of as a test, a “dress rehearsal” (as Esquire’s Charles Pierce puts it) for a show that might be taken on the road all over the country. The groundwork is being laid to intervene in Chicago, whose black lesbian mayor has already been tagged a “derelict” by press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. A famously liberal city like San Francisco would also make a good target for Trumpist media. A Reichstag fire won’t be necessary; a few lines of graffiti on some federal building will suffice.

Three things are being tested in Portland:

• Will the PACT agents do whatever they’re told, heedless of the rights of American citizens?
• Will Trump get away with this legally, or will federal courts put his secret police under injunction? Will Congress intervene in some way?
• Will Trump pay a political price, either in the media or by losing the support of the congressional Republicans who kept him in office in spite of the crimes he was impeached for?

The first test is clearly a success: Federal agents are acting like secret police in a classic banana republic, and there have been no signs of defections. No leaks, no scandalous stories attributed to anonymous sources.

Remarkably, Portland is a second-layer headline in both the New York Times and Washington Post this morning. You’ll find a Portland story if you scroll down, but they’re not calling your attention to it. I’ve also looked for a biting editorial cartoon on the subject and haven’t found one yet. So at the moment Trump is not paying a price in the mainstream media.

Elected Republicans are also ignoring the story, in spite of the traditional conservative principles being violated. (A satire article published after the first appearance of the Little Green Men in DC is being recirculated: “NRA Accidentally Forgets to Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government“.) It remains to be seen whether Democrats in Congress will insert some anti-LGM language into some must-pass appropriations bill, and whether Mitch McConnell will allow it.

Our best hope at the moment is the courts, where I don’t know what to expect. Neither do the folks at the LawFare blog, which is where I’m hoping to find insight before long. LF’s Steve Vladeck closes that article by wondering which would be worse: that the PACT agents are abusing their authority, or that all this is actually legal somehow?

The ultimate threat. As Trump continues to sink in the polls, more and more pundits raise the question: How will he try to cheat in the election? (The question “Will he try to cheat?” has already been answered. That’s what he was impeached for.) Various voter suppression schemes are brewing, and some are already working. Many of us are hard at work imagining scenarios where some combination of Covid-19 and voting by mail create new vote-stealing or vote-suppressing opportunities.

The true nightmare scenario is if he loses the election but refuses to leave office. Or perhaps he constructs some elaborate conspiracy theory in which the outcome of the election is doubtful, and decides to hang on until the doubt can be resolved to his satisfaction, which it never will be. Obviously, he can’t succeed in that plan entirely on his own, and different scenarios require different accomplices: Republicans in Congress, the Supreme Court, and so on.

If any of those play out (and I’m far from convinced they would) we could find ourselves in a true third-world-country situation, where the last line of defense is that the People refuse to accept a stolen election and take to the streets. In a typical third-world situation, the next question is: What does the Army do? An election-stealing President can often survive if the Army is willing to sweep into the major cities and put down protests.

One reason I have not worried too much about these scenarios is that I don’t think our Army would do that. The traditions of non-interference in the political process go all the way back to George Washington, and are very strong.

But Portland raises an additional question: What do the Little Green Men do? Could Trump really call his Praetorian Guard into the streets against the American people?

That too is being tested in Portland.

There will be a Sift this morning. (My wife’s surgery did happen on Thursday. It went well, and her recovery has been faster than we expected. As a result, the physical and psychological demands the situation places on me have been manageable without cancelling the Sift. Thanks to everyone who has expressed concern and wished us well.)

I think there’s even a pretty good Sift this morning. Like most of you (or at least the “you” I imagine), I’ve been wondering what the heck is going on in Portland. Unidentified feds in camo pulling US citizens into unmarked vans and driving off with them — what’s that about? How can they do that? What happens next?

There’s a story to tell here, and I think I’ve pieced it together. It starts with the military’s reluctance to suppress the protests in DC in early June, and the “success” (from Trump’s point of view) of deploying a motley assortment of armed federal agents with no insignia or other ID. At the time, many legal observers thought DC was special; the same thing couldn’t be done in a state without the consent of its governor. But now it is being done.

Based on Trump’s subsequent executive order protecting federal statues and monuments, DHS has put together the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT), an inter-agency umbrella for assembling motley assortments of armed federal agents who operate under no particular rules. That’s who’s in Portland. If this works — where “works” means getting away with actions in a blue state that Fox News can make look good to Trump’s base in swing states — we can expect to see PACT’s little green men in the major cities of blue states all over the country. (Chicago or San Francisco, maybe.) And if Trump ultimately does respond to a lost or contested election with force, it won’t be the Army he calls in, because they won’t come. It will be some motley assortment of armed federal agents operating under no particular rules. (There are, believe it or not, 132,000 of them.)

Telling that story has turned into a long article, which I haven’t quite finished yet. But I think it’s worth your time. I should have it out around 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary hasn’t commanded nearly so much of my effort. The virus continues to spread and Trump continues to ignore it. John Lewis died. And a few other things happened, none of which grabbed my attention like video of federal secret police abducting people off the street. The summary should be out by 1.

I conceive that the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic.

– George Mason, at the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788

There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have adverted: if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.

– James Madison, responding to Mason

This week’s featured post is “Back to School“. I have an unpredictable week ahead of me, so I’m not sure whether there will be a Sift next week or not.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump Crime Family

I decided not to do a featured post on this, because all the points I would make are already being widely discussed. In all of American history, I can’t come up with a presidential action as blatantly corrupt as Trump commuting Roger Stone’s sentence. (Leave a comment if you want to suggest a rival.) It’s like he’s saying: “Sure, I’m obstructing justice. What are you going to do about it?”

Benjamin Wittes lays it out:

Roger Stone isn’t just Trump’s confidante or friend. According to newly unsealed material in the Mueller Report, he’s also a person who had the power to reveal to investigators that Trump likely lied to Mueller—and to whom Trump publicly dangled rewards if Stone refused to provide Mueller with that information. Now, it seems, the president is making good on that promise.

As Judge Amy Berman put it when she sentenced Stone:

He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the President. He was prosecuted for covering up for the President.

Stone hasn’t exactly been subtle. He talked to Howard Fineman Friday, and Fineman recounted the conversation in Saturday’s New York Times:

“I had 29 or 30 conversations with Trump during the campaign period,” he reminded me. “He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t. They wanted me to play Judas. I refused.”

And so, in the fullness of time — which is to say, about an hour later — the White House made official what Stone already knew: Trump was commuting Stone’s felony convictions for lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses. At 67, Stone would not have to report to a federal pen to serve his allotted 40 months.

Stone’s statement is not hard to interpret: He can testify to something Trump did that a prosecutor would make a deal to learn about — crimes, in other words. Stone deserves his commutation because he didn’t rat out his criminal boss.

Recall the larger plot Stone was part of: Russia hacked Democratic emails, and then sent them to WikiLeaks to be released in a fashion designed to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help Trump’s. Stone was the connection between WikiLeaks and Trump — not just the Trump campaign, Trump himself. In written testimony to the Mueller investigation, Trump claimed to remember no conversations with Stone about WikiLeaks. If Stone had testified, the President could have been charged with perjury. That’s when Trump began tweeting about how “brave” Stone was and raising speculation about a pardon.

Wittes again:

[T]he commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis a vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller Report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day.

That’s not all that happened this week on the ending-the-rule-of-law front. On the same day (Friday, of course) that Trump was giving Stone his pay-off for respecting the Trump Family omerta, Consigliere Bill Barr was shutting down another possible source of legal jeopardy: He replaced the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

This is the third time Barr has pulled this trick: He previously installed a lackey at the US Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia (who promptly rewrote the Roger Stone sentencing memo and is trying to walk away from the conviction of Mike Flynn), and tried to do the same thing at SDNY. Each time, he started by making the incumbent US attorneys offers they couldn’t refuse: some cushy job elsewhere in the Trump administration. SDNY’s Berman did refuse, and got fired (but did manage to get his deputy to replace him rather than a Barr-bot).

EDNY is not as famous as its neighboring district SDNY, but it does have its finger in the Trump-corruption pie as well. Newsday reports:

Why Barr has been busily ousting U.S. Attorneys in New York City has been a subject of intense debate and speculation. Several criminal probes and prosecutions in Manhattan have rankled as a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, from the campaign-finance crimes of the president’s former fixer Michael Cohen to the impeachment-related allegations against Rudy Giuliani’s former associate Lev Parnas.

As Trump’s Senate trial played out in February, Politico reported that Donoghue had been in charge of vetting and managing all Ukraine-related efforts. His district reportedly had been heading an investigation into Tom Barrack, a Trump confidant who headed the president’s inauguration committee and whose fundraising for that event allegedly caught the scrutiny of federal prosecutors.

Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman violated omerta by testifying during the impeachment hearings in February. He and his twin brother (who had no connection to the impeachment hearings) were then fired from their jobs at the National Security Council. Wednesday, Vindman announced he is retiring from the military after 21 years, due to what his lawyer called “a campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation” by President Trump.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court gave Trump a split decision on his tax cases: They rejected his argument that he was completely beyond the reach of the law, but allowed him to run out the clock. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone will get to see his tax returns or other business records until after the election.

Last week I mentioned the Commerce Department’s attempt to delay its inspector general’s report on SharpieGate. Now it’s out, and it makes infuriating reading. To make a long story short: Trump couldn’t admit even a trivial mistake, so Mulvaney pressured Ross who pressured NOAA to put out a statement rebuking National Weather Service forecasters for being right and doing their jobs. The process of putting out that cowardly statement consumed NOAA management’s attention while a actual hurricane was still raging.

Ross delegated the problem to Commerce Dept. Chief of Staff Mike Walsh, who denies he ever told anybody at NOAA their jobs were on the line. However, some of the phone conversations with him happened at 2:30 in the morning, so you might understand how the NOAA folks got that impression.

Reading the report, I kept wishing somebody would defend the NWS forecasters and tell the sycophants in the White House to go fuck themselves. (You want to fire me? If you think this looks bad in the media now, wait until you start firing people over it.) But it never happened.

It’s a small incident, but it explains so much about how the last three years have gone: Defending the President’s fragile ego absorbs so much of the government’s attention that there’s not much left to devote to governing. And precious few people (like Colonel Vindman) are willing to risk their careers to stop it.

and schools

It’s time to decide what school-age children are going to do in the fall. It would be nice if communities could make those decisions based on local conditions, using the best scientific insight available, but this is the Trump Era. If you’re for him, you want schools 100% back to normal, and if you don’t, it must be because you hate him. More in the featured post.

Colleges and universities are a different subject, which I didn’t get to this week. I noticed some developments in the college-sports world, though.

The Ivy League won’t have a football season this year. No Harvard vs. Yale game. A University of Indiana sports blogger thinks this won’t start a trend.

The Big Ten and the others will do everything in their power to play football this season, simply because there is so much money involved. They can do what the Ivy League can’t — play games without fans and still make a ton of money because of their television contracts — so that will happen if it’s at all possible.

The Big Ten subsequently announced that it will play only conference games, and has not yet committed even to them.

By limiting competition to other Big Ten institutions, the conference will have the greatest flexibility to adjust its own operations throughout the season and make quick decisions in real-time based on the most current evolving medical advice and the fluid nature of the pandemic.

The main problem right now is getting the teams together for practice when players keep testing positive for Covid-19. Makes you wonder what’s going to happen when all the students show up for fall term.

and the virus surge

Since the surge in Covid-19 cases began around June 8 or so, we’ve experienced the mystery of how cases could surge while deaths kept going down. Two obvious explanations were (1) The newly infected people are younger and so less likely to suffer dire consequences. (2) Hospital treatments, particularly of the most serious cases, are getting better.

Those are probably both factors, but there was a third explanation: the time lag between infection and death. As I heard Chris Hayes put it: “We’re between the lightning and the thunder.”

This week the thunder arrived. The low point in deaths appears to have been 217 on July 5. Two weeks ago I predicted:

[N]ationwide, the new-case curve started rising around June 10. That would suggest deaths will begin rising about July 4.

There have been 4980 deaths in the last seven days, compared to 3334 the seven days before that.

The surge in cases is continuing. Depending on when you start the clock on a day, we either did or didn’t break the 70,000-new-case mark on Friday. That number was around 20,000-per-day in early June.

The Trump administration is now treating Dr. Fauci as if he were a political rival. Anonymous sources at the White House distributed a list of supposedly inaccurate statements Fauci has made, “laid out in the style of a campaign’s opposition research document”. CBS’ Face the Nation has been trying to interview Fauci for three months, but the White House has refused permission for that as well as many other interviews. He no longer briefs Trump or appears in White House briefings for the public.

Fauci has committed the unforgivable sin of refusing to let Trump dictate reality. He has directly contradicted Trump’s ridiculous claim that the recent spike in cases is simply a reflection of more testing, and told 538 “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”

Fauci is a civil servant rather than a political appointee, so firing him would be difficult. He could quit, but people close to him say he wants to keep overseeing vaccine development.

There has been a virus outbreak in the Mississippi legislature, leading this embarrassing result:

Gov. Tate Reeves is warning the public to get tested for coronavirus if they have been in contact with a state lawmaker.

Here in Massachusetts, we’re currently doing well, but I worry about complacency. I think the Northeast in general is imagining that we had our outbreak, so the area is immune now. We’ve opened restaurants for indoor dining, which has to be a mistake.

Pittsburgh is a cautionary tale. Allegheny County had zero new cases on June 17, but was back over 200 by July 2.

An economic consequence of the surge is that it has stalled the recovery of the economy. Jobs will come back much more slowly, unemployment is running out, and so far Republicans in Congress are resisting any further stimulus. One expert projects that 20 to 28 million Americans face eviction by September.

and the Supreme Court’s contraception decision

As usual, there was a flurry of end-of-term decisions. In addition to the Trump tax cases mentioned above, the Court issued a 7-2 opinion upholding the Trump administration’s reworking of the religious exemption to ObamaCare contraception mandate. An exemption that the Obama administration originally crafted so that religious organizations that object to birth control wouldn’t have to provide it to their employees has now been stretched to cover any organization — even publicly traded corporations — that claim either a religious or moral objection. What’s more, the Obama administration had a work-around so that the employees would continue to get their birth control covered. The Trump people have thrown that out, with the result that some number of women will now not have contraceptive coverage.

This was just one more step down a wrong path, so I have a hard time criticizing the liberal justices (Kagan and Breyer) who sided with the conservatives. Like Roberts in the Louisiana abortion case last week, Kagan and Breyer had precedents to consider.

The case goes back to a lower court, so it’s still possible that the Trump rule will be thrown out ultimately. But it will be allowed to take effect in the meantime.

Longtime readers know that I am deeply skeptical of all these “conscience” provisions. I think employer-supported health insurance should be like a paycheck: What the employee does with it is none of the employer’s business. Whether somebody works for Little Sisters of the Poor or the Taliban or whoever, their health insurance should cover contraception, and the employer’s moral or religious beliefs should have no bearing on the subject. Again, it’s like a paycheck. If a woman can use her paycheck to buy contraceptives, she should be able to use her health insurance just as freely.

Once you let the employer’s religious or moral values into the picture, though, you’ll never find a place to draw the line. That’s why these cases keep going to the Supreme Court: There’s no clean rule that lower courts can apply unambiguously.

and cancel culture

A large number of well-known people signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that will appear in Harper’s. Some of the names are quite famous, like Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, and Salman Rushdie, while others are people you will frequently see me quoting in this blog, like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Vox’s Matt Yglesias.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

While I continue to respect a lot of the signers, I have to say I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just not in plugged into the academic community and don’t appreciate the pressures on campus today. But none of the cases I hear about impress me. For example, NYT opinion-page editor James Bennett resigned (presumably under pressure) after the outcry surrounding his publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s call to use the military to suppress the rioting/protesting after George Floyd’s murder. That seemed like a serious act of bad judgment to me, and was one of a series. (See David Roberts’ article.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, I think, offers some appropriate perspective:

any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.

Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless. But now, in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized.

He reminds us of the more serious cancellations that are just part of business-as-usual: Colin Kaepernick got drummed out of the NFL for his views; Christian Blasey Ford got death threats for telling her story. It would be nice to live in a more forgiving world, Coates says, but we would need to construct it from scratch. Just going back to the day when the powerful could be forgiven for whatever they say or do, but the powerless could not, is not that world.

and you also might be interested in …

At long last, the Washington Redskins are going to change their name. The new name hasn’t been announced yet. I’m hoping they pick a name unrelated to Native Americans, rather than just dialing back to something like Warriors or Braves and keeping a Redskin-like logo.

It’s funny what does and doesn’t fly as an athletic team name. Only certain breeds of dogs work (bulldogs or wolves). Insects are OK if they sting (hornets or yellowjackets, but not ants or crickets). The Washington Spies would have an appropriate local flavor, but violates some sort of taboo I can’t put my finger on. The Washington Generals ordinarily would work, but that’s the name of the hapless team the Harlem Globetrotters have been beating up on for decades. I could go for Agents or G-Men. If it were up to me, though, I’d play off the Capitol area’s neo-classical architecture and name the team the Centurions.

Peter Wehner of The Atlantic talks to an unnamed Christian minister about the price Christians have paid for supporting Trump:

“Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

The only thing worth mentioning about Tucker Carlson’s claim that Tammy Duckworth “hates America” is Duckworth’s response:

They’re doing it because they’re desperate for America’s attention to be on anything other than Donald Trump’s failure to lead our nation, and because they think that Mr. Trump’s electoral prospects will be better if they can turn us against one another. Their goal isn’t to make — or keep — America great. It’s to keep Mr. Trump in power, whatever the cost.

It’s better for Mr. Trump to have you focused on whether an Asian-American woman is sufficiently American than to have you mourning the 130,000 Americans killed by a virus he claimed would disappear in February. It’s better for his campaign to distract Americans with whether a combat veteran is sufficiently patriotic than for people to recall that this failed commander in chief has still apparently done nothing about reports of Russia putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.

The Lincoln Project doesn’t mess around.

When my nephew gave me the insider’s tour of the Tennessee State Capitol a few years ago, we had to pass a bust of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest to get into one of the two chambers of the legislature. It looks like that bust is finally leaving the capitol. The war criminal behind the Fort Pillow massacre will no longer guard that chamber, warning African American legislators that Tennessee will never really be their state.

If you want to understand why the fact-checking model doesn’t work any more, consider this Reuters fact-check: “Metal Strip in Medical Masks is Not a 5G Antenna“.

Fact-checking is based on the idea that the information environment is basically clean, so when there’s a disinformation spill, we can go clean it up. But now the insanity has gotten too dense. There’s no way to play whack-a-mole with this stuff any more.

and let’s close with something violent

Jan Hakon Erichsen destroys things on YouTube. Mostly he destroys silly inanimate things, like balloons or pasta, and does it in ways that are either creative or stupid, depending on your mood at the time you watch. But on days when the world has pissed you off and something needs to pay, an Erichsen video may be just the thing.

When schools began closing in March, everyone said it was just for a few weeks. The logic was simple: The virus’ incubation time was two weeks or so; if we all just stayed home through one incubation cycle, everyone already infected would show symptoms, they’d go into quarantine, and the rest of us could get back to our normal lives. When things didn’t go that way, schools were closed for a little longer, and then for the rest of the year. Still, few imagined that it wouldn’t be safe to go back in the fall.

Now it’s mid-July, time (or maybe past time) to start making commitments for the 2020-2021 school year. The virus’ widely anticipated summer lull never arrived. And although the world’s well-governed countries have been getting their epidemics under control, the United States has not been well governed for some while. The experts at the CDC established sensible standards for restarting normal life in stages, but our president pushed the states to ignore them, encouraging lawsuits and even armed protests against governors who tried to follow them. As a result, Covid-19 is still spreading like wildfire in all but a handful of states.

So what do we do with schools in the fall? Several fundamental facts about schools, children, and the virus point in different directions.

• As a group, compared to the general population, children are less vulnerable to the most serious consequences of Covid-19. The odds that your child will die from catching it at school may not be zero, but they are very low. At the same time, the long-term consequences of a “mild” case are still not well understood.
• Leaving schools closed also has risks and costs, especially for children whose home life is stressed in some way. Some children live in homes with large indoor and outdoor play spaces, robust internet connections, and extensive book collections; their parents may also work at home and may be well equipped to supervise online learning. Some other children not only lack those advantages, but live in dangerous or abusive homes; before Covid, school was the safest part of their day.
• Traditional classrooms share a feature that has made meat-processing plants and prisons such fertile ground for Covid-19 to spread: “prolonged close proximity to other[s]”. Worse, strict protocols of masking and social distancing will be hard to enforce in schools; violating them provides an easy way for difficult students to disrupt the classroom.
• Schools link households that would otherwise have little contact. With schools open, the community becomes a denser network that is easier for the virus to traverse. (For some reason, elementary schools have not been implicated in major outbreaks, but schools for older children have.)
• Children are not the only ones in the classroom. Many teachers are near retirement age, or have other Covid-19 risk factors. Is it age discrimination, or a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, to require teachers in high-risk categories to either endanger themselves or quit? Will teachers unions agree to open schools under conditions that are unsafe for many of their members?

And we are once again going through the familiar pattern: The CDC has established guidelines for opening schools safely, but the president and his education secretary are pushing communities not to follow them, to the point of threatening their federal funding. [1]

we’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools, to get them open. And it’s very important. It’s very important for our country. It’s very important for the well-being of the student and the parents. So we’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on: Open your schools in the fall.

The CDC’s advice includes closing schools for extended periods if there is “substantial community transmission” of the virus, and making major adjustments (no field trips, desks six feet apart, students wear masks, staggered scheduling, …) when there is “minimal to moderate community transmission”. The President has pronounced those measures “impractical“, but has offered no alternative plan beyond just opening the school doors and letting the epidemic run its course.

Worse, he has turned school reopening into a test of loyalty. If you’re on his side, you support his alternate reality, where the virus surge is just an artifact of overtesting, 99% of cases are “totally harmless“, and there’s no reason not to fully open all parts of the economy, including the schools — unless, of course, you’re a Democrat trying to hurt his re-election chances.

Corrupt Joe Biden and the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it! [2]

New York City. A number of school districts have already announced their own plans for the fall. New York City, for example, intends to have students physically present only two or three days a week, cutting the number present on any given day in half. The school-system chancellor said:

We know that we cannot maintain proper physical distancing and have 100% of our students in school buildings five days a week. It’s just geographically, physically not possible. Health and safety requires us to have fewer students in the building at the same time.

This is not nearly good enough for the Trump administration, which wants five full days a week. NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg offers a liberal parent’s view: She agrees, up to a point.

I want schools to open full-time at least as much as Trump does. On Wednesday, New York City announced its plan to send kids back to school part time, and it is a calamity. To accommodate C.D.C. guidelines calling for six feet of distance between desks, students will be able to go to school only one to three days a week. It is not yet clear if schools will be able to ensure that siblings will attend on the same days. Working parents could end up needing full-time child care indefinitely, and there are, as yet, no plans to provide it publicly. …

So far, the results of so-called “remote learning” — a term I dislike, since it presumes that learning is happening — have been terrible for students, especially disadvantaged ones. The fallout for many parents’ financial prospects and mental health is catastrophic. And part-time schooling is likely to significantly amplify educational inequalities that are already enormous. As those who can afford it hire private teachers and tutors, we are rapidly heading toward a system of neo-governesses in which basic schooling becomes a luxury good unattainable for many people outside the 1 percent.

But she also recognizes that Trump’s politicization of the argument has made any rational discussion of reopening plans much harder:

Trump’s interference means that now no departure from the current C.D.C. guidelines will be seen as credible outside of MAGAland. “The recklessness has made people distrust anything that they say because they have downplayed the virus from the beginning,” said [American Federation of Teachers President Randi] Weingarten. … This is a president with negative credibility. The more Trump demands that schools open, the more people who’ve paid close attention to him will fear they all must remain closed.

Florida. As if to prove the point that we should do the opposite of whatever Trump urges, there’s Florida. New York was once the worst-hit state in the nation, but has been doing comparatively well lately. Florida is one of the states currently experiencing the worst outbreaks, but Education Commissioner Richard Corcora is insisting on a full reopening of the state’s schools.

Under the emergency order, all public schools will be required to reopen in August for at least five days a week and to provide the full array of services required by law, including in-person instruction and services for students with special needs.

Governor Ron DeSantis, who got the state into its current mess by following Trump’s advice on early reopening of businesses and bars, compares schools to big box stores.

I’m confident if you can do Home Depot, if you can do Walmart, if you can do these things, we absolutely can do the schools.

