Saturday Snippets is a regular weekend feature at Daily Kos.
• North Dakota governor urges citizens not to politicize the wearing of masks: Hard not to do when Donald Trump has done exactly that by modeling unsafe behavior with his outright refusal to wear a mask at his briefings and visits outside Washington. His trip to the Ford factory this week was a slight improvement as Trump wore a mask during his private tour of the plant, although when the media were present, the mask came off. Trump has been more worried that he’ll look silly than that he would set a good example in a nation where several states have seen a surge in coronavirus cases and deaths as the economy has begun reopening. This attitude and behavior obviously has done nothing to tamp down the aggression engaged in by people who have bought into the Trump line that the perils of the coronavirus are a hoax, mere Democratic propaganda. He might instead listen to North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, who choked up Friday talking to the press about partisanship over masks.
“This is a … senseless dividing line,” Burgum said, according The Washington Post, “and I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding. If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidate they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old who’s been going through cancer treatments.” He added, “They might have vulnerable adults in their life who … currently have COVID-19 and are fighting. So again, I would just love to see our state, as part of being ‘North Dakota smart,’ also be ‘North Dakota kind,’ ‘North Dakota empathetic’.”
• Pandemic means U.S. Census having a tougher time than usual counting people in rural and tribal areas: The Associated Press reports that a rolling census count shows states with large rural populations are behind the more urban areas of the nation when it comes to answering the 2020 Census questionnaire. Those regions have the largest concentration of households that are dependent on receiving forms directly from census workers. But the census has been on hold for six weeks in the fight against the spread of the coronavirus. Leaders in rural America point out that catching up will be difficult for communities that are the already among the toughest to count. That matters because the census provides data on how federal funding for highways, schools, and health care is divided up. An undercount could cost congressional seats. Said Javier Sanchez, mayor of Española, a city of 10,000 in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, “We have historically been underrepresented in the past, and there’s an unfortunate precedent to show we will be underrepresented again. This pandemic makes it all the more challenging,”
• Judge ridicules Interior Dept. document on taking back land from tribe: The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe that welcomed the pilgrims in 1620 has been fighting with the federal government over the removal of the tribe’s 321 acres of communal land from trust status. The tribe seeks to build a casino on its land, as other tribes have done across the nation over the past three decades. The Mashpee argue that the Interior Department that handles trust lands through the Bureau of Indian Affairs—which many Native peoples have for decades labeled the Bureau of Indifference and Arrogance—overlooked evidence when the decision was made to yank the land out of trust. U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman said an Interior memo addressing the issue that was released March 5 was one of the most poorly written documents he has ever read, peppered with grammar and spelling errors. “And you can tell your client that. It’s a joke,” Friedman told the government after it refused during the teleconference hearing to reconsider the tribe’s status retroactively.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Wash your mask: The Centers for Disease Control have urged people to use washable cloth coverings to ensure there are enough surgical and N95 masks for medical workers. Cloth face masks worn during the coronavirus pandemic should be washed regularly. Public health experts recommend wearing a mask made from cotton fabric, such as T-shirts, or scarves, and bandannas, when you are outside and unable to maintain social distancing from others. The covering should be washed daily after use. It is best to clean your mask in a washing machine or with soap and hot water. It should be dried completely, preferably in a hot dryer, if possible. Storing the clean, dry mask in a new paper bag to keep it safe from germs is a good idea.
• Bumblebees bite plants to make them flower earlier. Seriously:
Bumblebees are a resourceful bunch: when pollen is scarce and plants near the nest are not yet flowering, workers have developed a way to force them to bloom. Research published on Thursday in Science shows that the insects puncture the plants’ leaves, which causes them to flower, on average, 30 days earlier than they otherwise would. How the technique evolved and why the plants respond to bumblebee bites by blooming remain unclear. But researchers say the discovery of a new behavior in such a familiar creature is remarkable.
“This is one of those really rare studies that observes a natural phenomenon that hadn’t been documented before,” says John Mola, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center in Colorado, who was not involved in the study. The new finding “offers all sorts of questions and potential explanations” about how widespread the behavior is and why it occurs, he says.
• Since March 18, as 38.5 million workers have filed for jobless benefits, the wealth of U.S. billionaires has swollen by $434 billion, up 15%: Just two of them—Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg—saw their own wealth soar by nearly $60 billion during these two months, according to a new analysis, jointly released by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies.