So basically they’re working hard to…raise their own body count?

In perhaps his most overt effort to shun the wearing of masks, Trump retweeted a tweet from Fox News analyst Brit Hume ridiculing Joe Biden for appearing with a face mask during a Memorial Day ceremony in Delaware.

Trump hates the masks, Trump refuses to wear the mask, Trump keeps telling everyone the masks are voluntary. Last week he even made a point of saying he didn’t wear a mask in public view on his visit to the Ford plant because he didn’t want to give reporters the satisfaction.

The implication was pretty clear: When it comes to wearing a mask, public health isn’t the only consideration. So, too, are pride and Trump’s appetite for provocation. That message, perhaps better than anything, summarizes his attitude toward masks. Whatever can be gained by a president setting an example for the American people, there are other considerations.

Or, to put it in more trumpian terms: fuck setting an example, he just wants to do what he wants to do.

It’s not difficult to see the public consequences to this more laissez-faire approach to masks. In the days before Trump’s Monday retweet, anecdotal images showed Memorial Day weekend revelers in places such as the Lake of the Ozarks flouting not just mask-wearing guidelines but also social-distancing guidelines.

Polls have indicated members of Trump’s party are much more likely to flout the mask guideline. A Quinnipiac University poll last week showed 90 percent of Democrats thought Trump should wear a mask in public, but just 38 percent of Republicans said the same.

So…in other words they’re thinning their own numbers. On purpose. I’m not sure they’ve really thought this through.

Audubon Society statement on Incident in Central Park’s Ramble:

“Black Americans often face terrible daily dangers in outdoor spaces, where they are subjected to unwarranted suspicion, confrontation, and violence,” said Audubon SVP for State Programs Rebeccah Sanders, who is white. “The outdoors – and the joy of birds – should be safe and welcoming for all people. That’s the reality Audubon and our partners are working hard to achieve. We unequivocally condemn racist sentiments, behavior, and systems that undermine the humanity, rights, and freedom of Black people. We are grateful Christian Cooper is safe. He takes great delight in sharing New York City’s birds with others and serves as a board member of the New York City Audubon Society, where he promotes conservation of New York City’s outdoor spaces and inclusion of all people.”

The other horror yesterday was the police murder of George Floyd.

Four Minneapolis police officers have been fired after a black man was restrained by the neck and died in custody on Monday night. Bystander video captured a white police officer kneeling on the man’s neck for several minutes, despite the man’s pleas that he could not breathe. The man has been identified as George Floyd by an attorney for his family.

Kneeling on someone’s neck. Wtfffff.

The account from Darnella Frazier, who filmed the now-viral video showing part of the police encounter and said she watched Floyd being suffocated, differs from that of the police, who said Floyd was stopped because he matched the description of a suspect in a forgery case, resisted arrest and then suffered “medical distress.”

Being a suspect in a forgery case does not seem like a sufficient reason to use lethal force, to put it mildly.

In a video she posted on Facebook, Frazier said that she was on her way to see friends on May 25 when she saw Floyd outside of a grocery store on the south side of Minneapolis. Police had him pinned to the ground by his neck, she said. In her telling, Floyd’s face was being pressed so hard against the ground by the officer that his nose was bleeding.

She said she began recording the encounter, and that police kneeled on Floyd’s neck until he stopped moving and then later carried his motionless body away on a stretcher. She later posted the 10-minute video on Facebook.

I’m not going to watch it. I’m a coward.

The video begins with Floyd lying on the ground with a police officer’s knee pressed onto his neck. A voice, seemingly from a bystander, says “You’re going to just sit there with your knee on his neck?”

Floyd can be seen and heard voicing distress and saying repeatedly, “Please. Please. I can’t breathe. Please. I can’t move.” A bystander’s voice can be heard telling police, “You got him down. Let him breathe.”

Minutes later, Floyd appears motionless on the ground. A bystander again addresses police saying, “Bro, he’s not even f—— moving!” Another voice is heard saying, “Get off of his neck!” One person asks, “Did you kill him?”

Floyd’s eyes appear closed and his head lies on the ground. An ambulance arrives and Floyd is loaded onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.

“The police killed him, bro, right in front of everybody,” Frazier said on video posted on Facebook. “He was crying, telling them like, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and everything. They killed this man.”

Four cops have now been fired. A civil rights suit is on the way.

Zowie!

H/t Rob

Graham Linehan asked a question.

It was this, on a post about women and abortion rights.

Yes, if you’re going to talk about abortion rights please keep in mind that not all women are women and not all men are not-women.

Glinner goes on:

Franklin Templeton has now fired Amy Cooper.

“I don’t think there’s an African American person in America who hasn’t experienced something like this at some point,” Christian Cooper, a 57-year-old science editor, told The Washington Post in an interview. “I don’t shy away from confronting the scofflaw when I see it. Otherwise, the park would be unusable — not just to us birders but to anybody who enjoys the beauty.”

Christian Cooper — who is not related to Amy — had gotten up early on Memorial Day to head to the Ramble, a heavily wooded section of Central Park designed to resemble a wild garden. With its rocky outcrops and thick canopy, the area makes for an especially inviting stopover for birds on their northward migration, he said.

…

The novel coronavirus shut down the city this spring along with its busy dog runs. Authorities wanted to ensure pets’ humans were staying six feet apart, and the Ramble — already an occasional target for loose puppies — became a canine playground.

On a nearly daily basis, Cooper had seen unleashed pooches digging up the soil, ruining the delicate habitat and disturbing the birds. He had often asked unaware owners to restrain their pets, sometimes on camera, he said, and he carried around some dog treats for this very purpose. Monday morning was no different.

Around 7:30 a.m., he spotted rowdy, 2-year-old Henry grazing through the brush, as his human, an investment manager in yoga pants and a face mask, was standing right by a sign saying all dogs must be leashed.

He asked her to leash her dog, she refused, he started recording, she made a false report to the police. (I wonder if that will become a criminal matter. She’s admitted to doing it, and the police don’t look kindly on swatting.)

As of early Tuesday, the video had been viewed nearly 20 million times. Her employer, the investment firm Franklin Templeton, initially said it had placed her on administrative leave, but on Tuesday said that “[after?] our internal review of the incident in Central Park yesterday, we have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately.”

She was never going to be good PR for them after this.

Who is Christian Cooper? This guy.

Now there’s a headline:

He asked Twitter to remove Trump’s false tweets about his dead wife. Twitter refused.

Six times this month, in a vile attempt to punish a political rival, President Trump has tweeted about a decades-old conspiracy theory about MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.

Twitter (TWTR) has come under increasing pressure to remove the tweets, but the company is not bending, despite being called out by some of the people personally hurt by the posts.

This is the same Twitter that summarily bans women who say on Twitter that men are not women. Saying men are not women not only gets tweets deleted, it gets the women who say it permanently banished from the platform. That’s worth censoring, but false libelous accusations of murder from an evil tyrant with millions of followers are not.

Klausutis’ widower, T.J. Klausutis, took action in private last week, writing to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and asking him to remove Trump’s tweets.

“Nearly 19 years ago, my wife, who had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work. She was found dead the next morning. Her name is Lori Kaye Klausutis and she was 28 years old when she died,” he wrote in a letter to Dorsey dated May 21. “Her passing is the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with in my 52 years and continues to haunt her parents and sister.”

T.J. said he has tried to honor his late wife by protecting her memory “as I would have protected her in life.”

He said that’s why he was writing to Dorsey.

“The President’s tweet that suggests that Lori was murdered — without evidence (and contrary to the official autopsy) — is a violation of Twitter’s community rules and terms of service,” he wrote. “An ordinary user like me would be banished from the platform for such a tweet but I am only asking that these tweets be removed.”

No dice.

On Tuesday morning, New York Times columnist Kara Swisher published the Klausutis letter and Brzezinski read it on the air.

Three hours later, Twitter told CNN Business that it would not be removing the tweets.

“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”

What’s that supposed to mean? How does it justify not removing the tweets?

It’s just naked power. Trump has naked power, more of it than he should have as a constitutional matter, because so many people are just afraid of his naked power. It’s a closed loop. He has chosen to abuse his power in ways that no one ever attempted before, and because he has made that choice, people like Jack Dorsey are afraid to do something as obvious as remove a venomous lie about a named person.

Last year, Twitter said it was instituting a policy that would make some exceptions for world leaders like Trump. The company said it planned to place a disclaimer on future tweets from world leaders that break its rules but which Twitter decides are in the “public interest.”

Has the company done that? No. What’s the holdup exactly?

The evil monster today:

Is that a fact.

It’s not an “idea” that humans are sexually dimorphic, it’s a fact. It’s an idea that humans are not sexually dimorphic and that there’s a joyous rich tapestry of sexes open to us: a silly, childish, fantasy-based idea.

It’s not any kind of phobia to refuse orders to agree with and endorse and submit to fantasy-based ideas, especially ones as sweeping and fundamental as that.

I watched this unfolding on Twitter yesterday afternoon and didn’t post about it because…skatey-eight million people already were posting about it, and some of the facts were unclear at the time. But given the lynching “in effigy” of the governor of Kentucky on Sunday, and the death by cop of yet another black guy in Minneapolis last night, and the facts that have been clarified by now – there are things worth saying.

The tweet that everyone was talking about yesterday:

Slate tells the story:

An interaction between a black male birder and a white woman walking her dog in Central Park early Monday morning went viral after the woman called the police on the man when he admonished her for disobeying park rules by allowing her dog off the leash in a protected area of the park. Christian Cooper posted a video he took of the Memorial Day interaction that occurred in an interior, wooded portion of Central Park known as the Ramble that is popular with birders. Cooper came across the woman walking her dog between 7:30 and 8 a.m. and pointed out to her that unleashed dogs are not allowed in area, before asking her to put her dog on a leash. When the woman refused, Cooper says he took a dog treat out of his pocket that he carries for just such occasions with recalcitrant dog owners, and gave it to the dog. He then took out his phone and started recording.

The video begins with the woman, later identified as Amy Cooper (no relation), standing some 30 feet away. She takes her dog by the collar and then begins approaching Christian Cooper with her arm up as if to cover the phone lens asking him to stop videoing her. When he calmly refuses, asking her “please don’t come close to me,” presumably for social distancing reasons, she threatened to call the police. “Please call the cops,” he said in response. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she replied. “Please tell them whatever you like,” he said.

The description is carefully journalistically neutral; watching the clip is more visceral. Amy Cooper’s approaching the man feels more aggressive than that narrative conveys, because of the pandemic. Without the pandemic it might feel just bizarre, but with it it feels belligerent, like those stories of people who spit or cough at store clerks who say masks are required. Normally it seems silly to call a woman rushing up to a man “aggressive,” but these times are not normal.

Amy Cooper then calls the police on her cellphone, telling them, “I’m sorry, I’m in the Ramble. There’s a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” Christian Cooper, who is standing on a footpath, doesn’t move and continues to record. “I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble, please send the cops immediately!” the woman says in an increasingly distraught voice. While she’s on the phone with police, she clicks the leash back on her dog. “Thank you,” Christian Cooper says in response to her leashing her dog, as he lowers his phone and stops recording.

And while that sequence of events is going on Amy Cooper is also holding her poor dog by his collar while standing up straight, and since he’s a cocker spaniel this means she is holding him off his front paws by the collar and strangling him. The suffocating dog is struggling desperately the whole time while Amy Cooper is too busy with her phone to notice; it’s horrible to watch. The racism is the serious issue but the casual strangling is brutal too.

The New York Police Department said when officers responded to the call neither Amy Cooper nor Christian Cooper [was] at the scene. The NYPD said no arrests were made and no complaint was filed for what was determined to be a “verbal dispute.”

That was the main thing that was unclear yesterday as far as I knew. I saw one claim that the police never showed up, so I wondered if Amy Cooper could possibly have pretended to make the call, but I didn’t feel like seeming to want to exonerate her by suggesting it, so I left it alone. (Who cares? Well there’s the whole issue of social media pile-ons, and it is a real issue. On the other hand racist murder by cop is a far bigger issue.)

Christian Cooper is a serious birder. He explains why dogs really have to be on leash in the Ramble.

Christian Cooper explained in interviews afterward that his chief concern was protecting the bird habitat in the park, which he described as “a major birding hotspot. It’s on the Atlantic flyway.” “That’s important to us birders because we know that dogs won’t be off leash at all and we can go there to see the ground-dwelling birds,” Christian Cooper told CNN. “People spend a lot of money and time planting in those areas as well. Nothing grows in a dog run for a reason.”

He carries dog treats as a last resort, because people don’t like seeing strangers feed their dogs so on goes the leash at last.

Amy Cooper, however, responded far differently, threatening not just to call the cops, but using the birder’s race as an implicit trumped-up threat when requesting a police response to being asked to follow the rules and then being recorded for not doing so. “I videotaped it because I thought it was important to document things,” Christian Cooper said. “Unfortunately we live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where black men are seen as targets. This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn’t having it.”

And now her life is a mess; social media yadda yadda. But what if the cops had arrived swiftly? What if they’d arrested Christian Cooper? (Let alone killed him, which is not as far-fetched as it should be.) What if Amy Cooper had strolled home happy with her morning’s work? Would that be a better outcome?

Hardly. Social media pile-ons are a bad thing, but calling the cops on a black guy while claiming non-existent violence is much much worse.

Her employer has put her on administrative leave, and her dog is back with the spaniel rescue organization she adopted him from.

This is horrifying to watch – more so than I expected. It’s “in effigy” so I didn’t think it would be all that disturbing, but I was wrong.

The song is deeply ironic. We are ashamed to be American right now.

Originally a comment by Claire on Marcus Aurelius he isn’t.

I grew up amongst these people too, albeit in the UK not the US. But the working class man who toils down the pit or on the docks or the steelworks etc, tough, salt of the earth types who don’t tolerate anything they regard as weakness (with a special focus on “womanly” behaviors) are the same there too.

I’m from the northeast of England, where once there were jobs aplenty in those industrialized industries. The men whose fathers and grandfathers and so on worked down the pit, they work down the pit and they expect their sons to do so as well. Except they didn’t because the collieries, the shipyards, the mills all closed down and suddenly there were no jobs anymore. They weren’t helped or supported by the Government (who was doing the closing) and whole villages died or were reduced to a rump population. Communities destroyed and scattered to the four winds.

Those people were the solid base of the Labour party, and most would have died rather than vote Tory. Anyone who did was outcast as class traitors (this was not the case in other places where working class Tories were a thing). They were socialists and proud of it, the word doesn’t carry the negative connotations it does in the US.

These were the people that voted for Brexit.

I was horrified. Couldn’t they see that it would hurt them not help them? That a post-Brexit Britain would be no more interested in anything beyond London and the Home Counties than before? Some of them even voted Tory, a fact so astonishing I could barely believe it was true.

They’ll keep believing, even when the inevitable economic and logistic havoc is rained down upon them. They’ll blame Europe for any messes and now they have COVID19 as another excuse for why Brexit isn’t the Utopia they were promised.

They are the British equivalent of Trump voters – angry white working class people who are blaming many past injuries on immigrants and globalism going back decades. They’re given an icon – he doesn’t follow any of their rules on masculine behaviors but he articulates their misplaced rage. They’ll follow him over the cliff, telling themselves their beloved leader knows what he is doing.

Tom Nichols in the Atlantic asks a question many of us have asked and asked and asked – why do working class men love Trump when he’s so “unmanly”?

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

And not just any little boy, but a rich little boy, a bratty spoiled demanding tantrum-prone greedy little boy?

I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage…

They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”

…I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage.

I would say that dominance is just plain bad in itself, as opposed to having a dark side. People have to be in a boss role at times, but that doesn’t have to be a matter of dominance. But that’s a quibble.

Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard.

And he’s weak, and puffy, and lazy, and cruel, and a bully, and envious, and spiteful. He’s the Captain to Henry Fonda’s Mister Roberts.

As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can’t control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

He goes through the particulars one by one, including Trump’s terror of strong women and his blustering attempts to make them stop questioning him.

His anxiety at such moments—for example, when he calls on female reporters in the White House press room—is palpable. He begins his usual flurry of defensive hand gestures, from the playing of an imaginary accordion to a hand held up with a curled pinky finger like some parody of a Queens mobster, while he stammers out verbal chaff bursts of “excuse me” and “are you ready?”

I think it’s not just anxiety, I think it’s also contempt, disgust, loathing – in short a deeply entrenched misogyny. What is some fucking bitch doing questioning him? Excuse me, excuse me.

Does Trump accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s a blamer. Nothing is ever his fault. In the midst of disaster, he praises himself while turning on even his most loyal supporters without a moment’s hesitation. Men across America who were socialized by team sports, whose lives are predicated on the principle of showing up and doing the job, continually excuse a man who continually excuses himself. This presidency is defined not by Ed Harris’s grim intonation in Apollo 13 that “failure is not an option,” but by one of the most shameful utterances of a chief executive in modern American history: “I take no responsibility at all.”

That’s a good one; I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. The refusal ever to take responsibility, yes, but not the team sports part or the Gene Kranz part.

In the end there is no explanation. Nichols attempts one by saying people see Trump as a boy rather than a man, but that just moves the question back a step. Why do they do that, and who wants a boy in this job anyway? I’ll never understand it, myself.

Dominic Cummings’s perfectly reasonable not at all crazy explanation for that little side trip to Barnard Castle is that his eyes were wonky from his bout with COVID-19 so before driving himself and wife and child back to London from Durham he would take a little test drive (with child) to find out if he could see well enough to drive. As one does.

Oh nothing, just hanging a governor in effigy, just your normal Sunday outing.

What started out as a freedom-loving celebration of the Second Amendment ahead of Memorial Day turned into Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear being hanged in effigy and protesters chanting outside the governor’s mansion.

Not that that’s a very big jump. A “freedom-loving celebration of the Second Amendment” is actually a freedom-for-me violence-promoting celebration of guns and white supremacy.

The Second Amendment rally, meant to inspire people “about what it really means to be FREE,” according to Take Back Kentucky, attracted at least 100 people to the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort on Sunday.

Again, it’s important not to take the rhetoric at face value. Second Amendment rallies are about worship of gun violence at the hands of white men, and no one else; they’re not about rights in general or freedom in general.

Pastor Cliff Christman said that law isn’t relative, and to understand the country’s laws, one should understand Biblical law.  

“This has been one of the biggest shams in world history,” Christman said. “Grown men have been hiding in (their) homes nearly wetting their pants over this invisible enemy that nobody sees. Where is it at? Let it come out and face us. I serve the one true and living God who conquers all enemies. Why should we give our freedom and our liberties up for such fear (and) propaganda and all the garbage that is coming out of Frankfort today?”

Because more people will die if you don’t; that’s why. The virus doesn’t care about your god or your freedom or your liberties or your guns.

As the rally wound down, organizers led the remaining crowd to the governor’s mansion to attempt to hand-deliver a request for Beshear to resign. Groups carried signs reading “Abort Beshear from office” and “My rights don’t end where your fear begins” to Beshear’s home and chanted, “Come out Andy” and “Resign Andy.”

Nobody came out. Some state troopers stood around watching, and nothing in particular happened.

The crowd returned to the capitol, at which time an effigy of Beshear was hung from a tree outside the Capitol while “God Bless the U.S.A.” played over the loud speaker.

Right, God bless the USA and lynching and murder by gun. Bless bless bless.

The effigy bore a sign that read, “sic semper tyrannis,” which means “thus always to tyrants.”

No shit, Sherlock; it’s also famous as the slogan John Wilkes Booth shouted after he shot Lincoln. Proud motto of the slaveowning South!

Trump’s busy weekend:

As the death toll in the coronavirus pandemic neared 100,000 Americans this Memorial Day weekend, President Trump derided and insulted perceived enemies and promoted a baseless conspiracy theory, in between rounds of golf.

In a flurry of tweets and retweets Saturday and Sunday, Trump mocked former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight, ridiculed the looks of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and called former Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton a “skank.”

He revived long-debunked speculation that a television host with whom Trump has feuded may have killed a woman and asserted without evidence that mail-in voting routinely produces ballot stuffing.

In short he carried on like an angry disordered incel who lives on Twitter and potato chips, rather than a normal dim-witted president like a Bush or a Reagan.

Trump’s barrage of social media attacks stood in sharp contrast to a sober reality on a weekend for mourning military dead — the number of Americans whose lives have been claimed by the novel coronavirus has eclipsed the combined total of U.S. deaths from wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.

And some share of those lost lives were lost because he is a bad incompetent self-dealing head of state, who spends his time insulting people on Twitter rather than managing a pandemic.

In 2014, Trump had criticized President Barack Obama for playing golf when there were two confirmed cases of Ebola in the United States.

“He’s played a lot of golf, there’s no doubt about it,” Trump said then, in a telephone interview with the “Fox & Friends” program, on which hosts had noted disapprovingly that Obama had done so 200 times as president at that point, six years into his presidency.

Yes but Trump is white, ok?

Trump’s Twitter barrage on Saturday evening included crass descriptions of women viewed as his adversaries.

Retweeting one supporter in rapid succession, Trump blasted doctored images of Pelosi and two images of Abrams to his more than 80 million Twitter followers. Abrams, who is under consideration as a vice presidential pick by Biden, had “visited every buffet restaurant in the State,” Trump’s retweet said.

“To protect PolyGrip during this pandemic, we have developed 2 options. With the DJT option, she will be able to tongue and adjust her dentures more easily,” Trump retweeted, showing doctored images of Pelosi’s face, one with a “Trump 2020” mask over her mouth and the other with silver duct tape. “With duct tape, she won’t be able to drink booze on the job as much. Which do you think she will prefer? #maga #tcot #kag,” Twitter user John K. Stahl had tweeted.

Pelosi’s office has repeatedly said she does not drink alcohol.

Stahl’s Twitter profile describes him as a retired tech executive and conservative. Trump appears to have scrolled through the account and retweeted numerous posts that praised Trump, criticized Democrats and the news media or voiced support for Trump’s view, which is not based on fact, that mail-in voting invites fraud.

As any president would, because that’s what presidents do, especially during a rapidly-spreading pandemic.

Trump also claimed Sunday that hydroxychloroquine has “tremendous rave reviews,” despite studies showing that it can be dangerous.

In a Sinclair Broadcasting interview, Trump politicized a study from Columbia University indicating that had stringent social distancing been in place a week earlier, the United States could have prevented 36,000 coronavirus deaths through early May — about 40 percent of fatalities reported to date.

“Columbia University is a liberal, disgraceful institution, to write that,” Trump said in the interview broadcast Sunday. “I saw that report from Columbia University and it is a disgrace that they would play right to their little group of people to tell them what to do.”

Yes, so liberal and disgraceful to tell people how to avoid being infected and infecting others. Good people just get on with things, and bury the dead as needed.

Good timing.

Boris Johnson says everything Dominic Cummings did was fine and according to the rules and what anyone would do. This is bewildering to most observers because of all the rules Cummings broke.

Facing intense pressure to explain why Cummings appeared to have flouted lockdown rules by driving more than 260 miles to his parents’ estate in Durham with his wife and young son after his wife became ill, the prime minister said Cummings had simply been trying to keep his family safe.

“I have had extensive face-to-face conversations with Dominic Cummings and I have concluded that in travelling to find the right kind of childcare, at the moment when both he and his wife were about to be incapacitated by coronavirus – and when he had no alternative – I think he followed the instincts of every father and every parent,” Johnson said. “And I do not mark him down for that.”

So then all families with children can drive hundreds of miles to move in with older relatives when one parents is infected? That’s just fine is it?

Calling some of the allegations against Cummings “palpably false” – but not saying which – Johnson continued: “I believe that in every respect he has acted responsibly, legally and with integrity, and with the overriding aim to stopping the spread of the virus and saving lives.”

That makes no sense.

The prime minister insisted that Cummings’s trip was in line with restrictions on movement in place at the time, and that people could use their own discretion in similar circumstances.

If they’re friends with Boris Johnson, that is.

“Looking at the very severe childcare difficulties that presented themselves to Dominic Cummings and his family, I think that what they did was totally understandable,” he said

But they’re the same childcare difficulties that present themselves to any family with children. There’s nothing unique about them. All parents of young children are terrified about what will happen if one or both of them get the virus. Is Boris Johnson so privilege-blinded that he doesn’t grasp that? Or just lying.

Birx says Trump does wear a mask.

White House public health adviser Dr Deborah Birx is appearing on Fox News Sunday and according to Fox News Sunday, she says: “President Trump does wear a mask when he is unable to social distance from others.”

There’s one slight snag though: she also says she doesn’t actually know that, she just assumes it.

“I’m not with him every day and every moment so I don’t know if he can maintain social distance. I’ve asked everybody independently to really make sure you wear a mask if you can’t maintain the six feet,” Birx said.

“I’m assuming that in a majority of cases he’s able to maintain that six feet distance.”

And that he wears a mask the rest of the time, but since that’s the whole issue, assuming isn’t really apropos.

Pressed by host Chris Wallace if she felt Trump should be setting an example to the country by wearing one in public, Birx said: “The president did wear a mask while he was less than six feet… where that was important, while he was travelling last week.”

Whenever he was “less than six feet”? Or just for 30 seconds on one occasion and the rest of the time just breathing all over everyone? Facts this time, not assumptions.

Surprise surprise, Trump continues to be a jackass.

After playing golf yesterday, Donald Trump was back on the fairways at his course in Virginia today. According to CNN’s Manu Raju, this is the president’s 266th trip to one of his golf clubs since he took office.

Photos from Saturday, showed the president failing to observe social distancing and shaking hands during his round as the number of deaths from Covid-19 in the US approaches 100,000.

See that, America?? That’s FREEDOM.