This silly pronouncement has received the widespread disrespect it so richly deserves. California Congressman Ted Lieu’s response was one of many:

Did I somehow miss the true Home Depot experience? I didn’t realize Home Depot packed 35 people together in a room for 6 hours a day.

Similarly silly was this Trump tweet:

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!

Yes, let’s compare Florida and Denmark. Florida has a little less than four times the population of Denmark. But in Covid-19’s entire history, Denmark has had 13,000 cases. Florida found 15,000 new cases yesterday. Denmark had 159 new cases in the last week; Florida over 69,000. Safely opening schools in Denmark is a completely different problem than opening them in Florida.

It is absolutely insane for Florida schools to be planning to open five days a week. If this hadn’t become a Trump-loyalty issue, no one would support doing it.

What at least one teacher thinks. If there’s one blog you ought to be reading right now that you’re probably not, I’d say it’s Teacher Life, written by Mrs. Teacher Life. Start with “Nobody Asked Me: A Teacher’s Opinion on School Reopening“, where you’ll find this kind of insight:

Let’s discuss hand washing. If an average class size of kindergartners is 25, then it would take 8.3 minutes for them each to wash their hands for 20 seconds- not too bad you might think. That’s doable- let’s reopen! Unfortunately that does not account for transition time between students at the sink, the student who plays in the bubbles, or splashes another student, or cuts in line, or has to be provided moral support to flush the toilet, because they are scared. It doesn’t account for the fact that only a few students will be allowed in the bathroom at a time and the teacher must monitor whose turn it is to enter and exit the bathroom, and control the hallway behavior, and send the student who just coughed to the “quarantine room” that doesn’t exist BECAUSE THERE ARE NO EXTRA ROOMS. Where are the students in hallway waiting? In line? All together? Six feet apart? No wait, three feet is okay now. Either way, 25 children standing three feet apart is a line over 75 feet long. Who is monitoring this line? Keeping them quiet, reminding them to keep their hands to themselves?

When you take a classroom-level view, you start to see a strange disconnect: Getting schools open is somehow both a top priority and barely an afterthought. On the one hand, it’s absolutely essential, because the economy can’t get back to normal (and the President can’t get re-elected) until parents can go back to work without leaving unsupervised children at home. But on the other hand, if it were actually that important, you’d think some roomful of geniuses would have been convened long ago to work out

• exactly what conditions need to hold in our communities for it to be safe to reopen schools
• how we’re going to achieve those conditions (i.e., do we really need to re-open the bars?)
• how schools are going to function when they do reopen
• what additional resources they need to function that way.

So, for example, what about that quarantine room Mrs. Teacher Life doesn’t have? Or the bigger classrooms that allow socially distanced desks? Or the extra assistants who supervise those 75-foot lines at the bathroom? Or new desks to replace the tables where children can no longer sit together? Or the extra crayons and scissors and whatnot, now that it’s unsafe for kids to share? Who is going to sub for all the teachers who are quarantined, or who ordinarily would come to work even when they feel sick, but shouldn’t do that now?

If we do find a sub- what germs are they bringing in? Where have they been? If they test positive do all schools they have been subbing at have to quarantine?

If school reopening were really a priority, there would be a plan and there would be money to implement that plan. There isn’t. That’s got to tell you something.

[1] For what it’s worth: I would not take these threats seriously. Trump does not understand how the government works, so he often makes threats he has no idea how to carry out. In this case, attempts to redirect funding approved by Congress would be blocked by the courts, at least until the next presidential term begins in January. If we can vote Trump out, those cuts will never happen.

What he and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seem to be hinting at is turning federal aid into a voucher that students can use for private schools in areas where public schools are not physically open. (This is what DeVos wanted to do even before the pandemic.) But neither DeVos nor the White House press secretary have been able to explain what legal authority would allow them to do this.

And I know it’s petty, but comparisons between DeVos and Harry Potter’s Delores Umbridge never get old.

[2] I think Trump is the one who doesn’t get it here, probably because he doesn’t understand people who live for others. Parents will accept risks to themselves — going to an unsafe job, for example — if the family needs it. But they have a far lower tolerance for risks to their children. Statistics don’t help here. Once you’ve told parents that their child could die, they’re not going to pay much attention to the exact probabilities.

Back in March, when Ohio was the first state to cancel school, I don’t think a lot of people expected schools around the country to close for the rest of the year. And surely by fall we would have this whole coronavirus thing figured out, as the world’s well-governed countries more-or-less do. Well, now it’s time to make decisions about the next school year, and it’s not at all obvious what to do. And the process is made that much harder, because it can’t just be about the kids now. Trump has made reopening schools a loyalty issue for his cult, so it has to be about him too.

That’s the topic of this week’s featured post “Back to School”, which should be out around 9 EDT or so.

That’s far from all that happened this week. There were also some major new moves in the Trump Crime Family’s assault on the rule of law. Roger Stone got his payoff for not ratting out the Boss, and Consiglieri Bill Barr put out a hit on the Eastern District of New York, where Trump-related investigations might have been brewing, but now presumably are sleeping with the fishes. Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, who violated omerta during the impeachment hearings, has been forced out of the military. The Family’s allies on the Supreme Court showed mixed loyalties: They rejected Trump’s claim to be completely above the law, but still his taxes and business records will remain hidden until after the election. Complete victory over the law will have to be a second-term project.

Meanwhile, coronavirus continues to rage out of control. By some counts, the number of new cases surged over 70,000 on Friday, up from 20,000 a few weeks ago. And the months-long decline in deaths ended, as experts had been predicting. The official word in MAGAland is that there is nothing to see here: More testing is turning up more cases, and everyone should go back to normal life as fast as possible.

I feel an obligation to report some good news too: The Washington Redskins are finally changing their name, hopefully to something not racist this time.

Anyway, that’s all in the weekly summary, which should come out around noon or so.

BTW, I don’t know what to predict about next week. My wife is having surgery on Thursday. I could imagine either being completely absorbed in that, or sitting around the hospital with an internet connection and nothing to do but wait and watch her sleep. So the Sift might or might not happen at all next week, and if it does, I can’t guess how much effort will go into it.

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

– Frederick Douglass “What, to the slave, is the 4th of July?“

This week’s featured post is “In the Land of ‘No We Can’t’“.

This week everybody was talking about the virus

The number of new Covid-19 infections surged to new heights this week, going over 57,000 on Friday. Deaths continued on a flat-to-downward path, running between 500-600 a day, but deaths lag infections, so it’s hard to see how that continues.

Tens of thousands of Americans are dead because of Trump’s denial and incompetence. I laid this out in some detail last week, but James Fallows has done it even better in The Atlantic. In addition to being a top-notch journalist and writer, Fallows is an amateur pilot. (The book Our Towns describes his and his wife Deborah’s tour of the kinds of American cities that are hard to get to by commercial flights.)

As an amateur pilot, I can’t help associating the words catastrophic failure with an accident report. The fact is, confronting a pandemic has surprising parallels with the careful coordination and organization that have saved large numbers of lives in air travel.

So he reviews the government’s handling of Covid-19 the way that the National Transportation Safety Board would review an airliner crash: starting way back at the beginning, with how the system was designed, and then looking at how those plans were implemented and what went wrong.

Making a long article short: The Bush administration left a sound pandemic plan after the H5N1 flu of 2005, and the Obama administration updated it after the Ebola outbreak. The early-detection system they put in place worked, but nobody in the Trump administration could be bothered to notice.

By at least late December, signs were beginning to show something seriously amiss—despite foot-dragging, lies, and apparent cover-up on the Chinese side. A different kind of Chinese government might have done a different job, calling for help from the rest of the world and increasing the chances that the coronavirus remained a regional rather than global threat. But other U.S. leaders had dealt with foreign cover-ups, including by China in the early stages of the SARS outbreak in 2002. Washington knew enough, soon enough, in this case to act while there still was time.

… During the Obama administration, the U.S. had negotiated to have its observers stationed in many cities across China, through a program called Predict. But the Trump administration did not fill those positions, including in Wuhan. This meant that no one was on site to learn about, for instance, the unexplained closure on January 1 of the city’s main downtown Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a so-called wet market where wild animals, live or already killed, were on sale along with fish and domesticated animals.

When the early warnings started, CDC tried to get observers in.

“CDC asked for access, and was denied it [by the Chinese government],” Ron Klain, who coordinated efforts against the Ebola pandemic during the Obama administration, told me. “In normal circumstances, that request would have gone up the chain, and you would have had senior-level people in the NSC pressing at senior levels. My guess is that it wasn’t pressed in this case because the senior people were Mnuchin and Kudlow, and they had other priorities. … The question isn’t what leverage we had. The point is that we gave up leverage with China to get the trade deal done. That meant that we didn’t put leverage on China’s government. We took their explanations at face value.”

Obama had left a plan, but Trump ignored it.

The Obama playbook, like the Bush report, is chillingly prescient. Its emphasis is on the step-by-step “how to” of the government’s response.

The worldwide pandemic response system was set up to rely on American logistics. But Trump never mobilized it.

When the new coronavirus threat suddenly materialized, American engagement was the signal all other participants were waiting for. But this time it did not come. It was as if air traffic controllers walked away from their stations and said, “The rest of you just work it out for yourselves.”

… The system was primed to act, but the person at the top of the system had to say “Go.” And that person was Donald Trump.

“Here is the way I would put it,” a person who has been involved with the President’s Daily Brief process told me, referring to Trump. “The person behind the desk is the same person you see on TV”—emotional, opinionated, fixed on his own few hobbyhorses and distorted views of reality, unwilling or unable to absorb new information. “In a normal administration, the president would have seen the warnings unfolding from January onward. But this president hadn’t absorbed any of it.” … In a resigned way, the people I spoke with summed up the situation this way: You have a head of government who doesn’t know anything, and doesn’t read anything, and is at the mercy of what he sees on TV.

… The United States still possesses the strongest economy in the world, its military is by far the most powerful, its culture is diverse, and, confronted with the vicissitudes of history, the country has proved resilient. But a veteran of the intelligence world emphasized that the coronavirus era has revealed a sobering reality. “Our system has a single point of failure: an irrational president.” At least in an airplane cockpit, the first officer can grab the controls from a captain who is steering the aircraft toward doom.

So Fallows imagines the conclusion of the NTSB report like this:

There was a flight plan. There was accurate information about what lay ahead. The controllers were ready. The checklists were complete. The aircraft was sound. But the person at the controls was tweeting. Even if the person at the controls had been able to give effective orders, he had laid off people who would carry them out. This was a preventable catastrophe.

Because they were hit hard early in the pandemic, a few EU countries — Belgium, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and France — still have more Covid deaths per capita than the US. (We’re gaining on them, though, and will probably pass France in another month or so.) But most of them — Germany and the other countries on the Baltic Sea stand out — have been doing far better from the beginning. The most valid comparison is the EU as a whole, so I decided to use the Worldometer numbers to do an EU spreadsheet of my own on Saturday morning. Totaling up across all 27 EU countries, they had almost exactly the same number of deaths we do: 133,651 to our 132,112. We’ll probably pass them sometime today, with only about 3/4 of their population.

Not all EU countries report their number of active cases — infected people who have neither died nor recovered — but my guess from the available numbers is that the US has 7 or 8 times as many.

The EU added insult to injury on Wednesday: It started admitting non-essential travelers from many countries, but not Americans. Because we have let the virus get so out of control, Europeans consider Americans to be disease vectors, lumping us in with other virus-ridden countries like Russia and Brazil.

One reason I don’t think Trump will stage a comeback in the polls is that every day it gets harder and harder to deny how totally he has botched the federal response to the pandemic. The well-governed countries are getting through this, while the poorly-governed ones are still floundering. Under Trump, the United States is poorly governed.

Imagine that things go as well as is reasonably possible for Trump between now and the election: The death rate doesn’t shoot up to match the case rate, so we get to November with “only” 200,000 or so dead. Vaccine research goes well, so that we have a viable formula ready, though it won’t go into mass production and wide distribution until spring. We avoided a second lockdown, so the unemployment rate is only 10% or so.

Even in that rosy scenario, it will be undeniable that the rest of the world’s governments handled this much better. So even if by November you think the end of this crisis is in sight, is this really the guy you want in charge for the NEXT crisis?

Controls on the southern border are tightening up — on the Mexican side.

As cases have increased in Southern California, Arizona and Texas, Mexican border states have increasingly come to see the outbreak in the United States as their biggest threat in controlling the epidemic.

Citing no evidence, President Trump has said that the border wall would keep infections from entering the United States from Mexico. But given the soaring U.S. caseload, it is Mexico that has more reason to fear the virus coming across the border.

Conservatives would like to blame the George Floyd protests for the surge in infections, but the data seems not to support that. Reason: Even as the protesters may have been infecting each other, they were also discouraging other people from going out. The net result looks like a wash.

Whether and how to open schools in the fall is a huge topic this summer. Many parents won’t return to work if they have nowhere to send their school-age children. (An NYT opinion piece argues that opening schools should have been the primary goal of every state’s reopening plan. Leaving bars and restaurants closed longer would have been a small price to pay, if the payoff was beating the virus back to a level that allowed schools to open.)

College students and their families may not be willing to take on massive debts for the sake of online classes, and colleges without big endowments may go under for good if they close for a semester. So there’s lots of motivation to open schools at all levels, even without a good plan for doing it safely.

One fly in the ointment: college professors. Many of them are in the endangered over-50 age group, so sending them into classrooms with undergraduates or expecting them to meet individual students in their small offices is a bad idea. They’re smart enough to know that, and they have more power within the system than your average kindergarten teacher.

Expecting college students to follow strict protocols in their dorms, or to stay out of crowded local bars, is foolish. Young adults feel invulnerable anyway, and in this case many of them are.

This week, Iowa health authorities reported case spikes among young adults in its two largest college towns, Ames and Iowa City, after the governor allowed bars to reopen. And on campuses across the country, attempts to bring back football teams for preseason practice have resulted in outbreaks.

More than 130 coronavirus cases have been linked to athletic departments at 28 Division I universities. At Clemson, at least 23 football players and two coaches have been infected. At Arkansas State University, seven athletes across three teams tested positive. And at the University of Houston, the athletic department stopped off-season workouts after an outbreak was discovered.

I know I’m repeating a link from last week, but it really fits here: “A Message from Your University’s Vice President for Magical Thinking“.

And Randy Rainbow has another great video.

and the bounties

The official response to reports that the Russians paid bounties to Taliban fighters for killing Americans is somewhere between “I don’t believe it” and “Nobody told me.” In any case, Trump isn’t going to do anything about it.

Neither explanation holds water. “Nobody told me” is particularly weak, given that Trump oversees the people who didn’t tell him. His excuse for being incompetent as a commander-in-chief is that he’s incompetent as a manager.

“I don’t believe it” is another example of taking Putin’s word for it. We saw this in Helsinki, and we’re seeing it again.

and jobs

The June jobs report came out, and the top line number was good: 4.8 million new jobs, and the unemployment rate dropping to 11.1%. However,  I agree with Slate:

The most important thing to keep in mind about Thursday’s monster jobs report is that it’s a backward-looking window into the moment right before much of the country’s reopening plans went completely to hell.

Probably this is the last piece of good news about the job market we’ll see for some while.

and Trump’s bizarre 4th of July

Because somebody has to keep an eye on them, I get the Trump campaign emails. Saturday this showed up:

We’ll get right to the point – Democrats HATE America.

They’re attacking President Trump for wanting to celebrate Independence Day at Mount Rushmore – an ICONIC monument that features George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln – as a symbol of white supremacy.

Can you believe it? They truly hate EVERYTHING our great Nation stands for.

I think they misjudged this one, and it’s typical of the way they’re misjudging the electorate in general. The Democrats’ tweet — and the Native American protesters the tweet supports — makes a good point.

What’s more, I think a large majority of Americans would agree that Mount Rushmore isn’t an appropriate spot for a partisan event, and that it’s an abuse of power for the President to order the Navy’s Blue Angels to be the warm-up act for his campaign speech. The mountain and the Navy belong to the nation, not to the President. An iconic national monument is not the place for aggressively divisive political rhetoric like this:

In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. (Applause.)

Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.

To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.

It’s Trump’s right to smear his enemies this way, if that’s what he wants to do, but at least when Hillary gave her “deplorables” speech, her campaign paid for it. And Obama didn’t order the Blue Angels to perform overhead.

It’s weird that Trump complains about being “censored” — giving no examples, because there are none — when he has very recently tried to prevent John Bolton from publishing his book, and is still trying to stop Mary Trump’s book.

Catherine Rampell itemizes all the ways Trump has tried to censor, bully, and otherwise control people who criticize him.

and the Supreme Court

Last week the decision throwing out the Louisiana abortion law had just come out, and I had no time to look at it. I read it this weekend.

It’s kind of a strange read all around: the plurality opinion of the four liberal justices, the concurrence by Chief Justice Roberts, and the various dissents by the other four conservatives. Everybody is dancing around the fact that everybody knows, but the Court doesn’t want to state openly: Louisiana passed this law in bad faith. The stated reason (protecting women’s health) was totally distinct from the real reason (harassing abortion clinics into closing).

So the question was whether the Court would let that go. The four liberal justices come up with reasons not to, without actually accusing the Louisiana legislature of bad faith. The four conservative justices come up with arguments that give the legislature cover — basically, that it’s too soon to make this decision; the Court should wait until the clinics actually close, and then look at things. And John Roberts says that the Louisiana law is identical to a Texas law the Court threw out four years ago (but then it waited for clinics to close), so the law needs to be applied the same way.

I can’t remember who was making this point, but I think it’s a good one: Roberts’ decision here resembles his decision against the citizenship question on the census: He’s willing to bend the law in a conservative direction, but he hates to look blatantly political and corrupt. So he needs conservatives to show him the respect of sending him better cases.

The Court, in my opinion, is ready to reverse Roe v Wade, or at least to chip it away to nothing. But they need a better excuse than this.

I speculated last week that Roberts had scheduled the more liberal decisions to come out first, to give cover to something outrageous later on. The first political decision came this week: the House won’t get access to documents from the Mueller grand jury.

We’re still waiting for a ruling on Trump’s tax returns.

and Biden’s VP choices

People are making a case for Kamala Harris, Stacy Abrams, Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Val Demings, Susan Rice, Keisha Lance Bottoms, and Michelle Lujan Grisham.

I’m not going to either make a prediction or pick a favorite from that list. Mainly, I’m struck by what a strong list it is.

Biden has said he’ll pick a woman, and there are many reasons for him to lean towards a woman of color. (The only white woman on the list, Elizabeth Warren, is there because she could raise enthusiasm among progressive Democrats who didn’t support Biden in the primaries.) Ordinarily, people worry that such prior restrictions limit the talent pool. But I don’t think that’s a valid complaint here.

Biden has described himself as “a transition candidate“, raising the possibility that he might only want a single term. In that scenario, his VP would be well positioned for a 2024 presidential run.

BTW, lately I’ve been responding to Facebook posts about Biden and the Democrats leading us into “socialism” by quoting Voodoo Pork:

You know how your parents used to call every console a “Nintendo”? That’s how conservatives use the word “socialist” to describe everything to the left of hunting the homeless for sport.

and you also might be interested in …

Caroline Randall Williams writes a powerful statement on the monuments of the Old South: “My Body is a Confederate Monument“.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

Among her white Confederate ancestors are Edmund Pettis, the general and KKK grand dragon whose name adorns the bridge where John Lewis and other civil rights demonstrators were beaten by police on Bloody Sunday in 1965.

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. …

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof.

SharpieGate is far from the most serious scandal of the Trump administration, but the very triviality of it speaks volumes.

When Hurricane Dorian was approaching Florida last September, Trump erroneously tweeted that the storm would hit Alabama “harder than anticipated”. In fact, it was not headed to Alabama at all, according to National Weather Service projections, which turned out to be right. The NWS, worried that Alabamans might panic unnecessarily, corrected Trump’s tweet within minutes:

Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama.

That’s not a scandal; it’s just a mistake. (And who hasn’t gotten confused by a map or named the wrong state sometime?) But Trump lacks the strength of character to admit even trivial mistakes, and he could not let this subject drop. Ultimately he  “proved” he was right by showing reporters an NWS map that had been crudely doctored with a Sharpie.

That’s petty to an almost clinical degree, but still not a scandal. The true low point of SharpieGate, though, came when NOAA issued a false statement undercutting its own people and supporting the president.

The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.

How did that happen? The White House put pressure on Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who reportedly threatened to fire people at NOAA if they didn’t support the president’s false claim. (Ross has denied this.)

So why bring it up now? Well, the Commerce Department inspector general looked into this incident and has written a report. That report has been awaiting release since June 26, when the Commerce Department had 48 hours to mark it up.  But Wednesday, a memo to Secretary Ross from the IG complained that something else is happening:

The final publication of our evaluation has been delayed, thwarted, and effectively estopped by the Department’s refusal to identify specific areas of privilege. Additionally, your staff has refused to engage in any meaningful discussion to identify proposed privilege redactions, indicating that such discussions would not be fruitful. To allow the Department’s all-encompassing and opaque assertion of privilege to stand is to effectively grant the Department a pocket veto over the completion and issuance of final OIG work, which is clearly contrary to the IG Act, OIG independence, and good government.

All this, because Trump couldn’t simply thank the alert people at the NWS for catching his mistake before any harm came of it, as any responsible adult would do.

China has imposed more draconian laws against protest in Hong Kong, and the protesters haven’t figured out how to adjust yet.

A company hand-picked by Trump to build a $1.3 billion chunk of his border wall also built a 3-mile segment on private land as a demonstration project. That segment was built too close to the Rio Grande and only 2.5 feet deep. ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report:

But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say.

Just months after going up, they said, photos reveal a series of gashes and gullies at various points along the structure where rainwater runoff has scoured the sandy loam beneath the foundation.

“When the river rises, it will likely attack those areas where the foundation is exposed, further weakening support of the fence and potentially causing portions … to fall into the Rio Grande,” said Alex Mayer, a civil engineer professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has done research in the Rio Grande basin.

It’s like the old proverb: A thing that is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.

I don’t know if this is true, but I hope it is.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is requiring everyone in Texas to wear a face covering. It’s illegal to carry a gun while wearing a face covering. Texas just unintentionally banned concealed and open carry.

and let’s close with a blast from the past

Recently lots of people have been making fun of Karen, and in particular her sense of entitlement and white privilege. But not many people remember that when she was a teen-ager she used to have her own TV show, and the Beach Boys sang her intro. Back then, she was an alarming, quite disarming, and a really somewhat charming modern girl. Maybe it was obvious then how she would grow up, but I didn’t see it coming.

The Trump administration’s surrender to Covid-19 is just a symptom of a larger dysfunction. Whenever a problem calls for collective action, whether that problem is a disease, mass shootings, climate change, economic inequality, out-of-control police, chaotic elections, or systemic racism, Republicans tell us nothing can be done; we just have to live with it. And until we can banish them from positions of power, we do.

In 2008, a young black senator with an odd-sounding name, facing a well-known and well-financed rival with the full backing of his party’s establishment, won the Democratic nomination for president. He went on to a landslide victory in the fall, with large majorities in both houses of Congress riding on his coattails. The slogan he ran on was “Yes We Can”.

Like most effective political slogans — “Make America Great Again” has the same quality — “Yes We Can” meant different things to different people. Most obviously, African Americans heard it as: “Yes we can elect one of our own. We don’t have to pick our leader from a list of white men drawn up by other white men.” But depending on what you were listening for, “Yes We Can” could also mean: “Yes we can reform our healthcare system” or “Yes we can rebuild our infrastructure” or “Yes we can overcome inequality” or “Yes we can do something about climate change” or “Yes we can offer all our children a 21st-century education” or “Yes we can create enough jobs for everybody” or “Yes we can get our troops out of Iraq”.

In all of its interpretations, “Yes We Can” meant that we weren’t stuck. We aren’t doomed to watch our country (or planet) decay — perhaps retaining the freedom to complain about it, but not the power to choose a new course. Instead, we can band together, elect a government that represents our real interests, and focus the power of America on shaping the future we want.

Obama himself put it like this:

When the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful, and told that it can’t be done, then it doesn’t. I’m running for president because I want to tell them: Yes We Can.

Yes vs. No. Opposing “Yes We Can” is the Republican belief that government is never the solution, it can only make problems worse. And so, if some nationwide problem keeps you up at night, all you can do is change your individual behavior or circumstances — assuming you can afford to.

