James.galbraith

The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly investigating why it took 74 days and a national media spotlight for officials to make an arrest in the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was seen in a video jogging before the son of a former South Georgia police officer shot him. The family of the victim believes the shooting was racially motivated, one of their attorneys even calling the shooting a “lynching.”

Lee Merritt, Benjamin Crump, and Chris Stewart, attorneys for the Arbery family, said in a joint statement Monday that they met with U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Bobby Christine last week. "According to Mr. Christine, his office is investigating why it took so long to arrest the individuals responsible for Mr. Arbery's death," the attorneys said. "This would involve the consideration of both civil and criminal charges against state officials and other conspirators involved in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery."

RELATED: Father and son finally arrested on murder and aggravated assault charges in Ahmaud Arbery case

RELATED: Watch: Body cam video of Georgia cop trying to shock Ahmaud Arbery with Taser years before his death

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In mid-February, an Atlantic piece declared, "Latino support for Trump is real, and that's a problem for Democrats." That was about a month before states started enacting serious social distancing guidelines in response to COVID-19 and a little over three months before the nation would reach a grim milestone of 100,000 American deaths. 

Earlier this year, Pew Research Center polling suggested about 30% of Latino voters approved of Donald Trump’s job performance, in line with the 28% of Latino support Trump received in 2016, according to exit polls. But the coronavirus has given Trump some very clear vulnerabilities among Latino voters, according to new polling conducted by Latino Decisions for the Democratically-aligned group Priorities USA.

The polling was conducted in two battleground states that Trump won in 2016, Arizona and Florida, and where he arguably has the most to lose among the voting bloc since they have the highest share of eligible voters who are Latino (24% eligibility in Arizona and 20% eligibility in Florida).

Specifically, Latino voters in the two critical states cited the coronavirus as their top concern for the next president (the second being health care access and affordability), and they held Trump uniquely responsible for the crisis the nation is now in, according to Priorities USA. In part, that may be because Latinos have contracted COVID-19 at higher rates than many other demographic groups. "In Florida, for example, Latinos make up a quarter of the population, but account for 35% of the state’s confirmed cases," writes Priorities USA.

Among Latino registered voters, Trump is underwater for his pandemic response even more so than with the general voting population, with just 34% of Arizona Latino voters approving of his handling while 58% do not, and 41% of Florida Latinos approving while 55% don't. 

Latinos have also been heavily impacted by the economic fallout surrounding the pandemic, with about one-half of Latino voters in both states saying someone in their household had been impacted financially through job loss or a pay cut. Similar numbers said essential items like food, shelter, and medicine had become difficult to afford due to the pandemic.  

The main crux of the Priorities USA memo is that Biden has an opening to pick up critical Latino support in the two states if his campaign continues to connect the dots between Trump and the pain the coronavirus is wreaking on the Latino community, both economically and health-wise. 

"When Latino voters were asked which candidate would be better at 'helping workers and small businesses that are hurting because of the coronavirus outbreak,' Joe Biden holds a substantial lead over Trump — 13 points in Florida and 26 in Arizona," writes Priorities.

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From a letter to parties by Judge John Coughenour (W.D. Wash.):

As reflected in the General Orders recently issued by the Western District of Washington, the coronavirus pandemic has substantially affected the Court's ability to conduct in-person proceedings. It is the considered view of most judges in the Western District of Washington that criminal jury trials are not likely to resume prior to 2021. The Court cannot configure its courtroom for trial to comply with the social distancing guidelines promulgated by local and national health officials, and the Court is not confident that potential jurors will (or should) respond to subpoenas before they are convinced that it is safe to do so. Therefore, the Court will continue the trial dates in pending criminal matters consistent with future General Orders, which exclude the time of such continuances under the Speedy Trial Act.

However, the Court believes that it is important to maintain existing case schedules to the greatest extent possible under the current circumstances. Therefore, in granting future continuances of trial dates, the Court will keep case management dates the same absent a showing of good cause. This will ensure that trials are efficiently resolved once in-court proceedings are safe for the parties, counsel, and jurors.

While the nation officially hits the mark of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is back home in Kentucky for the week, taking a victory lap on the legislation that was passed because of the work of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. While he was trying to force Democrats into passing a corporate bailout bill back in March, Pelosi and Schumer were negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on what became the CARES Act. And now McConnell is taking credit.

He's touting the $11 billion he says he got for Kentucky on this recess visit back home. That's after he declared that there wouldn't be any more aid to states because he was going to refuse a "blue state bailout." The enormous backlash he got for that statement has made him back off and adapt a new red line: a liability shield for the health care industry and private businesses to protect them from being sued because of their actions in the pandemic. Like opening too soon and bringing back their employees too soon and killing them. McConnell's completely on board with Trump's premature reopening plan, and completely on board with getting people killed and making sure that his corporate pals can't be held to account for those deaths.

We can save the nation. We can boot McConnell and his majority, with your $3.

"The way to get back to normal is to get back to normal, for the economy to begin breathing again, for people to begin to engage again," Sen. McConnell told WKYT Monday. "Ultimately, that will be done in the best way once we have a vaccine, but we know we can begin to reengage. We're doing it now, doing things like this, restaurants are beginning to open up." And if workers or customers at those restaurants get sick and die, it's no skin off McConnell's nose.

Nope, here's McConnell bravely standing up for the Chamber of Commerce, as if it didn't already have at least half the governors, the White House, the Senate, and a majority on the Supreme Court to protect it. McConnell insists that he has to have these protections or nothing in the next response bill, including state and local aid. When that bill eventually passes, and it will because it has to, and the $1 trillion the House has included in state and local aid is finally provided, McConnell will be back home again, touting his great success.

But that's not happening soon, because McConnell has the Senate out for the week, and when they come back next week, he's got more judiciary and executive branch nominations on the calendar. Because that's what matters to him—creating a federal judiciary that will be 100% in the pocket of the Chamber of Commerce.

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Four Minnesota police officers involved in the aggressive arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced the firings at a press conference Tuesday after video of the brutal arrest was circulated widely around social media. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the firings were “the right call.”

