‘Open up’ is too often code for ‘stimulate the economy to get Trump re-elected’. But public health and reality says..
WaPo:
How Arizona ‘lost control of the epidemic’
Arizona has emerged as an epicenter of the early summer coronavirus crisis as the outbreak has expanded, flaring across new parts of the country and, notably, infecting more young people.
Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is recording as many as 2,000 cases a day, “eclipsing the New York City boroughs even on their worst days,” warned a Wednesday brief by disease trackers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, which observed, “Arizona has lost control of the epidemic.”
STATNews:
As Covid-19 cases peak, a virus once again takes advantage of human instinct
Researchers have learned a lot about SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, since it emerged in China at the end of 2019. They have learned more about how it spreads, and how to test for it. They have learned that two drugs, remdesivir and dexamethasone, show some benefit in the sickest patients.
But they have also learned that the virus takes advantage of human instinct. Its long course means that it is possible to believe that things aren’t going to get that bad — long after they are actually becoming catastrophic. And many experts fear — though they may not be able to say for certain — that the U.S. is nearing the point of catastrophe again.
Important piece for those who follow day to day numbers. This plays out over weeks.
WSJ editorial:
The Trump Referendum
He still has no second term message beyond his own grievances.
President Trump may soon need a new nickname for “Sleepy Joe” Biden. How does President-elect sound? On present trend that’s exactly what Mr. Biden will be on Nov. 4, as Mr. Trump heads for what could be an historic repudiation that would take the Republican Senate down with him.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump’s new reelection strategy reveals his contempt for his voters
Now we’re learning that the Trump campaign wants to galvanize his base in part by continuing to urge the country to reopen faster. That’s not surprising, except for one thing: This will be happening even as the numbers of people getting infected with the novel coronavirus are spiking dangerously in numerous states that voted for him, something that will get worse in coming weeks.
Stuart Stevens/USA Today:
2020 Election: If Republicans care about America, they should vote for Joe Biden
Another four years of Donald Trump would be a disaster for America and the world. They would also be a disaster, and likely fatal, for the Republican Party.
I’ve worked in five Republican presidential campaigns. Four won the nomination and two won the White House. It’s a presidential election summer but I am trying to do everything I can to help elect a Democrat: Joe Biden.
Another four years of Donald Trump would be a disaster for America and the world. They would also be a disaster, and likely fatal, for the Republican Party. The reality is that President Trump is a symptom, not the source, of the disease that is ravaging the Republican Party. Only by confronting that sickness can there be a possibility of a cure.
Caroline Randall Williams/NY Times:
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?
I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
Newsweek:
Majority Support Obamacare Despite Trump's Supreme Court Bid to Kill ACA
A Fox News Poll, which interviewed 1,343 registered voters nationwide between June 13 and 16, found 56 percent had a favorable view of Obamacare. Of those 30 percent were strongly in favor and 26 percent somewhat. This was a record high for Fox News polling.
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) Health Tracking Poll has also consistently found support for Obamacare at over 50 percent in recent months. Its latest survey found 51 percent had a favorable view, in a poll conducted among 1,189 adults in the U.S. over the phone between May 13 and 18.
In February, KFF's polling saw a peak in support at 55 percent, at the time stating "a clear majority" viewed the law favorably. The survey was conducted over telephone between 1,207 adults in the U.S. between February 13 and 18th.
While polling would appear to indicate support for the ACA, the move to do away with has also swiftly been condemned by Democrats.
The next big issue is school.
Benjy Sarlin/NBC:
The future of the coronavirus recovery runs through the classroom
Analysis: Nobody knows what school will look like in the fall, and that's a huge problem for everything from the economy to November's elections.
With just weeks to go before classes typically begin, education advocates complain that the federal government's response has been lethargic — the House and the Senate have held hearings on opening schools and child care facilities, but President Donald Trump and Republican leaders have been slow to craft a relief bill that might back up school budgets and fund new pandemic safety measures.
"It's really shocking to me how little appreciation there is for the situation in Washington," said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the Learning Policy Institute and head of the California State Board of Education. "It's not a problem that can be solved at the state level."
Even Mississippi is changing… watch for movement on the state flag.
Stuart Stevens/Bulwark:
My Confederate Past
Everyone who grew up in Mississippi was steeped in the Confederacy. Even if they didn’t realize it.
It’s difficult to explain to a non-Southerner the role the Confederate flag has played in our lives. I suspect that’s more so for a Mississippian than for someone from any other state as Mississippi is the most Southern of the states. Put it this way: If you have connections to the University of Mississippi—the most Southern school in the most Southern state—then your connection to the Confederate flag is what the shamrock is to Notre Dame.
I was born in the 1950s to parents who met at Ole Miss. The role Ole Miss football played in my life was basically what the Catholic Church is to the Jesuits. It was both a belief system and the organizing principle of life. Saturdays in the fall were the Holy Days when the Faithful would gather and reinforce our devotion through the shared communion of ritual.
These were not football games but celebrations of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Only this time our 11 soldiers on the field of battle more often than not emerged victorious. At halftime the band marched in Confederate battle gray uniforms while Colonel Reb led the cheerleaders in unfolding what was billed as the world’s largest Confederate flag. (Even as a 10-year-old I remember wondering, “How big was the second-largest flag?”) Cheerleaders threw bundles of Confederate flags into the stands. We stood and swayed together singing Dixie, always ending in the stadium-shaking cry, “The South Shall Rise Again.”
It was at halftime in the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky game at Jackson’s Memorial Stadium—walking distance from my home—that Governor Ross Barnett gave his famous speech calling for states’ rights. We beat Kentucky that afternoon and the next day in Oxford there began the last pitched battle of the Civil War. It took 30,000 troops to force the University of Mississippi to accept a single black student
Today you’re more likely to get a student riot if a top-ranked black athlete committed to Ole Miss and then switched at the last minute to Alabama.
Washington Examiner:
Republican nightmare: Trump vote-by-mail demonizing driving down GOP participation
President Trump’s extreme opposition to mail-in ballots is more likely hurting him and down-ballot Republicans than it is helping him.
Mounting evidence in voter registration data, a survey, and organizer anecdotes shows that instead of preventing the voting method from being a major factor in the November election, his stance is turning Republican voters off from using the method entirely, which could have the effect of depressing Republican votes.
The president’s rampant alarmism on mail-in voting — most recently claiming that foreign governments will rig the election by printing millions of mail-in ballots, an idea rebuked by elections officials — frustrates those trying to push state election officials and Congress to provide ample absentee voting and in-person voting options and resources in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. They point out that many analyses find that mail-in voter fraud is small and often prosecuted.
Careful what you wish for, Donald.