Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/us/coronavirus-churches-outbreaks.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Weeks after President Trump demanded that America’s shuttered houses of worship be allowed to reopen, new outbreaks of the coronavirus are surging through churches across the country where services have resumed.

The virus has infiltrated Sunday sermons, meetings of ministers and Christian youth camps in Colorado and Missouri. It has struck churches that reopened cautiously with face masks and social distancing in the pews, as well as some that defied lockdowns and refused to heed new limits on numbers of worshipers.

 

Mississippi's War: Slavery and Secession | MPB

Cooper: Trump says US in a good place. His experts say otherwise

See Trump's Own Family Call Him A Cheating, Traumatized “Clown” | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

Tucker Carlson ratchets up criticism of Duckworth, calls her a 'coward'

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/506322-tucker-carlson-ratchets-up-criticism-of-duckworth-calls-her-a-coward

 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson escalated his criticism of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) on Tuesday night, calling her a “coward” for refusing to come on his show without a public apology.

The Fox News host said his show reached out to the Illinois Democrat’s office to invite her on the program to have a “vigorous, reasoned exchange between adults.” But he said a representative “informed us that before even considering our request, we must first issue a public apology for criticizing” the senator.

“Keep in mind that Tammy Duckworth is not a child, at least not technically – she is a sitting United States senator, who is often described as a hero,” he said. “Yet Duckworth is too afraid to defend her own statements on a cable TV show. What a coward.”

Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.

This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.

“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”

The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.

Five shocking passages in Mary Trump's tell-all book

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53328654

A tell-all memoir written by President Donald Trump's niece claims that he is a "narcissist" who now threatens the life of every American.

'More than narcissism'

 "This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism," his niece, who has a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, writes of Mr Trump. "Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be."

 University 'cheater'

Ms Trump claims that her uncle paid a friend to take the SAT test for him - a standardised exam which determines university placement - because he was "worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted".

 

President Donald Trump tweets to Bubba Wallace urging apology for noose ‘hoax’

https://www.foxsports.com/nascar/story/bubba-wallace-president-donald-trump-noose-hoax-070620


“Whether it was tied sometime throughout 2019, the fall race there, someone did it with whatever intent they had,” Wallace said. “We weren’t in that garage stall at that time, so we can’t say it was directed toward me, which is good. It wasn’t directed toward me or my family.
“But somebody still knows how to tie a noose and whether they did it as a bad joke or not, who knows? But it was good for the public to see. It still won’t change some people’s mind of it being a hoax, but it is what it is.”

 

Phelps stressed June 25 that Wallace had nothing to do with the reporting of the noose. It was found by Richard Petty Motorsports crewman David Cropps, who is Black, and Wallace never saw the noose itself.

“Bubba Wallace and the 43 team had nothing to do with this,” Phelps said June 23. “Bubba Wallace has done nothing but represent this sport with courage, class and dignity.

No other garage stall on the NASCAR circuit has a garage pull shaped as a noose, NASCAR said June 25 after it had tracks inspect all garage stalls.

“We’re in a crucial time in the world right now,” Wallace said June 26. “And, we see what’s going on outside of the sport. And the way we reacted to it and the way it was brought to my attention, I thought it was done in the right way.

“[Should the statement be] worded it differently? Sure. You can’t let that slip-up and be just like, ‘Oh, it might be a mistake.’ I encouraged him to do the same thing over and over again. I tried to do my research behind the scenes with my guys to make sure it wasn’t a garage pull. You’ve seen the numbers and how many garage stalls they inspected. Eleven had knots and only one had a noose.”

Trump’s Misguided Tweet Seeking Wallace Apology for Noose ‘Hoax’

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/trumps-misguided-tweet-seeking-wallace-apology-for-noose-hoax/

President Donald Trump misdirected blame when he questioned why NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace had not “apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid … only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX.”

Why the media raced to cover Trump, NASCAR and the Confederate flag

https://www.foxnews.com/media/why-the-media-raced-to-cover-trump-nascar-and-the-confederate-flag

A few points: NASCAR’s only fulltime black driver didn’t initiate the probe of a noose found in his stall, which turned out not to have been targeted at Bubba. NASCAR’s ratings aren’t down. And the president was clearly critical of the league’s decision to ban the Confederate flag at its races.

 

Now it would be easy to say the media are utterly obsessed with this issue. It fuels the journalistic narrative that the president is stoking white resentment with his attacks on angry mobs and left-wing fascism, not to mention his threat to veto a major defense bill if it renames bases that honor Confederate generals.

 hat’s more, the reporters were frustrated by McEnany’s repeated insistence that Trump has no position on displaying Confederate flags.

But most of all, the contretemps reflects the president’s decision to drive the news cycle through Twitter.

Since that social network is the primary way he communicates with his 83 million followers, Trump has the power to change the national conversation with a couple of sentences. Sometimes this chokes off positive coverage he had been getting, to the dismay of his advisers, and sometimes it helps him turn the page from negative coverage.

But the White House can’t very well complain that journalists are creating a distraction when they covering the president’s own words, not when he has used Twitter to make major announcements, push policies, attack opponents and otherwise generate headlines.

There are many well-documented instances of Trump stunning his top aides by tweeting a big decision that they thought they were still debating.

Trump leans into old failures in push to reopen schools as virus roars

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/08/politics/donald-trump-schools-coronavirus-education/index.html

 

President Donald Trump's new push to open schools shows he's learned nothing from calamities sparked by his demands for premature state openings. 

He also delivered a fresh rebuke to his government's top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had dismissed the President's discredited claims that the US has the world's lowest mortality rate.

And Trump conjured another wishful prediction: that the worsening battle against the virus, which has already killed 130,000 Americans and infected 3 million, would be far less serious within weeks. This all came a few days after another discredited claim -- that 99% of cases of the virus are harmless.

Sen. Duckworth, who lost both legs in the Iraq War, hits back at Tucker Carlson for suggesting she hates America

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/07/tammy-duckworth-slams-tucker-carlson-suggesting-she-hates-america/5389191002/

The senator has also drawn attention from the Trump campaign. Trump shared the video of Carlson's monologue on Tuesday, and his campaign released a statement later in the day saying she was "using her military service to deflect from her support for the left-wing campaign to villainize America’s founding."

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs serving in Iraq, hits back after Tucker Carlson suggests she hates America

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/07/media/tammy-duckworth-tucker-carlson/index.html

Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a US Army veteran who lost both of her legs while serving in Iraq, rebuked Tucker Carlson after the conservative Fox News host attacked her on Monday night and suggested that she hates America.

"Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?" Duckworth wrote on Twitter.

Duckworth was awarded the Purple Heart after she lost her legs in 2004 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the helicopter she was co-piloting during the Iraq War.

But Carlson, whose controversial comments over the years have prompted multiple advertiser boycotts, sought to question her patriotism on his Fox News program.

Stelter: Book is essentially an anti-Trump campaign book