In the video, taken by a bystander, Floyd could be seen, handcuffed, facedown on the ground at the foot of a police SUV. A police officer, believed to be 19-year-veteran Derek Chauvin, has his knee pressed to Mr. Floyd’s neck with the full weight of his body behind it. Floyd can be seen pleading with the officer, telling him he cannot breathe and that his head, his neck, and his body hurt. Floyd seems to become completely unresponsive a couple of minutes into the video, and likely never regained consciousness.

One of the most infuriating aspects of the video is that numerous bystanders yell at the officer to stop what is clearly an unwarranted tactic, especially as Floyd appears to lose consciousness. New images have appeared online purporting to show the other side of what was visible in the video, showing the suspected four officers who were fired at work on Floyd.

The firings come after news and video of the arrest made its way throughout the country, with elected officials like Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar weighing in on behalf of justice. No charges have been announced or further punishment detailed for the officers involved.

A screenshot of a video taken by Christian Cooper showing Amy Cooper calling the police. | Twitter

She is just the latest in a long line of white people calling the police on black Americans.

Christian Cooper was bird-watching in New York’s Central Park on Monday when he saw a woman with an unleashed dog.

Leashes are required in the Ramble, the part of the park where the two were walking. “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,” Cooper told CNN.

So Cooper decided to say something. What happened next was captured in a video that’s now been seen by millions of Americans.

The woman, Amy Cooper, refused to put her dog on a leash or move to another area. So Christian took out some dog treats he carries for situations like this. At that point, according to Christian, she began to panic — and he started filming.

In the video, posted to Facebook and shared thousands of times, Amy approaches Christian, potentially violating social distancing guidelines. Then she threatens to call the police, saying, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Finally, she actually calls the authorities, saying that an “African American” man “is recording me and threatening me and my dog.” Cooper says very little on the video, and certainly nothing threatening.

When police arrived, both Christian and Amy had already left the park. And after the video went viral, Amy issued an apology and was fired from her job. But for many, the incident is a reminder of larger ills in American society: the willingness of white people to call the police on black people, and the epidemic of violence against black Americans by both police and white civilians, including the recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.

“We live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where black men are seen as targets,” Christian Cooper told CNN. “This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn’t having it.”

Amy Cooper called the police after a dispute about her dog

Christian Cooper told CNN he was “pretty calm” when he asked Amy Cooper to abide by the park’s leash rules. But Amy claims he was screaming at her. “He was running in an open field,” she told CNN. “He came out of the bush.”

When she refused to leash her dog, he says he told her, “if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.” He meant he was going to film her, but Amy says, “I didn’t know what that meant. When you’re alone in a wooded area, that’s absolutely terrifying, right?”

She now claims that fear is the reason she decided to call the police. “I think I was just scared,” she told CNN. “When you’re alone in the Ramble, you don’t know what’s happening. It’s not excusable, it’s not defensible.”

Amy also says she wants to “publicly apologize to everyone.”

“I’m not a racist,” she told CNN. “I did not mean to harm that man in any way.”

Amy also told CNN that her “entire life is being destroyed right now” — after calls on social media for her employer to fire her, she has been let go by Franklin Templeton, the investment company where she worked.

“Following our internal review of the incident in Central Park yesterday, we have made the decision to terminate the employee involved, effective immediately,” the company said on Twitter. “We do not tolerate racism of any kind at Franklin Templeton.”

Amy Cooper has also surrendered her dog to the shelter where she adopted him, after some people noted that she appeared to be choking him with his collar in the video.

“The dog is now in our rescue’s care and he is safe and in good health,” shelter staff said in a Facebook post, according to CNN.

The incident was part of a long history of white people calling the police on black Americans

In this particular case, no arrests were made and Christian was not physically harmed. But there’s a long history of such 911 calls by white people resulting in arrests, interrogation, and violence against black people.

This dangerous pattern received greater national attention in 2018 when two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks while doing nothing more than waiting for a business partner to arrive. Soon after, a white Oakland woman became the subject of countless “BBQ Becky” memes after she called the police on a black family who were barbecuing in a park — the family were detained and questioned for an hour. Also in 2018, Chikesia Clemons was arrested and thrown to the ground by police at an Alabama Waffle House after restaurant staff called over a dispute with the bill. The officers exposed Clemons’ breasts and threatened to break her arm.

As P.R. Lockhart wrote at Vox in 2018, “if ‘shopping while black’ and ‘driving while black’ have been long used to describe a tendency for people and police to treat black people with suspicion, recent incidents have provided an increasing number of scenarios to add to the list.”

Indeed, black bird-watchers have long spoken out about the dangers of “birding while black.” In a 2016 essay by that name, J. Drew Lanham wrote about encountering Confederate flags and KKK graffiti while out looking for birds, and having to give up a promising research project because a white supremacist group became active in the mountainous area he was supposed to study.

“In remote places, fear has always accompanied binoculars, scopes, and field guides as baggage,” he wrote.

Many in the birding community have voiced support for Christian Cooper since the incident became public.

“Black Americans often face terrible daily dangers in outdoor spaces, where they are subjected to unwarranted suspicion, confrontation, and violence,” Rebeccah Sanders, senior vice president for state programs at the Audubon Society, said in a statement. “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.”

For his part, Christian Cooper told the Washington Post, “I don’t think there’s an African American person in America who hasn’t experienced something like this at some point.”

But, he said, “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.”

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If Donald Trump loses Florida, it's all over but the epic celebrations. He has no path to winning the Electoral College without the delegate-rich state, which makes his sudden downturn among older voters particularly relevant.

In 2016, Trump won voters 65 and over by 7 points at the national level, but in the Sunshine State, Trump won the demographic by 17 points, according to exit polls. But as the Washington Post points out, a Quinnipiac poll of Florida late last month showed the voting bloc favoring Democratic rival Joe Biden by 10 points over Trump, 52%-42%. If that trend were to hold true in November, it would represent a nearly 30-point swing toward Democrats from 2016.  

Seventy-four-year-old Allen Lehner, who retired to Florida from Pennsylvania, is exactly the type of voter who could make a difference. A former Republican, Lehner refused to vote for both Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, so he sat out the election instead. But this year, the self-identified independent plans to vote for Biden after watching Trump's total lack of leadership during the pandemic. He's worried about his own health along with the well-being of his adult children from both a health and an economic perspective. 