If your town’s public schools are poorly funded and badly run, you can move somewhere richer with better schools, or find the money to send your kids to a private school, or quit your job and homeschool. Ditto for infrastructure and public services: If your town can’t afford to fix its potholes or keep the parks open, move somewhere that can. If you don’t want to die in some country you don’t care about, stay out of the Army. If climate change worries you, buy a Prius and recycle. If you can’t find a job, start your own business. Search out better health insurance and pay what it costs. Buy a gun to defend your family, and if you can’t stop imagining a mass shooting at your child’s school, pray.

It’s all up to you. You’re on your own. If you can’t solve it, don’t look at us, because No We Can’t.

Around the world. The dirty secret of “No We Can’t” is that lots of other countries do take collective action, and so they already enjoy the nice things Americans can’t have. Every other first-world country has universal health care; if you get sick, you get the care you need and your family doesn’t go bankrupt. And they provide that health security by spending less of their national wealth on it.

Thursday’s New York Times included a number of compelling graphs showing America’s unique dysfunction. Only in America does increased GDP not lead to increased life expectancy. A smaller share of our economy goes to worker pay. We imprison more people. Our “free market” system provides the most expensive cellphone service in the world.

Just about all the countries of Western Europe and Scandanavia have free college. Little Costa Rica can run itself on sustainable energy for months at a time. China, Japan, and Europe have extensive bullet-train networks. China is building enormous public-infrastructure projects. Finland is beating homelessness and has the best schools in the world. Fourteen other countries offer their residents faster internet than the US does; average download speed in Taiwan or Singapore is more than double ours.

And while we watch our public infrastructure and services decay, other countries give their citizens beautiful presents like the Hovenring bicycle interchange in the Netherlands,

or the Oodi Library in Helsinki, whose library director describes it as “book heaven”.

Imagine proposing marvelous things like that in an American city.

Covid. The most obvious current example of “No We Can’t” is the Trump administration’s surrender to Covid-19, which now we are told we just have to “live with” — unless we get unlucky and die of it. I often criticized George W. Bush’s response to 9-11, but at least he never told us we just had to live with mass terrorist attacks.

Public health is the original us problem. Throughout history, no matter how rich or powerful you might have been, you were in trouble if the people who prepared your feasts or changed your bed linens got the plague. At the margins, there were things you could do individually to try to save yourself, but ultimately the solutions had to come from the public sector: sanitation, pure water sources, untainted food supply chains, quarantines, and other treatment plans that contained diseases before they spread.

No matter how much medical technology advances, that aspect of it hasn’t changed: Public health is a public problem. Nothing you can do on your own is going to find a Covid-19 cure or vaccine. And you can try to be careful, but nobody is completely self-sufficient, so eventually you’re going to deal with other people. If they’re infected, you’ve got a problem. We’re all in this together.

Public-health problems are solved by government action, or they’re not solved at all. Early in the pandemic, we heard stories of governments that got ahead of the spread and took effective action to protect their populations. South Korea has gotten a lot of attention, partly because its first verified case of Covid-19 appeared on the same day ours did: January 20. The Koreans used the full public-health playbook: aggressive testing, quarantining, contact tracing, and public-information campaigns to encourage good hygiene.

It worked, and despite occasional flare-ups, it continues to work. As of yesterday, South Korea had 13,030 total cases of Covid-19 and 283 deaths. Adjusting for population, that would be like the US having around 85,000 cases and 1,800 deaths. Actually, we’ve had 2.9 million cases and 132,000 deaths.

Americans more-or-less sloughed that comparison off. Whatever the Koreans did couldn’t possibly have worked here, because No We Can’t. Through March and April, we ignored South Korea (and Taiwan and New Zealand and even Germany) and instead focused on what was happening in Italy and Spain. Looking down rather than up reassured us. We had it bad, but so did a lot of other places. We weren’t some special loser country.

But now we are.

Europe locked down harder than we did, and its people whined about it less. European political leaders united behind their public health officials, so basic hygiene measures like mask-wearing didn’t become political issues. It shows: Even including Italy and Spain, the EU as a whole, with about a third more people (446 million) than the US, now averages less than 4,000 new cases a day. This week, Arizona (population 7.5 million) has been averaging around 3,600 new cases each day, hitting a peak of 4,877 on Wednesday. The US as a whole hit 50,000 new cases for the first time on July 1, and stayed above that level for four days. (Yesterday was “down” to 43K, but I wonder how much of that was due to fewer tests being done over the holiday weekend.)

In the face of that horrifying comparison, the Trump administration has just decided to move on. His televised daily briefings ended in April, not long after his inject-bleach embarrassment. Since then Trump has talked about the virus only to minimize it, mock Joe Biden for wearing a mask, urge states to ignore the recommendations of his own CDC, and assemble his own supporters In rallies that have all the earmarks of super-spreader events. In highly promoted speeches on Friday and Saturday, Trump neither acknowledged our national failure to contain the virus, nor proposed any plan for the future beyond waiting for a vaccine — which we can’t even be sure is coming at all.

Other nations can beat this virus, but No We Can’t.

The post-policy GOP. The Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell noticed the pattern, and connected its dots like this:

Much as they gave up on coronavirus containment, U.S. political leaders previously gave up on solving our epidemic of gun violence. And on our high numbers of police-perpetrated killings. Also our high rates of child poverty, uninsurance and carbon emissions. On these and other metrics, the United States fares worse than most if not all other industrialized countries. Yet U.S. officials — from one party in particular — treat these crises as imaginary or unsolvable.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had a similar epiphany:

Covid-19 is like climate change: It isn’t the kind of menace the [Republican] party wants to acknowledge.

It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response, not to mention inconveniences like wearing face masks; it wants you to be afraid of people you can hate — people of a different race or supercilious liberals.

So instead of dealing with Covid-19, Republican leaders and right-wing media figures have tried to make the pandemic into the kind of threat they want to talk about. It’s “kung flu,” foisted on us by villainous Chinese. Or it’s a hoax perpetrated by the “medical deep state,” which is just looking for a way to hurt Trump.

Steve Benen, who writes the companion blog to the Rachel Maddow Show, elaborated on this theme at book length in The Imposters: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics. Benen coined the label “post-policy party” to describe the current GOP. His book goes issue by issue, and shows how Republicans have systematically ditched their policy-making apparatus in favor of marketing, with the result that they have plenty of good one-liners, but no programs they’re ready to implement once they take power.

The most obvious example is health care. Republicans have been running against ObamaCare since Obama proposed it in 2009, and Trump has been claiming since 2015 that ObamaCare “can be replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government.” What would that “much better” replacement look like? We still have no idea. “Repeal and Replace” was a nice slogan, but once you’ve heard the slogan, you’ve heard all they have.

That’s true across the board. There are no Republican policies, just slogans.

You can see that in Congress, where the Democratic House passes bills that the Republican Senate never debates. Nothing comes back in the other direction. If the Democratic solutions seemed to liberal to Mitch McConnell, his Senate could amend those bills with Republican solutions and send them back. But there are no Republican solutions, so the bills just sit in Mitch’s in-box.

You can see it in the presidential campaign. Ordinarily, candidates for president are dying to tell you what they want to do in office. (For comparison, here’s the Biden policy page.) But here’s how Trump answered Sean Hannity’s question about the “top priority items” for his second term.

One of the things that will be really great — the word experience is still good, I always say talent is more important than experience, I’ve always said that — but the word experience is a very important word, a very important meaning.

I never did this before, never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington maybe 17 times and all of a sudden I’m the president of the United States, you know the story, riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say this is great but I didn’t know very many people in Washington, it wasn’t my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York, and now I know everybody. And I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes, like an idiot like Bolton, you don’t have to drop bombs on everybody.

What American problems does he hope to address in the second term? None. He’ll grapple with imaginary enemies like Antifa, and “far-left fascism“. He’ll protect our endangered statues of Confederate generals, but not our soldiers in the field. He’ll continue tweeting and preening in front of crowds and playing at being president. But he won’t actually lead us in accomplishing anything, because No We Can’t.

The Republican Party must be removed from all positions of power. Much ink has been spilled lamenting the loss of bipartisanship, and waxing nostalgic about the deals cooked up by Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, or Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan. Usually this is presented in a pox-on-both-houses tone, as if the two sides were equally intransigent.

Here’s the point that is often lost: You can’t compromise with people who aren’t trying to do anything. If you and I both recognize a problem and each have our own approaches to solving it, chances are good we can work something out. But if I care about climate change and systemic racism but you claim both are hoaxes, or if I want universal health care and you don’t care about healthcare at all, or if you fake concern for the budget deficit when my party is in power, then forget about it the moment you take office, or if I want DACA dreamers to have a path to citizenship, and you won’t say what you want for them … where can we go from there? What can I offer you in exchange for your help with my agenda?

Steven Benen is right: Our two-party system only works when we have two governing parties, two parties that have directions they want to go and policies they think will take us there, two parties that have plans for dealing with the nation’s problems. At the moment we only have one such party, the Democrats. Our political system will be broken until Republicans get serious about governing again.

And they won’t until the electorate forces them to. That means voting them out, up and down the ballot. You don’t have to believe that the Democratic direction is ideal, just recognize that they have a direction. You may wish they would go much farther or faster, but at least they want to move. If we enter 2021 with Biden as president and two Democratic houses of Congress, we can at least try to address our national problems.

But if Republicans are left holding any lever of power at all, we’ll be stuck in the Land of No We Can’t.

So this week the US started finding 50,000 new cases of Covid-19 a day, and on Wednesday Arizona had more new cases than the entire European Union. Meanwhile, our President responded to this deepening crisis by using our tax dollars and military bands to put on two big campaign rallies — one at Mouth Rushmore and the other at the White House. Reading those speeches, I learned that I (and probably most of my readers) are “far-left fascists” who are trying to “overthrow the American Revolution”. And here I thought I was just trying to finally make good on the Declaration of Independence’s unfulfilled promises of equality and government based on the consent of the governed.

I stand corrected. But I still don’t see why I had to pay for him to insult me. I mean, when Hillary gave her “deplorables” speech, at least her campaign rented the space and Obama didn’t order the Blue Angels to fly overhead.

Anyway, this week the featured post will be “In the Land of No We Can’t”. It puts Trump’s surrender to the virus in the larger context of Republican fatalism, which holds that nothing can be done about school shootings, climate change, economic inequality, systemic racism, or most of the other problems Americans face. Either we’re supposed to deny the problems exist, cope with them through our individual actions, or just live with them, because collective action to solve them is off the table.

No we can’t.

That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary has the virus surge to cover. Also: the jobs report, Biden’s VP options, Trump’s bizarre 4th of July celebrations, the Supreme Court, a new chapter of SharpieGate, and a number of other things, before ending with a bit of nostalgia about Karen when she was just a girl.

At every crucial moment, American officials were weeks or months behind the reality of the outbreak. Those delays likely cost tens of thousands of lives.

– “How the Virus Won”
The New York Times (6-25-2020)

The president thinks so much about what he’s doing in terms of the show he’s putting on that there’s been very little attention paid to how the government is functioning. … What does the dog do when it catches the car? Turns out the dog just keeps running and barking. I had this thought in the Lafayette Square madness. Trump puts on this show. And then he gets there and has nothing to do. He’s just standing there. His whole presidency is like that.

– Yuval Levin

This week’s featured post is “Back to Square One“. The reason there was no Sift last week was that I was virtually talking to churches in Illinois and Wisconsin (which answers the Firesign Theater question: “How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all?”). The topic was “Hope and Realism in Difficult Times”. You can read the text and watch my dress rehearsal.

This week everybody was talking about the virus breaking loose again

That’s the topic of the featured post. Here are some extras that didn’t make it into that post.

A reporter at Oklahoma Watch tested positive for Covid-19 after covering Trump’s Tulsa rally. Ever the objective observer, the reporter says, “I can’t say definitively that I got it at the rally.”

McSweeney’s provides “A Message from Your University’s Vice President for Magical Thinking“.

Our university will proceed as if everything will be okay because we really, really want it to be.

It goes on from there.

Wednesday night was an interesting lesson in the divergence of American news bubbles. If you watched any of the major evening news shows on CNN or MSNBC, the main story was that the number of new Covid-19 cases in the United States had hit a new high that day, with new state records in the biggest states: California, Florida, and Texas. The second major story was that whistleblowers had testified to the House Judiciary Committee about political interference in Bill Barr’s Justice Department. (See below.) Those two stories dominated the conversation.

Throughout the evening, though, I would occasionally jump over to Fox News to see what stories Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham thought were most important. I didn’t watch any of those shows end-to-end, so I can’t definitely say they never mentioned the two stories that were dominating the other news networks. But I never caught them talking about either one. Instead, they wanted to talk about the excesses of the protests that were still going on in many major cities: statues being pulled down, the CHOP autonomous zone in Seattle, and so on. These were presented as very scary developments; our cities are dissolving into chaos.

To see if I was hearing this right, I bopped over to FoxNews.com. And yes, there was a story about the rising coronavirus case numbers — down in the third level of headlines. The impression I got was that, if you really must know about the spread of the virus, they would tell you; but they weren’t going to insist that you pay attention.

The image below was FoxNews.com Thursday morning. There are no stories about either the virus-case spikes or the Justice Department whistleblowers in the top two rows of headlines, or near the top of the two sidebars. The sidebar headlines you can’t make out are “Iraq War vet on destroying statues: ‘We don’t solve problems via mob rule'”, “Trump touts powerful alliance and relationship with Poland”, “Dr. Nesheiwat: ‘Exciting’ experimental COVID vaccine proved ‘robust immunity'”, and “Ari Fleischer: ‘We’re having the summer of violence’, you’re seeing one-sided lawlessness”.

In the main column, you had to go down to the 13th headline to find “L.A. mayor reveals ‘troubling trend’ after uptick in coronavirus cases“. (I’ve noticed this since: If Fox does talk about the rising case numbers, it focuses on blue California rather than red Texas or purple Florida.) And your reward for going that far was a 2fer in the 14th story. You could vicariously indulge both your virus-denial and your racism by reading: “Arizona councilman chants ‘I can’t breathe’ before ripping off face mask“.

FoxNews.com Thursday morning

and Russia offering bounties to kill American troops

The New York Times broke the story Friday:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter. …

Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

Several other news organizations have independently corroborated parts of this scoop. CNN was told a similar story by “a European intelligence official”. ABC got it from “a military official”, The Wall Street Journal from “people familiar with” a “classified American intelligence assessment”, The Washington Post from “officials”, and so on. So nobody is willing to identify a source, but it’s pretty clear the NYT didn’t just make this up; other news organizations looked for a source and found one.

The Post added this important detail: actual American deaths.

Russian bounties offered to Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan are believed to have resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members, according to intelligence gleaned from U.S. military interrogations of captured militants in recent months.

Trump and various other top officials spent the weekend using a Sergeant Schultz I-know-nothing defense. Sunday morning — what took him so long? — Trump tweeted:

Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @Mark Meadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported by an “anonymous source” by the fake-news @nytimes. Everybody is denying it and there have not been many attacks on us.

Marcy Wheeler points out that Mark Meadows wasn’t Chief of Staff at the time, which “makes it clear that whoever wrote this tweet didn’t actually refer to any records.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe tweeted:

I have confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday.

Ratcliffe himself was took office at the end of May.

The Times insisted otherwise on Saturday:

But one American official had told The Times that the intelligence finding that the Russians had offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants and criminals had been briefed at the highest levels of the White House. Another said it was included in the President’s Daily Brief.

John Bolton happened to be on Jake Tapper’s Sunday show anyway to promote his book, so he got to comment:

The fact that the President feels compelled to tweet about the news story here shows that what his fundamental focus is, is not the security of our forces, but whether he looks like he wasn’t paying attention. So he’s saying well nobody told me therefore you can’t blame me

CNN national security analyst Samantha Vinograd described this as “gross incompetence any way you cut it”.

It would be disastrous not to get to the bottom of this. Either someone sat on this intelligence, or the President didn’t pay attention, or he decided to do nothing about it. Worse than doing nothing, Trump has continued to carry water for Putin internationally: At the beginning of this month, Trump was still pushing to get Russia invited to the G7 meetings. And regardless of who knew what when, Trump has heard about it now. Is he going to once again take Putin’s word over US intelligence and say it’s not true? Is he going to do anything about it?

and Justice Department corruption

An appeals court ruled 2-1 that the judge must accept the Justice Department’s decision to drop the Michael Flynn case, in spite of all the reasons to think that undue political influence was at work. So: obstruction of justice works.

In addition, Attorney General Barr got rid of the US attorney heading SDNY, which has been investigating several Trump-related cases. Rudy Giuliani is rumored to be under investigation, and the trial of his former friends Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman  is supposed to begin in February. Barr had previously gotten rid of the US attorney in DC, which is how Roger Stone’s sentencing memorandum got rewritten.

Congress heard testimony from two Justice Department whistleblowers. Prosecutor  Aaron Zelinsky testified that “What I saw was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from every other defendant. … This leniency was happening because of Stone’s relationship with the president.” And John Elias alleged political interference in antitrust cases.

and Biden’s huge lead

Biden has held a lead over Trump in head-to-head national polls more-or-less from the beginning of this race, but those leads almost always came with two caveats:

• It’s way too early to take polls seriously.
• Even if he wins the national popular vote by as much as 5%, he might still lose in the Electoral College.

But in recent weeks Biden’s lead has extended to 9.4% in 538’s polling average and 9.2% in Real Clear Politics’ differently weighted average. The most recent NYT/Siena poll has him ahead of Trump 50%-36%. That’s enough to put the Electoral College out of reach. 538’s state-by-state analysis now has Florida as the “tipping point”, the state that puts Biden over the top. He leads there by 7.4%.

In addition to the polls, there are anecdotes, like 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina supporting Biden over Trump.

Democrats are constantly reminding each other not to be complacent, so I’ve been seeing references to Mike Dukakis’ 17-point lead over George Bush in July of 1988, a race Bush ultimately won by nearly 8%. That’s not a compelling parallel, though: Dukakis was relatively unknown compared to Biden, so his public image was easier to tar with negative ads. Also, Bush’s approval had been near 90% during the First Gulf War, so most voters could at least remember a time when they thought he was a good president. Trump, conversely, has never had majority approval.

The real reason to maintain focus, though, is that Trump bound to try to cheat. His claim that mail-in ballots are inherently unreliable is false, but it justifies his followers in whatever shenanigans they can come up with. The bigger Biden’s margin is, the harder it will be for fraud to take it away.

The failure of Trump’s Tulsa rally made me think of the entertainment term “jump the shark”. Trump is trying to run his old playbook in a different world, and when confronted with that fact he just tries to push it harder.

In 2016, the country was facing no immediate crises, so culture-war messaging and identity politics could carry the day for Trump. But in 2020, the world looks grim, and the public wants to know that the next president has some idea what to do about it. Trump clearly does not. Witness the word salad Sean Hannity evoked by asking the softball question: “What are your top priorities for a second term?”

As Yuval Levin put it in the quote at the top: Trump is the dog who caught the car, and all he knows to do now is keep running and barking.

and abortion

Just this morning, the Supreme Court blocked a Louisiana law that would have had the effect of closing every abortion clinic in the state. John Roberts crossed over to vote with the Court’s four liberals.

Legally, the case should have been a slam-dunk, because a nearly identical Texas law was thrown out four years ago. The only thing that has changed since then is the composition of the Court, particularly Justice Kavanaugh replacing Justice Kennedy. So this should have been a 9-0 decision: Quote the precedent and move on.

This is the third recent victory for the Court’s liberals, joining the LGBTQ-rights case and the DACA case.

This may sound paranoid, but I have the feeling John Roberts is setting up something awful in the remaining big case concerning Trump’s taxes. Roberts has some control over the order in which decisions come out, and it would fit his pattern to buffer the pain of a horrible decision by releasing more popular decisions first.

Meanwhile an appeals court held that Trump’s emergency seizure of otherwise allocated funds to build his border wall is invalid.

The panel held that the Executive Branch lacked independent constitutional authority to authorize the transfer of funds. The panel noted that the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress. The panel held that the transfer of funds violated the Appropriations Clause, and, therefore, was unlawful.

… The Federal Defendants cite drug trafficking statistics, but fail to address how the construction of additional physical barriers would further the interdiction of drugs. The Executive Branch’s failure to show, in concrete terms, that the public interest favors a border wall is particularly significant given that Congress determined fencing to be a lower budgetary priority and the Department of Justice’s own data points to a contrary conclusion.

and Trump’s push to invalidate ObamaCare

The Justice Department has filed a brief in a case about ObamaCare that the Supreme Court will decide in its next term. It argues that the whole law is unconstitutional, and would have the immediate effect of throwing tens of millions of people off of their health insurance, as well as making tens of millions of other people worry about their pre-existing conditions.

Naturally, Trump claims these horrible outcomes would never really come to pass, because once ObamaCare has been tossed aside he will finally reveal the magic replacement plan he has been talking about for five years without revealing any details.

In his entire first term, we have seen no sign of the “beautiful” health plan that Trump promised would replace ObamaCare, the one that would “cover everybody” and leave nobody worse off financially.

By now it should be obvious that Trump never had a plan; he was just stringing words together. Republicans in general have no plan. That became obvious when they tried to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare in 2017. “Replace” was just a word that polled well; it meant nothing.

If Trump gets his wish and the Supreme Court invalidates ObamaCare, no fairy godmother will tap a pumpkin and turn it into a Republican healthcare plan. ObamaCare will just be gone and nothing will replace it until Democrats get back in power.

BTW: If you’re a young person who has recovered from Covid-19, or who imagines that recovering from it would be no big deal: Decades from now, you would still have a pre-existing condition. Your insurance company might point to any subtle scarring on your lungs or other long-term organ damage as a reason not to cover whatever health problem you might have then.

Biden responded to Trump’s attack on ObamaCare with a good speech on health care.

and DC statehood

The House voted to make Washington D. C. a state. The bill is expected to go nowhere in the Senate and Trump has promised to veto it.

This is a voter suppression issue. The District of Columbia has a population over 700K, which makes it bigger than Wyoming or Vermont, and not far behind Alaska and North Dakota. But DC is 49% black and only 44% white. It would be a reliably blue state with two Democratic senators and a congressperson. (Let’s not even get into Puerto Rico, which would be the 31st-largest state, between Utah and Iowa. But, I mean, they’re Puerto Ricans! Can’t give them a say in how the national government is run.)

It doesn’t take much interpretation to see that the Republican opponents are saying those people shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Here’s Mitch McConnell:

They plan to make the District of Columbia a state—that’d give them two new Democratic senators—Puerto Rico a state, that would give them two more new Democratic senators. […] So this is full bore socialism on the march in the House. And yeah, as long as I’m the majority leader of the Senate, none of that stuff is going anywhere.

Socialism on the march … yeah, it must have been Karl Marx who described governments as “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed“.

And Tom Cotton:

Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but it has three times as many workers in mining, logging and construction, and ten times as many workers in manufacturing. In other words, Wyoming is a well-rounded working-class state.

So people in Wyoming work for a living, unlike all those bureaucrats and welfare mothers in DC. The WaPo’s Karen Tumulty responds.

Wyoming is an interesting example. Nearly half of Wyoming’s territory is federal acreage — a much higher proportion than in the District (less than one-third). And among states, Wyoming ranks top in the nation when it comes to the percentage of its workforce employed by federal or local governments.

Which makes you wonder what, precisely, is the senator’s criterion for deeming a group of people “well-rounded.”

Cotton also raised the argument that the kind of people who live in DC are just not ready for self-government.

Would you trust Mayor Bowser to keep Washington safe if she were given the powers of a governor? Would you trust Marion Barry?

Why not just go ahead and use the N-word, Tom? You know you want to.

you also might be interested in …

The New York Times does a great job of annotating video to show how police over-reaction in Seattle turned a peaceful demonstration into a violent encounter.

It looks like Mississippi is going to remove the Confederate stars-and-bars from the state flag.

#ByeIvanka is a bit harsh, but you have to wonder at the administration’s decision to make her the face of skills-based hiring. The implication seems clear: The federal government is doing away with “outdated career or licensure requirements” so that it can hire more relatives of well-connected people.

I’ve written before about defunding the police: It makes sense to divert some large portion of local police-department budgets to fund other kinds of first-responders, who can answer 911 calls that don’t require guns or handcuffs, like marital disputes or mental health problems. Those incidents might get handled better, and fewer people will wind up dead.

However, we need to watch out for a trap: The Covid-19 crisis and the ensuing economic collapse have made a shambles of local budgets; expenses are up and revenues are down. There’s going to be pressure to cut across the board, including laying off teachers and not fixing potholes.

