The Weekly Sift

Week after week, the pandemic has dominated the news. That’s what happens when you kill 80K Americans in two months.

But this week, the pandemic has competition: new highs in the corruption of the Trump administration. Bill Barr once again made a mockery of the Justice Department’s independence by serving Trump’s political interests; the Department moved to drop the indictment of Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. As in the Roger Stone case, a prosecutor resigned rather than have his name tainted by this dirty deed.

Also, the recently removed director of BARDA, a biological research organization inside HHS, filed a whistleblower complaint. In that complaint, he describes a history of political “cronyism” overruling the judgment of BARDA’s scientists, culminating in a corrupt move to push hydroxychloroquine, the drug Trump was promoting as a miracle cure for Covid-19, but which had not been proven to be either effective or safe.

And tomorrow, the Supreme Court considers Trump’s claim to have “absolute immunity” against any form of investigation, either federal or state. If the Court signs off on that, there’s really no limit.

So one of this week’s featured posts will be “This Week in Corruption”. I still have some work to do on that, so it probably won’t be out until around 11 EDT. Before that, I want to examine something I know a lot of people are wondering about: how the stock market can be so high when the economy is so awful. “What’s Up With the Stock Market?” should be out before 9.

The weekly summary still has a lot to cover after that, most notably that Covid-19 deaths seem to have leveled out, even as states start relaxing their shelter-in-place restrictions. Deaths are dropping in the New York City area, but rising elsewhere. Meanwhile, the virus has reached the White House. Baseball is back, but in South Korea, not here. The Tara Reade conversation continues. And I’ll close with a quarantine version of Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time” performed by the Phoenix Chamber Choir. Let’s say that gets out before 1.