“Regardless of what they say about [Biden's] senior moments, I think he would be good and take good care of the country,” Lehner, who lives in a gated community in Delray Beach, told the Post.

But Florida isn't the only swing state where older voters could prove decisive and could also more than make up for any younger voters Democrats worry about motivating to the polls. A similar dynamic could play out in Arizona, where 65 and older voters represented a quarter of all voters in exit polls and Trump won them by 13 points; Michigan, where the bloc was 19% of all voters and Trump took them by 4 points; Pennsylvania, where older voters were 21% of the voting public and Trump won them by 10 points; and Wisconsin, where older voters were 20% of all voters and won them by 1 point. 

National polls in the last several months have continued to find voters 65 and older turning against Trump in significant numbers, particularly older white independents such as Lehner. Democrats have taken note and, in some cases, are teaching these voters how to make sure they can participate safely in the upcoming election. 

“We have the ability to sway this election,” Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Terrie Rizzo told fellow seniors earlier this month in an online town hall in which she reviewed instructions on how to vote by mail. Florida residents over 65 have made up more than 80% of COVID-19 related deaths in the state, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Even some Trump loyalists have grown frustrated by Trump's failure to come up with a testing and tracing strategy. “We are clearly highly susceptible,” said 80-year-old David Israel, who lives in a retirement community in West Palm Beach. “We’re missing testing, and we’re missing contact tracing. We need to see that.” Israel still favors Trump over Biden, crediting him with taking care of the economy. But he still doesn't see how the country can return to work without a national testing/tracing program. "Everybody should be tested,” Israel said. “I don’t see how else we’re going to get on top of this.”

Everybody is not going to get tested, however, because Trump has ensured that won't happen. In the meantime, Trump's failures are winning Biden converts and causing even some Trump loyalists to question him. One has to wonder what someone like Israel will do if Trump's rush to reopen without proper preparation actually backfires, dooming the economy for years rather than months. 

Overall, the Post found the people they interviewed mostly broke along predictable lines: If they liked Trump pre-COVID, they're still defending him; if they didn't like Trump, they see lots of flaws in his so-called leadership during the pandemic. Florida Democrats say they haven't yet witnessed a decisive mass defection among older voters. But a mass defection also isn't necessary, since the state will be won on the margins—Trump prevailed in Florida by just over 1%. And the Post interviewed several former Republicans who sat out 2016 and either plan to vote for Biden this year or are weighing doing so. If Biden can win back 5% to 10% of older people who voted for Trump in 2016, Democrats think he could carry the state.

Don't feel sorry for Republicans who have gifted their dignity to Donald Trump.

CNN’s Gary Tuchman hit the beach towns of Alabama to ask holiday sunbathers, none of whom were wearing masks or practicing social distancing, their thoughts about the COVID-19 crisis.

“I’m just here just to have fun and meet everybody and be cool,” said one young man. “When it’s my time to go, it’s just my time to go.”

“Everybody’s gotta [die] somehow. I don’t wanna die but if that’s what God has in store for my life then that’s okay,” said a 21-year-old woman.

Said another young man: “My family has the same mindset as me. We kind of just agreed that if we get it we get it. We’re gonna handle it as a family and just get over it because that’s what a family does.”

“Just like the flu, right,” said one woman. “People die from the flu also.”

“We’re all gonna get sick from something eventually,” said one man on his decision to forgo a mask.

“If [Trump’s] not wearing a mask, I’m not gonna wear a mask,” another man told Tuchman. “If he’s not worried, I’m not worried.”

The post Beachgoing Alabamans on Ignoring COVID-19 Guidance: ‘I Don’t Wanna Die But if That’s What God Has in Store Then That’s Okay’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

It's been 11 days since the House passed its next $3 trillion effort at saving the nation's people and economy in this pandemic. In those 11 days, the Senate has done a whole lot of nothing besides posture, hold hearings for more deplorable judges, and a handful of confirmations.

Senate Majority Leader McConnell in fact is still posturing, saying that there will "likely" be another relief bill "in the next month or so," but it "will not be the $3 trillion bill the House passed the other day." A week and a half ago, to be more precise. That's while states face hundreds of billions in shortfalls. California alone is looking at a $54 billion budget deficit with a June 15 deadline for figuring out the next fiscal year's budget. The next fiscal year for many states is July 1. So states don't really have a "month or so" to find out whether help is on the way.

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While that's brewing and the death toll continues to climb, Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, are insisting that even when corporations are responsible for those deaths—like by reopening before its safe to do so, and requiring that their employees risk their health to go back to work—the companies cannot be held accountable for the deaths. That includes nursing homes, which now account for roughly 40% of the deaths as far as we know from problematic reporting from states.

That's what Sen. John Cornyn of Texas appears to be working on now with McConnell. They say they won't protect the bad guys, carving out cases of "gross negligence," for example—though when you're telling people to come to work in a pandemic it's hard to know what is more gross. "We should not put our health care workers in an impossible situation where we ask them to do everything they can to help and then we punish them by subjecting them to litigation when somebody claims that they could or should have done better," Cornyn said about his efforts on the Senate floor last week.

That, by the way, totally mischaracterizes the effort. It's not the healthcare workers Republicans are trying to protect here, and in fact the HEROES Bill does recognize them by requiring they get hazard pay. No, who McConnell and Cornyn want to protect are the corporate owners of the healthcare facilities in question, not the people providing care.

Meanwhile, what McConnell has planned for next month—which is after the Senate returns from recess next Tuesday—is a defense authorization bill for the new fiscal year and a public lands package. "The Senate may also take up further responses to the coronavirus pandemic, including modifications to the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program," Roll Call reports, "though no final agreement was at hand before senators departed for Memorial Day."

An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Teper, CVP for Microsoft 365, has a vision for the company's Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack, Facebook's Workplace, and Google Chat. In terms of reach, Teper wants Microsoft Teams to eclipse Windows. (Windows 10 runs on over 1 billion monthly active devices.) Our interview took place a day after Microsoft concluded its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, where the company gave business developers new tools to build Teams apps. Microsoft launched a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extension for Teams in preview, introduced new integrations between its Power Platform and Teams, and announced a custom app submission process to help IT admins. Teper was happy to cover a range of Teams topics, including metrics, growth, competitors, consumer positioning, machine learning, and of course dealing with the increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday morning, the United States officially passed 100,000 deaths from COVID-19.

