6.30 Anthony Fauci: “I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 [cases] a day.”
6.30 Carl Reiner dies at 98
6.30 Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signs a bill to change the state flag Tuesday, effectively ending the most prominent display of the Confederate battle emblem in the country.
6.30 Donald J. Trump in a tweet: I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill if the Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren (of all people!) Amendment, which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases from which we won Two World Wars, is in the Bill!
6.29 David Frum in The Atlantic: “The first coronavirus spike, in late April, can be blamed on President Donald Trump’s negligence. The second spike, in June, is his own doing. This is Trump’s plague now. . . . [What] “has happened in the U.S. in June, and what will happen in July, is entirely Trump’s fault. . . .This time, though, reality will not be blustered away. Tens of thousands are dead, and millions are out of work, all because Trump could not and would not do the job of disease control—a job that includes setting a positive example to those Americans who trust and follow his leadership. . . .How lethal will this new peak be? We will learn that the way we seem to learn everything in this era of Trump: the hard way.”
6.29 David Ignatius in the Washington Post: A basic truth about Russian President Vladimir Putin, which President Trump evidently doesn’t understand: Putin is in the payback business. He believes the United States destroyed his former country, the Soviet Union. He likes the United States to feel pain, in Afghanistan and everywhere else. Trump has his own, much rosier take on Putin. And I can’t help wondering whether that explains why, assuming his account is true, the American president was never briefed about intelligence reports early this year that Russia was offering bounties to Taliban fighters to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan. Perhaps Trump’s national security aides were afraid to upset him.
6.27 The New Republic: It is entirely possible that the pandemic will permanently change workers’ relationship to the workplace. This is especially true of the white-collar workforce that has quickly adapted to the remote Zoom model, and even more true of the wealthier Wall Street workforce that has abandoned its glassy towers for places far from the pandemic’s former epicenter. As the Times reported earlier this year, executives at Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley have determined that “it is highly unlikely that all their workers will ever return to those buildings.”Five gigantic changes” are happening in America all at once. 1. “[W]e are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.” 2. “[A]ll Americans, but especially white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day. … [P]ublic opinion is shifting with astonishing speed.” 3. “[W]e’re in the middle of a political realignment. The American public is vehemently rejecting Donald Trump’s Republican Party.” 4. Social justice is sweeping the culture, with the argument: “History is essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of which are oppressed. … Words can thus be a form of violence.” 5. “[W]e could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression.”
6.27 David Brooks in the Times:
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6.22 Brett Favre discussing Colin Kaepernick on TMZ: “It’s not easy for a guy his age, black or white, Hispanic, whatever, to stop something that you’ve always dreamed of doing and put it on hold–maybe forever–for something that you believe in. I can only think of–right off the top of my head–Pat Tillman‘s another guy who did something similar, and we regard him as a hero. So I’d assume that hero status will be stamped with Kaepernick as well.”
6.22 NASCAR drivers march with Bubba Wallace.
6.21 At Talladega, an unidentified person left a noose in the garage of Bubba Wallace, a black driver who called for banning the Confederate flag at NASCAR events. ESPN’s Marty Smith: “This sport is moving forward. This sport is in a progressive mood. This sport is in a moment where this crap, this despicable crap, is not only not acceptable, but there’s just no place for it. Whomever that is, I hope that you are so ashamed of yourself. I hope that you realize that that is someone’s dignity and that is someone’s positioning in this sport, who has earned his place by talent and by hard work and he stood up for something that he believed. He asked for help from other people who believe similarly. The measures were taken to start taking those steps. And then we come down here, to a place that I love—I love Talladega, Alabama, it’s my favorite place on the NASCAR tour, it’s my favorite race, I love the staff here—and then something like this happens?! In the garage area?! In the garage area of Richard Petty’s racecar?! For a young man in Bubba Wallace who has galvanized so many people because he was willing to stand up for something that is so long overdue and NASCAR’s current management agrees that it was time to take this stand. And then somebody goes and does this. You’re not just hurting one or two people, whomever you are. You’re hurting a whole lot of people who made the decision that it’s damn sure time to go be better. And it pisses me the hell off and it pisses everybody else in the sport off who care, who care not only for Bubba but for every other person who he is standing up for. I am so sorry that we even have to have this discussion tonight.” NASCAR says it will banish the perpetrator.