In this environment, the path of least resistance is to substantially cut the police budget, as protesters have been demanding, but not to fund any alternative first-responders. That scenario looks like the nightmare painted by right-wing critics of police defunding — you call 911 and no one answers. When that turns out badly, as is bound to happen somewhere, it will be easy to convince the public that the defund-the-police approach has been tried and discredited.

and let’s close with a marching tune

“March, March” from the trio formerly known as The Dixie Chicks. Here are the lyrics.

This week the number of new Covid-19 infections spiked up to even higher levels than before the shutdown. Other governments have avoided this scenario, but ours has no plan for dealing with it.

What if we have a crisis? In one of the less-noticed parts of John Bolton’s new book, Chief of Staff John Kelly complains that he is frustrated to the point of quitting. “What if we have a real crisis like 9/11,” Kelly asks Bolton, “with the way he makes decisions?”

As Bolton — like so many other former Trump insiders before him — demonstrates with numerous examples, “the way he makes decisions” is to start from a place of complete ignorance. (Prior to his ill-fated Helsinki meeting with Putin, he asked aides whether Finland was part of Russia. He also seemed not to know that the United Kingdom has nuclear weapons.) Then he ignores the briefings that come from the intelligence community or other government experts, and doesn’t ask for any studies or position papers from people the government employs to do research like that. Instead, he spends hours each day talking to friends on the phone and listening to the pundits on Fox News. If he hears something he likes, maybe that becomes government policy immediately, or maybe it turns into a line he uses at rallies. If the rally-goers cheer, then that’s what the world’s greatest superpower will do.

If you think there ought to be a more rigorous process than that, you must be part of the Deep State.

This is how we got the border wall project. No one who studies border security for a living ever concluded that a wall between the US and Mexico was the most efficient way to accomplish some desirable goal. But Trump’s 2016 campaign advisers decided he needed a “mnemonic device” to get him to focus on immigration. Any realistic plan to deal with unwanted border-crossings is full of the kind of legal, diplomatic, environmental, and other details Trump hates, but “Build a Wall” was simple enough to hold in his head, and the crowds loved it — especially when he added the fantasy that Mexico would pay for it.

Those cheering crowds are why some adviser’s mnemonic device is turning into a physical wall that takes years to build, costs billions of dollars, and doesn’t solve any identifiable problems. We just lucked out that Trump wasn’t still holding rallies when the inject-yourself-with-bleach idea got into his head.

Own-goal crises. The reason Bolton and Kelly were having a what-if conversation rather than recalling an actual disaster is that until that point the United States had been having an extraordinary run of good luck. You may remember these last three-plus years as a high-wire state of constant national anxiety, but in fact the real world was unusually tame. Barack Obama had handed Trump a country in pretty good shape, particularly compared to the one Obama had received from George W. Bush. All the major economic trends were in the right direction, Obama’s light-footprint strategy to defeat the ISIS caliphate was working, and so on. Obama did leave behind a number of worrisome long-term challenges, like climate change, the ascension of China, nuclear proliferation, the decades-long decline of America’s middle class, and so on. But no one really expected Trump to make progress on any of that, and on any given day all those problems have been pretty easy to ignore.

Instead, what made the pre-Covid Trump years feel so tense were the crises Trump created himself: He ratcheted up his “fire and fury” rhetoric against North Korea to the point that war seemed inevitable, and then arranged a marvelous reality-show resolution when he “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un, a performance so compelling that Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize for it. Of course, nothing was actually accomplished by the whole up-and-down cycle (other than some great propaganda for the Kim regime), but didn’t it look grand on TV?

The low points in his approval rating were similarly self-inflicted: when he described the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville as “fine people” or sided with Putin against the US intelligence agencies or couldn’t let go of a spat with a military widow. His China trade war spooked the markets and slowed the economy, but that was also something he brought on himself, so he could create good news whenever he wanted by tweeting about “progress” in the negotiations or delaying some tariff he had threatened to impose unilaterally.

Since those were all holes he dug himself, he could just stop digging, divert the public’s attention elsewhere, and wait for it all to blow over. Easy-peasy.

And then there was the ever-rising budget deficit, which would have been framed as an existential crisis for Obama, but became acceptable once a Republican was in the White House.

Before Covid, Trump only had to face two truly external problems: impeachment and his complete botch of the federal response to the Puerto Rican hurricane. Impeachment was never a big worry for two reasons: First, no matter how guilty he was, the Republican Senate was never going to convict him. (In the end, they decided that the House’s evidence wasn’t good enough to remove a president chosen by 46% of the people, and that if there was better evidence, they didn’t want to see it.) And second, the underlying offense (the extortion of Ukraine) didn’t really matter to Trump’s base. As for the Puerto Rican hurricane, well, that mainly affected Spanish-speaking people of color that the Trump base also didn’t care about. (Yeah, thousands of them are dead, but it’s not like they were ever “real Americans”, right?)

The virus is real. But Covid is different. There’s a real virus out there killing people. It can’t be intimidated by tweets or derogatory nicknames like “Wuhan virus” or “kung flu”. Even though it has been killing people of color at a rate disproportionate to their numbers, it kills white people too. And now it’s even spreading in red states (Texas) or purple states (Florida) that Trump needs to carry if he wants to be re-elected.

Trump has no plan to defeat the virus, but that’s par for the course. He doesn’t have a plan to deal with any of America’s problems. For example, he’s still promising a “FAR BETTER AND MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE ALTERNATIVE” to ObamaCare, and to “ALWAYS PROTECT PEOPLE WITH PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS,ALWAYS!!!” But in the five years since he came down the escalator, he has not produced so much as a back-of-the-envelope sketch of a program to deliver on such promises. I’m sure the words in those capitalized phrases sound good to him and his fans, but as soon as the sound waves fade out the air is empty again.

Like his bromance with the North Korean dictator, Trump’s coronavirus briefings also made good TV for a while, but eventually they became embarrassing and he got bored with them. So he applied his usual crisis-control tactic: He congratulated himself for defeating the virus, which is “dying out“; flattered or browbeat Republican governors to reopen their states too early; stopped talking about the whole crisis, even as additional thousands of Americans continued to die each week; tried to divert our attention elsewhere; and waited for it all to blow over.

But here’s the thing: Reality doesn’t blow over. Covid-19 isn’t a PR flap or a misstep he can back away from, it’s a pandemic. For a short time, he may be able to get large segments of the public to “ignore that pile of dead bodies over in the corner” (as Bill Gates put it), but people keep dying even when everyone’s looking the other way, and eventually we start to notice again.

Comparisons. Covid-19 started out in China in December, and from there spread around the world, taking different courses in different countries. Some small countries with good leadership and a strong public spirit — New Zealand, Iceland, and South Korea pop to mind — reacted quickly, got the epidemic under control, and continue to hold it in check through a combination of testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and public cooperation in preventive measures like mask-wearing, hand-washing, and social distancing.

A number of EU countries, beginning with Italy, had really bad outbreaks, but then shut down just about all activities other than food distribution and medical care, using their national wealth and strong social-welfare systems to keep individual and family budgets above water. After a month or two of extreme sacrifice, the number of new infections began to collapse, to the point that they can now make use of the tactics that the fast-reacting countries used.

And then there’s the United States, where Covid-19 became the kind of crisis Kelly had been worrying about. Here’s how our daily reported new infections compared with the EU and South Korea as of Saturday.

South Korea’s infections stayed down. The EU’s went up and came down. But in the United States infections went up, started to creep down a little, and then shot back up.

What did we do wrong? A lot of things. Thursday The New York Times presented an illuminating series of graphics describing about how the virus spread in the US.

At every crucial moment, American officials were weeks or months behind the reality of the outbreak. Those delays likely cost tens of thousands of lives.

A short list of early failings:

• The CDC’s initial set of test kits were faulty, and tests were not imported to fill the gap, resulting in what the NYT described as “the lost month“. This was both a CDC failure and a White House failure, because it’s the role of the White House to keep tabs on the workings of the government and intervene when something important is falling through the cracks in the system.
• As a result, the initial spread of the virus was grossly underestimated. The NYT article suggests that in mid-February, when the US had 15 known cases (that Trump said “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero“) there were actually around 2,000 cases spread across ten major cities.
• Unlike other countries, the US did not use its lead time to build its stockpile of masks and gowns for medical personnel, as detailed by HHS whistleblower Dr. Rick Bright.
• The federal government did not prepare the public for the sacrifices that would eventually be asked of it. Instead, officials from President Trump on down consistently reassured the public that the virus was “totally under control” and “the risk is low”.
• Trump began politicizing the virus response early, charging on March 9 that “The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant.”

By mid-March, states began to respond, with Republican Governor Mike DeWine shutting down schools in Ohio, Democrat Andrew Cuomo closing businesses in New York, and local health officials in six San Francisco Bay counties issuing a shelter-in-place order. A national campaign to “flatten the curve” began. Even Trump got on board for a month or so, rewriting history to claim: “I’ve always known this is a real, this is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Undermining the national will. The number of new cases reached an initial peak of 33,000-a-day in early-to-mid April and then began to slope downward. But unlike Europe, the United States lacked the national will to finish the job.

That failure came from the top. As soon as it was clear a peak had been reached, Trump began pressuring states to relax restrictions and reopen their economies without waiting to achieve the milestones listed in his administration’s own guidelines.

Trump encouraged armed demonstrators to intimidate state governments. When protesters with rifles came to the Michigan statehouse carrying signs saying “Tyrants get the rope”, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”. He also encouraged “liberators” in Virginia and Minnesota. Without once calling for the protesters to disarm, he tweeted:

The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.

Michigan more-or-less held firm, but Republican governors in red states knew they could not survive a Trump tweet storm and could benefit from White House photo ops. Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona began to open their economies without achieving the statistical milestones laid out by the CDC. When the Republican members of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court invalidated the Governor Ever’s stay-at-home order and plunged the state’s gradual-reopening plan into chaos, Trump was jubilant.

The Great State of Wisconsin, home to Tom Tiffany’s big Congressional Victory on Tuesday, was just given another win. Its Democrat Governor was forced by the courts to let the State Open. The people want to get on with their lives. The place is bustling!

Meanwhile, he was campaigning against wearing masks, which nearly all public health officials recommend when people are unable to maintain social distance. He mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask in public, and for “cowering in the basement” rather than holding face-to-face events. Trump refused to wear a mask while touring a mask factory in Arizona, even as “Live and Let Die” played on the sound system.

Long after it had become clear that the reopenings were premature and cases were spiking, Trump pushed to hold dangerous large-crowd events in Tulsa and Phoenix. (Fortunately for the nation, the crowd in Tulsa was not nearly so large as he had expected.) In Tulsa, he discounted the rising case numbers, arguing (falsely) that they just reflect increased testing, and offering a 10-year-old with “sniffles” as an example of a case. He said he had asked his administration to “slow down the testing”, and later contradicted aides who tried to downplay that suggestion as a joke. “I don’t kid,” he told reporters.

This anti-social leadership has had its effect: Around the country outraged people, many sporting MAGA hats or Trump shirts, are refusing to abide by rules that mandate mask-wearing or social distancing. Michelle Goldberg summarizes:

This is what American exceptionalism looks like under Donald Trump. It’s not just that the United States has the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths of any country in the world. Republican political dysfunction has made a coherent campaign to fight the pandemic impossible.

The viral resurgence. New infections have been rising sharply in precisely the southern and western states that have reopened quickly, refuting the theory (which Trump had long promoted) that the pandemic would fade in warm weather. Nationally, cases had flattened out at less than 20,000 per day in late May and early June. But they have been above 38,000 each of the last five days.

On the state level, the best measure for comparison is the 7-day-weighted-average of new cases per day per 100K people. Here are the most seriously affected states:

Arizona 44

Florida 30

South Carolina 25

Mississippi 23

Arkansas 20

Louisiana 20

Nevada 19

Texas 19

California also has an large number of cases, due partially to its size. Its daily-new-case-per-100K number is 12. New York, which was the center of the epidemic in April, is down to 3.

And as for Trump’s attempt to discount those numbers, 10-year-olds with “sniffles” don’t show up in the ICU. Hospitals are reportedly close to capacity in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and perhaps other states getting less national attention.

The Washington Post assesses what went wrong in Arizona:

At critical junctures, blunders by top officials undermined faith in the data purportedly driving decision-making, according to experts monitoring Arizona’s response. And when forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.

And now, Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even by hard-hit Brazil. Among states with at least 20 people hospitalized for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, no state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day.

And Republican governors or not, Texas, Florida, and Arizona have all had to retreat on their reopening timetables.

Deaths haven’t turned back up yet, but they will. The one saving grace is that nationally, deaths are still declining. For weeks I’ve been commenting on the mystery of how the death rate could continue downward while the new-case rate flattened and then turned upward.

Med school Professor Florian Krammer points to the same three explanations I’ve given: more testing has raised the new-case rate (or more accurately, made it better match the actual spread of the infection); better care is keeping people alive; but most of all, that the age-distribution of the infected population is shifting to younger people who are more likely to survive.

But he then goes one step further: Something similar happened in Iran in May. The new-case curve had been dropping, but started going up again around May 1.

But deaths did not go up. People explained to me, that now mostly young people are getting infected so nothing bad would happen.

Deaths started going up May 25.

What happened? First, it takes time to die of COVID-19. Second, cases probably really built up in younger people. But they diffuse into older populations. And then the deaths rose.

Each state has its own version of the pandemic, and death rates might already have started upward in some of them, like Arkansas and Texas. (The curves are jittery enough that it’s hard to be sure.) But nationwide, the new-case curve started rising around June 10. That would suggest deaths will begin rising about July 4.

Similar ideas (with a similar timeline) show up on the COVID Tracking Project Blog.

New daily positive cases only began to exceed the plateau of the previous two weeks around June 18-19, which means that an increase in deaths as a result of the rise in new cases would not be expected to show up until July.

So where are we? In some ways, we’re back where we were in April, and in some ways we’re worse off. Except in the northeast, whatever we gained through the sacrifices of the shutdown has been frittered away by bad leadership.

So now John Kelly knows: What happens if we have a real crisis “with the way he makes decisions”? This.

What is needed at this point is another wave of restrictions, and every state that thinks it is about to reopen its bars or arenas needs to think again. The American people can’t be trusted in bars; that is now a proven fact, at least until we have a vaccine. But a second wave of stay-at-home orders is hard to feature given that most of the country has nothing to show for the first wave.

We also need the kind of public spirit we had in the early days of “flatten the curve”: We need to encourage each other to wear masks, avoid crowds, keep our distance, and in general use common sense. Unfortunately, this is very unlikely to happen now that flouting common sense is necessary to establish your identity as a Trump conservative.

As best I can tell, this hasn’t happened in any other country (except maybe Brazil, which is also in very bad shape). Things got bad in Italy and Spain, but taking stupid risks never became a political identity.

And that reminds me of another famous question, this one raised by Trump himself in the 2016 campaign. “What the hell do you have to lose?”

Now we know.

So I was off for a week. Did I miss anything?

Two weeks ago, the rise in Covid-19 cases nationally was still debatable, and even the outbreaks in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas could be optimistically interpreted as blips that happened to coincide, but didn’t necessarily add up to a trend. Now it’s clear we’re back in the soup nationally, and it’s the Northeast, where cases are still flat or declining, that looks like the anomaly.

In some ways, we’re worse off now, because the President is AWOL, the federal government has no plan, and common-sense measures the public needs to take — like mask-wearing and avoiding crowds — have turned into culture-war issues. Instead of leading a patriotic response to the virus, the President is out there promoting anti-social anti-public-health activities like large-scale political rallies. All the expense and sacrifice of the lockdown seems to have been wasted, except in the Northeast and a few counties near San Francisco.

Lots of other stuff has been happening, but that’s the most serious development, which I’ll discuss in “Back to Square One”, which might not be out until 11 EDT. The weekly summary then somehow has to cover the revelation that Putin offered bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan (and Trump has done nothing about it), the ongoing story of the corruption of the Justice Department, the huge lead Joe Biden is building in the polls, Trump’s push to get the Supreme Court to invalidate ObamaCare, and DC statehood. I’ll try to find space to mention Mississippi changing its flag and an appeals court ruling against Trump’s border-wall emergency, which might have been lead stories in more normal times. And then I’ll close with a new video by The [formerly known as Dixie] Chicks.

Let’s predict that to appear around 1.

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on June 29.

Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.  … Ignorance/hate → racist ideas → discrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship — racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate.

– Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning

This week’s featured post is “What’s in a Slogan?”

This week everybody was still talking about policing

The featured post discusses the “Abolish the Police” slogan.

With the George Floyd protests still continuing, there’s been a new police killing:

Rayshard Brooks, 27, was shot dead on Friday night after police were called to [a Wendy’s in Atlanta] over reports that he had fallen asleep in the drive-through lane.

Apparently Brooks failed a sobriety test and struggled with police. He grabbed a police taser and was running away with it when a policeman opened fire. The NYT reconstructs the incident in detail from video.

In addition to the question of why it was necessary to shoot a man who was running away, the case illustrates some of the issues that abolish-the-police activists have been raising: Yes, falling asleep in a drive-through lane is a violation of public order. But why is sending people with guns the right response?

Demonstrations in the US have inspired anti-racism demonstrations overseas. Thousands of Germans formed a ribbon-connected “socially distant human chain” in Berlin on Sunday. And here’s a quote that brings me shame: A German politician says the demonstrators have it wrong. “Germany is not the USA. We don’t have a racism problem in the police.” We’re the nation other nations don’t want to be compared to.

Charles Blow reviews the positive imagery we have seen since the death of George Floyd, images in which people of all colors and ethnicities seem united in their response to police brutality and racial injustice. But the police are not the cause of injustice, racial or otherwise. They are the enforcers of systemic injustices that continue.

This country has established a system of supreme inequity, with racial inequity being a primary form, and used the police to protect the wealth that the system generated for some and to control the outrages and outbursts of those opposed to it and oppressed by it.

It has used the police to make the hostile tranquil, to erase and remove from free society those who expressed sickness coming from a society which poisoned them with persecutions. …

But just remember: These are not necessarily rogue officers. They are instruments of the system and manifestations of society.

They are violent to black people because America is violent to black people. They oppress because America oppresses.

The police didn’t give birth to American violence and inhumanity. America’s violence and inhumanity gave birth to them.

The point of books like The New Jim Crow and Slavery by Another Name is that systems for controlling black people and expropriating the value of their labor don’t just morph from era to era, they morph cleverly. In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi argues that new racist ideas don’t bubble up from the ignorant masses, they are constructed by some of the most brilliant and educated minds of the time.

Any system of inequality requires justification and enforcement. If you have more than someone else or enjoy privileges they are denied, you crave an explanation that exonerates you from their resentment and protects your advantages. Some intelligent person will soon satisfy that craving with the justification and enforcement mechanism required. Like junkies determined to kick our current habit, we must be careful not to just shift to a new drug.

and the virus

Death totals continue to decline, while the number of new cases is at best flat and possibly increasing. The total number of US deaths is up to 117.9K, up from 112.6 last week.

The contrast between cases and deaths is even more pronounced in certain states. Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and a few other states now have more proven new cases each day than ever before — more than double in Arizona — but they had more deaths per day in early May.

I can think of a few possible explanations:

• Even though there’s still no sure-fire treatment for Covid-19, doctors are getting better at keeping people alive long enough for their immune systems to beat the virus.
• Maybe we’re getting better at protecting the most vulnerable. Perhaps the new cases are mostly young otherwise-healthy people, so they’re dying at a lower rate.
• Because there was less testing in early May, maybe there were more infections then than anyone realized.

In any case, unless there’s some breakthrough in treatment, this pattern can’t go on forever. If cases keep increasing, eventually deaths will start increasing too.

In case you’re wondering how to stay safe when your office reopens, Mike Pence has provided us with a great don’t-do-this photo.

Thanks to Trump campaign staffers in Virginia, we can see all the major no-nos in one picture: enclosed spaces, large numbers of people in one room, and standing close to people not wearing masks.

Trump intends to give us another bad example: A big indoor rally in Tulsa on Saturday. Originally the rally was scheduled for Friday, which is Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. Tulsa would be a particularly bad place to mark Juneteenth, given the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, where whites burned a prosperous black neighborhood to the ground and killed hundreds of African Americans.

Eventually, Trump backed off of the Juneteenth date. Instead, the rally will happen on Saturday, with crowds packed together indoors and probably very few masks. But the Trump campaign has thought about this and taken precautions to protect itself:

“By clicking register below, you are acknowledging that an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present,” the disclaimer reads at the bottom of the ticket page on the Trump website. “By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or injury.”

and the Supreme Court

I haven’t had time to read the decision or even digest the news stories, but CNN is reporting this:

Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.

The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices.

Gorsuch is the shocker here. I don’t know what to think.

and symbols of the Confederacy

160 years ago, the white aristocracy of 11 states led them into revolt to preserve their mastery over millions of enslaved Africans. That revolt led to a war in which more than 600,000 soldiers died. Today, those wealthy traitors are honored in numerous ways, such as flying their flag, honoring their statues, and immortalizing their names by attaching them to military bases, schools, and other civic institutions. Descendants of the enslaved people are constantly reminded of the slavers who expropriated their ancestors’ labor, and of the continuing legacy of white supremacy.

You’d think that changing all this would be uncontroversial, but you’d be wrong. Still, one result of the wave of protests that followed George Floyd’s murder has been a further erosion of the honors devoted to the Confederacy.

• Protesters in Richmond toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis. Governor Northam announced that a statue of Robert E. Lee owned by the state will also be removed.
• The mayor of Birmingham pledged to finish removing a statue of Confederate sailor Charles Linn that protesters attacked. Birmingham has tried to remove Confederate statues in the past, but the state legislature passed a law blocking the city. The mayor is daring the state to enforce its law.
• NASCAR announced: “The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties.” The policy came in response to a request from the racing circuit’s only African American full-time driver, Bubba Wallace. NASCAR has requested that fans not bring Confederate flags since 2015, but some have continued to do so.
• Wednesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved Elizabeth Warren’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The amendment would give the Defense Department three years to rename the military bases that currently are named after Confederate officers. “The language, adopted by voice vote as President Donald Trump preemptively threatened to veto any defense bill that did just that, affects massive bases like Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Benning in Georgia. But it also goes further and includes everything from ships to streets on Defense Department property.”
• Democrats in Congress have introduced a bill to remove statues of 11 Confederate generals and officials from the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes the bill because the choice of statues belongs to the states. (Each state gets two.) Apparently no Georgian in history is a more appropriate choice than Alexander Hamilton Stephens, the Confederate Vice President who gave the famous Cornerstone speech: “Stephens said the Confederacy was founded ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition’.”

I’m sure I missed some recent developments. The pro-Confederate (i.e., Republican) responses to these proposals has generally been that liberals are trying to “take away our history“, or that next we will have to remove monuments to all slave-owning or otherwise objectionable figures.

My answer to the “rewrite history” objection is that there’s a difference between marking history and making heroes out of the defenders of slavery. If “history” is the point of monuments, then there ought to be a gigantic monument to General Sherman in Atlanta: He was one of the Civil War’s greatest generals, and his victory in Atlanta was a decisive moment in the war. There isn’t such a monument because Atlanta’s white population hates Sherman for his role in burning the city. And yet, the South’s black population is supposed to tolerate monuments to men who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved.

Andrew Egger answers the next-they’ll-come-for-George-Washington objection.

There’s a world of difference between purging monuments to anyone with a complicated history (FDR, Wilson, Jefferson) and purging monuments to those who are *only deemed historical* for acts we now correctly deem shameful. What did Nathan Bedford Forrest ever do for America?

If, say, Robert E. Lee had never fought to preserve slavery, would anyone remember him today? Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. George Washington led the revolutionary forces and was a key figure in establishing a government that followed its constitution. But what accomplishment of Jefferson Davis is unrelated to slavery?

Vote Vets has this to say about military bases like Fort Bragg.

and Antifa

We’re getting a lesson in just how far Trumpists are willing to go to justify his paranoid rants. The local news site Columbus Alive tells the wild story of how a busload of traveling street performers got “outed” by Columbus Police as Antifa provocateurs.

The police reported finding knives (kitchen knives), a hatchet (for the wood stove), and clubs (juggling clubs). The police social media post — with a picture of the decorated bus — got shared thousands of times, and the performers are now constantly being hassled by Trumpists who think they’ve found Antifa.

Another set of paranoid rants concerns the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (formerly the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) in Seattle. It’s a six-block area that has been taken over by protesters, and which state and local officials have decided to tolerate. Thursday, Trump tweeted this threat:

Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!

Trump’s propagandists have been working hard to demonize the CHOP ever since. The Seattle Times explains:

Fox News published digitally altered and misleading photos on stories about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in what photojournalism experts called a clear violation of ethical standards for news organizations.

In one photo of a gateway to the CHOP, Fox digitally inserted an image of a guard armed with a military-style weapon. After the Times called them on it, Fox took down the faked image.

In addition, Fox’s site for a time on Friday ran a frightening image of a burning city, above a package of stories about Seattle’s protests, headlined “CRAZY TOWN.” The photo actually showed a scene from St. Paul, Minnesota, on May 30. That image also was later removed.

After Trump promoted the notion that the elderly man assaulted by Buffalo police was actually an Antifa provocateur, the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri assembled the warning signs that your grandparent is a secret Antifa agent. The most telling:

She belongs to a decentralized group with no leadership structure that claims to be discussing a “book,” but no one ever reads the book and all they seem to do is drink wine.

Is always talking on the phone with an “aunt” you have never actually met in person. Aunt TIFA????

Always walking into rooms and claiming not to know why he walked into the room. Likely.

Suddenly, for no reason, will appear or pretend to be asleep.

Remembers things from the past in incredible, exhausting detail, but recent ones only sporadically? Cover of some kind.

Antifa is everywhere and nowhere. (Well, mostly nowhere, but never mind.) We can’t be too careful.

but we should pay more attention to the International Criminal Court

The US has long had a problem with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. US officials don’t want to give the ICC jurisdiction to prosecute incidents that it might see as US war crimes in places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

The Trump administration has just escalated that conflict considerably.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday sanctioning members of the International Criminal Court, the global judicial body investigating American troops for possible war crimes during the Afghanistan war.

The provocative move targets court staff involved in the probe, as well as their families, blocking them from accessing assets held in US financial institutions and from visiting America. Top members of the Trump administration — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper — made the announcement with surprisingly forceful language to make their point.

“We cannot allow ICC officials and their families to come to the United States to shop, travel, and otherwise enjoy American freedoms as these same officials seek to prosecute the defenders of those very freedoms,” Pompeo, a former Army officer, told reporters without taking questions.

and the Flynn case

Remember where we are and how we got here: Trump’s then-National-Security-Adviser, Michael Flynn, lied to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador during the transition period. He pleaded guilty to that crime, but his sentencing was delayed until he had assisted the government in other cases.

Somewhere along the line, he stopped cooperating and moved to withdraw his guilty plea. Then the Justice Department tried to drop the indictment — after the prosecutors who had been on the case from the beginning withdrew.

The Justice Department has total discretion about who it decides to prosecute, but once a case goes to court, withdrawing the indictment requires “consent of the court”, i.e., of the judge. The judge in this case wasn’t inclined to rubber-stamp either the Justice Department’s motion or Flynn’s motion to withdraw his guilty plea. (It is highly unusual to withdraw a guilty plea after the sentencing process has started.) So Judge Emmet Sullivan appointed a retired judge, John Gleeson, to argue why the charges should not be dismissed. That report is now in, and it is truly damning.

Gleeson argues that the Justice Department’s explanations for wanting to dismiss the charges are just pretexts that are not credible. (For example, the Department now claims it doubts it can prove a charge that Flynn has already confessed to under oath.)

The reasons offered by the Government are so irregular, and so obviously pretextual, that they are deficient. Moreover, the facts surrounding the filing of the Government’s motion constitute clear evidence of gross prosecutorial abuse. They reveal an unconvincing effort to disguise as legitimate a decision to dismiss that is based solely on the fact that Flynn is a political ally of President Trump. …

The Executive Branch had the unreviewable discretion to never charge Flynn with a crime because he is a friend and political ally of President Trump. President Trump today has the unreviewable authority to issue a pardon, thus ensuring that Flynn is no longer prosecuted and never punished for his crimes because he is a friend and political ally. But the instant the Executive Branch filed a criminal charge against Flynn, it forfeited the right to implicate this Court in the dismissal of that charge simply because Flynn is a friend and political ally of the President. Avoiding precisely that unseemly outcome is why Rule 48(a) requires “leave of court.”

Flynn and the Justice Department have tried to get an appeals court to intervene and prevent Judge Sullivan from looking into the Justice Department’s motives. So far, it looks like the appeals court wants to see the lower-court process conclude before weighing in.

Flynn, meanwhile, published a head-scratching op-ed in The Western Journal on Thursday. His opening line says America is at a “seminal moment” that will “test every fiber of our nation’s soul”. He then has several paragraphs about God and prayer and freedom, and denounces the “tyranny and treachery” that are “in our midst”. But through it all he never says anything specific enough to allow me to figure out what he’s talking about. Then he concludes:

As long as we accept God in the lifeblood of our nation, we will be OK. If we don’t, we will face a hellish existence. I vote we accept God.

Digby pronounces it “batshit crazy“, and I can’t really argue. If you can make any sense out of it, leave a comment.

and you also might be interested in …

Trump gave his West Point graduation speech. It was a boiler-plate graduation speech: You’re great; your school’s great; your parents and teachers have done a great job; you’ll go on to do great things. Why this had to happen in person during a pandemic is still mysterious.

A couple of odd motions during his West Point appearance started speculation about Trump’s health.

The Atlantic’s David Graham reports on how much money — campaign money and tax money alike — is being spent just to make Trump feel better about his situation. For example, the campaign has been running ads on cable news shows in the D.C. area. This makes no political sense, since D. C. and Maryland are not swing states, and the northern suburbs of Virginia (which probably isn’t a swing state any more either) aren’t where Trump needs to turn out his voters. Obviously, the campaign is running those ads so that Trump himself will see them, and feel like his campaign is out there defending him.

If, like me, you’ve lost track of all the places the US has troops, it turns out that the President is supposed to keep Congress informed about that. Here’s the latest letter, sent Tuesday.

and let’s close with a Confederate general worth commemorating

The founder of Dogpatch: Jubilation T. Cornpone. If you want to know his legend, listen to this number from the 1959 musical Li’l Abner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

So far, Covid-19 has been characterized more by what we don’t know than what we do. That has allowed reporters to write either scary or reassuring articles, depending on what they assume about the unknown. This week I went looking for articles that give the unknown its due respect, and explain a lot of the artifacts in the data that might look like trends, but aren’t.

A good place to start is Ed Yong’s “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing” in The Atlantic.

Terminology: “SARS-CoV-2 is the virus. COVID-19 is the disease that it causes.” It’s like HIV and AIDS. The epidemic — how the disease develops in a community — is yet a third thing.

The fatality rate isn’t a property of the virus. The reason the death rate (or case-fatality rate or CFR) is so hard to pin down is that it only becomes an objective quantity — number of deaths divided by number of cases — in retrospect. The CFR describes how the epidemic unfolded in a particular place; it’s not some inherent property of the virus.

The CFR’s denominator—total cases—depends on how thoroughly a country tests its population. Its numerator—total deaths—depends on the spread of ages within that population, the prevalence of preexisting illnesses, how far people live from hospitals, and how well staffed or well equipped those hospitals are. These factors vary among countries, states, and cities, and the CFR will, too.

We’re not really sure how the virus causes the symptoms of the disease. We know what a human body looks like after Covid-19 has attacked it. We’re not sure how to separate that into (1) damage the virus does, (2) collateral damage the immune system’s response causes, and (3) side effects of treatment.

The disease seems to wreak havoc not only on lungs and airways, but also on hearts, blood vessels, kidneys, guts, and nervous systems. It’s not clear if the virus is directly attacking these organs, if the damage stems from a bodywide overreaction of the immune system, if other organs are suffering from the side effects of treatments, or if they are failing due to prolonged stays on ventilators.

Others viruses might also have more wide-ranging effects than we know, but we just haven’t seen enough cases to notice them.

“Is COVID-19 fundamentally different to other diseases, or is it just that you have a lot of cases at once?” asks Vinay Prasad, a hematologist and an oncologist at Oregon Health and Science University.

Science doesn’t go straight to the right answer. The back-and-forth nature of the early scientific debate (asymptomatic people can’t spread the disease; yes they can) throws a lot of people, but it’s not that unusual.

This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”

The upshot is that if your whole view of the virus depends on one study by one lab, you should maybe take a wider look.

Uncertainty is a strength, not a weakness. In politics, the guy who is loudest and most sure of himself tends to win the argument. But expertise doesn’t work that way; real experts understand just how far their expertise goes, and recognize past some point, other kinds of expertise become more important.

The idea that there are no experts is overly glib. The issue is that modern expertise tends to be deep, but narrow. Even within epidemiology, someone who studies infectious diseases knows more about epidemics than, say, someone who studies nutrition. But pandemics demand both depth and breadth of expertise. To work out if widespread testing is crucial for controlling the pandemic, listen to public-health experts; to work out if widespread testing is possible, listen to supply-chain experts. To determine if antibody tests can tell people if they’re immune to the coronavirus, listen to immunologists; to determine if such testing is actually a good idea, listen to ethicists, anthropologists, and historians of science. No one knows it all, and those who claim to should not be trusted.

In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole.

The flu comparison is even less appropriate than the numbers make it sound. In Scientific American, Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust concludes that the comparisons we hear about flu deaths vs. Covid-19 deaths are misguided.

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

He began asking other emergency-medicine doctors, and found that their memories match his. They remember lots of opioid deaths, gun deaths, and traffic-accident deaths — which are supposed to happen in similar numbers — but not flu deaths. Flu death totals, he came to understand, are not counted deaths — deaths of particular people whose doctors write “influenza” on their death certificates — they’re extrapolations based on models. The models assume that many people die of the flu outside of hospitals, and aren’t officially counted.

In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which [is] far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

In other words, (and I’m commenting here, not quoting or summarizing Dr. Faust) the flu death totals we usually hear are more comparable to the Covid-19 death totals we’re starting to get from excess-death demographic models — which show much higher numbers than the 65,000+ you commonly see reported. But if we compare counted Covid-19 deaths during the second week of April to counted flu deaths during the worst week of an outbreak “we find that the novel coronavirus killed between 9.5 and 44 times more people than seasonal flu”.

What happened in Belgium? If you study those country-by-country death totals, the one that always stands out is Belgium, which has 677 deaths per million compared the US’s 204 or Italy’s 475. What horrible lesson, you might wonder, should we learn from Belgium’s disastrous handling of the epidemic?

Maybe none.

Belgium’s high numbers have less to do with the spread of the disease and more to do with the way it counts fatalities. Its figures include all the deaths in the country’s more than 1,500 nursing homes, even those untested for the virus. These numbers add up to more than half of the overall figure.

The curve has flattened, but hasn’t turned downward much yet. Check out the Washington Post’s graphs of deaths and new cases per day. The peak in deaths was 2,874 on April 21 (assuming we ignore April 14, when New York City created a blip by reclassifying 3,700  previous deaths). But deaths have been in the neighborhood of 2,000 a day for the last two weeks. Trends are harder to detect due to a Sunday/Monday effect, when deaths are lower for some reason I don’t understand. (Sunday April 26 had “only” 1,087 deaths, but yesterday had 1,558.)

The numbers also depend to a certain extent on how they’re being collected. The WaPo numbers come from Johns Hopkins, and list 2,461 on Wednesday, 2,097 on Thursday, and 1,723 on Friday. But the WHO has a different way of collecting deaths and assigning them to days. They announced that 2,909 people died in the US on Thursday, a new high.

If you look at things Monday-to-Monday, as I do, there is a downward trend. 68K today, 55K last week, 40K and 22K the weeks before. So new deaths per week have gone from 18K to 15K to 13K.

As for where the numbers might be going next, 538 collects the projections of a variety of models about how many deaths we’ll see in the next three weeks. From the 65K deaths already recorded by May 1, some models predict as few as 72K deaths by May 23, others as many as 103K deaths. But if social distancing is abandoned too quickly and a second wave starts, all those projections go out the window.

When (and even whether) a vaccine shows up is anybody’s guess. A good summary here is Stuart Thompson’s article in Thursday’s NYT. If the normal vaccine-development timetable holds, a vaccine is years away, or maybe even decades. (There’s still no HIV vaccine, for example, after more than 30 years of looking for one.) But lots of things are being done to speed up the normal timetable, and maybe they’ll work.

There is a process to finding and producing a vaccine, but not one that can be easily predicted.

Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years — more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.

But if there was any time to fast-track a vaccine, it is now.

The main way you speed things up is that you do everything at once. Rather than take the most likely vaccine candidate, test it, and then test the next one after the first one fails, 95 different vaccines are being worked on at the same time. Some of them are probably very bad ideas.

What if a promising vaccine actually makes it easier to catch the virus, or makes the disease worse after someone’s infected? That’s been the case for a few H.I.V. drugs and vaccines for dengue fever, because of a process called vaccine-induced enhancement, in which the body reacts unexpectedly and makes the disease more dangerous.

That’s why you don’t just dream up a formula and start injecting it into the general public. Normally, there are three phases of testing, with time in between for analysis. But for Covid-19, you might start one phase before the previous one finishes. You also might start prepping a factory for production before you’re sure a vaccine works.

If you do all that and you get lucky, you might have a vaccine in mass production by August 2021.

The most aggressive timetable has been put forward by a group at Oxford, which is talking about availability in September, 2020. That would be a million doses, not the billions ultimately needed. But a lot has to go right before that happens. Human trials started this week. Right now all we know is that it works in rhesus macaques.

Whatever we’re returning to, it’s not “normal”. Another Atlantic article, Uri Friedman’s “I Have Seen the Future—And It’s Not the Life We Knew“, looks at the early signs of post-lockdown life in countries that are ahead of the US: China, South Korea, Denmark, and a few others. The very resemblance to normal enhances the strangeness of it.

In China, Friedman reports, reactions bifurcate as everyone anticipates the possibility of a second wave or a new plague. Some remain constantly on their guard, while others take a live-now approach: You’d better do whatever you can while you can, because it might all be taken away tomorrow. In general, the Chinese are saving more and spending less, frustrating planners who hope for a quick economic recovery.

Denmark seems to have the opposite problem: When the government reopened daycare centers and schools, many Danes took it as an all-clear signal. “[Just] because the schools open, doesn’t mean you should stop washing your hands,” says a University of Copenhagen professor.

Temperature screening at City Hall in Seoul

The NYT has a similar article:

In Hong Kong, tables at restaurants must be spaced at least five feet apart and customers are given bags to store their face masks during dining.

In China, students face temperature checks before they can enter schools, while cafeteria tables are outfitted with plastic dividers.

In South Korea, baseball games are devoid of fans and players can’t spit on the field.

… Libraries in Hong Kong are reopening, but visitors are allowed to be inside for only an hour at a time.

Hair salons in Sydney, some of which had closed because of the virus or financial pressures, are back in business with abundant supplies of masks and hand sanitizer. At some, magazines are no longer handed out to customers.

… In Sydney, schools are reopening in phases, holding classes one day a week for a quarter of the students from each grade and gradually expanding until the end of June.

We can hope that our opportunities increase over the coming months. But normal? Well, not exactly.

This week I want to focus more on what we do and don’t know about the virus and the pandemic, and less on the politics of it (though of course the politics can’t be ignored). So the featured post does not have “Trump” in the title, and may not mention him at all. He’ll turn up in the weekly summary, but there’s no need to dwell on him.

A lot of the articles that my social media universe brings to my attention express knowledge of one sort or another: The virus is like this; this tactic works and this one doesn’t; there will or won’t be a vaccine by such-and-such a time; this treatment is or isn’t a breakthrough; and so on. But I went looking for articles that give due respect to our ignorance, or that point to something we think we know, but really don’t. (Those stats people toss around about annual flu deaths aren’t nearly as solid as they look, for example.) And looking at countries that are ahead of us in dealing with the pandemic shows that whatever they are getting back to, it isn’t “normal” by any means. “Normal” is still quite a ways off, if we ever get there at all.

The point is not to cheer you up or get you down, it’s to build a stock of knowledge carefully, so that we don’t whipsaw back and forth between “It’s going to be OK” and “Millions of people will die.” Anyway, that should be out sometime this morning. (I’m being vague because I’m still making decisions about what’s in or out.)

The weekly summary will, of course, get into the politics of the lockdown, those armed yahoos trying to intimidate legislators, the accusation against Joe Biden and his response, the Republican president who did look like a statesman this week, and so on, before closing with a great piece of lockdown art: over 100 Julliard students, faculty, and alumni coming together virtually to play and dance their way through “Bolero”. When it came to my attention, I thought, “No way I’m watching the whole nine and a half minutes.” But I did.

I’ll try to get the summary out between noon and 1 EDT.

Due to recent speculation and social media activity, RB (the makers of Lysol and Dettol) has been asked whether internal administration of disinfectants may be appropriate for investigation or use as a treatment for coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).

— The Reckitt Benckiser Group

This week’s featured posts are “Why the Country Isn’t Rallying Around Trump’s Flag” and “Trump is Still Eating Souls“.

This week everybody was talking about states reopening

As I pointed out last week, no state truly fulfilled the criteria that the federal guidelines set out for beginning to roll back stay-at-home orders or other lockdown provisions. But Georgia allowed a variety of non-essential businesses, like barbers and nail salons, to open on Friday. Some of them did, but others decided not to. Restaurants and movie theaters will be allowed to open today.

A few other states are reopening a few types of businesses, and most states have announced a planning process that will lead to reopening at some undetermined future date.

Even if government allows it, reopening is a complex decision for a business to make. Of course you want to get your revenue stream started again. But are you telling your workers and your customers that you don’t care about their health? And if social distancing requires a restaurant to reduce its number of tables or a theater to reduce its seating, does its business model still work?

Everybody wants life to go back to normal, when you could go out to the mall without worrying about dying on a ventilator. But “back to normal” requires more than just unlocking the mall.

Also last week: I predicted that Trump would throw Republican governors under the bus. Thursday, a headline in the WaPo read: “Donald Trump Just Threw Georgia’s Governor Directly Under the Bus on Coronavirus“.

A reopen-the-economy protest in Arizona backfired when ICU nurse Lauren Leander showed up and silently observed. She was one of four healthcare workers at the rally. Healthcare workers have shown up at similar rallies around the country.

That poor guy with the flag, unable to intimidate one skinny little female. He’ll have to go home and order a big new gun to restore his manhood.

Congress passed another half-trillion in money for small businesses and hospitals. The one saving grace of Trump’s presidency is that deficits only matter when a Democrat is in office.

and the death totals rising

Friday, the United States recorded its 50,000th coronavirus death. This morning, we’re up to 990K cases and 55,506 deaths. That’s up from 40K deaths last Monday and 22K the week before. So the new deaths this week were slightly down, from 18K to 15K. Unless the trends slow down a lot faster, we’ll pass 60,000 deaths before the next Weekly Sift comes out on May 4.

If you remember, 60K has been tossed around as the likely total number of American deaths from this entire pandemic. That we’re sailing past it with considerable momentum should make everyone stop and think.

The IHME, [IHME Director Christopher Murray] said, will update its estimates next week to reflect a gloomier future amid indications that states like Georgia will begin to reopen — and boost the odds of a prolonged pandemic.

“We had presumed, perhaps naively, that given the magnitude of the epidemic, most states would stick to their social distancing until the end of May,” Murray said. “That is not happening.”

Another milestone likely to be passed in the next few days: 58,209, the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. We passed the Korean War total of 36,516 a week or so ago without much fanfare.

Confession time: I have been an economic pessimist for at least a year, so I happened to be in a relatively good position when the stock market collapsed. I lost money, of course, but I also had some cash to reinvest at the new low prices. I went looking for companies that would still be able to sell their products, and one I picked was Tyson Foods, the meat company. I was still buying chicken, so I figured everybody else must be also.

A couple weeks ago, when stories of the virus outbreaks at meat-packing plants started to surface, I realized that I had inadvertently joined the ranks of the villains: People were dying to make me money. Meat-packing plants are set up to crowd workers together, so if one of them gets sick, it spreads quickly.

So I sold the stock (at a profit, which feels weird). Anyway, yesterday Tyson took out full-page ads in major newspapers to emphasize how important it is to keep their plants open. They’re vital to the nation’s food supply and so on (which is true, but is only part of the picture). The letter from their chairman is very precisely worded, so he at least appears to care about the health and safety of his workers. But it’s hard not to be skeptical of lines like: “The government bodies at the national, state, and city levels must unite in a comprehensive, thoughtful, and productive way to allow our team members to work in safety without fear, panic, or worry.”

It kind of sounds like, “If we only kill a few workers, regulators should let us get away with it.”

From an editorial in National Catholic Reporter:

The question for the church in the United States is whether we will come out of this austere moment able to admit the role Catholics and their leaders played in electing and enabling a man who, far from being pro-life, has proven himself a distinct danger to life on several levels. …

This awful moment has laid bare the high cost to the U.S. church of 30 years or more of accommodation to a culture of political expediency and an attempt to diminish the community of faith’s responsibility to the common good. Single-issue voting relieved too many of us of the responsibility to engage deeper political and historical realities. The questions we’re left with are urgent.

The reckoning is upon us.

Dr. Fauci gets his wish: Brad Pitt plays him on SNL.

and injecting disinfectant

which you SHOULDN’T DO, under any circumstances. (Not that you ever would.)

In “Trump is Still Eating Souls“, I talked about the Thursday briefing where Trump suggested this, focusing not on why he said such a stupid thing (I think we all know the answer to that) but why none of the medical people corrected him before any damage was done.

If Republicans want to do some whataboutism here, they can point to stupid things Joe Biden has said, of which there are many (though I don’t remember any quite this bad). Words tend to pile up in Biden’s head, and sometimes they come out in an order that doesn’t make sense. Even Barack Obama, who generally thinks clearly on his feet and speaks off-the-cuff in well constructed paragraphs, once flubbed by saying he had visited “57 states“.

The difference is that Biden and Obama have enough strength of character to own up to their mistakes and laugh at themselves. (So could both Presidents Bush. It’s a character thing, not a red/blue thing.) So no Obama apologist had to argue that there really are 57 states, or deny what the tape clearly recorded, or insist that the President had intentionally exaggerated for effect. Instead, Obama confessed, “I understand I said there were 57 states today. It’s a sign that my numeracy is getting a little …” at which point an aide interrupted and ushered journalists out of the room.

But Thursday-into-Friday the White House and the entire Trump propaganda machine had to turn itself inside-out denying the obvious fact that the President had said something asinine and harmful. At first, Fox News just didn’t comment on it. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted that the media was to blame for taking Trump’s comments “out of context“. (They hadn’t.) Then Friday, Trump gaslighted the country: His suggestion was “sarcastic”, a sarcasm so subtle that no one — not Birx, not Bryan, not McEnany, not Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham — had recognized it up to that very moment.

But now that’s the official explanation, so all those whose souls Trump has eaten have to parrot it. If anybody says anything else, they are the ones who are being absurd. “How can any adult believe, seriously believe, that he was saying, ‘Hey, people should inject Clorox into their body’?” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld asked incredulously.

That’s how gaslighting works: How can any loyal subject truly believe that the Emperor is walking down the street naked? That’s just crazy.

If Trump’s “sarcasm” didn’t appeal to your sense of humor, try Randy Rainbow’s “A Spoonful of Clorox“. What have you got to lose?

And while we’re singing, here’s “The Liar Tweets Tonight“ by Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi, in collaboration with the Raging Grannies of Mendocino.

and the immigration ban

A new executive order shuts down the green-card process for 60 days. Ostensibly this has something to do with the pandemic, but that explanation isn’t credible. Really it’s Trump using the virus as cover for something he wanted to do anyway.

and this just in: Russia helped Trump win

One casualty of the Trump-era news cycle is that by the time evidence comes in and reasonable people have a chance to weigh it, the whole subject feels like ancient history.

Case in point: The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that all Trump’s talk about a “hoax” or “coup” or whatever is baseless. The intelligence community’s assessment of the Trump/Russia thing was right. Russia did intervene in the 2016 election, and did it for the purpose of making Trump president.

For years, President Trump has derided the assessment by American intelligence officials that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to assist his candidacy, dismissing it without evidence as the work of a “deep state” out to undermine his victory.

But on Tuesday, a long-awaited Senate review led by members of Mr. Trump’s own party effectively undercut those allegations. A three-year review by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found that the intelligence community assessment, pinning blame on Russia and outlining its goals to undercut American democracy, was fundamentally sound and untainted by politics.

and you also might be interested in …

This week I learned: The word quarantine comes from the Italian word for forty. During the Black Death in the 1300s, thirty days was the accepted standard period to isolate a ship from a plague-infested area. If that had held up, we’d be having trentines. But sometime during the 1400s, another ten days got tacked on for reasons no one remembers.

Nobody really knows what’s going on in North Korea. Maybe there’s some problem with Kim Jong Un’s health, or maybe he’s dead. But maybe he’s fine.

