One Texas boss is telling the workers: no masks allowed.

That’s what a back-of-the-house employee at a Hillstone Restaurant Group establishment in Dallas was told last week, as restaurants prepared to reopen at 25% capacity, according to CBS Dallas.

That employee, who did not want to be identified publicly, expressed discomfort and was told to think about it—and then was removed from the schedule, the employee told CBS Dallas’ Brooke Rogers.

If you’re not willing to die on the job, you’re fired.

The employee said management also told her that face masks don’t complement the restaurant group’s style or level of hospitality.

Oddly enough that’s true of pretty much all restaurants, as well as shops, bars, theaters, offices, schools – lots of workplaces. They’re usual and undisturbing in medical settings, dentists’ offices, many factories, farms, construction sites and the like. I’ve worn dust masks on the job plenty of times. The public areas of restaurants naturally tend not to be full of people with masks in normal times, but these aren’t normal times.

Infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Diana Cervantes called Hillstone’s decision concerning.

“It is really important to be able to wear those face coverings, especially if you can’t keep that six-foot social distancing, which of course when you go to a restaurant, that it very hard to maintain,” Cervantes, of UNT Health Science Center, said.

In fact impossible. There’s no way to put people’s food in front of them from six feet away.

She points to Governor Greg Abbott’s minimum standard health protocols for restaurants, which encourages social distancing first. But if that’s not feasible, it says measures such as face coverings should be rigorously practiced.

Which protects the customers as well as the workers, after all.

Hillstone management also points to the law, writing on its website: “Current orders do not require our staff or guests to wear face masks. If you are concerned about your safety in this respect, we hope you will join us a later date.”

Or how about never; never’s good for me.

Wut?

So…he wore one somewhere behind the scenes where no reporters could see him, but not in the plant he was there to visit.

I’m gonna call that a brazen lie, on the grounds that what the fuck would be the point of wearing it “backstage” and not wearing it in the plant where he could infect the workers or vice versa or both? Nothing. Nothing would be the point of that. He didn’t wear it “backstage” and the Honeywell chief didn’t tell him that. He just didn’t wear a mask, because he didn’t want to.

Trump is ok with it if lots more people die because he tries to “re-open” the economy.

President Donald Trump said in an exclusive interview with ABC “World News Tonight” Anchor and Managing Editor David Muir on Tuesday that “it’s possible there will be some” deaths as states roll back restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of the novel coronavirus, acknowledging that it was the choice the country faces to reopen and jumpstart the economy.

…

In addition to the president’s acknowledgement directly to Muir that it’s “possible there will be some” deaths as a cost of reopening the country, the president also acknowledged during his visit to Arizona that there will be some who are “affected badly” by the decision.

“Will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon,” Trump said, directly acknowledging there will be a real, negative human cost in prioritizing an economic revival over a more cautious approach in favor of public health. But even as the president advocates for a return to normal economic business, the nation’s governors remain in control of decision-making for their respective states.

The president’s cost-benefit analysis is exemplified in his decision to move forward with disbanding the task force of medical experts in the weeks ahead, as he declares that “our country is now in the next stage of the battle.”

Except that it’s not. Nothing has changed. There is no effective treatment, there is no vaccine. This is not the next stage, this is the same stage – the one with a virus that we can neither prevent nor treat, that spreads with shocking ease, that kills some of its victims and leaves some with permanent damage to lungs and other useful bits. The only “next stage” here is the next stage in Trump’s stunted attention span.

Even as the president sought to prepare Americans that “more death” is ahead, he expressed optimism that the virus will go away, regardless of whether a vaccine is achieved.

“There’ll be more death, th[en] the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine. And I think we’re doing very well on the vaccines but, with or without a vaccine, it’s going to pass, and we’re going to be back to normal. But it’s been a rough process. There is no question about it,” Trump said.

That’s not “optimism,” it’s just making shit up. It’s just childish assertion. “It’s going to pass because I want it to, the end, by Donnie Trump age 4.”

The president’s optimistic outlook stands in contrast to the consensus of opinion among public health experts in warning that the virus will continue to pose a major risk until the time that there is effective treatment and vaccination.

It’s not an “optimistic outlook”; it’s heedless reckless lying for the sake of his own desire to hold rallies and win the next election.

Also, he’s still insisting that anyone who needs a test can get one. That’s not true. At all.

