5.31 I felt inexplicable joy in seeing this 2000 photo of Bob Dylan reading Baseball Weekly in an empty convenience store.
5.31 Christo dies at 84
5.31 Danielle Allen in the Post: We should choose: reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent. This is not utopian. The Netherlands uses incarceration at about this rate and Germany at an even lower rate. There are alternatives for responding to wrongdoing and wrongdoers than our violent criminal-justice system. If we pick this one goal and organize our energy around that, everything else will change — policing, drug policies, court processes, the depths of our despair, our health, our freedom, our economic opportunities. Everything.
5.30 Albany
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5.28 Riots in Minnesota, elsewhere
5.29 Raven Rakia, in The New Inquiry in 2013: With the destruction of property, violence can turn from an aspect of self-defense to a useful offensive tactic. Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property. In America, property is racial. It always has been. Consider the racist violence which stretches from slavery to lynching to the ongoing extrajudicial killings of black men and women. For 300 years, the very idea of a black person’s freedom was a direct threat to white men’s property. After slavery, lynchings were often targeted at blacks who had gained relative wealth and therefore, challenged the wealth and property of white men. This year, George Zimmerman was found not guilty for killing an unarmed black child-who he assumed was breaking into homes in his gated, white community, or threatening the property of his white neighborhood. When property is destroyed by black protesters, it must always be understood in the context of the historical racialization of property. When the same system that refuses to protect black children comes out to protect windows, what is valued over black people in America becomes very clear.
5.27 In New Mexico, Couy Griffin, the head of a group called Cowboys for Trump, said. “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” He clarified his statement, saying that he doesn’t mean that in a “physical sense,” but in a “political sense.” Responding, Trump tweeted “Thank you.’’
5.27 Larry Kramer dies at 84.
5.27 The confirmed COVID-19 death toll in the United States has surpassed 100,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The development falls in line with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projection in mid-May that the U.S. would reach that milestone by June 1. The U.S. has the greatest coronavirus death toll of any country in the world — around triple that of the United Kingdom, which ranks second in total deaths.
5.27 After accounting for the present crisis, the average millennial has experienced slower economic growth since entering the workforce than any other generation in U.S. history. Millennials will bear these economic scars the rest of their lives, in the form of lower earnings, lower wealth and delayed milestones, such as homeownership.
5.27 From an article in The Washington Post, November 27, 2015: “It’s not hard to recognize that evidence intended to back your point of view actually does no such thing. But that’s not the way humans work. “We all think of ourselves as being these rational people. We hear evidence, and we process it,” said Peter Ditto, professor of social psychology at University of California at Irvine, when we spoke by phone this week. “What’s clear from decades of social psychological research is that people’s emotions get involved in their reasoning, their motivations, their intuitions. Those shape and bias the way we process information.” “It’s not that people believe anything they want to believe. People still think and need rationale,” Ditto said. “But the things that we feel change what we count as evidence.” You’re probably familiar with the concept of “motivated reasoning.” That term refers to the tendency of people to rationalize on behalf of outcomes they want to see. Maybe you’re thinking about making a leftover sandwich from your Thanksgiving turkey but are on a diet. If you don’t eat the turkey, it will spoil, you might think, offering a reason to do what you want despite any number of arguments that could be made contrary to that impulse. Ditto talks about something similar — motivated skepticism. “People tend to be a lot more skeptical of information they don’t want to believe than information they do want to believe,” he said. He suggested that most users of Facebook would be familiar with this. Someone with an opposing political position on an issue might share an image that you can immediately see is false or misleading — but you’re more motivated to be skeptical than the other person. (Think Donald Trump and the murder rate tweet.) “People tend to just sort of scoop up information they want to believe and uncritically analyze it,” Ditto said, “and then are much more skeptical and allocate their skepticism in a biased way.”
5.25 In Minnesota, an unarmed black man named George Floyd is killed in police custody
5.26 Albany
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5.24 The New York Times prints thousands of names of those who succumbed to the virus
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5.19 A new study shows that global greenhouse gas emissions plunged 17 percent in early April. Experts say the findings underscore just how challenging it would be for the world to avert climate catastrophe without structural changes.
5.19 Biden: “It’s like saying ‘Maybe if you inject Clorox into your blood, it may cure you.’ C’mon, man! What is he doing? What in God’s name is he doing? There’s no serious medical person out there saying to use that drug. It’s counterproductive. It’s not going to help, but the president decided that’s an answer.”
5.19 HuffPo: As a result of being quarantined, not only are we disconnected from the people we care about, many of us have also lost our jobs and are unable to do the things we’d normally do to blow off steam ― either because we can’t afford to or because our go-to stress-busters are no longer an option (eating out at restaurants, going to the movies, hitting up a workout class). “The problem here is that our cortisol levels are too high, while our dopamine (reward) and oxytocin (bonding) levels are low,” said Patricia Celan, a psychiatry resident at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This leaves us more at risk of developing feelings of restlessness, loneliness and depression during quarantine, especially if we place a high value on social interactions, Celan said.
5.18 Trump: “You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the frontline workers before you catch it. … I happen to be taking it. . . .I’ve heard a lot of good stories. And if it is not good, I will tell you right. I’m not going to get hurt by it. It has been around for 40 years for malaria, for lupus, for other things.”
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5.16 Eric Trump on Fox News: “You watch, they’ll milk it every single day between now and November 3. And guess what, after November 3, coronavirus will magically, all of a sudden, go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen.”
5.14 Immunologist Dr. Rick Bright in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee: “Our window of opportunity is closing. If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities. . . . The undeniable fact is there will be a resurgence of (COVID-19) this fall, greatly compounding the challenges of seasonal influenza and putting an unprecedented strain on our health care system. Without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history.”
5.13 David Frum in The Atlantic: A couple of years ago, BuzzFeed asked a former White House official to explain the logic behind some bizarre Trump action. The official responded with one of the master quotes of the Trump era. President Trump, the official said, is not playing “the sort of three-dimensional chess people ascribe to decisions like this. More often than not he’s just eating the pieces.”
Over Mother’s Day and then through Monday. . . Trump has fired off hundreds of rounds of weapons-grade lunacy on Twitter. When Trump does this kind of thing, many are ready with an explanation: He’s rallying his base; he’s distracting his critics; he’s challenging the existence of reality itself. But these explanations miss the point. Trump horribly and uniquely bungled the coronavirus crisis. The human result is mass death and Great Depression–scale unemployment. . . . Trump’s psychology is defined by his terror of rejection. The most stinging insult in his vast vocabulary of disdain is loser. And yet every poll, every powerful Biden TV ad, forces Trump to contemplate that he is headed toward a historic humiliation. He’ll stand with Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover, the incumbents rejected because they failed to manage economic crises.
Trump failed to prevent the crisis. Out of envy and spite, he dismantled the pandemic-warning apparatus his predecessors had bequeathed him.
Trump failed to manage the crisis. At every turn, he gave priority to the short-term management of the stock market instead.
Trump failed to message the crisis. He not only lacks empathy; he despises empathy.
Angry, scared, and aggrieved by the lack of praise for his efforts, Trump turns for safety to television, where his two-dimensional friends explain how everything is everybody else’s fault. They tell him that he is right and all his critics are wrong. They promise that miracle drugs will—poof!—make all his troubles vanish without effort. Sean and Tucker and Laura and Jeanine and the Fox & Friends romper room tell him stories that hold the terror at bay. But those stories have drawn Trump into a twisting ghetto of craziness that is impenetrable to outsiders.
The “Obamagate” that Trump tweets about—like the comic-book universes on which it seems to be modeled—is a tangle of backstories. The main characters do things for reasons that make no objective sense, things that can be decoded only by obsessive superfans on long Reddit threads.
So you’re saying that the deep state set up this whole elaborate plot to entrap Trump, but instead of using any of that material, it instead sabotaged Hillary Clinton 10 days before the election?
No, no, you don’t get it. You’ve gotta go back to the Benghazi episode four seasons back. Well, really to Troopergate, but that’s only available on DVD …
Biden’s proliferating internet ads hit two themes over and over: the pandemic and jobs, jobs and the pandemic. Those themes are easy to understand. They carry the power of truth. Above all, they are about the viewer: You are sick or scared, you have lost your job or your business—all because Trump failed to do his job.
Trump’s messages, by contrast, are all about him. You are sick or scared, you have lost your job or your business—but let’s remember who the real victim is. Me. Me and Michael Flynn. But mostly me.