6.20 At a rally in Tulsa that was said to have attracted a million ticket request, Trump filled only 6,200 of the 19,200 seats. A Tic Toc user said people around the world, egged on by K-Pop fans, reserved the seats. Trump delivered a wandering speech, and left angry and discouraged. Said Steve Schmidt, it was “a speech that George Wallace could have given in 1968. . . .It was the language of white grievance. His embrace of the confederacy and the mythology of it was appalling in this moment of time.”
6.19 Governor Cuomo: “Over the past three months, we have done the impossible.”
6.19 Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland: “It really does feel like the U.S. has given up. I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe. It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”
6.19 Ian Holm dies at 88
6.18 Jean Kennedy Smith dies at 92
6.18 Trump in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: “I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous. It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”
6.18 The Supreme Court blocks Trump’s efforts to end DACA. John Roberts for the majority: “We address only whether the [Department of Homeland Security] complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action. Here the agency failed to consider the conspicuous issues of whether to retain forbearance and what if anything to do about the hardship to DACA recipients. That dual failure raises doubts about whether the agency appreciated the scope of its discretion or exercised that discretion in a reasonable manner.”
6.18 Max Boot in The Washington Post: “Your [Bolton’s] book presents an ironclad case that Trump is utterly unfit for the office you thought he should win in 2016. . . . But here’s the thing you may not realize. The stronger you build the case against Trump — and you have constructed a titanium-strength case — the more you indict yourself for not speaking out sooner. You could have helped stop Trump in 2016 — when all of his deficiencies were evident — by endorsing his opponent. More recently, you could have aided the impeachment managers by testifying under oath. But you refused to do that. Instead you waited for a subpoena that never came and saved your revelations for a book that is now a bestseller. . . .There is no one who could have done more to aid a wider impeachment inquiry than you — but you failed us when the nation needed you most. You are, as Rep. Adam B. Schiff says, an author but not a patriot.
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6.17 PepsiCo, Inc., today announced it will remove the image of Aunt Jemima from its packaging and change the name of the brand.
6.17 Governor Cuomo announced he will end his daily coronavirus briefings. “I hope people learn from what we accomplish here in New York. I hope people around the country look at New York and say, ‘How did they do that? How did they go from the worst situation, in terms of transmission, to the best? How did they do that?’ I hope they look around and say, ‘How can all of these states be going up and New York is going down? How can that be? That would be the logical question to ask. And there is a logical answer. And that answer can save lives. We have saved tens of thousands of lives in New York…And that is more important than any of this other stuff.”
6.15 Jon Stewart in the Times: “We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. How can they police? Is it about sensitivity and de-escalation training and community policing? All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. But the how isn’t as important as the why, which we never address. The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that.”
6.15 The Supreme Court rules that Federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers, The landmark ruling extends protections to millions of workers. It 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 gender identity and sexual orientation.
6.13 George Will in The Washington Post: “Decades of growth have propelled China’s rise from an almost entirely peasant society to one that still has an enormous peasantry. This growth, which was more rapid than can be continued, pulled China’s per capita gross domestic product to $9,770, 72nd in the world, slightly better than Mexico’s, still behind Russia’s, one-fourth that of neighboring Japan and one-third that of South Korea, and about 15 percent of the United States’ $62,887. The bitter fruit of China’s “one-child policy,” from 1980 until 2016, is an aging population that will become gray before it becomes rich. Last year, China’s birthrate fell to 1.05 percent, a record low (the U.S. rate is 1.73), and China is projected to be among 55 nations with fewer people in 2050 than today. By 2030, Chinese deaths might exceed births. Today, China’s working-age population is 70 percent of the total population; it is projected to plunge to 57 percent by 2040, when there will be barely two workers to support every retiree.”
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6.12 Albany decides to remove statue of Philip Schuyler, general, legislator, pal of Alexander Hamilton, and largest slaveholder in the Albany area, from the front of City Hall.
