Crooked Media - What A Day: Happy Meme-orial Day

President Trump spent Memorial Day weekend golfing and tweeting insane nonsense as the official U.S. coronavirus death toll approached 100,000. Fun fact: Back in 2014, Trump lashed out at Barack Obama for golfing during the Ebola outbreak, when there were a total of two (2) Ebola cases in the U.S. (Sorry, this is as fun as facts get these days.)
 

•  On Sunday, the New York Times filled its front page with the names and stories of 1,000 COVID-19 victims, in a stark acknowledgement of the incalculable loss that the country has suffered. Instead of leading the nation in mourning, the President of the United States tweeted misleading information about the pandemic, feuded with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, amplified misogynistic attacks on Democratic women, and continued to spread an awful, baseless conspiracy theory that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough murdered a former staffer. (That staffer’s widower, T.J. Klausutis, wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week asking that Trump’s tweets on the subject be deleted, to no avail.)
   
• Joe Biden made his first public appearance since March on Monday, in a visit to Veterans Memorial Park in Delaware. Trump joined Fox News’s Brit Hume in mocking Biden for wearing a mask, continuing to stoke an inane partisan culture war over a lifesaving public-health measure that more than 70 percent of the public supports. This is a bizarre fight to pick for a few reasons: 1) Biden, in contrast to Trump, acted in accordance with the Trump administration’s own recommendations, 2) more Americans wearing masks would allow a faster economic recovery, which is all Trump ultimately cares about, and 3) Biden looked cool as hell, actually.
   
• Crowds gathered all over the country for Memorial Day in defiance of social distancing rules, alarming local officials. You may have seen this video of a packed pool at the Lake of the Ozarks, which made the rounds on social media and marked another dark chapter in the life of the song “High Hopes.” Health officials in Missouri and Kansas have urged anyone who was in that crowd to self-quarantine for 14 days, which seems somehow unlikely, but here’s to keeping high, high hopes.

Those crowds came at a precarious moment, with around a dozen states currently experiencing growing infection rates.
 

• Those states include Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, which were in the first wave of states to relax restrictions in late April and early May. Arkansas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, have also reported increases in confirmed cases—those states never had stay-at-home orders in place, but recently began reopening businesses. Today the World Health Organization warned of an “immediate second peak” in places that relax restrictions too early.
   
• Thankfully, the White House has swung into action by banning travel from Brazil, which is second only to the U.S. in the number of confirmed cases worldwide. A decisive move to protect the country from new infections, except the ones already ricocheting across the land that would require effort and coordination to suppress. This may be the last time Trump plays the travel ban hit for a while: The country with the world’s third-highest caseload is in Russia. 
   

Trump’s activities over the weekend offered another surreal glimpse into the warped mind of someone unfit to be president, particularly at this moment, but none of it taught us anything new. Trump will stay bent on changing the conversation away from his failure and polarizing the country, no matter how high the death toll—everything depends on ensuring he doesn’t succeed.

Even as public life in the U.S. ground to a halt during the pandemic, the rate of fatal shootings by on-duty police officers has remained roughly the same as in previous years. The victims of those shootings, as always, have been disproportionately black.

Many stories that reflect systemic racism in the criminal-justice system have been drowned out to some degree by pandemic conditions, but the racism and violence themselves have continued unabated: There were the delayed arrests in the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, which the Justice Department is now investigating as a hate crime. Today four Minneapolis police officers were fired in connection with the death of George Floyd, after a video showed an officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck, while he repeatedly said “I cannot breathe!” Yesterday, a viral video captured Amy Cooper, a white woman, calling the police on Christian Cooper (no relation), a black birdwatcher in Central Park who had asked her to leash her dog. Amy Cooper directly threatened him with the racial dynamics at play: “I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life.”

Not only have the U.S. coronavirus epidemic and subsequent economic collapse disproportionately harmed black communities, they have done nothing to slow systemic social ills, and obscured just how prevalent they remain. 

• Glenn Fine, whom President Trump removed as the Defense Department’s acting inspector general in order to block his appointment to oversee the federal coronavirus response, has resigned from the Pentagon.
   
• The RNC has sued California to block the state from mailing absentee ballots to all voters ahead of the November election, part of Republicans’ $20 million effort to combat expansions of vote-by-mail programs across the country.
   
• The Trump administration has discussed whether to conduct a U.S. nuclear test for the first time since 1992, a proposal that is reportedly “very much an ongoing conversation.” Terrific news for all of our very much ongoing stomach aches. 
   
• Twitter (kind of) labeled Trump’s tweets as misleading for the first time today, marking two of his dishonest tweets about mail-in voting with (somewhat subtle) links urging users to “get the facts.”
   
• House Republicans plan to file a lawsuit against Speaker Nancy Pelosi to block a remote proxy-voting system, calling it unconstitutional. The Constitution, interestingly, gives the House power to write its own rules.
   
• A former White House aide won a $3 million federal contract to supply masks to Navajo Nation hospitals, 11 days after creating a company to sell PPE. Zach Fuentes, who had no prior experience contracting with the federal government, sold Chinese-made KN95s to the Indian Health Service, many of which might be ineffective. 
   
• Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, is back at work after recovering from COVID-19, and announced she’s pregnant in the weirdest possible way.
   
• Betty White is “doing very well”, just in case anyone was worried, and is being guarded by a family of ducks who live in her backyard. Another day, another undeniable parallel between Betty White and Tony Soprano.

The Trump campaign has seized on Joe Biden’s “you ain’t black” gaffe, for which he apologized the same day, and which pales (no pun intended) against President Trump’s history of racist remarks. In an interview with Charlamagne Tha God on Friday, Biden ill-advisedly said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” It drew immediate backlash, both legitimate and performative, and Biden apologized hours later. The Trump campaign quickly slapped “#YouAintBlack” on a t-shirt, and set about trying to use the moment to drive down black voter turnout. There are serious questions at the core of the gaffe: Does the Democratic party take black voters for granted? And will comments like that from Biden have an impact in November? This interview with author and professor Chryl Laird is a great conversation on how the remark was problematic, but ultimately not something to lose sleep over.

Personal retreat. Second office. Home. Right now, it’s everything. Shop the Cozy at Home Shop at Nordstrom Rack now! 

A federal judge ruled that Florida’s law requiring people with felony convictions to pay court fines and fees before they can register to vote is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court declined to block an order for hundreds of at-risk inmates to be transferred or released from an Ohio prison with a major coronavirus outbreak. 

Los Angeles County, CA has opened its largest drive-through testing site at Dodger Stadium, with the capacity to test 6,000 people per day.

Gowns 4 Good, a new nonprofit, has collected thousands of graduation gowns for frontline medical workers to use as PPE.