The more Trump talks about his crackpot theories, the more he reveals why he plunged the country into such a catastrophe. He never cared about anybody else. He ignored unwelcome realities, because only fantasy flattered his ego as it required to be flattered.. . . .
The most important thing to notice about the Trump-Fox blizzard of mania is how remote it is from anything that real-world voters care about. In 2015, Trump apprehended that most Republicans were talking about things that Republican voters did not then care about: deficits, taxes, productivity, and trade. In 2015, Trump apprehended that nobody was talking about things that Republican voters did care about: immigration, drugs, the declining status of less educated white men.That Trump is gone. Today’s Trump has lost the plot. He’s talking about things most voters could not even understand, let alone care about. Yes, Flynn lied to the FBI. But you have to see, the FBI’s interview was not properly predicated …
Meanwhile, the country is on track to lose more people to the coronavirus than the Union lost in battle in the Civil War. Meanwhile, 33 million Americans have filed unemployment claims.
In her White House memoir, former President George W. Bush’s communications director Karen Hughes tells a useful anecdote. Walking on the beach, she looked up from to see a small plane flying an advertising banner: marilyn ive poured my ♥ out nothin left luv wes. Hughes contemplated the banner and thought, “I could have given him some message advice: the banner is clearly some sort of appeal to Marilyn, but the words are about Wes—what he has done, how he feels. He should have made the message about her.”
Trump is all about Trump. That’s always been true. For three years, Trump was protected from himself by the prosperity he inherited from others. Trump squandered that prosperity, as he previously squandered the for- tune bequeathed by his father. The consequences are here. The fairy tales Trump tells on Twitter will not conceal those consequences from the voters Trump needs. They weren’t listening before. Now they are. What they hear is not Obama was mean to me. What they hear is I cannot do this job.
5.12 Fauci to Rand Paul: “I don’t give advice about economic things. I don’t give advice about anything other than public health. . . .We really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children, because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China or in Europe. . . .I think we better be careful [that] we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects. I am very careful and hopefully humble in knowing that I don’t know everything about this disease, and that’s why I’m very reserved in making broad predictions.”
5.11 Libby Gelman-Waxner (Paul Rudnick) in the New Yorker. Study Ivanka’s tweets. So far, she’s advised us to build living-room forts, have fun with eighteenth-century shadow puppets, and continually praise her for using the words “jobs,” “empower,” and “me.” While I consider myself to be proudly useless and self-involved, Ivanka puts me to shame. I’ve been monitoring her hair, which resembles the entire L’Oréal color wheel; her heavy Benjamin Moore-grade makeup; and her always inappropriate wardrobe of Amish cocktail dresses. It’s as if her dream were to become a society-lady panelist on “What’s My Line?” in 1958. When she speaks, in her breathy Tweety Bird-at-boarding-school burble, the effect is complete. She’s an American Girl doll with a trust fund and a Gucci attaché case.
5.11 Fauci in an email to the Times: “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country, this will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”
5.11 Jerry Stiller dies at 92.
5.9 Little Richard dies at 87.
5.8 14% unemployed. highest rate since Depression.
5.8 Dana Milbank in the Post: “Now is the spring of our disgrace. Around the world, countries are winning the battle against the coronavirus and beginning a responsible return to work, school and leisure, confident that their governments have the deadly virus in check. But the United States plays the loser. Unwilling to do the hard work needed to beat the pandemic, we are quitting: forcing people back to work without protections people in other countries enjoy. The most powerful country in the world is failing.”
5.8 Barack Obama: “This election that’s coming up on every level is so important because — what we’re going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party. What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends of being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty. It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’—when that mindset is operationalized in our government.”
5.8 Toluse Olorunnipa in Washington Post: President Trump in recent weeks has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy and the rekindling of an economy that has been devastated by public health restrictions aimed at mitigating the outbreak. His administration has sidelined or replaced officials not seen as loyal, rebuffed congressional requests for testimony, dismissed jarring statistics and models, praised states for reopening without meeting White House guidelines and, briefly, pushed to disband a task force created to combat the virus and communicate about the public health crisis. Several Republican governors are following Trump’s lead as an effort takes shape to control the narrative about a pandemic that has continued to rage throughout a quickly reopening country. With polls showing most consumers still afraid to venture out of their homes, the Trump administration has intensified its efforts to soothe some of those fears through a messaging campaign that relies on tightly controlling information about a virus that has proven stubbornly difficult to contain. “If the message were to go out with complete objectivity, it would be disastrous for Trump,” said Max Skidmore, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. “So he is doing his best to prevent experts from speaking out or using their expertise, and he’s simply trying to divert attention.”
5.7 Trump‘s valet tests positive. Valet is in the Navy, a member of “an elite military unit.”
5.7 ROBIN KAISER-SCHATZLEIN in The New Republic: Between 1789 and 1914 across Europe and America, private property ownership consolidated, wealth inequality surged, and both reached levels rarely seen in human history. Private landownership and the agrarian economies consolidated under a relatively small group of people in Europe, and the spoils of colonialism flowed to just a few. The financial economics of slavery in the United States privileged whites with inherited wealth, crushed small farmers in the South, and kept black Americans destitute. Later, the ownership structure of the industrial trusts, like those created by Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller, ensured the gains of productivity went to a tiny coterie of financiers. By the late 1920s, the top 10 percent of Americans took half of all income. Wherever proprietarianism went, inequality quickly followed. In the years leading up to World War I, many believed that the fiercely unequal proprietarian regimes were unchangeable. But for many European countries, growing political turmoil, the devastation of the World War I, and the threat raised by the Bolshevik Revolution caused a quick turn to the redistribution of wealth. Political unrest in the United Kingdom from 1909 to 1911 gave rise to a progressive income and estate tax; France levied its first income tax to pay for the war. Further redistribution and a turn to more expansive social democracy would come later. In the United States, however, it took the calamity of the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression to begin a reversal of ideology. The justifications for inequalities that made sense at the beginning of the century, like Andrew Carnegie’s assertion that “the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many,” seemed hilariously untrue. The Great Depression spurred the New Deal, with its work programs, encouragement of cooperative businesses, and supportive labor laws. This period was one of both prosperity and some of the lowest wealth inequality in American history. Private wealth and corporate power were curtailed by a growing government prone to active intervention and by a strong labor movement; but ownership of property, management of corporations, and—most important for the twentieth century—wealth and capital continued to reside in private hands. It’s why Piketty somewhat disparagingly refers to the New Deal as a “bargain-basement version of social democracy.”
What happened next, we all know. Beginning in the 1970s, the New Deal welfare state crumbled under pressure from some combination of strong global competition, stagnating growth, and concerted attacks from a mobilized right wing. Piketty blames the lack of durable tools—like, say, constitutionally inscribed progressive taxation on wealth—for failing to maintain the low inequality of the postwar period. It was all too easy to slide back into a world owned by the few, instead of the many. Today, Piketty proposes, we live in a neo-proprietarian inequality regime, which takes the logic of the inviolable right to property and extends it to wealth and income (which was, by the way, Carnegie’s argument in 1889). The extraordinarily high incomes of tech executives, corporate lawyers, and unicorn entrepreneurs, their defenders argue, are theirs to keep, because they are earned in a dispassionate meritocratic system, largely emanating from our country’s higher-education institutions. Of course, we know now the dispassionate meritocracy is a lie; it’s a system that allows people with a head start to stay ahead. The ruling class is defined and legitimized by educational credentials; our last five presidents have all had Ivy League degrees, a fact that shows only a weak correlation between education and competence. The meritocracy, in fact, is quite similar to the purportedly dispassionate system of contracts and rational government that legitimized the concentrated wealth in France and the United States after their revolutions.
Piketty’s solution is that we move beyond private ownership to some blend of private, public, and temporary ownership. (Total abolition of private property, à la Soviet Union, for Piketty, was an ill-advised failure.) Since many societal goods are often already owned publicly, like electrical grids, highways, or parks, and some are owned communally, like worker cooperatives, it is easy to imagine this realm expanding. Temporary ownership is different, and would require permanently high levels of taxation (perhaps written into a country’s constitution) to ensure that any number of temporarily private goods return to the community on a regular basis. Homes, wealth, real estate, patents, and financial assets like stocks and bonds would all benefit the community if they were owned only temporarily. A steep wealth tax could also pay for a onetime “capital grant” that everyone would receive in their twenties, at 60 percent of the national average wealth (something like $120,000 if the average wealth is $200,000). Piketty also believes that a singular faith in the power of central government to bring big business under control, whether through nationalization or regulation, is mistaken. The reliance on state ownership of major industries—like that in France and Britain up to the 1980s—leads to a neglect of taxes on private enterprise. Taxes, Piketty stresses, are some of the only tools that can perpetually protect the society against developing unconscionable inequalities of wealth and incomes.
5.6 Trump: “I’m actually calling now . . . the nation warriors. We have to be warriors. We can’t keep our country closed down for years.”
5.6 Axl Rose and Steve Mnuchin engaged in a Twitter feud. After Mnuchin went on TV and said this was a great time to drive around the country, Rose tweeted: “Whatever anyone may have previously thought of Steve Mnuchin he’s officially an a–hole.” Mnuchin hit back, tweeting “What have you done for the country lately?”, adding an emoji that appeared to be the flag of the United States flag, but which was actually the flag of Liberia. Responded Rose: “My bad I didn’t get we’re hoping 2 emulate Liberia’s economic model. But on the real unlike this admin I’m not responsible for 70k+ deathsn’ unlike u I don’t hold a fed gov position of responsibility 2 the American people n’ go on TV tellin them 2 travel during a pandemic.”
5.6 Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: “People, when they’re the most desperate, it’s not like they become the most centrist. They become the most terrified. Trump has been very artful at manipulating those anxieties and shifting the blame in ways that I think are very dangerous.”
5.6 The global search for a treatment targeting the novel coronavirus has led to an unlikely potential savior: a cocoa-colored Belgian llama named Winter, whose blood produces a special class of disease-fighting antibodies — tiny, even by antibody standards — that show early promise in laboratory tests in blocking the novel coronavirus from entering cells.
5.6 Axios: Evidence is mounting that America is steamrolling toward a nightmarish failure to control the coronavirus. Why it matters: We made a lot of mistakes at the beginning. And despite a month of extreme social distancing to try to hit “reset,” a hurried reopening now raises the risk that we’ll soon be right back where we started. The Trump administration is in “preliminary discussions” to wind down its coronavirus task force, possibly in early June, Vice President Mike Pence told reporters yesterday. The dissolution is yet another sign that the administration is ready to move on — despite all of the indications that we’re not prepared. What we’re watching: The U.S. is still seeing around 30,000 new coronavirus cases a day — and that’s just the ones that we’re catching, because we’re still not testing enough people. Even with a robust contact tracing workforce, which we don’t have, tracking down the interactions of 30,000 people a day would be an impossible task. And even if it weren’t, we have no system in place for isolating those people to prevent them from infecting their family members, coworkers or other contacts. The bottom line: We don’t have a treatment or a vaccine, and we’re about to loosen the reins on a virus we still don’t fully understand.
5.6 Threatened by social distancing orders, the Lucky Devil strip club in Portland, Oregon has evolved into a drive through restaurant, You pay $30 to enter and can order any food item off the menu. Once inside the tent, you’re treated to a full show, from a group of masked dancers. They do a song or two for each car, and then they send you on your way with your food. There are tip buckets set up inside.
5.6 HuffPo: Sparsely populated Alaska, Hawaii, Montana and Wyoming have the lowest numbers of residents who have tested positive for the new coronavirus. They scored big this spring when Congress pumped out direct federal aid to the states. Their haul ranged from $2 million per positive test in Hawaii to nearly $3.4 million per test in Alaska. In Wyoming, the smallest state with less than 600 positive cases, the $1.25 billion it received from the congressional package equates to 80 percent of its annual general state budget.
5.5 Trump, tweeting in response to a critical ad created by the anti-Trump Lincoln Project: “A group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, “Morning in America”, doing everything possible to….get even for all of their many failures. You see, these loser types don’t care about 252 new Federal Judges, 2 great Supreme Court Justices, a rebuilt military, a protected 2nd Amendment, biggest EVER Tax & Regulation cuts, and much more. I didn’t use any of them….because they don’t know how to win, and their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to Honest Abe. I don’t know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, Moonface, but it must have been really bad. ”
5.5 Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, in the Wall Street Journal: “Everyone thought we’d be in a better place after weeks of sheltering in place and bringing the economy to a near standstill. Mitigation hasn’t failed; social distancing and other measures have slowed the spread. But the halt hasn’t brought the number of new cases and deaths down as much as expected or stopped the epidemic from expanding.”
5.5 Elon Musk and Canadian singer Grimes name their new son X Æ A-12
5.5 Trump, while visiting a mask-manufacturing factory in Arizona, commenting on reopening: “Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open, and we have to get it open soon.”
5.5 Trump on ABC, explaining his administration’s failure to ensure an adequate federal stockpile of medical supplies: “Well, I’ll be honest, I have a lot of things going on.”
5.4 Don Shula dies at 90. Why didn’t he put Unitas in earlier?
5.4 Washington Post: A draft government report obtained by The Washington Post estimates a big jump in daily deaths from coronavirus in the next month. Right now, an average of 1,388 are dying each day in the U.S. By June 1, this draft report estimates 3,000 people a day could be dying. . . .The document predicts a sharp increase in both cases and deaths beginning about May 14, which is actually around the time a separate model, prepared by a Trump adviser, predicts deaths will go to zero. This new, much more dire estimate comes as Trump says most states should start opening up — and most are.
5.4 A 5-year-old boy with $3 in his pocket was pulled over by Utah police while driving his parent’s car to California to buy a Lamborghini.The boy left in the SUV after his mother said she would not buy the luxury car for him, Utah Highway Patrol said. A trooper spotted the vehicle weaving on Interstate 15 at 30 mph. The trooper thought the driver was impaired.
5.3 Trump dramatically raised his prediction for the eventual death toll from the coronavirus pandemic within the United States, saying up to 100,000 people could die. That figure is a sharp increase from the president’s comments just last month when he said he believed around 60,000 people would die from the virus. In a Fox News Town Hall at the Lincoln Memorial, Trump said his response to the outbreak in the United States — where more than 1.1 million people have been infected — had been “successful” and said without his intervention more than a million people could have died. Elsewhere in the interview he said, “I think we’re going to have a vaccine, I’m telling you, by the end of the year … I think we’re going to have a vaccine.”
5.3 Pence on Fox: “I didn’t think it was necessary, but I should have worn a mask.”
5.3 On Facebook: Progressive people in this country are committed to due process, open-mindedness, and fairness. In the last couple years, the right has sought to exploit this as a weakness–Hilary‘s inconsequential server, Biden‘s spuriously scandalous role in the Ukraine, and now Tara Reade. Let’s get real: She has a story that flies in the face of what we have come to believe about a man who has spent 50 years in public life. She can’t say where it happened. She can’t say when. She has no documentation. Her story has changed over time. The incident allegedly happened at the same time that Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers and Bob Packwood‘s staff and Chuck Robb’s girlfriend and Barney Frank‘s boyfriend were all coming forward, and we we were hearing about the sexual shenanigans of Henry Hyde and Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich, but still she kept quiet. Is it within the realm of possibility that the incident happened as she has alleged? Yes it is. Is that the standard serious people should now use for evaluating leaders?
5.2 Gil Schwartz, a/k/a Stanley Bing, dies in his Santa Monica home at 68. David Hirshey remembers: “Of all the projects I worked on over the years with Bing, . . . my favorite memories are from the decade we collaborated on Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards with several colleagues from the magazine. What I remember most vividly of that time were not his Diet Coke-aspirating one-liners—and there were many. . . . No, what I remember most is the food. Gil refused to participate in these joke-a-thons on an empty stomach. That meant six weeks of endless lunches, most of them at the Cosmic Coffee Shop on 58th Street and Broadway. In one memorable month, we ran up a $1,400 tab, which, when you consider that the Cheeseburger Deluxe cost about $6.95, is a tribute to Gil’s herculean ability to order food for 19—with just six people the table.” (Above, Bing and Michael Hirshorn outside the Cosmic.)
5.2 Jerry Seinfeld on NPR: “Humor is of the greatest value in times like these,” he says. “Humor is an essential survival quantity, I think, of human life. I mean, I’ve been seeing some stuff about these nurses and medical professionals and these horrible units where they’re losing people so regularly. And I heard this one nurse say, she said, ‘You cry for a while and then you tell jokes.’ And that seems like the most human you can be.”
5.1 Biden denies Tara Reade‘s allegations.