7.31 The New York Times: The coronavirus pandemic’s toll on the nation’s economy became emphatically clearer Thursday as the government detailed the most devastating three-month collapse on record, which wiped away nearly five years of growth. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced, fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year as consumers cut back spending, businesses pared investments and global trade dried up, the Commerce Department said. The drop — the equivalent of a 32.9 percent annual rate of decline — would have been even more severe without trillions of dollars in government aid to households and businesses. But there is mounting evidence that the attempt to freeze the economy and defeat the virus has not produced the rapid rebound that many envisioned. A surge in coronavirus cases and deaths across the country has led to a renewed pullback in economic activity, reflecting consumer unease and renewed shutdowns. . . . “In another world, a sharp drop in activity would have been just a good, necessary blip while we addressed the virus,” said Heather Boushey, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank. “From where we sit in July, we know that this wasn’t just a short-term blip. We did not get the virus under control.”
7.30 Paul Krugman in the Times: Every worker’s nightmare is the horrible boss — everyone knows at least one — who is utterly incompetent yet refuses to step aside. Such bosses have the reverse Midas touch — everything they handle turns to crud — but they’ll pull out every stop, violate every norm, to stay in that corner office. And they damage, sometimes destroy, the institutions they’re supposed to lead. Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses. Unfortunately, he’s not just a bad business executive. He is, God help us, the president. And the institution he may destroy is the United States of America. Has any previous president failed his big test as thoroughly as Trump has these past few months? He rejected the advice of health experts and pushed for a rapid economic reopening, hoping for a boom leading into the election. He ridiculed and belittled measures that would have helped slow the spread of the coronavirus, including wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, turning what should have been common sense into a front in the culture war. The result has been disaster both epidemiological and economic. Over the past week the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 averaged more than 1,000 people a day, compared with just four — four! — per day in Germany. . . .All those extra deaths don’t seem to have bought us anything in terms of economic performance. America’s economic contraction in the first half of 2020 was almost identical to the contraction in Germany, despite our far higher death toll. And while life in Germany has in many ways returned to normal, a variety of indicators suggest that after two months of rapid job growth, the U.S. recovery is stalling in the face of a resurgent pandemic. Wait, it gets worse. Trump, his officials and their allies in the Senate have been totally committed to the idea that the U.S. economy will experience a stunningly rapid recovery despite the wave of new infections and deaths. They bought into that view so completely that they seem incapable of taking on board the overwhelming evidence that it isn’t happening.
7.30 Barack Obama: I like so many Americans owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom. America was built by John Lewises. He as much as anyone in our history brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideas. And someday, when we do finish that long journey towards freedom, when we do form a more perfect union, whether it’s years from now or decades or even if it takes another two centuries, John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.”
7:30 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: “Minutes after horrible economic numbers — a 32.9 percent annualized contraction in gross domestic product and 1.43 million new jobless claims — were released, President Trump tweeted out a statement suggesting we should delay the election. Clearly, he wants us to ignore the 32.9 percent annualized contraction in gross national product and 1.43 million new jobless claims. But we won’t ignore the 32.9 percent annualized contraction in gross domestic product and 1.43 million new jobless claims.”
7.30 John Lewis in the Times: When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.
7.28 Trump at a White House press briefing: “Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality, that’s all. . . .Remember, [Fauci]’s working for this administration. He’s working with us. We could’ve gotten other people. We could’ve gotten somebody else. It didn’t have to be Dr. Fauci. . . .He’s got this high approval rating. So why don’t I have a high approval rating and the administration with respect to the virus?”
7.28 Greg Sargent in the Washington Post: “As long as the pandemic is not under control, it is unsafe to go back to work, but it is also unsafe to go out shopping in face-to-face encounters,” Chad Stone, the chief economist at the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me. “Right now, policymakers should be making sure people have the resources to keep a roof over their head and food on the table while they get the virus under control, so it is safe to resume normal economic activity,” Stone said. He added that many experts “understand that it is the virus that is driving the economy.” This is the key principle that Republicans don’t want to accept. Because Trump refuses to accept it. Trump wants to create the impression that the only thing preventing us from roaring back to greatness is a failure of will — if he can persuade enough people that they can resume activity without needing to fear getting sick or dying, perhaps he can conjure the illusion of a return to normalcy in time for his reelection.
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7.27 Regina E. Dugan in the Washington Post: A 2020 McKinsey study on the revolution in biological sciences estimates that “45 percent of the global disease burden could be addressed using science that is conceivable today.” Biology and engineering are converging. It is already more science than fiction to cultivate human tissue in a lab, even cardiac tissue with cells that beat in synchrony with each other for days. We could choose to build a future where no one must wait on an organ donor list. Where the mechanistic underpinnings of mental health are understood and treatable. Where clinical trials happen in months, not years. Where our health span coincides with our life span and we are healthy to our last breath.
7.26 In the interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sen. Tom Cotton said that slavery is a critical piece of American history, telling the newspaper, “As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”
7.25 Regis Philbin dies at 88.
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7.23 The New York Times reports that the government has in its possession “unidentified aerial vehicles [that] possibly exhibited technologies not in the American arsenal.” Says the Times, “Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.” . . . Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”
7.23 Rep. Yoho calls AOC “a fucking bitch,” then offers a lame apology. Responds AOC: “I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse, and worse, to see that. To see that excuse, and see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology and to accept silence as a form of acceptance. I could not allow that to stand. . . 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. I am someone’s daughter, too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television. And I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”
7.23 Fauci: “We are certainly not at the end of the game. I’m not even sure we’re halfway through. Certainly we are not winning the game right now. We are not leading it.” Later he threw out the first ball to start baseball’s delayed season. The Yanks beat the Nats, 4-1.
7.23 Donald Trump: “The first questions are very easy; the last questions are much more difficult,” he explained. “Like a memory question. It’s like” — he looked around him — “you’ll go: person, woman, man, camera, TV. So they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that?’” So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So it’s person, woman, man, camera, TV. ‘Okay, that’s very good,'” he continued. “If you get it in order, you get extra points. If you — okay. Now he’s asking you other questions, other questions, and then 10 minutes, 15-20 minutes later, they’d say, ‘remember the first question?’ Not the first, but the 10th question — ‘Give us that again, can you do that again?’ And you go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ If you get it in order, you get extra points.” “Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” Trump explained, saying that listing the words in order was worth “extra points”, and that he found the task easy. They said nobody gets it in order, it’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy.”
7.22 Sierra Club confronts racism of founder John Muir. The Post: “Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to African Americans as lazy “Sambos,” a racist pejorative that many black people consider to be as offensive as the n-word. Muir’s friendships in the early 1900s were equally troubling, the Sierra Club said. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a close associate, led the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History and, following Muir’s death, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people, including Jews at the time, as inferior.”
7.22 Max Boot in the Washington Post: “[Republican operative Stuart Stevens] calls the GOP “a white grievance party,” and writes that “there is an ugly history of code words and dog whistles in the party.” The rest of the Republican platform he dismisses as a convenient fiction: “How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy, and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held.… [I]t had always been about power. The rest? The principles? The values? It was all a lie.” Stevens is particularly scathing about all the Republican politicians — many of them his clients — who have made common cause with Trump. “The most distinguishing characteristic of the current national Republican Party is cowardice,” he writes. “The base price of admission is a willingness to accept that an unstable, pathological liar leads it and pretend otherwise.”
7.22 A Wall of Moms protect protesters in Portland
7.21 Trump: “It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better. Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”
7.21 Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the group said on Tuesday. NY Times: “Ms. Sanger, a public health nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer. But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color.”
7.20 Chris Wallace interview Trump on Fox:
WALLACE: Whether it’s in 2021 or 2025, how will you regard your years as President of the United States?
TRUMP: I think I was very unfairly treated. From before I even won I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.
WALLACE: But what about the good –
TRUMP: Russia, Russia, Russia.
WALLACE: But what about the good parts, sir?
TRUMP: No, no. I want to go this. I have done more than any president in history in the first three and a half years, and I’ve done it suffering through investigations where people have been – General Flynn, where people have been so unfairly treated. The Russia hoax, it was all a hoax. The Mueller scam, it was all scam. It was all false. I made a bad decision on – one bad decision. Jeff Sessions, and now I feel good because he lost overwhelmingly in the great state of Alabama. Here’s the bottom line. I’ve been very unfairly treated, and I don’t say that as paranoid. I’ve been very – everybody says it. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. But there was tremendous evidence right now as to how unfairly treated I was. President Obama and Biden spied on my campaign. It’s never happened in history. If it were the other way around, the people would be in jail for 50 years right now. That would be Comey, that would be Brennan, that would be all of this – the two lovers, Strzok and Page, they would be in jail now for many, many years. They would be in jail, it would’ve started two years ago and they’d be there for 50 years. The fact is, they illegally spied on my campaign. Let’s see what happens. Despite that, I did more than any president in history in the first three and a half years.