Crisis has a way of hastening along trends that were happening anyway. Wednesday, the NYT raised the possible end of the big department store. The decline has been going on for a while; Sears, K-Mart, and Penney’s had already closed large numbers of stores before the virus hit. For years, the growth in retail has been online, and even the top-line department stores were struggling to remake themselves. Now their time may be up.

The NYT article says:

The entire executive team at Lord & Taylor was let go this month. Nordstrom has canceled orders and put off paying its vendors. The Neiman Marcus Group, the most glittering of the American department store chains, is expected to declare bankruptcy in the coming days, the first major retailer felled during the current crisis.

The whole industry is eating its seed corn.

At a time when retailers should be putting in orders for the all-important holiday shopping season, stores are furloughing tens of thousands of corporate and store employees, hoarding cash and desperately planning how to survive this crisis…. The resort season has been canceled entirely, and fall orders have been put on hold, raising questions about what inventory will be left if and when shops reopen and consumers return to stores.

Department stores are typically the anchors of big malls; you want to look for something in Macy’s, and since you’re there you window-shop at Yankee Candle and get lunch at the Panda Express in the food court — neither of which would have been worth the trip otherwise.

“The nature of the mall is if you lose a big anchor like a Macy’s, you have co-tenancy issues and you have more pressure on the mall traffic, which was already a big issue,” said Oliver Chen, an analyst at Cowen. Co-tenancy clauses typically allow other tenants to demand rent reductions if certain key chains depart. Mr. Chen said that could accelerate the ongoing divide between top-tier malls and the second- or third-choice malls in certain areas.

Shares in the biggest mall-owner, Simon, have fallen from a high of $180 to $53. The shares currently yield 15%, a number indicating that the market believes a large dividend cut is coming.

In related news, private equity firm Sycamore Partners is trying to wriggle out of its poorly timed acquisition of Victoria’s Secret.

and let’s close with something inspiring

Voices Rock Canada offers a choir of women physicians singing “Rise Again“.

I really don’t want to talk about injecting Clorox, but I kind of have to.

To start with: Don’t do it. Disinfectants work by killing living things. You are a living thing. Complete the syllogism.

With that out of the way, the thing to focus on here isn’t that Trump said something monumentally stupid Thursday. He does that; it’s usually not quite this bad, but he says stupid things fairly regularly. On the whole, I think I’d rather have him saying incredibly, ridiculously stupid things rather than run-of-the-stupid-mill things — like that you should take dangerous drugs that haven’t been tested yet — because fewer people are likely to believe him and do harmful things to themselves or others. (Though apparently some did believe him this time too.)

No, the really scary thing about the inject-disinfectant story is what happened next. DHS Undersecretary William Bryan (who had just talked about the effectiveness of sunlight and bleach in killing coronavirus on surfaces — not inside the body) was still standing near the podium, and Dr. Deborah Birx was sitting a few feet away, and neither jumped in to protect public health by telling people not to do what the President just suggested.

Within a minute or two, Bryan was asked a question by a reporter, and he didn’t backtrack to tell people not to inject themselves with bleach. Even later, when a reporter specifically asked “But I — just, can I ask about — the President mentioned the idea of cleaners, like bleach and isopropyl alcohol you mentioned. There’s no scenario that that could be injected into a person, is there? I mean —”, Bryan said “no” in a deflecting way, not calling it out.

No, I’m here to talk about the findings that we had in the study. We won’t do that within that lab and our lab.

In other words: “No, that’s not my department”, not “No, that’s a really bad idea.” Later, on Fox News, Birx did this bit of spin.

When [President Trump] gets new information, he likes to talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue and so that’s what dialogue he was having. I think he just saw the information at the time immediately just before the press conference and he was still digesting that information

Assume that’s true for a second: It’s still political malpractice. Imagine any previous president “digesting information” about a crisis on national TV in real time. Picture George W. Bush — not my favorite president — digesting what his generals are saying about Iraq and spitballing whatever crosses his mind. “Couldn’t we just nuke them? We’re going to wargame that, right?”

I can only assume that both Bryan and Birx have made the same calculation: Protecting public health is less important than protecting the President’s fragile ego. Admitting that Trump said something stupid is a good way to get fired — and then maybe no one in the administration would care about public health.

And so Bryan and Birx have been corrupted by the soul-eating process James Comey described a year ago: First you don’t interrupt when Trump lies about trivial things like his inauguration crowd. Then you give in to peer pressure and flatter him in public.

Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. …

It bothers you, at least to some extent. But his outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now. … Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

There is a substantial national consensus and someone needs to speak for it.
Unfortunately, our current President can’t.

The bullhorn speech. The highest presidential approval Gallup ever reported was published on September 24, 2001. Just ten months before, George W. Bush had lost the popular vote to Al Gore, resulting in a bitter dispute over Florida, and a widespread belief among Democrats that his presidency was illegitimate. In the poll published on September 10, Bush’s approval rating had been a lackluster 51%, barely higher than the 48% who had voted for him in November. But now, suddenly, 90% of Americans approved of his job performance.

Bush was the same man he had been two weeks before, but something historic had happened in the meantime: On September 11, the United States suffered a humiliating and horrifying attack. In New York, the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell, killing almost 3,000. In Washington, the Pentagon had been damaged. A fourth hijacked airliner, rumored to have been targeted at the Capitol, had been brought down by a self-sacrificing passenger uprising.

Three days later, Bush stood in the WTC rubble.

The president, who had been in office less than eight months, grabbed a bullhorn and started thanking the fire fighters and other first responders at the scene, telling them that they were in the country’s prayers. Someone in the crowd shouted that he couldn’t hear the president, and Bush replied with the words that made history.

“I can hear you!” he declared. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people – and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The crowd reacted with loud, prolonged chants of “USA! USA!”

In this electric moment, Bush captured the mood of the country, delivering just what the American people wanted a combination of gratitude for the rescue workers’ bravery and diligence, defiance toward the terrorists, and resolve to bring the evil doers to justice.

Rally round the flag. Other peaks of presidential approval reflect similar moments of national unity. In 1991 and 1945, the common emotion was pride and relief at the successful conclusion of a war. The first President Bush garnered 89% approval after the surprisingly one-sided victory over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. President Truman reached 87% approval after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Perhaps the moment that most resembled 9/11 was Pearl Harbor, when a similar sense of national determination pushed FDR’s approval up to 84%.

Crisis has a way of uniting Americans around their president. Past mistakes and doubts are put aside. Had W ignored the terrorist threat before 9/11? Had his father’s uncertain policy led Saddam to believe he could get away with invading Kuwait? December 7, 1941 was not just a “date that will live in infamy”, it was also a shocking defeat for the Navy that Roosevelt commanded, and was soon followed by the defeat of American ground forces in the Philippines.

So if you had wanted to disapprove of any of those presidents, you could justify it. But somehow none of that mattered. The nation yearned to be united, and there was only one president to unite around. Lingering disagreements and disappointments would have to be transcended until the current challenge had been met and overcome.

Over time, this pattern has baked itself into the American psyche so deeply that it has a name: the rally-round-the-flag effect.

What about now? Right now, we’re in another national crisis of historic proportions. More than 50,000 Americans have died of Covid-19, almost all of them in the last month. Hundreds of thousands are sick, and nearly every American has felt the impact of stay-at-home orders intended to “flatten the curve” and blunt the upward trajectory of death.

We’re mourning, we’re hurting, we’re frightened, and we’re angry. So why isn’t the rally-round-the-flag effect working for President Trump?

One theory is that the country’s partisan divide has gotten so wide that it’s impossible to cross over and support a leader of the opposite party. But that doesn’t explain why the effect is still working at the state level, for governors of both parties: Democrat Andrew Cuomo of New York, whose televised briefings have made him a national figure, scored an 87% approval rating in late March. And Larry Hogan of Maryland and Ohio’s Mike DeWine are Republican governors with similarly stratospheric ratings: 84% and 83%, respectively.

All those states (especially New York) have been hard-hit by the virus, and you could easily imagine people deciding to blame the governor rather than support him. But that’s not what’s happening. Past disputes are being forgotten. Past oversights are being forgiven. New Yorkers, Marylanders, and Ohioans want to be united, and they only have one governor to unite around. So that’s what they’re doing.

Trump’s problem isn’t us, it’s him. We’re still capable of uniting; he’s just not capable of leading us.

The country tried to unite around Trump. In early April, when he had finally stopped trying to happy-talk the virus into vanishing “like a miracle”, and proclaimed himself a “wartime president”, his disapproval fell below 50% for the first time since early 2017, and his approval rose near 46%, an all-time high.

Democrats were beginning to get seriously depressed about the fall election. In a true rally-round-the-flag moment, it wouldn’t matter that he had been consistently wrong about the seriousness of the virus, or that he had failed to prepare either the government or the public for the battle we are now in. It wouldn’t matter that the economy, which Trump had counted on to be his ticket to a second term, had collapsed. We’d all be in this struggle together, and he’d be leading us.

But that trend fell apart pretty quickly. By this week, Trump’s 538 polling average was back in familiar territory: 52.4% disapproval, 43.4% approval — with the trend line decidedly negative.

Why?

How it works. Sometimes we talk about the RRtF effect as if it were a knee-jerk reflex: There’s a crisis, so I’ll support the president. But it’s actually a more complex process than that.

The first thing to notice is that ordinary politics is divisive, while crisis politics is unifying. Ordinarily, our national political conversation is about issues we disagree on: Should abortions be easier or harder to get? Should government do more to help people, or just get out of their way? Do refugees and immigrants continually revitalize our nation, or do they steal opportunities from the native born? Do whites and men have unfair privileges they need to relinquish, or have they yielded too much already?

We’re a two-party system, so we tend to divide into relatively equal sides.

But when a crisis hits, most of us suddenly find ourselves on the same side. When the planes hit the World Trade Center, everybody became a New Yorker. When Nazi Germany surrendered, parties broke out all over America.

Being on the same side, a lot of us find ourselves thinking the same things. After 9/11, a huge majority of Americans were all thinking: “We can’t just let something like this happen to us. We have to find who did it and stop them. We have to make sure nothing like this happens again.”

But at the same time, a crisis makes us feel small in our individuality. It was paralyzing to imagine being in the WTC when the planes hit. What could you have done? And if people on the other side of the world were plotting similar attacks right now, what could you do about it?

That combination of factors creates an opportunity for a leader: When Bush picked up that bullhorn, he spoke for us, and spoke with the strength that we had together rather than the weakness we felt as individuals. (There’s a long conversation to be had about how he misused that strength, but that’s a different topic.) He didn’t say, “Listen to me!” He said “I hear you!” and he promised to channel our unified will into powerful action.

That’s what 90% of America approved of.

The consensus today. If you listen to cable news shows or watch the President’s coronavirus briefings, you might imagine that the virus is an ordinary-politics divisive topic. But it really isn’t. Pretty much everybody is thinking and feeling and wanting the same things.

• We’re afraid of getting sick and dying, or of passing the virus on to our more vulnerable loved ones and watching them die.
• We wish we could do something.
• We’re bored and frustrated with staying at home, but we’re willing to keep doing it if it actually helps.
• We sympathize with people who have lost relatives or friends without being able to visit them in the hospital or hold their hands.
• We’re worried about our financial future.
• We’re rooting for our doctors and scientists to figure out how to beat this thing.
• We concerned about the long-term effects on our communities. (Will our local shops and bars and restaurants and theaters and stadiums ever reopen? Will they be recognizable when they do?)
• We miss the lives we used to have.
• We worry that people will do stupid things to make it all worse.
• We admire the people who are risking their lives to take care of others, and we feel responsible for the people (grocery workers, meat-plant processors, delivery people) whose jobs require them to take risks on our behalf.

I could go on, but you can probably extend that list yourself.

The arguments we’re having on social media (or that other people are having for us on TV) are mostly artificial. When we talk about reopening businesses, my worry that stupid people will make it all worse may conflict with your desire to get out of the house and your worry that we’ve been wrecking our financial future, but we share all those concerns. Literally everybody wants to restore normal life safely, but none of us know exactly how to do that. We all wish we did.

That consensus creates the opportunity that many governors are using to raise their popularity: They hear us. They’re speaking for us. And they speak with the power we have together rather than the weakness and fragility we feel as individuals.

Why not Trump? The singular virtue that made Trump’s political career is that he has the best-defined personal brand of anyone who has ever run for president. People sometimes say, “You know what he thinks” or “You know where he stands”, but neither of those is actually true. (In reality, he likes nothing better than to get on both sides of an issue and then claim victory no matter how it comes out. Last week I pointed out how he was doing that in regard to reopening the economy, but you can see the same pattern many places. Like China, for example: He’s an anti-China trade warrior, but he also brags about his great relationship with President Xi.)

The real underlying truth is “You know who he is, and he never changes.”

“Who he is” is a divider, not a uniter. The heart of his 2016 campaign was to channel the resentment and anger of rural whites who feel like America has slipped away from them. His whole public persona (and I suspect his personality) is based on resentment. Wherever he goes, he has to define enemies: the Deep State, the fake-news media, Crooked Hillary, Shifty Schiff … it never ends. He recognizes no loyal opposition; those who are against him (or just not for him ardently enough, like Jeff Sessions) are “horrible people”. He couldn’t forgive John McCain, even in death.

Unifying politicians have a way of co-opting their enemies — the way W co-opted the so-called liberal media in the run-up to the Iraq War — but Trump must defeat his. They must visibly surrender and pay tribute to his victory. President Obama found diplomatic roles for George W. Bush to play, as Bush in turn had made use of Bill Clinton. But it’s impossible to imagine Trump asking Obama’s help — despite (or perhaps because of) all the countries where Obama continues to be popular. Obama would have to bend the knee and beg first, and even then Trump would probably refuse (as during the transition, he accepted Mitt Romney’s submission, but refused to offer him a post).

So even trying to speak for the country’s consensus would break Trump’s brand. Who would the enemy be? How could he hold a press conference without demonizing the reporters? How could he be smarter than everyone if he agreed with everyone?

On a deeper level, it would also run counter to his psychology. Look again at Bush’s bullhorn speech. “I hear you,” requires a fluidity of ego that Trump does not have. He is himself, and he is right, and he is better than everybody else. Speaking for the consensus requires putting yourself to the side. Trump will never, ever be able to do that.

Instead, we have the spectacle of his daily briefings, where the reporters are enemies and the doctors are rivals whose loyalty he must constantly assess. The dead are not individuals to mourn and the bereaved are not objects of sympathy or empathy. They are possible sources of blame, and so they must be removed from the spotlight as quickly as possible. There is only one spotlight, and only one person it should illuminate. The opinions that are validated must be his opinions, which he came to first, before anyone else. They can’t be yours or mine or anybody’s but his.

Being basically a hermit by nature, I’m enduring lockdown fairly well. (It also helps that I’m doing OK financially, I don’t have small children to keep occupied, and my major activity — this blog — can proceed more-or-less undisturbed.) Even my week in solitary, when I thought I might be infected, passed fairly pleasantly.

But I’m starting to notice more and more signs of depression in my social-media universe. Occasionally I hear someone try to say something uplifting, but even that comes out depressing. It’s sort of like when a soldier tries to raise his companions’ courage, but really just reminds everybody how scary the situation is. (“We may not have anything that penetrates their tanks’ armor, and poison gas is indeed a terrible way to die, but are we afraid? No, we are not! We may be running out of food and bullets, but we have as much spirit as we ever did!”)

So I’m wondering if I’ve been underestimating the toll this experience is taking on people in general. If you have observations on this that you’re willing to put out on the internet, please leave a comment.

As I’ve pointed out before, news keeps going into reruns: more people are dead, Trump said something stupid, yada yada yada. It would be easy to put out the same weekly summary week after week, just updating the links to the current instances of the continuing narratives. (Although Trump really outdid himself this week with the injecting-disinfectants comment. Try as I might to let that go, I ended up writing about it.) So it’s a challenge to approach the news with a what-did-we-learn-this-week attitude.

This week, the featured post looks at the question: Why isn’t the rally-round-the-flag effect working for Trump? During a crisis, presidents generally see their popularity rise — even if the bad news could just as easily be blamed on them. For example, FDR’s navy suffered a crushing defeat at Pearl Harbor, but the next month he had an 84% approval rating. The current crisis gave Trump’s approval a bit of a blip — from the low 40s to the high 40s — but it dissipated in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, governors of both parties are seeing a more typical rise: Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Republicans like Mike DeWine have scored numbers in the 80s. What’s up with that?

That post still needs some work, but it should be out by 10 or 11 EDT.

The weekly summary looks at a few states starting to reopen, and a lot of states starting to announce reopening plans. As always, I’ll update the numbers on cases and deaths. (The models that predicted 60,000 total deaths are looking way too optimistic now. We should blow through that number in a few days.) As I said, I can’t ignore the disinfectants controversy, but I’ll approach it from the why-didn’t-anybody-jump-up-and-correct-him angle rather than rage for the Nth time at how ignorant Trump is. Stupidity at the top is old news, but the corruption of the supposedly apolitical parts of the government is the ongoing story.

Some really funny song parodies are going around, and come out amazingly quickly.

And then there are stories that either have nothing to do with the virus, or are tangential to it: The Senate Intelligence Committee validated the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian interference to help Trump in 2016; Stephen Miller finally got his immigration ban; nobody knows what’s going on with Kim Jong Un; the big department store chains might not reopen; and a few other things. And I’ll close with a virtual choir of Canadian women doctors singing an inspiring song. Let’s say that appears by 1.

You don’t want to think, “If I go to the movies, I might die.”
We’ve got to take dying off the table.

– Jim Cramer, CNBC analyst (4-16-2020),
commenting on reopening the economy

This week’s featured post is “Trump’s Guidelines Aren’t What He Says They Are“.

This week everybody was talking about the lockdown protests

I say a little more about this is the featured post, which includes that photo from Columbus that looks like something out of The Walking Dead. But here’s a meme that makes a more explicit connection with the zombie mythos.

One thing to remember about these demonstrators: They may not represent anyone but themselves.

Americans overwhelmingly support continued social distancing measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic despite the impact on the U.S. economy, a new poll finds.

In the Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday, 81 percent of respondents say Americans should “continue to social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy.”

The virus is highlighting the difference between symbolism and reality, which ripples through America in so many places.

One thing no end-the-lockdown protest can do without is the American flag. These Tea Partiers see themselves as patriots, because they identify with the symbols of patriotism. They wave their flags, put flag decals on their bumpers, and tell anybody who will listen how proud they are to be Americans.

But they aren’t patriots at all in any real sense. If you ask them to do anything for the common good — stay home, do without a haircut, wear a mask in public, pay taxes — it’s too much. Their vision of America is that the government builds us roads, delivers our mail, protects us from criminals, educates our children, and sends helicopters to pluck us off the roof when the flood comes, but in return we wave flags and otherwise don’t have to do anything we don’t want to do. JFK’s idea that we should ask what we can do for our country — that’s tyranny. All that “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” crap — we don’t do that any more.

I can barely imagine how World War II would have played out if my parents’ generation had felt that way about the government rationing food and gas, or forcing Ford to build tanks and planes rather than new cars. There would have been riots, and probably America would have lost the war. History played out differently because the men and women of the GI generation were patriots in their actions, not just in their symbols and self-identifications.

Something similar is happening within Christianity. If Christianity is fundamentally an identity to you, then absolutely you had to symbolize your identity by going to church on Easter, and any government order trying to stop you was tyranny. The more obstacles public health officials put in the way of gathering together with hundreds or thousands of your fellow Christians, the more determined you are to do it.

On the other hand, if your Christianity is about following the teachings of Jesus, then the thought that you would make a big show of your Christian identity even if it costs your neighbor his or her life — that’s absolutely abhorrent.

and whether the virus is peaking

As of this morning, the US has reported 40,620 deaths from Covid-19. The number of deaths per day seems to leveling off at about 2,000. So if we’re going to achieve those “optimistic” predictions of “only” 60,000 deaths, the per-day totals have to start dropping significantly and soon.

The good news from New York is that the number cases in the state definitely looks to be past its peak. However, the peak of the graph looks rounded rather than spiky. If that’s the case nationwide, there’s a lot of death yet to come.

Something we have to bear in mind is that the virus is on a different track in different parts of the country, and that the models assume continued social distancing. If states start allowing people to congregate again, the graphs could go to a new peak.

One thing that’s driving me nuts about the discussion from the states that don’t have a large number of cases yet: If a state like New York or New Jersey had it to do over again, they’d lock down sooner, before the caseload took off. States like Wyoming and Idaho still have the chance to do that, but are acting like biology works differently for them.

CNN points to four good examples: Taiwan, Iceland, South Korea, and Germany.

But we’re also seeing examples that the virus can rise again if social-distancing restrictions are relaxed.

In Singapore, which is battling a resurgence of cases, the country reported 728 new cases today, a record daily high, according to the health ministry. None of the country’s cases since Apr 9 have been imported

China is also seeing a new wave of infections — not anywhere near its old peak, but the worst in five weeks.

The question of immunity remains open. It stands to reason that a person who beat the virus once, and who retains at least a few antibodies tuned to it, has a good shot at beating it again. But whether that person has a genuine immunity, such that the virus can’t even get a foothold that allows it to infect someone else, that’s still unknown. And if there is immunity, is it for life or just for some period of time? Since no one had this virus before December or so, the sell-by date of whatever immunity anyone has is a mystery.

Keep that in mind when open-the-economy folks start talking about antibody tests that “certify” someone’s immunity to the disease and make it “safe” for them to go back to whatever work they were doing. That might be true, or it might not.

and electoral politics

Hard to believe that a week ago, we still didn’t know who had won in Wisconsin: Biden won the presidential primary, but the big news was that the Republican voter-suppression effort failed. Wisconsinites turned out to vote in record numbers, and the incumbent conservative supreme court justice lost. Hats off to all the voters who either got their absentee ballots in on time or braved the virus threat to go out and vote in person.

Last week we knew that Bernie Sanders was withdrawing, leaving the nomination to Joe Biden. This week the Democratic Party began to close ranks around Biden. He was endorsed by Sanders, by Elizabeth Warren, and by Barack Obama.

All three endorsements demonstrated how different politics is during the lockdown. In a typical year, each would have been the occasion for a major rally: Biden and the endorser standing together with hands raised in front of a cheering crowd. This year, each happened via video messages.

and you also might be interested in …

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a grocery worker writing in The Atlantic. She appreciates all the attention she and her colleagues are getting during the coronavirus crisis, but the “hero” talk doesn’t sit well with her.

Unlike medical personnel and emergency responders, we didn’t sign up for potentially life-threatening work. We can’t check the temperature of people entering our store or maintain a safe distance from one another.

… Cashiers and shelf-stockers and delivery-truck drivers aren’t heroes. They’re victims. To call them heroes is to justify their exploitation. By praising the blue-collar worker’s public service, the progressive consumer is assuaged of her cognitive dissonance. When the world isn’t falling apart, we know the view of us is usually as faceless, throwaway citizens. The wealthy CEO telling his thousands of employees that they are vital, brave, and noble is a manipulative strategy to keep them churning out profits.

I have immense gratitude for my job. I love my co-workers like family. I respect the company that has employed me and given me excellent health-insurance benefits for more than 16 years. The anger I have is not toward my boss, or my boss’s boss, or even that guy’s boss. It’s toward an unfair system that will never change if we workers don’t question the motivations behind such mythmaking.

In spite of the we’re-all-in-this-together rhetoric, we’re actually not. Some of us can work at home, or are securely retired and can continue our normal activities (like writing this blog) with a few restrictions. For us, a trip the grocery store is like a mission behind enemy lines. We gear up and make plans for as efficient a strike as possible.

But people in other parts of the economy, typically working class and less well paid, enter that danger zone (or one like it) every day because they have little choice. If they’re heroes, it’s in the same way that drafted soldiers can be heroes, even the ones who wouldn’t have volunteered and would go home if they could. They’re carrying on, and doing what they have to do. The other workers we now recognize as “essential” — all the people who make Amazon packages magically appear on your doorstep, for example — are doing the same.

The one useful interpretation of the hero rhetoric is that it’s a promissory note we need to honor when this is all over. I don’t want to hear protests that workers don’t deserve a $15 minimum wage or health insurance or a chance to go to college. The drafted heroes of World War II got a GI Bill of Rights when the war ended. These heroes deserve something similar.

If you think Trump’s afternoon briefings are bizarre to watch, imagine what it’s like to participate in one. Brian Karem reports on Tuesday’s, where Trump responded to his question by threatening to walk out of his own briefing.

It was probably the most surreal thing I’ve seen in close to 35 years of attending White House news conferences. … The president of the United States was playing victim to a reporter he knows from past exchanges is going to ask him a tough question and not back down even if the president tries to bully him. Suddenly I had the power to make him leave? Please. It’s part of the Trump plan. He has turned the daily briefings into mini Trump rallies, complete with a propaganda video in Monday’s episode. Demeaning the media is a recurring theme, as is blaming everyone else for his problems. Trump may claim to have total authority, but in truth he loves to play the total victim.

Some have suggested that reporters should modify their behavior to keep Donald Trump from getting angry. I firmly disagree. As Helen Thomas told me when I was younger, “Just ask the question.” We are not responsible for the reaction our question elicits; we are merely responsible for the questions we ask. Trump’s behavior is on him and no one else. He is petulant, angry and dismissive because that is who he is, not because he’s the victim of some rude reporter asking him pointed questions.

Whether the Post Office is forced into bankruptcy or privatization by the current crisis is still up in the air. Bizarrely, it has turned into a partisan issue, with Democrats wanting to save the Post Office and Republicans willing to let it collapse. Trump reportedly threatened to veto the first stimulus bill if it included a post office bailout.

With local businesses shut down, the Post Office has lost some of its most lucrative business — delivering fliers for local stores and restaurants. It’s estimated to be losing $2 billion a month, and is projected to be insolvent by the end of September.

What’s weirdest about how the politics play out is that the parts of the country that will be most damaged by a collapse of the Post Office are the conservative rural areas.

Businesses like FedEx and UPS don’t build offices in remote rural areas, like deep in Wyoming or in the mountains of Colorado, because it’s simply not profitable. They often rely on the Post Office for last-mile delivery; the agency delivers mail for them from major transportation hubs to the final delivery destination, often in secluded areas.

This ultimately means that without the USPS, FedEx and UPS won’t have the resources to deliver to remote rural areas, nor will they likely make investments to do so since they’ll lose money in the process. Instead, people will have to bear the burden of traveling to the companies’ offices in larger towns to meet their mailing needs. For Mary Meyer, who lives in Bucyrus, Ohio — a town with a population of about 11,000 — the closest UPS customer center is 16 miles away in Marion.

and let’s close with an expression of values

This “Emptying Sacred Spaces” video was made in a variety of houses of worship in Maryland, and includes statements from leaders of many different sects. The mood is sad and somber, while at the same time hopeful and meaningful. A religious community may make its home in a particular place, but it is so much more than that place.

Trump’s rhetoric is quite different from what his “Opening Up America Again” plan actually says. The confusion he’s creating doesn’t help fight the virus or boost the economy. (Quite the opposite.) But it will allow him to claim credit for good outcomes while avoiding responsibility for bad ones.

Thursday, the White House released the long-awaited guidelines Opening Up America Again. It was rolled out in a quintessentially Trumpian way, one that will allow him to claim credit for any successes and blame someone else for any failures. This sleight-of-hand is achieved by a simple trick: What the document says is very different from what Trump says about it.

He says it’s a plan by which parts of the country can start relaxing stay-at-home orders almost immediately — even before his previously stated goal of May 1. But if you read the document (and how many MAGA-hatters will bother?) it lists a set of criteria not much different from those put forward by public-health experts all over the world — or by Joe Biden a week ago: a downward trend in cases, a rebuilt stockpile of medical equipment, extensive testing even of those with no symptoms, and exhaustive contact-tracing of those who test positive.

Since no state is anywhere near achieving those criteria, none can use these guidelines to justify opening up anytime in the near future.

You might expect all this open-up/stay-closed confusion to hinder both the economy and the fight against the virus — and you’d be right — but jobs and lives are not the point. The primary goal is to allow Trump to claim vindication no matter what happens.

• If a state reopens its economy soon and everything works fine, then Trump takes credit for all the jobs gained, because he told them to reopen. Even better, he overruled both Democrats and scientists, who were wrong when he was right. The stable genius wins again!
• If a state relaxes its lockdown rules, sees a spike in infections and deaths, and has to lock down again, it’s not Trump’s fault that the governor misapplied what was clearly written down in the guidelines. Blame that loser, even if he’s been a loyal Trumpist like Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott.
• If a state doesn’t reopen soon, then any economic or psychological distress caused by the continued lockdown is also the governor’s fault, and Trump is the champion of the suffering people trapped in their homes. Liberate Michigan!

It’s a neat trick. Let’s look a little deeper at how it works.

What he says. First off, here’s what Trump is saying:

I think 29 states are in that ballgame, not open enough for opening, but I think they’ll be able to open relatively soon.

Of course “not open enough for opening” is already a big enough loophole to excuse whatever happens. But when asked, he also wouldn’t name any of the 29 states. So no rigorous fact-checking is possible. If you point to, say, South Dakota, which appeared to be in good shape until a sudden explosion of cases this week, he can easily absolve himself with something like: “I didn’t say South Dakota.”

And when is “relatively soon”? Well, on a phone call to the governors, he said:

Some of you are in very, very good shape to open quickly and, if you’d like, according to the guidelines, you could open before the date of May 1.

Once again, though, he didn’t say who “some of you” are. So if any of you open up and it goes badly, you’re not the ones he meant.

And who’s standing in the way of people getting their jobs back, going to the church potluck dinner, or starting the baseball season? Why Democratic governors, of course. Organizations allied with Trump have sponsored anti-lockdown rallies (where some protesters openly carry rifles), and Trump has endorsed them, tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!“, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!“, and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!“. [1]

In Lansing, gun-toting white male Trumpists raise the patriarchy’s battle cry against women in power: “Lock her up!”

So if you’re facing real hardship during this crisis — or if you’re just bored and resent that you can’t get your hair cut — Trump wants you to know that he’s on your side. If it were up to him, the economy would be booming again. People would be gathering in bars, flying coast-to-coast, and buying standing-room-only tickets for country music festivals. [2]

And the virus? Oh, never mind all that. Trump’s propaganda network is telling his base that the virus is no big deal — pulling false statistics out of their butts, and using the merely 60 thousand deaths predictions of the most optimistic if-we-lock-down models to argue that we don’t need to lock down. [3]

What the guidelines say. In contrast to what Trump himself implies, or the things said explicitly by his mouthpieces at Fox News, the administration’s guidelines take the virus seriously. They set criteria for opening that no state can currently meet, and which probably won’t be achievable for some while.

The guidelines have three phases. To enter Phase 1 (or to progress from one phase to the next), a state has to meet (and then maintain) these criteria:

SYMPTOMS

Downward trajectory of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) reported within a 14-day period

AND

Downward trajectory of covid-like syndromic cases reported within a 14-day period

CASES

Downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period

OR

Downward trajectory of positive tests as a percent of total tests within a 14-day period (flat or increasing volume of tests)

HOSPITALS

Treat all patients without crisis care

AND

Robust testing program in place for at-risk healthcare workers, including emerging antibody testing

In other words, the virus has to have been in retreat for two weeks, and you have to be prepared for the possibility that loosening restrictions will lead to a new outbreak. But that’s not all. The “Core State Preparedness Responsibilities” section assigns key responsibilities to the states. This is, in essence, a second set of criteria. If you can’t do these things — and no state currently can — you’ve got no business opening up.

TESTING & CONTACT TRACING

• Ability to quickly set up safe and efficient screening and testing sites for symptomatic individuals and trace contacts of COVID+ results
• Ability to test Syndromic/ILI-indicated persons for COVID and trace contacts of COVID+ results
• Ensure sentinel surveillance sites are screening for asymptomatic cases and contacts for COVID+ results are traced (sites operate at locations that serve older individuals, lower-income Americans, racial minorities, and Native Americans)

HEALTHCARE SYSTEM CAPACITY

• Ability to quickly and independently supply sufficient Personal Protective Equipment and critical medical equipment to handle dramatic surge in need
• Ability to surge ICU capacity

PLANS

• Protect the health and safety of workers in critical industries
• Protect the health and safety of those living and working in high-risk facilities (e.g., senior care facilities)
• Protect employees and users of mass transit
• Advise citizens regarding protocols for social distancing and face coverings
• Monitor conditions and immediately take steps to limit and mitigate any rebounds or outbreaks by restarting a phase or returning to an earlier phase, depending on severity

In short, Opening Up America Again says exactly what nearly all the experts (and Biden) have been saying: We need to be doing lots more testing (about triple what we’re doing now, according to one Harvard report), including testing people without symptoms, so that we can figure out who has the virus and spot new outbreaks quickly. Healthcare workers and nursing home workers need antibody testing that is only just now becoming available, and may not be available in the needed quantities for some time. We need to be set up to do extensive contact-tracing, so that we track down everybody who might be infected (again, whether they have symptoms or not).

The healthcare system needs to have slack capacity and rebuilt stockpiles of protective equipment. Key systems like public transportation need to be reconfigured for safe use. Industrial plants (like the meat-packing plant that triggered the South Dakota outbreak) need to be reconfigured to protect workers.

The guidelines also say that public behavior can’t return to normal; you still need to keep away from people when you can and wear masks when you can’t. Keep washing your hands constantly, and self-quarantine if you feel sick.

Businesses that want to reopen need to keep limiting business travel, and shut down or regularly disinfect common areas where workers might otherwise congregate. The guidelines recommend temperature checks at the door for workers and perhaps customers as well.

Does any of that sound like the vision Trump has been putting forward in public? No, of course not. But if states loosen up their stay-at-home orders and something goes wrong, you can bet Trump will point to these Biden-like guidelines as what he really proposed, and completely forget all his contrary statements. “I never told you to do that,” he’ll say. And Fox News and right-wing talk radio will back him up: “None of us ever said to do that.”

And if that butt-covering action requires throwing some Republican governors under the bus — I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis of Florida — Trump will be more than willing to do it. Whether in business or politics, backing Trump’s play has always been a risky strategy.

The phases. A state needs two weeks of good testing to start Phase 1, then two more weeks to get to Phase 2, then two more to get to Phase 3. So if nothing at all goes wrong, no state can get back to anything resembling normal for six weeks.

In Phase 1, lots of stuff stays closed: schools, day-care centers, camps, bars. Nursing homes and hospitals are locked down against visitors. Gyms, churches, and arenas can open only if “strict physical distancing protocols” are maintained. (Picture a stadium or theater with about 1/10th of the seats occupied and no concession stand.) Out-patient elective surgeries are OK, but not ones that require hospitalization. Businesses should still encourage telework, and redesign their on-site processes for social distancing. As for individuals, you shouldn’t socialize in groups of 10 or more, and keep your distance from people even then. Avoid non-essential travel. Vulnerable people should stay home, and if you live with vulnerable people you need to be able to isolate yourself from them.

In Phase 2, schools can reopen, the limit on social gatherings rises to 50, and you get to travel non-essentially again. Common areas at work should still be closed, and telework continued. Elective surgery with hospitalization is OK. You still can’t visit Mom at the nursing home. Bars can reopen “with diminished standing-room occupancy”, whatever that means. Social distancing protocols for large venues can now be “moderate” rather than “strict”. Vulnerable people should still stay home.

In Phase 3, vulnerable people can come out if they’re careful, and everybody else should minimize time in crowds when not avoiding them altogether. Workplaces can resume “unrestricted staffing”. Bars and gyms can go back to more-or-less normal, but large venues should still maintain “limited” social-distancing practices. You can visit Mom again, if you’re “diligent regarding hygiene” (which Mom always nagged you about anyway).

States are on their own. By listing those “Core State Preparedness Responsibilities”, the Trump administration is denying any responsibility for its failure to create the prerequisites for reopening. Testing, contact tracing, building up PPE stockpiles — those are state responsibilities. So the states shouldn’t count on the federal government to help them get ready to reopen.

But some governors made it clear they are not ready to break out the roadmap, saying they badly need help from Washington in expanding testing.

[New York Governor Andrew] Cuomo, whose state is the most lethal hot spot in the nation and is still seeing over 600 deaths a day, accused the federal government of “passing the buck without passing the bucks.”

“The federal government cannot wipe its hands of this and say, `Oh, the states are responsible for testing.′ We cannot do it. We cannot do it without federal help,” the governor said.

However, Trump will incite citizens to demand — perhaps violently — that their states reopen whether they are ready or not. [4]

Governors out on a limb. In spite of the fact that no state fulfills the prerequisites for Phase 1, several states are announcing some kind of reopening.

Despite Florida hitting a new high for new Covid-19 cases Friday, beaches in Jacksonville, Florida reopened for limited hours. (“This is really a crazy bad idea,” said one resident.) CNN did not see much social distancing. The NY Post reported: “Aerial photos show hundreds of people packing the sand to swim, stroll, surf and fish. Many were without masks.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott appears to see the trap Trump has laid for him, and so far is doing the same thing Trump is doing: talking in favor of aggressive reopening, but not yet committing himself to anything specific.

Instead of kicking off a full restart, the Texas governor announced that a group of medical and economic experts will guide him through a series of incremental steps aimed at slowly reopening the state’s economy. The group’s aggressive name, the “Strike Force to Open Texas,” belies Abbott’s surprisingly cautious framework. Plans to restart business won’t come until April 27, and Abbott stressed they will be determined by “data and by doctors.”

But unlike Trump, Abbott has no one to pass the buck to. And his base, which belongs more to Trump than to him, is getting restless.

Through the week, as Abbott’s public messaging made it sound less likely that he would announce a grand reopening, he began taking fire from members of his own party who say he’s moved too slowly to reinvigorate the economy and has been overly deferential to public health experts. On Thursday for example, Don Huffines, a former Texas Republican state senator who represented Dallas County, wrote a blistering op-ed for the Austin American-Statesman, excoriated Abbott for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Some Republican governors — Mike DeWine in Ohio for one — are standing by their lockdown decisions without waffling. And they are not immune to the Trump-inspired protests, as this Pulitzer-worthy photo from Columbus makes clear.

Attack of the MAGA zombies in Columbus. The woman on the left is a Republican candidate for the Ohio state senate.

But they also must know that Trump will shamelessly throw them under the bus if reopening leads to a new wave of deaths. He has already laid the groundwork to do just that.

[1] If any of this leads to actual violence, of course, that’s not Trump’s fault either. It never is.

Trump advisor Stephen Moore calls these protesters “modern-day Rosa Parks“, because staying home and watching Netflix for a month is exactly like living your whole life under Jim Crow.

And one more thing: None of these demonstrations around the country were more than a few hundred people. Would a similar number of liberals demonstrating for a liberal cause get this much attention? I doubt it.

[2] This vision, of course, is a complete fantasy. The economy can’t recover if we don’t beat the virus.

It’s worth noting that no one has locked down the airlines, but traffic has drastically dropped off anyway, because people very sensibly don’t want to spend hours trapped in a small space with possible carriers of the virus. Iowa has been one of the slower states to respond to the virus, and is not usually considered a hub of liberal hysteria, but The Des Moines Register reports:

Facing a 95% reduction in passenger traffic, Des Moines International Airport officials have closed a terminal, shut down services and delayed projects — including a planned Allegiant Air crew base — to save money during the coronavirus pandemic.

The unprecedented decrease in travelers while Iowans are practicing social distancing follows three years of record-breaking traffic at the state’s largest airport.

Bill Gates makes the point like this:

It’s very tough to say to people, “Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner. We want you to keep spending because there’s maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is what really counts.”

And Thursday morning I heard CNBC’s Jim Cramer say:

You don’t want to think, “If I go to the movies, I might die.” We’ve got to take dying off the table.

[3] Bill Bennett and Seth Leibsohn write:

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Washington state is now projecting 68,841 potential deaths in America. It is also estimating lower ranges than that. The flu season of 2017-2018 took 61,099 American lives. For this we have scared the hell out of the American people, shut down the economy, ended over 17 million jobs, taken trillions of dollars out of the economy, closed places of worship, and massively disrupted civic life as we know it.

But National Review’s Rich Lowry (not usually one of my favorite writers) notes that the lockdown might have had something to do with keeping the death toll down to where it is, and then elaborates:

Consider the perversity of [Bennett and Leibsohn’s] reasoning a different way. If we had shut down the country a month sooner and there had been, say, only 2,000 deaths, then on their terms they’d have an even stronger argument, i.e., “We did all this, and there were only a couple of thousand fatalities?”

In other words, the more effective a lockdown would have been, the more opposed Bennett and Leibsohn would be to it.

[4] Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, who is often likened to Trump, is taking one more step: He’s appearing at anti-lockdown demonstrations that openly call for a return to military rule.

Political observers say the protesters were right-wing Bolsonaro supporters who called for military intervention on behalf of the president because they view the country’s supreme court and legislature as obstacles to his campaign against pandemic lockdown measures, despite the fact that the country has more than 35,000 confirmed cases and over 2,300 deaths as of April 19.

“Now it is the people in power. It’s more than your right — it’s your obligation to fight for your country,” Bolsonaro said, standing on a pickup truck outside the Army headquarters. “We don’t want to negotiate anything. We want action for Brazil.”

This week’s news was dominated by two trends: the apparent turning of the corner in New York’s battle against coronavirus, and Trump putting pressure on state governors to relax their lockdown orders, even though their predicted peak may still be weeks off. That pressure came from below, as well as above, as Trump-inspired and Koch-organized anti-lockdown protests were staged in states across the country.

This week’s featured post focuses on the blatant contradiction between Trump’s rhetoric and the “Guidelines for Opening Up America Again” that his administration released Thursday. His rhetoric is aggressive about reopening, claiming that 29 states are nearly ready to relax restrictions, and that some should start before May 1. But the guidelines are cautious, listing prerequisites about testing and contact-tracing that no state is anywhere near fulfilling.

If you want to be catty about this (and I guess I do) the guidelines are for people who read, and the rhetoric is for people who watch Fox News. I’m sure the protesters chanting “Lock her up!” against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have no idea just how closely her position lines up with the administration’s published guidelines. (BTW, this urge to lock up powerful women — what’s that all about, anyway?)

The post will be called “Trump’s Guidelines Aren’t What He Says They Are”, and its main point is that he has set himself up to take credit for any good that comes from relaxing lockdown rules, but dump blame on the governors for anything that goes wrong. Faithfully pro-Trump governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida or Greg Abbott in Texas shouldn’t imagine that he won’t throw them under the bus if relaxing the lockdown leads to a new wave of deaths. It’s not like he’s planning to take responsibility himself; he never does. (Abbott, at least, seems to understand the trap Trump has set for him. But it’s not clear he has a way out.)

That post should be out shortly. The weekly summary will discuss the numbers, good and bad, and the basic division this crisis is showing us between what is real and what is symbolic. (Flag-waving is symbolic, staying home is real patriotism. Crowding into church on Easter is symbolic, looking out for your neighbor’s health is real Christianity.) A lot of that needs to be written yet, so I’m not entirely sure what will be in it; I have to go through my bookmarks. Let’s say the summary comes out around noon EDT.

Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!

– President Donald Trump (4-8-2020)

This week’s featured post is “Republican Shenanigans in Wisconsin“.

This week everybody was wondering if we’ll turn a corner soon

Day by day, it’s striking how little of the news actually seems new. On any given day you’re likely to hear:

• The Covid-19 case and death numbers are higher.
• Healthcare workers are worried about running out of protective equipment.
• Trump said something false about the virus.
• Somebody you’ve heard of died.
• We discovered another warning Trump received (and ignored) in January or December.
• More people lost their jobs.
• There’s a new report about how dysfunctional and disorganized the federal response is.
• The stock market made some big move up or down, — down 2% this morning — for reasons that don’t seem to have anything to do with the economy.
• Trump made some new assault against democracy or transparency.
• Some idiot pastor is gathering his congregation together, in defiance of statewide orders that he’s decided to take personally.
• Trump touted some untested drug as a miracle cure.
• Somebody else you’ve heard of died.
• Some economist insisted we have to “open up” the economy and some public health expert said that would be a disaster, but neither defined what “opening up” actually means.
• Some government expert who contradicted Trump might be fired.

Somebody should turn all these into a daily Bingo card. Fill the square when you hear the story.

So anyway, let’s get started: The numbers are higher. The US has surged past Italy to have the most coronavirus deaths of any country in the world. As of early this morning, we had 560K cases (505K active) and 22K deaths.

Reasons for optimism:

• A model at the University of Washington says that the daily number of new cases in the US peaked April 5-7, and that the number of active cases (infections minus recoveries and deaths) will peak around April 20. Of course, different regions of the country are at different stages, so the peak where you are could be earlier or later.
• Another model says deaths in New York peaked April 9.

Trump’s announcements are meant to sound good in the moment, not to stand up to a month of scrutiny. So it’s practically cheating that NPR took a one-month-later look at the promises made when Trump declared a national emergency. He followed through on a few things, but most of the promises are still hanging. Remember all the big retail chains that were going to offer drive-through testing? And test-yourself-at-home kits? And the Google website that was going to coordinate everything?

A PBS Newshour article takes a similar look at the empty promises.

Two weeks ago, Trump brought word of an innovative diagnostic test that can produce results in minutes instead of days or a week. … New Hampshire, for one, received 15 rapid-test machines but 120 cartridges instead of the 1,500 expected. Only two machines can be used. “I’m banging my head against the wall, I really am,” Republican Gov. Chris Sununu said Wednesday. “We’re going to keep pushing on Washington multiple times a day to get what we need.”

So Easter has come and gone without “reopening the country” as the President was talking about two weeks ago. He’s still talking about it.

A senior White House official said there’s a lot of internal energy pushing for May 1, because that’s the end of the White House’s “30 Days to Slow the Spread.”

But you have to bear in mind that this is Trump; he and his people say stuff because it sounds nice, not because some thought process has led to this conclusion. Undoubtedly that’s the case with Stephen Moore, the guy Trump wanted on the Federal Reserve Board before Republican senators noticed that he’s a complete idiot:

“May 1 has to be a hard deadline for getting things open and running,” said Stephen Moore, an economist and former Trump campaign adviser, who advocated for reopening parts of the country on a rolling basis, beginning with less impacted areas. “There has to be a calibration of the best medical advice plus the best economic advice.”

So far May 1, or whatever date they eventually come up with, is just a number on a calendar. There is no set of criteria that will be met by then, and there is no plan for how to proceed. (Trump is putting together a new task force to make a plan. Reportedly Ivanka is on it, so it’s bound to be an all-star team.)

So at some point Trump will announce with great fanfare that the economy is restarting now. And then nothing will happen, because he’ll be stepping down on a gas pedal that isn’t connected to any fuel line.

To the extent that there’s been real thinking about how to restart the economy, it’s not coming from the administration. Fortunately, a lot of people outside the administration are saying the same things about the conditions that have to be met. (I was one of them two weeks ago. Joe Biden was another yesterday.)

• It’s not enough to flatten the curve or even to see it start to slope downward. The number of cases needs to fall by a considerable amount, so that the health care system has slack to absorb a possible second wave of cases. That slack would include not just beds and ventilators, but also rebuilt stockpiles of protective equipment.
• Testing needs to be so widespread that we find new cases quickly. Things are getting better, but our testing capacity still is nowhere near what it needs to be. We have tested about 8K out of every million people, while Germany has tested 16K per million — and they’re not ready to reopen their economy either.
• The public health system needs to ramp up an enormous bureaucracy to track new cases and find their contacts before they can spread the infection further. In Wuhan, the Chinese government “dispatched 1,800 five-person teams to track down every contact to warn them they were at risk.” Over the whole US, this effort could require tens of thousands of people. But as yet there is no federal effort to do this, and Massachusetts is the only state I’m aware of that has started a program on a realistic scale.
• An antibody test needs to be able to identify people who have recovered from the virus and presumably are immune for some period of time. Those tests are just starting to become available now.

The point is to allow people go out in public and trust that the odds of meeting someone who is contagious are low. The idea that all this can be accomplished by May 1 is just absurd; anyone who mentions a date like that has no idea what they’re talking about and is not worth listening to. June 1? Maybe. We’ll see how things develop.

Once we get to that point, the economy can reopen piece-by-piece, taking baby steps. In China, Starbucks began by allowing one-person-per-table seating. Businesses where everyone has been working from home might allow groups of, say, five people to come in and work in the same office, taking care to avoid contact with other working groups. Each step has to be monitored to see if it starts a new outbreak; if it does, everyone needs to step back and plan again how to take that step forward safely.

Getting “back to normal” is going to require a vaccine, which isn’t happening for maybe a year.

There have been a lot of good what-went-wrong articles. The NYT pulls together the various warnings Trump ignored in January, and then how slowly the White House moved afterward. The New Yorker looks particularly at the protective equipment issue.