6.11 Rebecca Solnit: “It’s a bad week to be a racist statue.”6.12 Albany
6.11 Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “As many of you saw the results of the photograph of me in Lafayette Square last week, that sparked a national debate about the role of the military in civil society. I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
6.10 Philonise Floyd, at a Congressional hearing: “He didn’t deserve to die over 20 dollars. I am asking you, is that what a black man is worth? Twenty dollars? This is 2020. Enough is enough.”
6.10 On Monument Avenue in Richmond, demonstrators took down the statue of Jefferson Davis
6.10 In response to the statement from an army spokesman saying the Secretaries of Defense and Army were open to a dialog about renaming army bases named for Confederates, Trump tweets “It has been suggested that we should rename as many as 10 of our Legendary Military Bases, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Benning in Georgia, etc. These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom. The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds, and won two World Wars. Therefore, my Administration will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations…”
6.9 Mark Cuban: “I need all of us to really open up and talk to each other, even when it’s difficult. Even when it’s not something we’re comfortable with, particularly those of you who look like me, the white people. Because it’s hard to discuss race when you’re white. The reality is, to be brutally honest, when people talk about white privilege, we get defensive. We all have this mechanism that I call manufactured equivalency to try to protect ourselves. We’ll say, ‘I have a lot of black friends.’ We’ll say, ‘I grew up in a mixed community, so I’m not like that. I can’t possibly be someone who takes advantage of white privilege,’ and manufacture this equivalency. It’s incumbent on us to stop doing that, because that doesn’t move us forward when we do that. That’s part of having a courageous conversation.”
6.9 Trump, via Twitter: 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. I watched, he fell harder than was pushed. Was aiming scanner. Could be a set up?
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6.8 Greg Sargent in the Washington Post: “What’s been exposed is [a political vulnerability on Trump’s part]: Trump simply will not, or cannot, operate out of any conception of what’s good for the country — the whole country. Faced with enormous crises, he has tried to pretend they don’t exist, or has tried gaslighting us into disbelieving our own eyes and ears about them, or has used them as occasions to demagogue and incite hatreds in ways he believes will help his reelection. But all the gaslighting and demagoguery have failed. . .only further exposed that vulnerability.
6.8 Trevor Noah on The Daily Show: “What about these people screams ‘terrorist’ to you? Maybe I’ve forgotten my history but I don’t remember the part where al Qaeda attacked America with cardboard signs.”
6.7 Axios: The structural failings in American policing begin with officers’ training, which largely focuses more on using force than reducing the need for it. Why it matters: While holding officers accountable is most important in stopping excessive force, law-enforcement experts say training that focuses on empathy and de-escalation could lead to fewer violent conflicts. There are more than 18,000 police departments in the U.S., but no federal standard on how their officers should be trained. The training that officers do receive has little to no emphasis on empathy, says University of South Carolina criminology professor Geoffrey Alpert. “The real issue is not how to use force, it’s when to use it.” Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institute and the University of Maryland, who leads implicit-bias trainings for police departments and the military, notes that police departments “don’t do a lot of training that is focused on social interaction.” “But nine out of 10 times, or even more, their job is simply having a conversation,” Ray said. Franklin Zimring, a University of California-Berkeley professor and author of “When Police Kill,” says it would be possible to cut the number of fatal shootings by police in half by creating “don’t shoot and stop shooting rules.” “It means a lot of confrontations will last longer, will involve more police officers, and will be very frustrating.” The bottom line: “The data is there telling departments what to do,” Ray said. “But until police departments are mandated to do it, they won’t do it.
6.7 Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic: Trump has governed according to a set of principles very different from those articulated by his original intellectual supporters. Although some of his speeches have continued to use that populist language, he has built a Cabinet and an administration that serve neither the public nor his voters but rather his own psychological needs and the interests of his own friends on Wall Street and inbusiness and, of course, his own family. His tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy, not the working class. His shallow economic boom, engineered to ensure his reelection, was made possible by a vast budget deficit, on a scale Republicans once claimed to abhor, an enormous burden for future generations. He worked to dismantle the existing health-care system without offering anything better, as he’d promised to do, so that the number of uninsured people rose. All the while he fanned and encouraged xenophobia and racism, both because he found them politically useful and because they are part of his personal worldview. More important, he has governed in defiance—and in ignorance—of the American Constitution, notably declaring, well into his third year in office, that he had “total” authority over the states. His administration is not merely corrupt, it is also hostile to checks, balances, and the rule of law. He has built a proto-authoritarian personality cult, firing or sidelining officials who have contradicted him with facts and evidence—with tragic consequences for public health and the economy. He threatened to fire a top Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, Nancy Messonnier, in late February, after her too-blunt warnings about the coronavirus; Rick Bright, a top Health and Human Services official, says he was demoted after refusing to direct money to promote the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine. Trump has attacked America’s military, calling his generals “a bunch of dopes and babies,” and America’s intelligence services and law-enforcement officers, whom he has denigrated as the “deep state” and whose advice he has ignored. He has appointed weak and inexperienced “acting” officials to run America’s most important security institutions. He has systematically wrecked America’s alliances.His foreign policy has never served any U.S. interests of any kind.
6.6 Quartz: Data show that blacks in the US have 10 times less wealth, are 20% more likely to be unemployed, and make 78% as much in weekly wages as whites. Due to the way that government statistical agencies collect data, these numbers actually underestimate the difference. Most official US economic statistics come from the US Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Their major surveys all exclude the more than two million Americans who are incarcerated. Since black Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, and twice as likely as Hispanics, this has the effect of making it appear that African Americans are better off financially than they really are. Moreover, 90% of inmates are men. “Whenever you see an employment rate for black men you know it’s BS,” says University of Chicago economist Derek Neal. “On any given day, 7-8% of young black men are incarcerated and those people are not counted.” Sociologist Becky Pettit has examined how ignoring the prison population distorts a variety of commonly cited statistics. For example, while conventional government stats show that the employment rate for young, low-skilled black men fell from 62% in 1980 to 42% in 2008, including incarcerated men brings the rate closer to 30%. Government statistics also show that the income gap between mid-career black and white men narrowed to 25% in 2014, compared with 35% in 1970. But that difference entirely disappears after accounting for the increase in incarceration.
6.6 Axios: By the numbers: 75% of the people who have died from the coronavirus in D.C. were black. These deaths are disproportionately concentrated in the district’s poorest, blackest neighborhoods in Southeast D.C. In New York City, the death rate for black residents is 92.3 deaths per 100,000 people, for Latinos it’s 74.3 per 100,000 people, and for whites it’s 45.2 per 100,000 people. The same thing has played out in cities across the country. These disparities reflect a slew of other, older inequities. Behind the shocked tone of so many headlines is a set of social and policy problems that are pretty familiar to health experts and even more familiar to the people they hurt. Minorities have higher rates of medical conditions that make them more vulnerable to death and severe infection if they catch the coronavirus, including heart disease, stroke, cancer, asthma, influenza and pneumonia, diabetes and AIDS. “When you go into the emergency room, you go into health care, black Americans do not get the same health care as white Americans,” Ms. Tina said. Social factors— including adequate housing, access to transportation, income, social supports and employment — have been shown to affect people’s physical health, and now they’re also risk factors for catching or spreading the virus.
6.5 Data updated yesterday by the federal government now show that nearly 32,000 American nursing home residents have died of the virus — a figure certain to grow, with 12 percent of all facilities yet to report their totals. Nearly 700 nursing home employees have also died. As of Thursday, more than 106,000 Americans overall had died of the disease.
6.5 George Packer in The Atlantic: “The protesters aren’t speaking to leaders who might listen, or to a power structure that might yield, except perhaps the structure of white power, which is too vast and diffuse to respond. A responsible establishment doesn’t exist.”
6.4 TNT’s Ernie Johnson: “You can fly the flag at your house. You can salute the flag. You can revere the flag. You can respect the flag. And all of those are fine. What you cannot do is use the flag as a blindfold. You can’t use the flag as a blindfold and not see the things you’ve seen with your very eyes that tell you that what’s keeping this country held back is systemic racism. When you see these things happen, you can’t be blinded by that.”
6/4 Condoleeza Rice in the Post: In the wake of Floyd’s death, Americans and people around the world are experiencing shock, grief, outrage — a set of emotions that too often are repeated. If the past is a guide, these feelings will fade and we will return to our lives. But something tells me — not this time,” says the former secretary of state. Floyd’s horrific death should be enough to finally move us to positive action.”
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6.2 Washington Post: Just as the protests over Floyd’s death have brought fresh attention to how black Americans are treated by law enforcement, the pandemic also stirred up a focus on how they lag far behind when it comes to personal health and access to affordable, high-quality care. “The stories about protests are also the stories about covid-19 and racism,” said Zinzi Bailey, a social epidemiologist at the University of Miami. One reason for this is they tend to live in cities, where the virus has taken hold more aggressively than in suburban or rural areas. U.S. localities with larger-than-average black populations account for more than half of coronavirus cases, according to a national study by Amfar, the Foundation for AIDs Research. “The Amfar study, based on data collected April 13, focused on counties in which black people made up more than 13 percent of the population,” my colleague Vanessa Williams wrote last month. “Disproportionately black counties account for 22 percent of all U.S. counties but have been home to 52 percent of coronavirus cases and 58 percent of deaths from covid-19.” Black Americans are dying from covid-19, the disease the virus causes, at a rate nearly two times higher than white Americans. While African Americans comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 24 percent of deaths where race is known, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Chronic health conditions including hypertension and diabetes — which significantly increase a person’s risk for serious covid-19 complications — are a major factor here.
6.1 Eugene Robinson in the Post: This coast-to-coast uprising is not about terrorism, foreign or domestic. It’s not about arson, looting or carpeting streets with broken glass. It’s about a powerful phrase in the Declaration of Independence: “the consent of the governed.” Police in this country no longer have our consent to kill African Americans unjustly and with impunity. Is that clear now?
6.1 Michael Gerson in the Post: Every crisis the United States now faces has been made worse by Trump’s limits as a leader and a man. We needed a president who could imagine what the American experiment looks like from the perspective of those who find its promises fraudulent. We got someone incapable of empathy. We needed a president who would be data driven in matters of public health policy. We got someone driven by irrational enthusiasms and the advice of cronies. We needed a president who could calm destructive passions. We got someone who now urges the militarization of his fight against the left. We needed a president capable of speaking across differences. We got someone whose only authentic public communications are expressions of rancor.
6.3 Bruce Jay Friedman dies at 90.
6.3 After a reporter asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada about President Trump’s handling of the protests, he paused for 21 seconds and avoided directly answering the question
6.3 The City of Richmond announced that they will remove the statue of Robert E. Lee
6.3 James Mattis in The Atlantic: “I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.. . . 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 can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”
6.2 Former Admiral Mike Mullen in The Atlantic: It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump‘s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other countries who take comfort in our domestic strife, and risked further politicizing the men and women of our armed forces.
6.1 Washington Post: In addition to the worst public health crisis since 1918 and the worst economic crisis since 1933, Trump now faces the worst civil unrest since 1968.
6.1 Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo: “Let me just say this to the President of the United States, on behalf of the police chiefs of this country: please, if you don’t have something constructive to say, keep your mouth shut.”
6.1 After mounted police, using smoke canisters, rubber bullets and flash bangs, cleared Lafayette Square of demonstrators, Trump crossed the park, and stood in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Brandishing a Bible in front of the historic church, which had been threatened with fire the night before, Trump said, “Our 7 o’clock curfew will be strictly enforced. Those who threaten innocent life and property will be arrested, detained, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
6.1 Trump, on a phone call with the nation’s governors: “We’re strongly looking for arrests. . . . You know, a lot of men — we have all the men and women that you need. But people aren’t calling them up.You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time. . . [T]he word is dominate. If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re gonna walk away with you.”
6.1 George Will in the Washington Post: Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm. The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting. In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.
6.1 Amber Philips in the Post: He has used language that sounded threatening (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”), mused about “vicious dogs” being set on them, painted the protests as far-left extremists known as “antifa” and on Monday in a call with governors, urged state leaders to “dominate” the protests and said they look “weak” otherwise. He has focused more on that than on the motivation for the protests across the country: police brutality and racial injustice that they say led to the death George Floyd, after a white officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck.