Crooked Media - What A Day: OANNing the libs

With his approval ratings tanking and his advisors attempting to steer him towards a message of national unity, President Trump went on Twitter to suggest an elderly victim of police violence had staged his own head injury. A seamless pivot.
 

• Last Thursday, two police officers in Buffalo, NY, shoved a 75-year-old peaceful protester so hard that he hit his head on the sidewalk and began bleeding from his ear, as other officers marched past him impassively. Bystanders captured the incident on camera. Today, the president of the United States tweeted this: “Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur. 75 year old Martin Gugino was pushed away after appearing to scan police communications in order to black out the equipment. @OANN I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?”
   
• First of all, there’s no world in which Donald Trump would have spelled “provocateur” correctly without copying it directly from a cable-news chyron. More importantly, this is one of the most monstrous and deranged conspiracy theories Trump has ever promoted, though the competition is stiff. Right on schedule, behold the parade of Republican senators who couldn’t possibly comment on the tweet because they “haven’t seen it.” Also right on schedule, behold the revelation that the OAN reporter who inspired Trump’s defamatory tweet is a Russian national who’s also employed by the Kremlin’s propaganda arm. 
   
• Tump keeps chiseling out new tunnels below rock bottom, and it probably has something to do with the fact that he’s losing. A wave of recent polling shows Joe Biden leading Trump nationally by an average of 10 points, as Trump’s support across nearly all demographic groups deteriorates. Trump is so stressed out about his re-election odds that over the past month, his campaign spent over $400,000 to run cable-news ads in the Washington, DC area, which will never flip red, all in the hope that our hardworking leader would see the ads during his favorite Fox News programs and feel soothed, much like a baby shown a jangling set of keys.

It’s a weird way to spend campaign cash if your goal is to convince voters, but then, that’s not the Trump team’s core strategy.
 

• Why persuade a few undecideds when you can make it all-but impossible for your opposition’s base to vote? See: Republicans' $20 million legal assault on efforts to expand mail voting. See also: Republicans’ efforts to recruit an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as “poll watchers” in November, to further intimidate the likely Democratic voters (minorities) whom they’ve forced to vote in person during a pandemic.
   
• Republicans already have a voter-suppression infrastructure in place, and recent primaries have shown us what can happen when that infrastructure and the coronavirus overlap. In Georgia’s debacle of an election today, voters had to wait in hours-long lines because some polling places were forced to close for lack of staffing and others were supplied with broken voting machines. Georgia has closed a slew of polling sites in black communities over the past few years, so guess where the lines were? Last week’s primaries in Maryland and Washington, DC, saw similar lines after many voters who requested absentee ballots failed to receive them.

Trump is flailing in the polls and melting down accordingly, but 1) it’s only June and 2) the polls mean nothing if voters can’t vote. Trump cares about staying president, not winning re-election fairly. If he’ll call a hospitalized septuagenarian an Antifa plant rather than acknowledge on-camera police abuse, imagine what he’ll say to call the election into question, and ask yourself if Republicans will admit to seeing that tweet. Then get to work: votesaveamerica.com.

Dan Pfeiffer is back to size up a new batch of 2020 ads with pollster Cornell Belcher. Today's ads include a positive spot from the Trump campaign, the Lincoln Project's "Traitor" ad, and an ad from the Senate Majority PAC against Susan Collins. Watch & subscribe → youtube.com/crookedmedia

Black-owned businesses have been hit the hardest by coronavirus lockdowns, driving the number of black owners of operating businesses down a cataclysmic 41 percent from February to April. Some 3.3 million small businesses across the U.S. have closed at least temporarily, 440,000 of which are black owned. That uneven toll may be partially attributable to the fact that their businesses were less likely to be in industries that governments deemed essential during the pandemic. The National Bureau of Economic Research’s findings don’t tell us how many of the businesses are likely to be closed permanently, but the findings are consistent with the larger pattern of African Americans suffering disproportionate harm from every consequence of the pandemic, from mortality rates to unemployment.

• The World Health Organization has walked back an official’s Monday comment that asymptomatic transmission of coronavirus was “very rare,” but not before everyone, you know, lost their minds. No one actually knows how common asymptomatic transmission is, and “asymptomatic” is often used to refer to cases that are actually pre-symptomatic, which may or may not be more contagious.
   
• George Floyd was laid to rest today in his hometown of Houston, TX. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner announced at the funeral that he would sign an executive order to prohibit the city police from using chokeholds, among other measures. 
   
• Fourteen states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the beginning of June. A wonderful time for President Trump and his advisors to strategically shift their focus away from the pandemic, because they don’t see a political advantage in continuing to address it.
   
• An NYPD officer who was filmed violently shoving a protester to the ground has been charged with third-degree assault. Vincent D’Andraia is the first member of the NYPD to face criminal charges for violence against peaceful protesters over the past two weeks.
   
• A Virginia judge issued a temporary injunction blocking the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, VA, pending the resolution of a lawsuit. It’s possible we watched the video of protesters dumping a racist statue in a river too many times, but we couldn’t help noticing that Mr. Robert E. Lee is a mere 1.8 miles from what looks like a very nice lake.
   
• Daniel Radcliffe spoke out against J.K. Rowling’s transphobic tweets, and said he hoped her comments wouldn’t ruin Harry Potter for fans. Yer a wise one, Harry.
   
• Sweden may have figured out who assassinated Prime Minister Olof Palme, over 34 years later. Prosecutors will announce the results of their investigation on Wednesday, at which time we will finally have the answer to the decades-old mystery that has haunted us since today when we first heard about it.
   
• COPS has been canceled, after 32 seasons on the air. For those who find the phrasing of “defund the police” unappealing, we put forth for your consideration: “Cancel cops.” 

The Trump administration has made it easier for hunters to kill bear cubs and wolf pups on national preserves in Alaska. You know, like cartoon villains in a Disney movie. The new rule ends a five-year ban on the practices of baiting hibernating bears outside with doughnuts, using artificial light to hunt wolf pups in their dens, shooting swimming caribou from a boat, and targeting animals from airplanes and snowmobiles. The rule change, which conservationists have called “barbaric and inhumane,” has been pending since 2018, and seems to fall in the bucket of “reprehensible agenda items we might as well check off the list during a pandemic, if they’ll help Trump shore up his base.”

The New York State Senate voted to repeal Section 50-a of the state's Civil Rights Law, which prevents police officers' disciplinary records from being made public.

Artists and galleries across the country have started selling works to raise money for bail funds and anti-racist organizations. 

Washington, DC, protesters have turned temporary fencing around the White House into a gallery and memorial of black lives lost to police violence.

Offset voted for the first time today! Reporting live from the Crooked Slack: Walk it like I vote it, Votesace, Vote Blue Tuesday, Bad and Blue-gie, when they go low, Migos high, Ric Flair drip go BLUE on a ballot, and finally, regrettably, “It’s time to OFFSET voter suppression.”