As far as I know, there are no national statistics of Covid-19 deaths broken down by race. But the limited statistics we do see indicate that blacks are dying of the virus at a rate much higher than whites. It’s not hard to come up with a speculative list of factors that would make them [I’m uncomfortable classifying blacks as a “them”, but being white, I can’t say “us” either] more likely to be exposed to the disease, and to fare worse once they have it:

• To the extent that black people form an economic underclass, they are more likely to have jobs where they deal directly with people and can’t work from home.
• Being on average more urban and poorer than whites, blacks are more likely to rely on public transportation.
• Being raised in inadequate housing makes them more likely to have a history of asthma.
• Racial disparities in nutrition, health care, and work environments leave more of them with pre-existing conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and heart or lung disease. Worse, those conditions are more likely to be undiagnosed or untreated.
• A combination of poor medical services, distrust of the medical services available, and concerns about expense lead to later and less aggressive medical intervention.

If you’ve ever struggled to understand the term intersectionality, look at that list. Some of it is racial, and some is due to class. Some is structural; some is cultural. Much of the problem is systemic rather than a result of active, conscious prejudice by some individuals against other individuals. But it all works together to achieve a malign result.

With so many people wearing masks, I’ve been joking that this is a good time to rob a bank. Turns out, if you’re wearing a mask and you’re black, that’s not a joking matter. Two black men posted a video of a security officer escorting them out of a WalMart for being masked.

The Denver Post describes how the crisis creates a new avenue for Trump’s corruption:

President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives. For the good of this nation during what should be a time of unity, he must stop.

Trump prevented Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, from obtaining 500 ventilators, claiming them for the federal government instead. A few days later, incumbent Republican Senator Cory Gardner tweeted that Trump:

has approved National Guard assistance in Colorado in response to #COVID19, following the request of members of the Colorado congressional delegation.

And Trump himself told the Colorado who they had to thank for this “favor”:

Will be immediately sending 100 Ventilators to Colorado at the request of Senator Gardner!

In other words, Colorado is down 400 ventilators in all, but the lack is Polis’ fault for being a Trump opponent, and what ventilators the state does get is due to having a Trump ally as senator. This seems to be a general pattern, which Josh Marshall describes like this:

Basically the White House won’t share anything about what framework is used on the confiscation or distribution side of this equation. The most they’ll say is that they’re using some version of ‘big data’ to do it in a totally coherent, awesome way. But the details we get make it sound like the oldest sort of system: distribution by friendship networks, patronage, the generosity of the powerful in exchange for future considerations. Who knows Jared? Who knows someone who knows Jared? Who’s Trump like? At minimum a significant amount of the lifesaving goods appear to be distributed on that basis.

Wonder how other countries are seeing the United States now? Here’s a view from India.

Mira Johnson recounts her family’s flight from the virus in a graphic short story.

and talking about the end of the Democratic nomination race

Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign Wednesday, leaving the nomination to Joe Biden. Biden’s path to the nomination has been an odd one, resembling John McCain’s in 2008: He was the early front-runner, then looked like he was going to fall out of the running, and finally came back to win. The difference from McCain is that Biden is trying to oust an unpopular president. McCain was trying to keep the White House Republican in spite of an unpopular president. Where the economic disaster of 2008 worked against McCain, the current economic/public health disaster should favor Biden.

I keep meaning to do a what-we-learned-from-the campaign article, but other stuff keeps getting in the way. But a number of good articles came out about why the Sanders campaign failed to win the nomination: in Vox, 538, Washington Post, New York Times, and Washington Monthly.

A few things stand out to me:

• Sanders over-estimated his support in 2016. He got a lot of anti-Clinton votes that he interpreted as endorsements of his policies.
• He under-estimated the loyalty that black Americans, especially older ones who remember the Civil Rights era, feel towards the Democratic Party. Villainizing the Party was not a good move. He should be trying to move the Party left, not burn it down.
• His belief that class interests trump everything else just didn’t pan out. A lot of the working-class rural whites who supported him when he was running against a woman voted for Biden this time.

I can never tell how typical the Sanders supporters on my Facebook feed are. But I’m struck by the amount of denial of the fact that the voters did not agree with them. I see a lot of conspiracy theorizing about the DNC and the big donors and so forth. But if Sanders had gotten the votes, he’d have gotten the nomination. He didn’t get the votes.

Biden holds a pretty solid lead over Trump in national polls, but the race looks closer when you look at the Electoral College. Biden needs to take either Wisconsin (where he currently has a 1-point lead) or Florida (currently 1 point behind).

Here’s how Matt Yglesias analyzes Biden’s VP options, given that Biden has already said he wants to pick a woman. I think a non-white woman would be better, given the necessity of motivating a high non-white turnout.

The WaPo’s Aaron Blake rates the 11 most likely choices and has Whitmer as third, with Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar more likely.

and the flap between Captain Crozier and Navy Secretary Modly

It ended on Tuesday with both of them having lost their jobs. Modly relieved Crozier of command of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt on April 2, a few days after a letter Crozier had written (reporting the Covid-19 outbreak on his ship) appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. Modly then flew to Guam to address the TR’s crew on Monday, saying that if Crozier thought his letter wouldn’t leak, he had been “too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer. … The alternative is that he did this on purpose.” Modly described that possibility as “betrayal”.

The uproar against Modly’s speech was immediate. He apologized (sort of) Monday evening, and then resigned on Tuesday.

This case is tricky to adjudicate properly. The first thing to emphasize is that Crozier’s heart was in the right place: He was protecting his sailors. The virus was spreading rapidly on the TR — we now know of 416 TR-coronavirus cases, including Crozier himself — and getting the ship to port, off-loading the infected sailors, and quarantining the rest was absolutely the right thing to do. “We are not at war, and therefore cannot allow a single Sailor to perish as a result of this pandemic unnecessarily,” Crozier’s letter said.

It’s also important to put Crozier’s actions in the context of the fundamental social contract of the US military (which was explained to me a few years ago by my friend from high school who at the time was a warrant officer in the Marines): Members of the military agree to follow their commanding officer’s orders even at the risk of their own lives, and in return the commanding officer acquires the responsibility to take care of those lives as best he can, given the mission he’s been assigned to carry out.

An officer, then, has to balance his pledged obedience to his commanders against his responsibility to his subordinates. There is a sparse, but also long and honorable, history of US officers risking their careers by defying foolish orders or otherwise crossing a line (like expressing a concern in a way likely to leak out to the public) to protect the people whose lives are in their care. So it’s no wonder that Crozier got such an emotional send-off when he left the ship, and I imagine his sailors will be drinking toasts in his name for decades to come.

The flip side of that, though, is that a career-risking move really does need to be career-risking. The military would fall apart if every officer felt free to appeal to the public whenever he disagreed with some order or policy. The logic here is similar to civil disobedience in the civilian world: I may approve of you protesting some injustice by blocking traffic. But if I am a policeman, it’s still my responsibility to arrest you. There has to be a cost to breaking the law, or else we don’t have laws at all.

So I agree that Brett Crozier is a hero for putting his career on the line to save his crew. And I also think he should have paid a price of some sort. Relieving him of command is maybe a high price, but it’s not unreasonable.

Where Modly went completely off the rails, though, was in going to the TR and denouncing Crozier to his former crew in such terms. (This is, in my mind, a typical Trump-administration stunt. They can’t just win and move on; they have to issue a fuck-you to anyone who got in their way.) He could have stayed in Washington and said nothing. He could have gone to Guam and humbly explained the situation the way I just did: “You are absolutely right to admire Captain Crozier, but I had to fire him anyway to maintain the discipline of the Navy. You will have a new commander now, and I expect you to give him proper respect.”

So while I harbor some reservations about Crozier losing his command, and I hope he lands on his feet somewhere else in the Navy, I have no reservations at all about Modly losing his job. I just wish I believed someone better would get the position next. However, that seems not to happen in this administration. Like Bill Barr replacing Jeff Sessions, Mark Meadows replacing Mick Mulvaney who replaced John Kelly, or Kayleigh McEnany replacing a long line of press secretaries back to Sean Spicer, each new person somehow manages to be even worse than the last one.

and you also might be interested in …

Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general, who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower report that eventually led to Trump’s impeachment, and whom Trump recently fired in apparent retaliation:

It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so

The administration wants public money to bail out airlines and hotels, but not the Post Office.

A US Court of Appeals says that Donald Trump’s accountants must turn over the eight years of tax returns subpoenaed by a Manhattan district attorney. Of course Trump will appeal to the Supremes, and since the case presents a clear choice between the Leader and the Law, God only knows what they’ll do.

Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow reacts: “The issue raised in this case goes to the heart of our republic. The constitutional issues are significant.” You got that right, Jay. The issue is whether there is any way to control corruption, once it reaches the presidency.

One important thing to note is that the case is not about making the tax returns public. If nothing in the returns is relevant to a prosecutable crime, the DA is obliged to keep them confidential. If some part is relevant, it might be quoted in an indictment or appear as evidence in a trial. (I am not sure what the rules are if the returns reveal some other crime within the DA’s jurisdiction.)

So far, for example, we don’t even know exactly what investigation this pertains to. In the decision, writing for the three-judge panel, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann tells us only that it concerns “potential criminal conduct within the District Attorney’s jurisdiction”. The nature of the subpoena itself indicates that it has something to do with the “hush money” paid to two women, and whether the Trump Organization finagled its accounting to hide those payments.

This section strikes me as the heart of the decision:

The President relies on what he described at oral argument as “temporary absolute presidential immunity” — he argues that he is absolutely immune from all stages of state criminal process while in office, including pre-indictment investigation, and that the Mazars subpoena cannot be enforced in furtherance of any investigation into his activities. We have no occasion to decide today the precise contours and limitations of presidential immunity from prosecution, and we express no opinion on the applicability of any such immunity under circumstances not presented here. Instead, after reviewing historical and legal precedent, we conclude only that presidential immunity does not bar the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce non-privileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the President.

Further:

Assuming, again without deciding, that the President cannot be prosecuted while he remains in office, it would nonetheless exact a heavy toll on our criminal justice system to prohibit a state from even investigating potential crimes committed by him for potential later prosecution, or by other persons, not protected by any immunity, simply because the proof of those alleged crimes involves the President. Our “twofold aim” that “guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer”, would be substantially frustrated if the President’s temporary immunity were interpreted to shield the conduct of third parties from investigation.

I interpret much of this as Katzmann feeling the Supreme Court looking over his shoulder. He writes nothing inflammatory or polemic, and repeatedly emphasizes the narrowness of his panel’s decision. (“We express no opinion on … circumstances not presented here.”) If the Supreme Court’s partisan Republican majority wants to reverse this decision, Katzmann can’t stop them, but he is going to give them as little as possible to grab hold of.

The news media is still trying to work out the right way to cover a President who will predictably misinform and lie to the public whenever a camera is pointed at him. Former NBC News executive Mark Lukasiewicz makes some suggestions in Columbia Journalism Review:

Try covering more of what they do, and less of what they say. What President Trump says he has done, or will do, about ventilator shortages is likely untrue and largely irrelevant. What he says someone told him about the situation in New York is equally irrelevant. What is actually happening in New York, what Trump has actually done … these are facts—knowable facts—and these are what matter.

Let truth-telling be a prerequisite for appearing on live TV. Repeat offenders who lie or obfuscate with abandon, no matter their position, should not be put on live again.

As for Trump officials like Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller, Lukasiewicz went on to tell Rolling Stone:

Putting people on live television who you know are going to lie, it seems to me, is journalistic malpractice. I don’t think — for want of a better word — a “traditional” journalist would be sitting at their computer going, “Gee, I need an expert on biomedicine. I think I’ll call that guy who’s lied to me 10 times before and see what he has to say.” No, you wouldn’t call that guy.

Yet there are people who lie to Chris Cuomo or lie to George Stephanopoulos or lie to Chuck Todd and they’re back and they’re back again. There’s something profoundly wrong with that equation.

In the last two weeks, two of my friends (who don’t know each other) have told me about robot projects they’re working on: One is part of a team developing robots that deliver packages. Another is working on robots to replace the pickers who assemble your order at the Amazon warehouse.

Both projects share a vision of goods arriving at your door untouched by human hands. Once that seemed creepy, but a viral pandemic makes it much more appealing. The NYT is seeing the same things I am:

Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs, from call centers to warehouses and grocery stores, as companies looked to cut labor costs and improve profit. But labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact.

What this does to employment is a good question.

Actual Trump tweet: “HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY TO ALL!”

Do you think he knows what Good Friday is about? Maybe in November he’ll wish Jews a “joyous Kristallnacht”. Tomorrow is the 155th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Let’s have a party!

World-renowned mathematician John Conway died of Covid-19 on Saturday. I never met Conway, but he and I were on the same side in a mathematical controversy in the 90s: A Berkeley professor claimed to have proved the Kepler Conjecture (about the tightest way to pack identical spheres in an infinite space), and we believed (correctly, as it turned out) that there were holes in his proof. I had to search a little to find a reference to the letter we wrote to the Mathematical Intelligencer. [J. H. Conway, T. C. Hales, D. J. Muder, and N. J. A. Sloane, On the Kepler conjecture, Math. Intelligencer 16, no. 2 (1994)] One of the other names on that letter (Tom Hales) actually did prove the Kepler Conjecture a few years later.

Conway is most famous to the larger scientific public for inventing the Game of Life, which was a landmark in the development of cellular automata.

but some of you are probably still wondering about my Covid-19 status

Last week I wrote about my week of quarantine and getting myself tested. (Yes, that turned out to be possible.)

Tuesday, my test results came back negative. A number of people have warned me about the test’s false-negative rate, and suggested I continue to act as if I were contagious. However, by the time the test came back, I had gone three days without the original symptom (low-grade fever), or any other symptom I don’t ordinarily have. (I always wake up congested, and cough in the morning.) My doctor and I discussed false negatives, and agreed that my symptoms (which had never amounted to much, even before they went away) did not justify continued quarantine.

In the days since, I continue to suffer the effects of stress and worry, like everybody else. But my temperature is back to its usual sub-normal.

I can report two things about a week of quarantine: First, if you’re already fairly reclusive and live a lot of your life inside your head, quarantine is not that difficult, especially if you have a support crew living somewhere else in the house. (Thanks, Deb and Dawn.)

Second, when I found out I could leave, my reaction surprised me: Rather than bursting out, I felt some reticence I had to overcome. “Is this OK? Am I safe?” After talking to my doctor, I finished the last ten minutes of the basketball game I’d been watching (the final game of the 1977 NBA championship series), called my wife to tell her I was coming, and then warily made my way downstairs.

I can only imagine how people must feel when they get out of prison. It must take an enormous amount of adjustment.

and let’s close with a melancholy tribute

Here’s to John Prine, whose songs have entertained us for decades. John died Tuesday of the coronavirus. He’s most famous for “Angel from Montgomery“, though I first heard one of his songs when John Denver covered “Blow Up Your TV”.

In this less well known piece, “The Lonesome Friends of Science“, Prine sings “I live down deep inside my head.” From now on, he’ll have to live inside the heads of the rest of us.

How much are Republicans willing to disrupt democracy to maintain their power? We’re starting to find out.

This week, partisan majorities in the Wisconsin legislature, Wisconsin Supreme Court, and US Supreme Court combined their power to rig Tuesday’s election, with the goal of safeguarding the Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court against possible interference by the voters. The cost of this exercise of raw power was both the disenfranchisement of large numbers of Wisconsin citizens and an increase in the spread of Covid-19 in the state. As a result, both votes and lives will be lost.

Wisconsin’s pre-existing condition: an ailing democracy. Before we get into the details of how Tuesday played out, it’s worth noting that Wisconsin’s claim to have a democratic form of government was already shaky. Elections are still held, but the state has been gerrymandered to the point that large Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature are just about impervious to the will of the People. Republicans have power because they have power, not because the voters of Wisconsin want them.

2018 election results in Wisconsin.

The election of 2018 proved that point: Democrats won all the statewide offices, including the governorship. Together, Democratic candidates for the lower house of the legislature — where all the seats were up for election — got 200,000 more votes than Republicans. And yet Republicans won not just a majority of the seats, but close to a supermajority: 63 out of 99.

That advantage comes on top of the unfair advantage Republicans get from voter suppression. They lost among the people who managed to vote by 200K. If voting were easier, they probably would have lost by much more.

How do they get away with that? Well, one reason is that the Wisconsin Supreme Court doesn’t protect the right of Wisconsin voters to control their government, at least not when that government is Republican.

But Supreme Court justices are elected in Wisconsin, so if Wisconsinites want their democracy back, they can vote out the Republican judges who stand in their way. At least in theory. That theory was being tested Tuesday.

What the election was going to be about. Outside of Wisconsin, Tuesday’s election mainly had been getting attention as a presidential primary. Joe Biden held a substantial delegate lead, but Bernie Sanders was still running, and Sanders had beaten Hillary Clinton soundly in Wisconsin in 2016. The recent polls weren’t looking good for Sanders this time, but if he could pull off a result similar to his 2016 victory, things might yet get interesting.

Inside the state, though, the election was about judgeships, particularly a seat on the state’s highest court. Politico explains:

The high court has played a pivotal role in upholding major pieces of GOP legislation including Act 10 in 2011, which limited public employee collective bargaining rights. The court, which now has a 5-to-2 conservative majority, also shut down a long-running investigation into the campaign of former Governor Scott Walker for campaign finance violations, and upheld the GOP Legislature’s move to limit the powers of incoming Democratic Governor Tony Evers after his defeat of Walker. The court will also play a decisive role in the upcoming fight over redistricting as well as a host of hot-button social issues such as abortion and religious liberty.

Also at stake: “three seats on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, over 100 other judgeships, over 500 school board seats, and several thousand other positions”.

The judicial elections happening simultaneously with the primary seemed like a misfortune to Republicans, though, because (since Trump is running unopposed) more Democrats seemed likely to turn out than Republicans. If only there were some way to keep turnout down across the board …

The coronavirus election. Then coronavirus happened. Showing up to vote is a risky thing during an epidemic, especially if you have to wait in long lines with other people, some of whom are bound to be carrying the virus. Other states have recognized this problem and so a series of primaries have been postponed. In all 16 states have delayed their primaries.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers thought Wisconsin should do the same. He already had issued a stay-at-home order on March 24, and reasoned that it made little sense to tell people both to stay home and to go out and vote. On April 3 he called the legislature into special session to delay the primary. Evers wanted to convert the primary to a vote-by-mail format, and allow voters to return their ballots anytime until late May.

That, of course, would raise turnout, which is seen as a partisan issue in Wisconsin, and across the country. (If you want a lot of people to vote, you must be a Democrat.) But the gerrymandered Republican legislature could have proposed its own plan to postpone the primary, and Evers would have found himself under considerable pressure to go along with it.

Instead, the legislature came up with the best voter-suppression plan of all: Let’s make people risk their lives in order to vote! The leaders of both houses issued a joint statement: “Our Republic must continue to function.” The primary would go on as scheduled.

This looked like a trainwreck-in-the-making to Governor Evers, whose main job these days is to convince his citizens to stay home and not spread the virus. So the day before the primary — right after the legislature adjourned his special session without acting — he issued an order delaying the primary until June 9, noting the risk not just to the voters, but even moreso to the poll workers who “come into close proximity with dozens, if not hundreds, of voters”.

Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos and state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald immediately challenged that order in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which — surprise! — supported them 4-2. Vos and Fitzgerald rejoiced:

We continue to believe that citizens should be able to exercise their right to vote at the polls on Election Day, should they choose to do so … this election will proceed as planned.

What about voting absentee? OK, there’s an election. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to the polls to vote. The decision that the show must go on produced a predictable avalanche of absentee-ballot requests. Last year, when there was a spring election but not a presidential primary, 167,832 absentee ballots were requested. For the 2016 general election there were 595,914 requests. This year? 1,293,288. About 200,000 of those ballots were not returned in time to count, compared to just 30,000 in the 2016 general election.

The office that distributes absentee ballots wasn’t set up to deal with such a deluge of last-minute requests, so it soon became apparent that some number of legitimate Wisconsin voters wouldn’t get their ballots before election day.

A collection of (mostly Democratic) voters and groups sued to get an extension for absentee voters to return their ballots. A federal district court ruled in their favor, extending the deadline from election day to today, nearly a week later. The election commission was also enjoined from releasing results until then.

That ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court’s Republican* majority: Votes could continue to be counted until today, but they had to be postmarked by election day. That decision is unsigned. It mentions the problem that voters may not have received their ballots (which the lower court held was an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote), but then completely ignores it, comparing the situation to normal elections where people who request a ballot at the last minute may not have much time to fill it out and mail it. (It’s worth pointing out that the undelivered-ballot question is not just theoretical. “Three tubs of ballots for Oshkosh and Appleton have been discovered at a mail processing center in Milwaukee, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a state senator.”)

Justice Ginsberg’s dissent asks a simple question:

If a voter already in line by the poll’s closing time can still vote, why should Wisconsin’s absentee voters, already in line to receive ballots, be denied the franchise?

The majority opinion doesn’t answer that question, because there is no answer.

Election day. The NYT’s Linda Greenhouse, in a column blasting the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, (and in particular skewering the majority’s use of the word “ordinarily”, as if anything about this situation were ordinary) summarized the election-day conditions.

Milwaukee voters are not ordinarily reduced to using only five polling places. Typically, 180 are open.

In a stunt that probably wasn’t as effective as he planned, Speaker Vos himself worked as an election inspector. Covered in protective equipment, he assured the public that “You are incredibly safe to go out.”

Implications for future elections. In the back of everyone’s mind is the question: What if Covid-19 turns out to have a seasonal factor? It almost certainly won’t go away completely in the summer — it’s summer all year round in Florida, and they’ve had nearly 20,000 infections — but what if it diminishes, and then comes roaring back in the fall? Or what if we re-open the economy too quickly and get a fall resurgence that way?

In either case, it’s not impossible to imagine that the general election in November could take place under very similar conditions to the ones in Wisconsin on Tuesday. Wouldn’t it be nice to make a plan for that now, rather than go through last-minute drama and see large numbers of Americans disenfranchised?

You know who has a plan for that? Elizabeth Warren. Her plan calls for online voter registration, a vote-by-mail option, and at least 30 days of early voting. Radical stuff like that.

The problem with all those ideas, of course, is that they encourage people to vote. Or at least Republicans see that as a problem. They talk a lot about fraud, which is their usual excuse for voter suppression, but that’s not their real issue. (Washington state votes entirely by mail and has for years. Voting by mail is the standard thing for our overseas military. Fraud has not been a problem.) Their issue is that if you make voting easy, more people will vote. Marginal voters tend to vote Democratic, so it’s important to make voting as hard as possible.

* Typically, the media refers to the Court’s “conservative” majority, but that characterization has not been accurate for some while. More and more often, dating back to Bush v Gore, Citizens United, and John Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, the Court has been making decisions that can’t be explained by legal philosophy. The point is that Republicans should win, not that some theory of constitutional interpretation is better than another. So henceforth I’ll be refusing to play along with the ruse that their rulings have something to do with limited government or the Founders’ original intent.

Some days I wonder if they’re re-running news from some previous day. You know: the death numbers have increased; health workers don’t have what they need; Trump said something stupid or offensive at the daily briefing; some idiot minister is defying the no-large-gathering order, as if the whole pandemic were a satanic plot to shut down his particular church; more people lost their jobs; and so on.

And now I’m part of it, because the weekly summary will (once again) have all that stuff in it.

With the same outrageous stuff happening week after week, it can be hard to notice when something happens that is outrageous even by our newly elevated standards of outrage. But Tuesday’s Wisconsin state elections (and incidentally, the presidential primary) was such an event. The Republican legislature (which is only Republican because of gerrymandering) used the threat of the virus as a voter-suppression technique. And then the supreme courts of both Wisconsin and the United States backed them up. So Wisconsinites were out there in face masks and garbage bags, standing as far apart as the long lines (to get into drastically fewer polling places) allowed.

Usually, the “I Voted” sticker is a mark of civic responsibility. Tuesday it was a badge of courage.

The vote still hasn’t been announced (more on that later), so we don’t know yet whether this bit of election tampering achieved the results the Republicans wanted: holding a seat on the very state supreme court that said all this was OK.

Anyway, the featured post will go into the blow-by-blow of all that. I’m aiming to get that out by 10 EDT, but I’m also moving unusually slowly this morning. The weekly summary will have this week’s versions of the news re-runs listed above, as well as a recap on the Democratic nomination race, which seems to be over now that Bernie Sanders has shut down his campaign. Speculation on Biden’s VP choice is rising. Trump’s taxes are going to the Supreme Court. And I’ll close with a John Prine song. I’ll try to get that out by noon.