Crooked Media - What A Day: You're a banned old flag

Over the weekend, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. reported just this month rose to 250,000, the White House tinkered with how to tell Amercians to just, like, get over it, and President Trump redoubled his attacks on the real enemy: Cancel culture.
 

• Addressing a throng of non-socially distanced, mostly unmasked supporters at Mount Rushmore on Friday, Trump monotonously warned that “angry mobs” were out to unleash “a wave of violent crime in our cities,” and branded the ongoing protest movement “new far left fascism” (a phrase that evokes nothing so much as Stephen Miller high-fiving himself). Trump repeated those festive, patriotic sentiments at the White House celebration on Saturday, which local officials had urged the White House to cancel. 
   
• Some of Trump’s advisors are, get this, concerned that riling up his core base without doing anything to bring in new voters is a terrible political strategy. In the words of one senior campaign advisor, “The question now is, is the statue shit going to work?” Republicans trying to hold onto their Senate majority aren’t wild about Trump’s Summer of Explicit Racism either, and have reportedly decided to start jumping ship if he hasn’t resuscitated his campaign by Labor Day. Anywho, today Trump defended the Confederate flag again and falsely accused Black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace of perpetrating a hoax, and a new Gallup poll found that his approval rating has dropped among independents, white voters, and men.
   
• The president did find a moment this weekend to lie about the pandemic still ravaging the country, claiming on Saturday–to an audience that included frontline medical workers—that 99 percent of the country’s infections are “totally harmless.” Meanwhile, hospitals in at least two Texas counties reached full capacity heading into the holiday weekend, infection rates are rising in at least 32 states, and Don Jr.’s own girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle tested positive ahead of the Mount Rushmore event on Friday, which we know because COVID-19 is so harmless that everyone who might come anywhere near Trump gets tested for it. 

As Trump tries to hide his coronavirus failures under a big Confederate flag, the White House is polishing up its equally offensive new coronavirus message: “We need to live with it.” 
 

• To no one’s surprise, White House officials reportedly hope that Americans will become numb to the growing official death toll (which now stands at over 130,000), and get used to tens of thousands of new cases a day. Presumably they also hope none of us can read the graphs illustrating the many countries that haven’t thrown up their hands and made their citizens live with it.
   
• On the economic front, Republicans in Congress are in lockstep with that message. The House and Senate have adjourned for a two-week recess without addressing the new spike in infections, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s priority for the next relief bill is a five-year liability shield for businesses and other institutions who negligently expose their workers to coronavirus. 

Trump is locked into a 2016 campaign strategy of fighting the losing side of a culture war while the country remains neck-deep in worsening public-health and economic crises. Doctors now describe America’s coronavirus situation as “in free fall,” and the Trump administration has pivoted away from even pretending to work on changing that trajectory. 

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Evictions are about to skyrocket thanks to the country’s failure to contain and respond to coronavirus, and as with infections, deaths, and job losses, people of color will be hit the hardest. Eviction moratoria across the country have begun to expire, and unless Congress steps in, federal unemployment benefits will run out at the end of the month. According to the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, 20 percent of the 110 million Americans in rental households, including a disproportionate number of people of color, are at risk of eviction by September 30. Even under current conditions, enforcement of the federal moratorium still in place has been uneven, and judges’ efforts to hold hearings online could increasingly put elderly and poor renters at a disadvantage, which will compound the inequity if and when the mass evictions begin.

• Hundreds of scientists have called on the World Health Organization to place more emphasis on airborne transmission in its coronavirus guidance. There’s increasing evidence that small virus particles linger in the air indoors and can infect people, which would require more aggressive containment efforts.
   
• The army has identified the remains of Spc. Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old soldier who went missing from Fort Hood in April.
   
• Ousted U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman will testify before the House Judiciary Committee in a closed-door session on Thursday.
   
• The Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked a judge’s order easing Alabama’s absentee voting requirements. Alabama’s GOP secretary of state expanded access to absentee ballots, but left in place rules requiring voters to make copies of their photo IDs and track down notaries during a pandemic. 
   
• Joe Biden’s climate task force has finalized a set of ambitious policy proposals. The panel led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and John Kerry set goals that include committing to seeing the U.S.’s energy sector fully powered by renewable energy by 2035, and a rapid transition to energy efficient buildings.
   
• Three police officers in Aurora, CO, were fired for their involvement in photos mocking the death of Elijah McClain. No police officers have yet been fired for their involvement in killing Elijah McClain.
   
• Amy Cooper, the white woman who called the cops on Christian Cooper, a Black man birdwatching in Central Park, has been charged with filing a false report. 
   
• Kanye West tweeted that he’s running for president, which seems like the pinnacle of exhausting news until you find out that Elon Musk is fully on board. 
   
• Broadway actor Nick Cordero died on Sunday, after a three month hospitalization for the coronavirus. He was 41.
   
• Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who scored around 500 films, died at 91. But not before writing a statement titled “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead,” like a legend. 
   
• Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg makes an assistant print out all his emails and fold them vertically, and other haunting insights into Quibi’s failure. 

The Supreme Court ruled that states can sanction or remove “faithless electors.” In 2016, 10 of the 535 presidential electors attempted to vote for someone other than the popular vote-winner in their states. The Court ruled unanimously that states can punish electors who go rogue to coerce them to vote for their pledged candidates, with Justice Elena Kagan noting that the Constitution’s text doesn’t protect electors’ free choice. So while the Electoral College can still hand the presidency to the loser of the national popular vote, states can prevent individual electors from upending the outcome of an election. That should assuage fears about one nightmare scenario, in which Trump loses both the popular vote and the race to 270 electoral votes, but gets installed in office by rogue MAGA electors. 

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A federal judge ruled that the Dakota Access Pipeline must be shut down within 30 days, pending a full environmental review.

Energy companies have canceled construction of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline altogether, due in part to legal challenges from environmental groups. 

Google, Facebook, and Twitter have suspended processing requests for user data from Hong Kong authorities, in response to the new national security law China imposed on Hong Kong.

The manager of the Cleveland Indians said it’s time to change the team’s name, and the Washington Redskins announced that the team “will undergo a thorough review" of its team's name. (Let us save the team some time: It's bad.)