7.19 Naked Athena faces federal police in Portland
7.19 Kanye West: “[Harriet Tubman] never actually freed the slaves. She just had the slaves go work for other white people,”
7.17 Preston Wilson, quoted in SI: “Do you really want to fix it?”
7.17 John Lewis dies at 80.
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7.12 A new Marist College survey of 718 adults between Monday, July 6, and Wednesday, July 8 found that 72 percent of respondents approve of how Gov. Cuomo has dealt with the pandemic. Of those polled, 24 percent said they disapprove and 4 percent were unsure. Democrats overwhelmingly supported Cuomo’s work during the pandemic with a 90 percent approval rating, while 53 percent of Republicans said they disapprove of the governor’s handling of COVID-19. In comparison, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had only a 42 percent approval rate
7.12 James Kwak in the Baseline Scenario: “Things don’t have to turn out this way. Perhaps the experience of this pandemic—a disjointed health care system, poor people forced by poverty to fight on the front lines of a war, an unemployment rate that could reach 25 percent—could inspire a new New Deal, or a rethinking of the kind of society we want to live in. The prospects for a resurgence of social solidarity seem dim, however. Remember, the political legacy of the financial crisis—an example of the dangers of greed and deregulation if there ever was one—was the Tea Party and, arguably, President Donald Trump. It is more likely that the deficits that the federal government has incurred to mitigate the economic damage so far will be used to justify austerity in the not-too-distant future. Robert Rubin—President Clinton’s treasury secretary, and to all appearances still the holder of a veto over Democratic economic policy—already could not resist using pandemic spending to call for action to reduce the national debt in the long term. Republicans will be far less nuanced. Deficits will be the trump card played—by moderate Democrats if necessary—to block universal pre-K, free college, expanded Social Security benefits, or Medicare for All. This is the future we are headed for. But there are no immutable laws of economics. We could choose to break up large companies, enable workers to unionize, mandate paid sick leave, and tax rich people to provide capital to young entrepreneurs. If we fail to make a choice, however, COVID-19 will cast a long shadow over our economic future.”
7.10 Trump commutes Roger Stone‘s prison sentence. Mitt Romney on Twitter: “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”
7.9 Mary Trump. in Too Much and Never Enough: “His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved.”
7.8 Juliette Kayyem in The Atlantic: “The lingering uncertainty about whether in-person education will resume isn’t the result of malfeasance, but utter nonfeasance. Four months of stay-at-home orders have proved that, if schools are unavailable, a city cannot work, a community cannot function, a nation cannot safeguard itself.”
7.8 Paul Krugman in the Times: Trump’s willingness to trade deaths for jobs and political gain has backfired.Reopening did lead to large job increases in May and June, as around a third of the workers laid off as a result of the pandemic were rehired. But Trump’s job approval and electoral prospects just kept sliding. And even in purely economic terms the rush to reopen is probably failing. The last official employment number was a snapshot from the second week of June; a variety of short–termindicators suggest that growth slowed or even went into reverse soon afterward, especially in states where Covid-19 cases are spiking. In any case, the point is that America’s defeat at the hands of the coronavirus didn’t happen because victory was impossible. Nor was it because we as a nation were incapable of responding. No, we lost because Trump and those around him decided that it was in their political interests to let the virus run wild.
7.8 The Ivy League cancels football season
7.8 The Supreme Court ruled that a large swath of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision with potential implications for nearly 2 million residents and one of the most significant victories for tribal rights in years. The land at issue contains much of Tulsa, the state’s second-largest city
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7.6 Christine Matthews, Republican pollster, quoted in the Times: “Right now, people are fearful of Covid-19, but that is inconvenient for Trump, so he is trying to kick up fear about something he thinks will benefit his re-election: angry mobs of leftists tearing down American history.”
7.6 Governor Cuomo: The president said over this weekend, “if we didn’t test so much and so successfully, we would have very few cases.” Think about that for a second. What he’s really saying is if we didn’t test, we wouldn’t find the cases. And if we didn’t find the cases, we wouldn’t have a problem. That’s incredible, but that’s what he is saying. So, let’s just extend that logic. If we don’t test, then we won’t know. And if you don’t know, then you have no problem. It’s a great way to go through life, isn’t it? So, on that theory — let’s do no more cancer tests and that will solve the problem with cancer. No more mammograms because we don’t want to know and that will solve breast cancer. No more prostate checks. That will solve prostate cancer. No more TB checks. That will end TB. No more HIV tests and that will solve the AIDS issue.No. Not knowing doesn’t mean you don’t have a problem. And in this case, if you do not admit it and if you don’t confront it, it is only going to increase. . . .Do one simple thing: Acknowledge to the American people that COVID exists. It is a major problem. It’s going to continue until we admit it and each of us stands up to do our part. If he does not acknowledge that, then he is facilitating the virus. He is enabling the virus. . . . Just wear the mask, and say to the American people, “this is real and it’s a problem and we have to do our part.” We started masks April 15. First state in the nation to start masks. They make a difference.”
7.5 James Fallows in The Atlantic: “What happened once the disease began spreading in this country was a federal disaster in its own right: Katrina on a national scale, Chernobyl minus the radiation. It involved the failure to test; the failure to trace; the shortage of equipment; the dismissal of masks; the silencing or sidelining of professional scientists; the stream of conflicting, misleading, callous, and recklessly ignorant statements by those who did speak on the national government’s behalf. As late as February 26, Donald Trump notoriously said of the infection rate, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.” What happened after that—when those 15 cases became 15,000, and then more than 2 million, en route to a total no one can foretell—will be a central part of the history of our times.”
7.5 Dinner with Cathy and Tim
7.5 The Economist: “Biden finds himself in landslide territory … Trump’s flailing has made a Democratic Senate majority possible. That opens up the chances of a highly productive presidency which once seemed inconceivable. Before COVID-19 and widespread social unrest, Mr Biden’s candidacy was about restoration — the idea that he could return America and the world to the prelapsarian days of 2016. It transpires that he could have the opportunity to do something big instead. …[T]o make lasting change through the federal government you need to win the Senate. And that cannot be done with a candidate at the top of the ticket who frightens the voters. … [B]ecause he comes across as the grandfather he is, he is viewed with suspicion on the left.Yet that is precisely what makes him reassuring … to voters in states like Montana and Georgia where Democrats must win to gain a majority in the Senate. It is Mr Biden’s caution that opens up the possibility of more change than a real radical would.
7.4 In Gettysburg, hundreds of heavily armed bikers, skinheads, and members of self-proclaimed militias and far-right groups from outside Pennsylvania, showed up to prevent an antifa flag burning, unaware that the social media figure who sounded the alert was a fraud.
7.4 David Nakamura in the Washington Post: In his inaugural address, President Trump sketched the picture of “American carnage” — a nation ransacked by marauders from abroad who breached U.S. borders in pursuit of jobs and crime, lured its companies offshore and bogged down its military in faraway conflicts. Nearly 3½ years later, in the president’s telling, the carnage is still underway but this time the enemy is closer to home — other Americans whose racial identity and cultural beliefs are toppling the nation’s heritage and founding ideals. Trump’s dark and divisive 42-minute speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota late Friday served as a clarion for his campaign reelection message at a time when the nation — already reeling with deep anxiety over the devastating public health and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic — is also facing a cultural reckoning over the residue of its racially segregated past. As he has so often during his tenure, the president made clear that he will do little to try to heal or unify the country ahead of the November presidential election but rather aims to drive a deeper wedge into the country’s fractures. “Their goal is not a better America; their goal is the end of America. We are now in the process of defeating the radical left — the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters.”
7.3 Bruce Fretts dies at 54
7.2 Michael Gerson in the Post “According to a report by Jonathan Swan for Axios, the president has been telling friends that he regrets following moderate advice from his son-in-law Jared Kushner and needs to “stick closer to his own instincts.” One of Swan’s sources summarized Trump’s determination this way: “No more of Jared’s woke s***.” Now that they mention it, it seems obvious. Trump has become so politically correct, so coy about his true beliefs. Yes, he unleashed riot police and tear gas on peaceful protesters in front of the White House. Yes, he tweeted videos of black men attacking white people, as well as the video of a supporter yelling “white power!” Yes, he accused a Black Lives Matter leader of treason and described the painting of “Black Lives Matter” on Fifth Avenue in New York as “a symbol of hate.” But, still, his public personality has become so diluted and constrained. If only he followed his instincts and spoke from his gut, the campaign would be okey-doke in short order.”
7.2 Hugh Downs dies at 99
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7.1 New polling by Morning Consult and Politico, which was conducted from June 26 to 29, found that 75 percent of voters believe the U.S. is on the wrong track, while just 25 percent believe things are headed in the right direction. 59% disapprove of the job that Trump is doing.