It’s very easy to complain about The New York Times. Especially so when they’re going to extraordinary pains to avoid pointing out Donald Trump’s lies, or bending logic into pretzels to generate bothsidesism, or when devoting every single column of the front page to the possibility that there might be more unknown Hillary Clinton emails (spoiler: there were not). But every now and then, the Grey Lady remembers that it is The New York Times, dammit. And this weekend was one of those.

That weekend front page, and four interior pages, were devoted to the names and barest bone details of just 1% of those who have died. The website also has a similar honor to those who have fallen. As the introduction heartbreakingly says, “they were us.” Compare that reality … to this Memorial day prediction from Mike Pence.

Mike Pence said the coronavirus pandemic could be over by Memorial Day. If that’s not incredible enough, Pence didn’t say that in January, when the virus was still poorly understood, or in early February when, thanks to a lack of testing, no one understood the true extent of the outbreak already beginning in the United States. Nope. 

As Bloomberg reported, Mike Pence said this just one month ago, on April 24. “I think honestly, if you look at the trends today,” Pence told listeners to Geraldo Rivera’s radio show, “that I think by Memorial Day weekend we will have this coronavirus epidemic behind us.”

In case you’re wondering, that was right after the United States had passed 50,000 deaths.

President Donald Trump outside the White House on May 25, 2020. | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

Trump’s push for a normal RNC is the latest indication he doesn’t get how the coronavirus works.

The idea of 20,000 people traveling from all parts of the United States to pack themselves into an arena amid an outbreak of a highly communicable, deadly disease that spreads especially efficiently indoors might sound ill-advised to most of us. But most of us are not President Donald Trump.

Ahead of the coronavirus pandemic, the GOP planned to have its 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. For obvious reasons, that’s no longer a sure thing — and Trump isn’t coping well with the uncertainty.

Despite new coronavirus cases continuing to show an upward trajectory in the state, Trump on Monday demanded immediate assurances from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper that more than 20,000 people will be allowed to pack into Charlotte’s Spectrum Center for the RNC in August.

In a string of tweets, Trump threatened that without such a guarantee, “We will be reluctantly forced to find, with all of the jobs and economic development it brings, another Republican National Convention site.”

“Unfortunately, Democrat Governor, @RoyCooperNC is still in Shutdown mood & unable to guarantee that by August we will be allowed full attendance in the Arena,” Trump wrote, seemingly ignoring the fact that it is impossible for Cooper to provide a specific date by which the coronavirus will no longer be a threat.

“In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space,” Trump added.

Vice President Mike Pence sounded the same theme during an interview on Monday’s installment of Fox & Friends, mentioning Florida, Georgia, and Texas — all states with Republican governors — as possible sites for a relocated RNC.

Cooper has good reason to be cautious. For one, his state’s coronavirus outbreak is not yet under control — in fact, it isn’t even clearly trending in the right direction.

According to data compiled by the New York Times, the 1,070 new cases reported in the state on Saturday constituted a single-day high. Some of that is due to increased testing, but the state’s recent single-day positivity rate of 9 percent is still significantly above the 5 percent number the World Health Organization has identified as the minimum standard for reopening. (According to the Raleigh News & Observer, 6.9 percent of all tests completed in the state so far

Cooper is moving forward anyway. Under pressure from local Republicans, he transitioned the state last Friday to a “Safer at Home” order that allows some businesses to reopen, but still limits gatherings to 25 people or fewer in most circumstances. (In an illustration of the pushback he’s facing, Ace Speedway in Alamance County disregarded Cooper’s order by packing thousands of people into the bleachers for races last Friday. The local sheriff refused to intervene, calling Cooper’s order “unconstitutional.”)

So while it’s not totally unreasonable to believe the coronavirus will be somewhat under control by late August, it’s unlikely that it will be so under control that having a mass gathering on the scale of the RNC will make sense. But Trump, as he is wont to do, is engaged in wishful thinking.

“Relying on data and science” is now akin to an attack on the president

In response to Trump’s tweets on Monday, Cooper’s office released a statement saying that officials are “relying on data and science to protect our state’s public health and safety.” That may read like a rebuke to Trump, who at this point is pretending like the virus doesn’t exist — but you don’t even really need a nuanced understanding of science or data to understand why holding the RNC as if a pandemic isn’t happening isn’t a great idea.

Studies have shown that the virus spreads especially easily indoors, so packing 20,000 cheering people into an arena where they likely will be spraying respiratory droplets (believed to be one of the chief vehicles for Covid-19 spread) onto each other could easily become a vector for the disease. This is why no major sports leagues in the United States plan to have games with fans in attendance this summer. Not only that, but since people travel from all over the country for the RNC, it could end up igniting outbreaks elsewhere.

Testing every attendee wouldn’t mitigate the risk, as coronavirus tests are far from perfectly accurate. And because it can take a week or longer for symptoms to emerge, someone could in theory contract coronavirus on an airplane on their way to Charlotte, test negative the next day, and then unknowingly spread the virus at the RNC.

Trump, however, either doesn’t seem to get how communicable disease work or doesn’t care. He has made it abundantly clear that he’s more concerned about doing everything possible to resuscitate the economy ahead of November’s election than he is about slowing the spread of the coronavirus. And if he can take shots at a Democratic governor while pushing for a full reopening of businesses, even better.

Part of the idea behind having the RNC in Charlotte in the first place is that North Carolina is a key state for Trump’s reelection hopes. He defeated Hillary Clinton by 3.7 percent there in 2016, but polling now shows him in a dead heat with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. So it makes strategic sense that he would want to energize the state’s Republican base — doing so at the potential expense of that base’s health does not, however.

That’s a reality the Democratic party has begun to grapple with, having planned on having its convention in the battleground state of Wisconsin. Trump’s push for a normal RNC stands in stark contrast to Biden, who has acknowledged that a virtual Democratic National Convention may end up being a necessity. Trump, however, is primarily concerned with quickly turning the page on a pandemic that he was unprepared for — and that now has killed nearly 100,000 Americans — as quickly as possible.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

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Hovertext:
For the record, this literary trope predates Spaceballs, you illiterate swine.