The president was dismissive of two new analyses that offered cautionary tales against a premature reopening, one from Johns Hopkins University that warned the daily death rate could nearly double by June and a model from the University of Washington model that warned the U.S. death toll could increase to nearly 135,000 by Aug. 4.

“These models have been so wrong from day one. Both on the low side and the upside. They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack. And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong,” the president said.

Again: this is just Trump making shit up.

Urgent matters:

How can anyone be dim enough to think that because Jane Wellmeaning from Accounting signs herself “Jane Wellmeaning she/her” therefore the organization is “trans-inclusive”? What do the two even have to do with each other?

Nothing really; rather, it’s a shibboleth, a hoop to jump through, a symbol, a test, a genuflection, a self-advertisement, a blockade, a display of heightened sensitivity and (much as I hate to say it) virtue. Yes, it’s that stale trope virtue-signaling. It’s not a trope I love because it’s applied way too broadly and often, and in my view not always fairly. But this? It’s such a crappy and stupid idea in the first place, and so irrelevant to pretty much everything in the second place, that I don’t see what it can be other than virtue-signaling. Maybe it’s also meant to be signaling “inclusivity” and compassion and solidarity, but the more frantically the People of Pronoun signal with the Pronoun Flag the less able I am to take any of it seriously. On the one hand centuries of oppression, poverty, exploitation, and on the other hand…Delia here was assigned male at birth so please make her feel welcome.

Not to mention the plain absurdity of it. We might as well add our favorite conjunctions to our email signatures. Betty Benevolent, if/because/when. Putting your pronouns in an email signature makes no sense because people aren’t going to hit reply and say “Dear Her.” There’s no call for pronoun-identification in correspondence, because the subject doesn’t come up. Unsolicited irrelevant pointless information about The Self is not desirable in work correspondence, and applying social pressure to use them is just…I lack the words to say what it is.

Originally a comment by Freemage on But he’s the second Lincoln.

I went to The Lincoln Project’s website:

OUR MISSION

Defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.

We do not undertake this task lightly nor from ideological preference. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.

I have two issues with them.

1: Too little, too late. This group should’ve been paying for ads and stirring up conflict with the Orange One during the 2016 primaries. And, of course, they’re a handful of voices, none of them in real positions of power. Maybe if they could get Romney to sign up.

2: That river in Egypt. They fail to acknowledge that Trump was not a barbarian who stormed into the GOP castle, but rather the monster they stitched together in the castle basement–a body built of income inequality and lassez-faire economics, a brain rotted by racism and sexism, stitched together with some kowtowing to the Religious Right, and then electrified by the right-wing media machine of which Faux News is only the most public face. Anyone who was in the GOP during Dubya’s reign was part of that creation process.

Trump thinks it’s time to put this whole pandemic thing to bed.

Trump administration officials are telling members and staff of the coronavirus task force that the White House plans to wind down the operation in coming weeks despite growing evidence that the crisis is raging on, Maggie Haberman reports.

Ok it’s raging on but it’s boring, all right? Trump has tv to watch and lies to tell, and this whole “task force” caper is a big yawn now.

A top adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who has helped oversee the task force, Olivia Troye, has told senior officials involved in the task force to expect the group to wind down within weeks, a notice echoed by other top White House officials. While the task force met Tuesday at the White House, Monday’s meeting was canceled, and a Saturday session, a staple of recent months, was never held.

…

While the rate of new infections and deaths has been falling in New York, it has continued to rise in much of the rest of the country, and a number of projections suggest that deaths will remain at elevated levels for months to come and could increase as states ease their stay-at-home orders. One document circulating inside the administration raised the possibility of a rise in coronavirus infections and deaths this month, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1 — nearly double the current level.

The normal daily death rate is around 8000, so 1000 is not a trivial increase, let alone 3000.

Remember when Trump removed Rick Bright as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority? And we were told he was working on a whistleblower report? He’s filed the report.

A federal scientist who says he was ousted from his job amid a dispute over an unproven malaria drug promoted by President Trump said on Tuesday that a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly pressured him to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the clients of a well-connected lobbyist, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.

It’s marketing again. Marketing über alles. Yes yes yes pandemic we know we know but steer the $$$ to the LOBBYIST.

Dr. Rick Bright, who was the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until his removal in April, said in a formal whistle-blower complaint that since 2017 he has been protesting “cronyism and award of contracts to companies with political connections to the administration,” including a drug company executive who is close to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

Filth all the way down. Give the money to me, give the money to my daughter’s husband, give the money to my lobbyist friends who will help me get elected again so that I can direct more money to my bank account.

