Harry Enten/CNN:
State polls suggest Biden has a clear national lead
What's the point: One of the big questions when we look at national polls is whether or not they're an accurate representation of what is going on at the state level. One of the easiest ways to check is to
compare state poll results to the past presidential vote in a given state. I did so for all telephone polls that called cell phones since the beginning of April.
When we average out
these state polls, they suggest that Biden's running about 6 points ahead of Hillary Clinton's final margin.
Christian Schneider/USA today:
Wisconsin's economy is reopening and it's a hot coronavirus mess. Don't do what we did.
The Republican plan all along was to thwart any plan. Granted a seat at the table, they now have set the table on fire and thrown it out the window.
The governor’s unilateral “safer at home" order was set to expire May 26, at which point a gradual reopening would continue to take place. (Some business restrictions have already been lifted.)
But Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature challenged the order, complaining that the governor, through his health secretary-designee, had both cut them out of the process and exceeded his authority. They took Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to court, emerging victorious on Wednesday.
The ruling leaves Wisconsin without any statewide rule or guidance in place for businesses, citizens and local governments. After the decision, Republicans said they didn’t see any need for any new rules, instead turning the state into a patchwork of local COVID-19 regulations, stretched throughout nearly 2,000 counties, cities, villages and towns. (Ironically, in the lawsuit, GOP attorneys argued that the statewide order was confusing — but without the order, every local government may now have different regulations and expiration dates.)
FT (free):
Inside Trump’s coronavirus meltdown
What went wrong in the president’s first real crisis — and what does it mean for the US?
What the headlines missed was a boast that posterity will take more seriously than Trump’s self-estimated IQ, or the exaggerated test numbers (the true number of CDC kits by March was 75,000). Trump proclaimed that America was leading the world. South Korea had its first infection on January 20, the same day as America’s first case, and was, he said, calling America for help. “They have a lot of people that are infected; we don’t.” “All I say is, ‘Be calm,’” said the president. “Everyone is relying on us. The world is relying on us.”
He could just as well have said baseball is popular or foreigners love New York. American leadership in any disaster, whether a tsunami or an Ebola outbreak, has been a truism for decades. The US is renowned for helping others in an emergency.
In hindsight, Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself.
Sean Iling/Vox:
The fake “Obamagate” scandal shows how Trump hacks the media
He is “flooding the zone with shit.” And it’s working.
We’ve been introduced to a new conspiracy theory this week: “Obamagate.”
There’s no point in unpacking this theory here because it’s bullshit and everyone knows it. (If you need an explainer, my Vox colleague Jen Kirby has you covered.) But for the sake of a reference point, here’s the simplest version possible: “Deep state” holdovers from the Obama administration allegedly spearheaded the prosecution of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as part of a broader scheme to undermine the Trump presidency.
I really don’t want to offer any more details because, again, this is a bullshit story. (Trump, despite promoting it endlessly, couldn’t even explain it when asked by a reporter.)
The important thing here is not that this theory is false. The important thing is that we’re talking about it at all, and we’re only talking about it because the president wants us to talk about it. Talking about this non-story means we’re talking less about, say, the nearly 85,000 Americans who have died so far from the coronavirus or the impending recession.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The 2016 nightmare is already repeating itself
The latest developments in the Michael Flynn case should prompt us to revisit one of the most glaring failures in political journalism, one that lends credibility to baseless narratives pushed for purely instrumental purposes, perversely rewarding bad-faith actors in the process.
News accounts constantly claim with no basis that new information “boosts” or “lends ammunition” to a particular political attack, or “raises new questions” about its target. These journalistic conventions are so all-pervasive that we barely notice them.
But they’re extremely pernicious, and they need to stop. They both reflect and grotesquely amplify a tendency that badly misleads readers. That happened widely in 2016, to President Trump’s great benefit. It’s now happening again.
I find myself somewhat in disagreement as i don’t think this story is getting the traction they want. Actual pandemic news remains the top news story.
This very long twitter thread is nonetheless a very interesting read:
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
Trump is right: ‘OBAMAGATE’ is ‘the biggest political crime in American history’
The White House press corps often gets accused — and sometimes deservedly so — of tossing softball questions at President Trump, but last Monday the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker threw one at the 45th POTUS that looked like one of Jamie Moyer’s late-career 60 mph “fastballs” that hung right over the plate, middle-in.
“You appeared to accuse [former president Barack] Obama of a crime yesterday — what did he do?" Rucker asked.
Instead of slamming it into the second deck, Trump whiffed, badly. For several days, the never-too-busy-to-tweet-while-90,000-Americans-are-dying president has been on the warpath about a scandal that he called “Obamagate” — or more typically, “OBAMAGATE!” — that he insisted was “the biggest political crime in American history” and that also “makes Watergate look small-time.” Now if he could just explain what the darn thing is!
…
All of this is utter baloney, or — as veteran legal analyst Dan Abrams colorfully described it — “100% bull(bleep).”