It’s Friday, everyone. TGIF. I’m up to my ears in pollen and it’s 80° and blazingly sunny out, and probably will be all weekend, so I’ll be spending the next two days huddled up inside for more reasons that just COVID-19.
Notes below. Updates through the day.
🍊 Trump’s thinking about doing his campaign rallies drive-in theater-style. That’ll tide him over for a minute or two, but he’ll still be pushing and pushing for those in-person rallies. Dude’s like some kind of energy vampire or something – he needs that face-first adulation or he just shrivels up and dies.
♻️ The GOP is going to try telling people that the economic meltdown we’re dealing with right now is what will happen if we roll out a Green New Deal. Which, no, not really. I mean, we’ll lose a lot of old energy jobs, but we’ll also gain a bunch of green jobs.
💸 Speaking of the economy: “April 2020 — more technically, the period between the second week of March and the second week of April — was the worst month for American workers at least since the Great Depression and possibly in the history of the nation.” Read it.
😷 Sure. Let’s make wearing masks a partisan action. That will certainly improve the situation.
📰 States are starting to reopen – some more safely than others. The Atlantic has a guide to staying safe with a whole bunch of useful information.
💩 Have you stumbled onto that “Plandemic” video that went viral? If you did, you should know it’s pretty much entirely bullshit.
🏫 Some schools went online when we started closing schools due to COVID-19. But a whole bunch of them just straight up stopped teaching.
🦠 Yesterday we found out that one of Trump’s personal valets, specifically one of the ones that brings him his food, tested positive for COVID-19. Today we found out that Pence’s press secretary has tested positive for COVID-19. Now they’re all being tested daily, which must be nice. Most people can’t get tested at all, but these weasels happy-assing around the country with no masks on and shaking hands everywhere can get a test whenever they want. I expect this is why Trump keeps saying anyone can get tested – because he can get a test whenever he wants.
📰 Laura McGann of Vox was working with Tara Reade to report her accusations about Biden, but couldn’t come up with enough corroboration to run the story. Instead, she wrote a really excellent process piece about why it’s so damn hard to prove Reade’s accusations.
🗳️ California just became a vote-by-mail state. Come on everybody, dive on in. The water’s fine and I promise you’ll love voting by mail.
🤡 And here’s some more proof that most of these far right protests, particularly the “reopen” protests, are astroturfed.
All right, folks, I’m calling it. Friday’s over, let the weekend commence! To kick things off on a high note, check out this amazing cover of Skrillex’ Bangarang on the cello.
Notes & Thoughts 