Francine Prose has thoughts on Trump’s cult of callous brutalism:

[U]ltimately our president’s failure of empathy is less disturbing than the ways in which it appears to resonate with his supporters. He and his allies have framed our response to the crisis in terms of partisan politics, to imply (incorrectly, as the polls suggest) that tough conservatives are eager to get back to work sooner than scaredy-cat, stay-at-home progressives.

The flag-waving, gun-toting, defiantly unmasked protesters storming the capitol buildings in Michigan and Wisconsin would seem to support that view.

Indeed they would, and isn’t that bizarre. A virus isn’t political. It’s not “liberal” or “hard left” or even “socialist” to want to avoid a lethal virus and to avoid giving it to others. It’s bizarre that so many on the right seem to be happy to claim that it is.

It may be that the deepening polarization in our country – the suspicion, grievance and rage that the president is spouting and encouraging – is less political than spiritual. These divides go deeper than how we vote; they express our core beliefs about our responsibility to those with whom we share this brief span on this damaged planet. As Slate editor Tom Scocca posted on Twitter: “Conservatives have by now been conditioned to believe that thinking about other people ‘s needs or interests in any way is tyranny by definition,” a sentiment echoed by Emily Raboteau in the Huffington Post: “I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to our fellow human beings.”

That is why I keep disputing people like Neil deGrasse Tyson when they say reason and evidence are not just necessary but also sufficient. They’re not sufficient. The instinct to give a damn has to be there too.

Apparently Trump is livid about a Republican campaign ad:

President Trump lashed out after an ad titled Mourning in America criticized his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The ad was released by The Lincoln Project, a super-PAC launched by a handful of Republicans including George Conway, a prominent lawyer and husband to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Show us the ad then.

Owen Jones is well known for being…what to call it…officious is perhaps the best word. For poking into stuff that’s not really his concern, for seeking out people to prod and scold and censure, for being tooth-grindingly self-righteous and smug. He is of course a devoted Trans Ally and policer of women who don’t think Gender Indenniny is the most important cause of all time.

His latest exercise in policing other people is a WHAT IS THAT ON HIS BOOKSHELF.

Never mind that, why does he have a copy of Atlas Shrugged? Why a book about cold cream? Why the Oxford Dictionary of Scottish History? So many mysteries, so little time.

But seriously. We have books for a lot of reasons. It’s not necessarily a matter of love, much less of endorsement. We can have some books for purposes of research or curiosity. Politicians probably have an unusually wide range of reasons for hanging on to particular books. But more than that it’s just so…peering, prying, snooping, sniffing, sneering. It’s so intrusive. I’m enjoying seeing people’s bookshelves as they do broadcasts from home; I wish Chris Cuomo had a bookshelf behind him in his basement instead of those two dull white armchairs. I look to see what books they have out of curiosity but I hope it wouldn’t occur to me to ask the world why Don Lemon or Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow has THAT book.

Andy Lewis shared his. I have some of those too.

The Post tells the story of how Trump and Kushner put Trump’s continued grip on power ahead of the survival of X thousands of their fellow citizens.

In late March Trump was disgruntled about models that predicted deaths from the virus ranging from 100,000 to 240,000 Americans at best, but he was much more disgruntled about the economy and his prospects. What’s a quarter of a million people compared to the next four years of Donald Trump’s life?

Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so.

He wanted data to justify doing what he wanted to do, as opposed to data to inform his decision about what to do. That’s Trump.

So the White House people made up their own models, which said everything would be fabulous, go back to work.

Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.

That is, they wanted the count to be lower, for their own selfish reasons, so they decided it was going to be lower, for their own selfish reasons. One the one hand hundreds of thousands of lives, on the other hand the continued power and self-enrichment of Trump and his callow fishbelly son-in-law. We’re called on to die of the virus so that Don and Jared can collar even more millions of corrupt $$$.

Trump directed his coronavirus task force to issue guidelines for reopening businesses, encouraged “LIBERATE” protests to apply pressure on governors and proclaimed that “the cure can’t be worse than the problem itself” — even as polls showed that Americans were far more concerned about their personal safety.

But our personal safety doesn’t matter compared to Trump’s personal opportunity to shout at us from the White House and inhale all the loose change in the world.

By the end of April — with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War — it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. “A catastrophic miss,” as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it. The president’s course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools.

“It’s going to go. It’s going to leave. It’s going to be gone. It’s going to be eradicated,” the president said Wednesday, hours after his son-in-law claimed the administration’s response had been “a great success story.”

…

Trump crowned himself “the king of ventilators” and boasted of his work shoring up supply chains, yet shamed governors for asking for too many supplies for besieged hospitals and health-care workers in their states. At one point, he seemed to suggest that hospitals were selling protective gear provided by the federal government on the black market.

Meanwhile he’s been stealing ventilators and PPE from states so that he can hand them out to governors who flatter him and withhold them from those who don’t. Our lives versus his vanity; an easy choice for him.

Fauci and Birx and others with medical degrees formed their own group that met daily.

Some in the “doctors group” were distressed by what one official dubbed the “voodoo” discussed within the broader task force.

…

The doctors group strove to present a unified front to the president on various medical and scientific issues. They recently discussed how antibody tests, designed to identify people with possible immunity from the virus, are not a panacea to reopening the country because the results sometimes are inaccurate.

“There’s a little bit of a God complex,” one senior administration official said of the group. “They’re all about science, science, science, which is good, but sometimes there’s a little bit less of a consideration of politics when maybe there should be.”

That is, they focus on the disease, when they should be paying more attention to Trump’s desire to be re-elected.

Trump has peppered his new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and other senior aides with phone calls “in almost every single hour of the day,” sometimes well after midnight, according to one senior official.

That’s so Trump. It’s a side issue but it’s so Trump. He’s awake, so what does he care that it’s 2 a.m. He’s awake, so other people have to talk to him. He’s awake, so other people don’t need sleep. Trump alone matters.

[B]y month’s end, as Trump cheered businesses reopening in Georgia, Texas and several other states “because we have to get our country back,” the total dead climbed past 63,000, with no sign of slowing down.

Never mind that, how is Trump doing?

A virtual vaccine summit:

World leaders came together in a virtual online summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate, but highlighted from Washington what one official called its “whole-of-America” efforts in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.

Why did the Trump administration decline to participate? Is Trump too busy fantasizing that he’s the new Lincoln?

The conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus that has killed nearly 250,000 people worldwide.

With the money came soaring rhetoric about international solidarity, and a good bit of boasting about each country’s efforts and achievements, live and prerecorded, by Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Japan’s Shinzo Abe — alongside Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.

Trump skipped a chance to boast about his non-existent achievements. Weird. The administration is not saying why Trump refused to participate.

“It’s the first time that I can think of where you have had a major international pledging conference for a global crisis of this kind of importance and the U.S. is just absent,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked on the Ebola response in the Obama administration.

“Just absent” sums us up right now.

What went wrong? No battery in the smoke alarm:

The disastrously tardy, inadequate, confused, and (for many citizens) confusing response of the federal government to covid-19, both before and after the first case, derives from too many factors to list here, but I’ll mention two: failure to appreciate the sars and mers warnings, both delivered by other coronaviruses; and loss of capacity at high government levels, within recent years, to understand the gravity and immediacy of pandemic threats. The result of that loss is what Ali Khan means by lack of imagination. Beth Cameron, a former head of the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense on the National Security Council staff, calls it the absence of “the smoke alarm.” Those in power who are charged with “keeping watch to get ahead of emergencies” need to smell the smoke and smother the fire while it’s small, Cameron told me. “You’re not going to stop outbreaks from happening. But you can stop outbreaks from becoming epidemics or pandemics.” She led the directorate from its establishment, following the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa, until March, 2017. It survived under her successor for a little more than a year, and then, after John Bolton became the national-security adviser, it was dissolved. A smoke alarm doesn’t work when the battery has been removed.

Dennis Carroll, a former research virologist, led a pandemic-threats unit at the U.S. Agency for International Development for almost fifteen years. In 2009, he created a large program called predict, dispersing about two hundred million dollars in grants to support discovery of potentially dangerous new viruses before they spill over into humans. That program is ending, due to “the ascension of risk averse bureaucrats,” he told the Times, last October. He mentioned the White House closure of the N.S.C. health directorate as a parallel instance, and said that both Congress and the Administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama were “enormously supportive,” but then came the current chill winds.

“Chill winds” is a very emollient substitute for “brainless greedy crook who understands nothing but money that flows to him.”

Trump decided Lincoln would be a good look on him.

President Trump gave a two-hour interview to Fox News on Sunday night in the Lincoln Memorial. His mix of self-pity and self-congratulation was startling, especially given the backdrop, as more than 67,000 Americans have been killed by an invisible enemy that has yet to be contained and the country plunges deeper into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Yebbut look. Lincoln. Trump is another Lincoln. Right? Sure.

“They always said … nobody got treated worse than [Abraham] Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse,” said Trump, pointing toward the statue of a president who was assassinated days after winning the Civil War. “You know, I believe we’ve done more than any president in the history of our country in the first three years, three-and-a-half years. I really believe that.”

The fact that Trump really believes something is not a reason for anyone else to believe it. Rather the reverse.

Trump’s claim that no president has been treated worse than he came in response to a question from a supporter named Carolyn Perkins, a retired nurse and elementary school guidance counselor.

“The question I have is about your manner of presentation,” Perkins said. “Why do you use descriptive words that could be classified as bullying? And why do you not directly answer the questions asked by the press but instead speak of past successes and generally ramble? The U.S.A. needs you. Please let go of those behaviors that are turning people away from you. Please hold on to your wonderful attributes that make you our great leader and let go of other characteristics that do not serve you.”

If you take the bullying and boasting and rambling away what’s left? What are those wonderful attributes exactly?

“Look, I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump responded. Motioning toward the statue of the 16th president, the 45th president said: “The closest would be that gentleman right up there.”

And yet, Lincoln didn’t respond to hostility with torrents of personal abuse. It’s almost as if that’s not the only possible way to react.

Trump’s boast about “winning” came as he once again seesawed over his estimate of the number of Americans who will die from the contagion. “Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people,” he said, arguing that more than 2 million might have died if he hadn’t acted to slow the spread. “I really believe we could have saved a million-and-a-half lives.”

Second invocation of what he really believes. It’s typical of his inability to think that he thinks his really believing something would make it true.

Shaina Cruz of Cullman, Ala., a single mother, said she was already living paycheck to paycheck when she lost her job in March. “I haven’t received a stimulus payment or anything from unemployment,” she told the president. “I’m behind on every bill, about to evicted and have had to rely on donations in order to feed my children. I feel frustrated and I feel scared, not knowing where to turn or what to do. What advice do you have for me and others in my situation? Is there more help coming?”

Trump promised that help is coming. “You’re going to get another job or you’re going to get a better job. You’ll get a job where you make more money, frankly, and I think that’s going to happen,” he told Cruz.

He thinks it’s going to happen. That’s not what she asked. She asked about actual help, now. His thinking she will get a better job is not that help.

The president predicted that the economy will be “incredible” next year and start to transition back to a good place in the third quarter. “I really believe that,” he said. “I have a good feel for this stuff.”

Third “really believe.” Still doesn’t make anything happen.

The historian Eric Foner from a talk at Swarthmore in 2013:

One other point, and this I think is important to anybody here who is studying in a history class, you will have heard about this, not necessarily, but reconstruction is a prime example of what we call the politics of history. I’m not just talking about a historian is a Democrat or a Republican or something like that, I’m talking about the way historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape the politics of the present, the time that is the historian is writing in.

For many, many years, certainly into the, well past the middle of the 20th century, what we call the old or standard view of reconstruction dominated historical writing and textbooks and popular thinking. In a nutshell, in a very brief summary, that view saw reconstruction after the Civil War as the lowest point. The low point in the whole saga of American democracy. According to this point of view, which is not taught in schools anymore I don’t think, but is still widely accepted by people who were educated maybe a generation ago, President Lincoln, at the end of the Civil War, just before he was assassinated, wanted to bring the defeated South back into the Union in a lenient and quick manner.

He was assassinated, his policy was continued allegedly by his success, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was thwarted in his effort to reunite the nation by some of the villains of the piece, the radical Republicans in Congress. Either because of his hatred for the South or from another point of view, the desire to fasten the grip of Northern capitalism on the South. These radicals took over Congress, overturned Johnson’s policy, and instituted what we call radical reconstruction based on black suffrage, based on giving black men the right to vote.

Because black people, according to this view, are inherently incapable of intelligently exercising political rights, there followed an orgy of corruption and misgovernment in the South. Presided over by carpet baggers, that is Northerners who went down to the South to reap the spoils of office, and scalawags, who were white Southerners who cooperated with these governments.

Blacks, although it was called black reconstruction before Dubois, they really were not actors, they were more manipulated by others. They were more childlike, and these whites manipulated them in order to get into power. Eventually, groups like the Ku Klux Klan decided enough was enough and overthrew these governments and restored what was politely called home rule, or what we should really call white supremacy, in the Southern states.

What are the politics of this view? This interpretation had an amazing longevity. Historians make their living overturning what previous historians have done. That’s our job, we’re always trying to prove the guy who came before us as wrong. To remain the accepted view of a period of American history for 50 or 70 years, is unheard of. There’s no other era of American history where the same view was dominant in 1900 as in 1960, let’s say.

Impossible. This was true of reconstruction. Why? Because this view of reconstruction was congruent with the racial system of the United States in the Jim Crow era, until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Because what were the lessons of that old view? One, it was a mistake to give black men the right to vote. Reconstruction proved that black men are not capable of voting because they misused the vote. Therefore, any effort to give African Americans back their right to vote, which was taken away around 1900, would just lead to another reconstruction. The alleged horrors of reconstruction were always invoked when efforts were made to expand or restore political democracy, that is to say, in the South.

The history is not taught that way any more. Foner is one of the major figures in that change.

The headline:

Female spaces need better protection after trans woman sex assault on girl, say campaigners

The subhead:

Campaigners have called for greater protection of female-only spaces after a trans woman sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl in a supermarket toilet.

How do they know the perp is a trans woman? How do they know the perp is not just a man who claims to be a trans woman so that he can use the women’s toilets for the purpose of assaulting girls? How does anybody know that? How can can anybody ever know that? Given the adamant ideology that a trans woman is anyone who claims to be a trans woman (and that said trans woman is also a woman), how can anyone ever know that?

Why is the Scotsman (ironic name) being so polite to a guy who assaulted a child in a toilet? Why is it taking his self-identification so seriously? Why is it pretending he’s a woman who sexually assaulted a child as opposed to a man claiming to be a trans woman?

Katie Dolatowski, 18, admitted sexual assault after grabbing the girl by her face and forcing her into a cubicle in Morrisons in Kirkcaldy before ordering her to remove her trousers.

A very womany thing to do.

She also told the girl, who managed to escape after punching Dolatowski in the face, that there was a man outside who would kill her mother.

See…women kind of resent being told to accept this guy as a woman even though he grabs girls by the face and pushes them into toilet stalls and tells them their mother will be killed. We think it’s adding insult to injury.

Dolatowski also tried to film a 12-year-old in the toilet of Asda Halbeath, Dunfermline, last February.

But please, continue to call Dolatowski a “trans woman.” His feelings must be respected.

Robert Reich on Trump’s kill them all plan to “re-open the economy”:

Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes roaring back.

But of course the economy isn’t going to “come roaring back” no matter what Trump does. But never mind that, he’s going to force a re-opening no matter how many people die gasping for breath.

Step 1: make it a choice between the virus and starvation.

Trump’s labor department has decided that furloughed employees “must accept” an employer’s offer to return to work and therefore forfeit unemployment benefits, regardless of Covid-19.

Trump’s ally, Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, says employees cannot refuse to return to work for fear of contracting the disease. “That’s a voluntary quit,” making someone ineligible for benefits.

Pure evil.

GOP officials in Oklahoma are even threatening to withhold the $600 a week of extra unemployment benefits Congress has provided workers, if an employer wants to hire them. Safety is irrelevant.

“If the employer will contact us … we will cut off their benefits,” says Teresa Thomas Keller of the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.

Step 2 is secrecy. Block Fauci from talking to Congress; dawdle over testing.

Step 3: sing a song of freedom.

Trump called on citizens to “LIBERATE” states like Michigan, whose Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed strict stay-at-home rules.

Michigan has the third-highest number of Covid-19 deaths in America, although it is 10th in population. When on Thursday Whitmer extended the rules to 28 May, gun-toting protesters rushed the state house chanting: “Lock her up!”

Trump said she should “make a deal” with the gun-toting fascists.

Meanwhile, the attorney general, William Barr, has directed the justice department to take legal action against any state or local authorities imposing lockdown measures that “could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens”.

Making this about “freedom” is absurd. Freedom is meaningless for people who have no choice but to accept a job that risks their health.

Naw, the right to die for the boss is the most sacred right of all.

Step 4: give employers a “liability shield” against lawsuits by workers and customers.

No price is too high to pay for Donald Trump’s continued tyranny.