Today's News:

The Minneapolis Police Department is under fire after disturbing video emerged of one of its white officers kneeling on the neck of a black man, identified as George Floyd, who is screaming “I can’t breathe” as another officer looks on. Floyd then went unconscious and was unresponsive for several minutes before an ambulance arrived.

Floyd continued: “My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Everything hurts. … (I need) water or something. Please. Please. I can’t breathe, officer. … I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.”

Onlookers urged the officers to let Floyd up.

“You just really killed that man, Bro,” said one onlooker.

The police released a statement: “Officers were advised that the suspect was sitting on top of a blue car and appeared to be under the influence. Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. … At no time were weapons of any type used by anyone involved in this incident.  … Body worn cameras were on and activated during this incident.”

Warning: the video below is graphic and disturbing.

UPDATE. The Minneapolis PD has fired four officers over the incident: “Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced their terminations during a news conference. He did not publicly identify the officers.”

Four responding MPD officers involved in the death of George Floyd have been terminated.

This is the right call.

— Mayor Jacob Frey (@MayorFrey) May 26, 2020

My remarks delivered earlier this morning and video below. https://t.co/qC2IgWdm1T pic.twitter.com/XWXhSygaCY

— Mayor Jacob Frey (@MayorFrey) May 26, 2020

The video of a Minneapolis police officer killing a defenseless, handcuffed man is one of the most vile and heartbreaking images I’ve ever seen. The officer who stood guard is just as responsible as his partner; both must be held fully accountable. This must stop now.

— Mayor Melvin Carter (@MayorCarter) May 26, 2020

My statement on the officer-involved death in Minneapolis: pic.twitter.com/HUoGfXEj7R

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) May 26, 2020

The post White Minneapolis Police Officer Kills Defenseless, Handcuffed Black Man While Second Officer Looks On in Disturbing Video: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Joe Biden and his wife Jill depart after Biden spoke in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 10. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Not a joke, folks: He’s running on a transformative policy agenda.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has never really sought or received a reputation as a deep thinker on domestic policy matters. His highest-profile role as a senator involved judicial confirmations and his time chairing the Foreign Affairs Committee. As vice president, his best-known work was in the national security domain or as a personal emissary from the White House to Congress.

As a candidate in the 2020 primaries, his pitch was overwhelmingly about electability; his policy profile was defined primarily by the things he wouldn’t embrace. Left-wing journalists and activists criticized his opposition to sweeping proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders like Medicare-for-all or the Green New Deal. Biden argued that plans were implausible to make real and that he would take a more pragmatic approach — frustrating proponents of a “political revolution” or Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “big structural change.”

That conflict between what the left wants and what Biden wouldn’t give them became the dominant narrative about him in the mainstream press. Biden was defined by the things he was against, rather than by the substantial overlap between his policy ideas and those of his progressive critics. Biden is a mainstream Democrat, and as the Democratic Party has grown broadly more progressive in recent years, he is now running on arguably the most progressive policy platform of any Democratic nominee in history.

It’s a detailed and aggressive agenda that includes doubling the minimum wage and tripling funding for schools with low-income students. He is proposing the most sweeping overhaul of immigration policy in a generation, the biggest pro-union push in three generations, and the most ambitious environmental agenda of all time.

If Democrats take back the Senate in the fall, Biden could make his agenda happen. A primary is about airing disagreements, but legislating is about building consensus. The Democratic Party largely agrees on a suite of big policy changes that would improve the lives of millions of Americans in meaningful ways. Biden has detailed, considered plans to put much of this agenda in place. But getting these plans done will be driven much more by the outcome of the congressional elections than his questioned ambition.

A big minimum wage increase

Biden’s commitment to raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $15 an hour is one of the least talked-about plans at stake in the 2020 election.

In the 2016 cycle when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders disagreed about raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, the debate was the subject of extensive coverage. By the 2020 cycle, all the major Democratic candidates were on board, so it didn’t come up much. But it’s significant that this is no longer controversial in Democratic Party circles. If the party is broadly comfortable with the wage hike as a matter of both politics and substance, Democrats in Congress are likely to make it happen if it’s at all possible.

David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

The $15/hour minimum wage increase is also a signature issue for Biden. He endorsed New York’s version of it in the fall of 2015, back when he was vice president and his boss Barack Obama was pushing a smaller federal raise.

A big minimum wage hike polls well, it aligns with Biden’s thematic emphasis on “the dignity of work,” and it’s a topic on which he’s genuinely been a leader. It reflects his political sensibilities, which are moderate but in a decidedly more populist mode than Obama’s technocratic one.

Free college for most

Biden was also an early proponent of free college, saying in a 2015 Rose Garden speech that “we all know that 12 years of public education is not enough. As a nation, let’s make the same commitment to a college education today that we made to a high school education a hundred years ago.”

In concrete terms, Biden supports the College for All Act, which Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced in 2017. The act would provide matching grants to states that want to eliminate tuition at public colleges and universities for any student coming from a household with less than $125,000 in income. When he introduced the bill, Sanders noted this covers about 80 percent of American households — and more affluent households don’t have a huge barrier to higher education. But on the 2020 campaign trail, he disparaged this goal as inadequate and backed zero tuition for all students.

The big problem with these matching grant schemes has always been that there’s a good chance states won’t want to spend the money, and with the coronavirus pandemic sending state budgets into crisis, those odds only get better.

Under the circumstances, a more consequential part of Biden’s platform may be his commitment to greatly boosting the federal financial commitment to community colleges. These institutions often get neglected in the policy debate, which often involves graduates of more selective institutions. But Biden’s wife is a longtime community college instructor, so it’s an issue he has a direct personal connection with.

Biden’s plan gives a very generous boost in funding to community colleges to eliminate tuition while also proposing a number of grant programs to improve the actual quality of community college offerings, facilities, and infrastructure. Last but by no means least, Biden wants to double the size of the maximum Pell Grant award — a move that would bolster college affordability while improving states’ budgetary situations.

Enhancing the Affordable Care Act

The health care debate during the primary became a long dispute between Medicare-for-all supporters (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and non-supporters (the other candidates, more or less).

That obscured the extent to which Biden’s plan was considerably less ambitious than other “moderate” plans from the likes of Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke. Their ideas would have created a new, beefed-up Medicare that competed directly with private insurance for non-elderly customers — likely taking advantage of Medicare’s administrative efficiencies and greater bargaining power to gobble up a huge share of the market.

Biden has proposed something more modest. His plan would add a public option to the Affordable Care Act exchanges, an old progressive proposal from the 2009 debate, which should lower costs for people shopping on the exchanges. But while Biden’s version of the public option will be formally open for anyone to join, in practice, the vast majority of Americans who haven’t reached retirement age would continue to get health care from their employers. There is seemingly no tax-efficient way for a company to shift employees into the exchanges.

In other words, Biden uses the public option to improve the situation for people currently using the ACA exchanges while not really altering the structure of job-based health insurance.

On the exchanges, individuals who don’t get insurance at work can shop for insurance on an individual regulated marketplace. They also get subsidies on a sliding scale to cap premiums as a share of income. Biden’s plan makes the subsidies more generous relative to income. He also switches the standard, aiming to make “gold”- rather than “silver”-rated plans affordable — which in practice means lower copayments and deductibles. He also extends incentives for more states to join the ACA Medicaid expansion and tweaks the subsidy formula so that low-income people in non-expansion states can have better results on the exchanges.

He pairs this relatively modest approach to health care with a very ambitious and specific opioid epidemic agenda, which Vox’s German Lopez points out commits more funds than anything his more left-wing rivals had put on the table.

Ezra Klein argued in early April that with Covid-19 leaving millions of people’s employer-provided insurance up in the air, Biden should embrace something more like Buttigieg’s Medicare for All Who Want It or the Center for American Progress’s Medicare Extra program. These ideas, which would have been considered incredibly left-wing as recently as five years ago, have now obtained an aura of moderation, so it’s at least conceivable Biden could be persuaded to hop on the bandwagon.

The biggest known unknown is probably the question of prioritization. Even during a primary season when rank-and-file Democrats indicated that health care was their top issue priority, Biden was the guy who was leery of promising a huge fight over dramatic change on this front. The joint pandemic and economic crisis could make a person more inclined to pick a major early legislative battle about health insurance — but could also have the opposite effect.

Dramatic transformation of federal housing policy

While a minimum wage hike and a big boost for community colleges have both been longtime Biden passions, his housing policy was released in late February at the tail end of the campaign, and the candidate himself has barely ever mentioned it.

Even though Biden was the last candidate in the field to release a blueprint for housing policy, what the campaign came up with is excellent on substance and aligns closely with experts’ view that there is really a dual housing crisis in America as well as with their recommendations about how to fix it. Biden’s approach has two major policy prongs, paired with a series of commitments to step up federal civil rights enforcement.

Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

First: Biden wants to make the federal Section 8 housing voucher program an entitlement, like SNAP or Medicaid, so that all eligible families would get help — a huge change from the current situation where 75 percent of low-income families who meet the criteria for help don’t actually get any. This is a longtime goal of anti-poverty wonks that until recently didn’t seem to be on the radar of Democratic Party politicians, but which has gained considerable steam over the past two years.

Second: Biden wants to tie federal transportation funding to state and local government commitments to reduce regulatory barriers to housing construction. This is much more ambitious than the Obama administration’s proposals on housing supply, but it is the main policy recommendation of a book I wrote in 2012, so it’s a great idea.

People familiar with the development of the Biden housing agenda describe it as a subject of interest to some of his top aides rather than a personal passion of the candidate. And while Biden’s plan would be a boon to the poor and for broad economic growth, it doesn’t really address the primary housing concern of people who write about politics for a living on the internet — namely that young middle-class renters in very expensive cities would like more stringent rent control.

But beyond its technical merits, the plan has some real virtues in its implementation. That starts with the fact that the Section 8 proposal is perfectly designed to be folded into a budget reconciliation bill that could avoid the filibuster. A change to the transportation funding formula, by contrast, would have to happen on a bipartisan basis. But the idea of wielding federal carrots and sticks to encourage changes in local land use policy is one that has elite support across party lines and could conceivably make its way into the kind of bipartisan megabills on surface transportation that wend their way through Congress every few years.

A huge financial boost to schools with low-income students

K-12 education hasn’t been on the political radar that much over the past few years, but Biden is running on a pledge to triple the money the federal government sends to low-income schools and districts from about $16 billion per year to about $48 billion.

Education is primarily a state and local responsibility, but the federal government does spend a significant amount of money on grants made under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, money intended to help level the playing field between richer and poorer schools. Biden’s plan calls for the extra money to be spent on higher pay for teachers, preschool programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, and ensuring that advanced coursework like AP classes is available at all schools.

Biden’s emphasis on a big boost in spending reflects a swing of the pendulum in the research community in the direction of “throw money at the problem” solutions that became unfashionable in the 1990s. A wave of research indicating that how schools spent money was more important than how much money they spent helped inspire a generation of policy emphasis on “education reform” ideas like charter schools and changing teacher compensation formulas.

A newer line of research, summarized in a 2018 paper by economist Kirabo Jackson, looks at quasi-experimental evidence driven by state court decisions mandating equalization of funding between rich and poor districts, and mostly concludes that spending more money works pretty well.

That scholarship says that a 10 percent spending increase each year from kindergarten through 12th grade led students to complete a few more months of school, to earn 7.25 percent more, and to be less likely to be poor.

Biden’s plan was released before the pandemic threw state and local governments into budgetary crisis. Under present circumstances, the issue for K-12 education policy is likely going to be exactly how much is spending cut given those pressures — with Biden joining congressional Democrats to call for significant federal aid to minimize cuts.

So it is relatively unlikely that a standalone education bill, as opposed to state and local aid as part of a pandemic recovery agenda, would quickly materialize from a Biden administration. But the text of the plan is a good outline to his education priorities, and his “more is more” approach here is pretty different from the much less teacher-friendly course Obama pursued in office.

A labor-friendly climate agenda

Climate change is a huge, complicated issue, and Biden’s stated climate agenda, like proposals from other Democratic campaigns, has a lot of moving parts, covering everything from investments in advanced biofuels to clean drinking water to a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory change that would require companies with stock listed on the major markets to make public disclosures of their climate risk.

The top-line objective is to make the US economy carbon neutral by 2050, but a president whose term would span from 2021 to 2025 or 2029 can’t deliver on that commitment even with an infinitely cooperative Congress — which he also won’t have. Climate is one of the trickiest policy areas for Democrats because the gap between the goals climate scientists think are appropriate and the likely results of the legislative process is so large.

But this is an area where it’s probably not yet worth spending much time sweating the details of Biden’s existing plan. The Biden/Sanders climate working group on policy, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Secretary of State John Kerry and featuring the Obama administration’s former EPA director and the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, is an extremely high-powered crew. It’s widely believed in the climate policy community that there is going to be a substantial rewrite of Biden’s plan.

What’s probably more important about Biden’s climate plans is that he has angered environmental activists with his stances on three issues not directly related to the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions: Biden favors funding research into carbon capture and sequestration technologies, Biden has a favorable view of nuclear power, and Biden does not favor a short-term ban on fracking.

Some environmentalists oppose those stances, largely due to the non-carbon impacts, but, critically, Biden is on the right side of organized labor on all three topics. That emphasis on maintaining a version of a Green New Deal agenda that America’s unions can wholeheartedly back is a key priority of Biden’s and will shape his overall approach to climate policy.

Major commitments on union organizing

Biden has a big Plan A to support organized labor, and a Plan B that’s still consequential and considerably more plausible politically.

Beyond a general disposition to be a good coalition partner to organized labor, the centerpiece of Biden’s union agenda is support for the PRO Act, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.

That bill, were it to become law, would be the biggest victory for unions and collective bargaining since the end of World War II — overriding state “right to work” laws, barring mandatory anti-union briefings from management during organizing campaigns, imposing much more meaningful financial penalties on companies that illegally fire workers for pro-union activity, allowing organizing through a streamlined card check process, and guaranteeing public sector workers the right to bargain collectively.

Realistically, it’s very difficult to see this bill becoming law. It passed the House, but it has no prospect of obtaining bipartisan support in the Republican-controlled Senate. Even if Democrats were to win three or four Senate seats and obtain a majority, six incumbent Senate Democrats don’t support the bill, and it’s not something you could put into a reconciliation package, which would lower the bar to a simple majority. Biden has not indicated any desire to change the filibuster rule. Even if he did, there seems to be little support for significant filibuster change among Senate Democrats.

Short of massive legislative change, there are dozens of discrete areas in which regulatory policy weighs on workers’ ability to form unions and bargain collectively. Far and away Biden’s most significant promise with regard to organized labor is a pledge to “create a cabinet-level working group that will solely focus on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining in the public and private sectors.”

The Obama, Clinton, and Carter administrations were all sympathetic to unions and union concerns, but none of them made it a priority to promote union organizing. If Biden were to follow through on this in a remotely serious way, it would be a significant shift in economic policy priorities from what we’ve seen from recent Democratic presidents.

Given the extent to which Biden has run as a candidate of continuity and restoration rather than revolution, there’s good reason to doubt exactly how much appetite for pushing the envelope in this regard he really has. But a much more favorable view of unions is in line with the evolving thinking of mainstream Democratic Party economic policy hands, so it’s not out of the question by any means.

Back to the future on immigration

Biden’s immigration plan makes a very self-conscious effort to distance him from the rapid speed-up of deportations in the first four or five years of Obama’s presidency. But immigration is the area where Biden, generally, is most literally promising continuity with Obama’s approach — at least during his former boss’s second term.

Item after item after item on Biden’s immigration policy platform promises to reverse this or that Trump administration policy — the national emergency that is funding wall construction, the metering of asylum seekers at the border, the detention of children, the crackdown on legal immigrants’ ability to access social services, the efforts to deport Dreamers — and promises to take America back to the course it was on in 2016.

Biden says he’ll stop routinely yanking Temporary Protected Status from immigrants and try to go back to the Obama-era policy of “prioritizing” violent felons for deportation while otherwise relaxing interior enforcement.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

At the same time, Biden doesn’t promise to decriminalize unauthorized entry into the United States, doesn’t want to abolish or “reorganize” ICE, and isn’t promising a moratorium on deportations.

Instead of those activist-favored demands, he supports comprehensive immigration reform, including the legislative establishment of a path to citizenship for millions of long-settled unauthorized workers. Many activists are frustrated when they hear Democrats talk about a legislative solution because immigration-friendly politicians have been talking about it for nearly 20 years and it keeps not happening in Congress. But it polls reasonably well and would provide a better and more stable outcome for unauthorized immigrants than the alternatives, and politicians can point to big stacks of research that say it would be economically beneficial.

If it happened, it would be a huge deal — but it’s hard to get people excited about it in part because few people believe it will actually happen.

A transformative agenda — maybe

Reviewing the Biden policy agenda is a sobering reminder that despite the mythmaking of the presidential primary process, the identity of the person sitting in the White House simply is not that decisive in the future course of domestic policy.

A Biden administration backed by a Democratic Senate majority will drastically improve living standards for people in the bottom half of the income distribution via a higher minimum wage and big new federal investments in education and health care, while taking big steps to reduce American carbon dioxide emission and invest in breakthrough clean energy technologies.

Even with a Democratic majority, however, a Biden administration is unlikely to deliver the huge shake-ups to labor and immigration law that even the most moderate candidate in the field supports, due to filibuster dynamics. And if Mitch McConnell remains Senate majority leader, it’s very unlikely that any of these things will happen.

It’s true that there’s plenty that can be done through unilateral use of executive power, and it matters which appointments Biden makes and what those appointees do. But the ability to get executive branch nominees who’ll use those powers confirmed — and the ability to install federal judges who’ll approve discretionary uses of power — ultimately depends on Senate control, at least to some degree.

But beyond that, when people talk about candidates’ policy agendas or wanting to see fundamental change in the policy landscape, they really are primarily talking about passing and signing laws. Much of what Obama achieved in a flurry of executive action has been wholly or partly unwound by Trump, but the bulk of his major legislative achievements remain in place.

Biden is proposing big enough changes on a wide enough range of topics that if he’s backed by a supportive Congress, he’ll achieve an even more substantive policy legacy than his former boss. And if he fails to achieve his ideas, the cause is much more likely to be lack of congressional support than insufficient ambition.

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St. Louis County Executive Sam Page issued a travel advisory on Monday after videos of massive crowds partying at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri went viral on social media.

ICYMI: 147 People Potentially Exposed to COVID-19 After Two Hairstylists Work While Symptomatic

“The St. Louis County Department of Health is urging everyone who was there this weekend and ignored social distancing guidelines to self-quarantine for two weeks or until they have been tested and the result comes back negative,” KMOV4 reports.

As the U.S. death toll from COVID nears 100,000, this is how people spent Saturday at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. pic.twitter.com/EBZKCQjRKf

— Mark Elliott (@markmobility) May 24, 2020

No covid concerns at the lake of the ozarks #loto pic.twitter.com/Yrb4UNM64u

— Scott Pasmore (@scottpasmoretv) May 24, 2020

Said Page in the release: “This reckless behavior endangers countless people and risks setting us back substantially from the progress we have made in slowing the spread of COVID-19. I encourage everyone to follow the Department of Public Health advisory to determine a safe path forward in the workplace.

St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson denounced what she saw in the videos: “Now, these folks will be coming home to St. Louis and counties all over Missouri and the Midwest, raising concerns about the potential of more positive cases, hospitalizations, and tragically, deaths. It’s just deeply disturbing.”

The post Massive Crowd Seen Partying in Lake of the Ozarks Pool Told to Self-Quarantine for Two Weeks: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Trump is prioritizing the creation of an illusion of normalcy over actually getting it done.

Something like justice has been swift for one Amy Cooper of New York City after she responded to a simple request to leash her dog with a threat: She was going to call the police and “I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life.” We know how that story ends, and she very clearly did, too.

Amy Cooper has been placed on administrative leave at her job with investment firm Franklin Templeton and has had to surrender her rescue dog after the video showed her choking it as she yelled threats at birdwatcher Christian Cooper (no relation). She’s apologizing, but the apologies have been weak and the video is appalling.

“I sincerely and humbly apologize to everyone, especially to that man, his family,” she told WNBC. “It was unacceptable and I humbly and fully apologize to everyone who’s seen that video, everyone that’s been offended…everyone who thinks of me in a lower light and I understand why they do.” 

“That man”?

“When I think about the police, I’m such a blessed person. I’ve come to realize especially today that I think of [the police] as a protection agency, and unfortunately, this has caused me to realize that there are so many people in this country that don’t have that luxury,” she continued. Except that she very obviously used the police as a threat against a Black man for the sin of asking her to follow the clearly posted rules of a public space.

When a white woman tells a Black man “I’m going to tell [the police] there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she knows what she’s doing. If Amy Cooper had really been so terrified, she would have called the police right away without pausing to issue threats first. If race hadn’t been a part of her pitch for why the police should care, she wouldn’t have wielded one description—“African American”—like a weapon throughout.

Christian Cooper is a science editor and bird watcher who has told reporters he frequently asks people to leash their dogs in Central Park’s Ramble so they don’t disturb birds and dig up the plants that are their habitat.

”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,” he 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.”

After he asked Amy Cooper to leash her dog—he says he was “pretty calm”; she says he was screaming; one of these accounts is more believable than the other based on the video—he took out dog treats he carries precisely because dog owners don’t want a stranger feeding their dogs and will usually put a leash on when the treats come out. That’s the point at which Amy Cooper took out her phone and, it cannot be emphasized enough, didn’t immediately call the police but instead paused to make the explicit racial threat, “I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life.”

Christian Cooper stood his ground. “I can be racially intimidated and kowtow to her,” he told The Washington Post, but “I’m not going to participate in my own dehumanization.”

“We take these matters seriously, and we do not condone racism of any kind,” Amy Cooper’s employer, Franklin Templeton, said in a statement. “While we are in the process of investigating the situation, the employee involved has been put on administrative leave.” 

As some of my newspaper clients are shrinking or shutting down right now, if you are able, please consider joining the Sorensen Subscription Service!

Follow me on Twitter at @JenSorensen

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s favorability ratings in all 50 states: 

Daaaaaamn.

As noted last week, McConnell is far more unpopular than Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 27-58 favorability ratings, versus 40-53, respectively. McConnell is a net-18 points more unpopular. There’s no doubt that his refusal to pass another stimulus bill in response to our national calamity is having an effect. 

In the Senate battlegrounds: 

Don't let Republicans escape their own moral culpability for this disaster.

Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman, reporting for Wall Street Journal: A Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing people together. They were driving people apart. "Our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness," read a slide from a 2018 presentation. "If left unchecked," it warned, Facebook would feed users "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform." That presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding: Does its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found, in some cases, was yes. Facebook had kicked off an internal effort to understand how its platform shaped user behavior and how the company might address potential harms. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had in public and private expressed concern about "sensationalism and polarization." But in the end, Facebook's interest was fleeting. Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior executives largely shelved the basic research, according to previously unreported internal documents and people familiar with the effort, and weakened or blocked efforts to apply its conclusions to Facebook products. Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were "paternalistic," said people familiar with his comments.

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Twitter's policy carve-out for world leaders is facing another test with President Donald Trump's latest tweets resurrecting baseless claims that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough should be investigated for the death of his former staffer. From a report: Earlier this month, Trump tweeted questions about when an investigation would be opened into the "Cold Case" of "Psycho Joe Scarborough." The unfounded accusation refers to the death in 2001 of Lori Klausutis, who was working for Scarborough when he was a Republican congressman for Florida. At the time, the medical examiner concluded Klausutis, 28, had fainted due to an undiagnosed heart condition and hit her head on the way down, finding no evidence of foul play. Scarborough was in Washington, D.C., when Klausutis died in his district office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Trump's tweets revived a baseless theory that Scarborough was allegedly involved in Klausutis' death. On Thursday, her widower, Timothy Klausutis, wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey requesting the company delete Trump's tweets referencing those claims. "I'm asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him -- the memory of my dead wife -- and perverted it for perceived political gain," Klausutis wrote in the letter, which was dated May 21 and published by The New York Times on Tuesday. A spokesperson for Twitter indicated that they would be updating their policies, but Trump's tweets were not removed. "We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family," the 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."

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