One Week

Steve Inskeep, host of NPR's Morning Edition, put a timeline of events/news stories leading to last night on Twitter this morning. Some commenters added others.

There's been a joke on Twitter for months that historians will specialize in a particular month or week of 2020... now it's getting down to just a day or even a few hours.

James Poniewozik, TV critic for the New York Times, described recent events this way: "Gonna be like an October Surprise Advent Calendar."

• Friday, Sept. 25: Ruth Bader Ginsburg lay in state at the Capitol.
• Saturday, Sept. 26: Amy Coney Barrett was nominated at a Rose Garden gathering that was later found to be a COVID super-spreader event.
• Sunday, Sept. 27: the Trump tax story was published in the New York Times (his indebtedness, how little he paid in taxes, his outlandish deductions and undervaluing of assets); former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale was hospitalized after a standoff with police.
• Monday, Sept. 28: Brad Parscale was arrested for $40 million in theft from the campaign.
• Tuesday, Sept. 29: the presidential debate was held, in which Trump wouldn't disavow white supremacy, among other unprecedented moments.
• Wednesday, Sept. 30: the New Yorker published an extensive story on Trump campaign surrogate (and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend) Kimberly Guilfoyle's sordid sexual harassment history at Fox News, which Fox paid her former assistant to $4 million to settle.
  
• Thursday, Oct. 1: Melania Trump was revealed to have said “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff?” and “‘Oh, what about the children that were separated?’ Give me a fucking break” back in 2018; Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced he was limiting ballot-drop locations in each county to one, no matter how many people or square miles per county (Harris County, for instance, is as large as Rhode Island and has 2.4 million registered voters); Trump aide Hope Hicks tested positive for COVID.
• Friday, Oct. 2: After tweeting that he and Melania had tested positive for COVID, Trump was airlifted to Walter Reed; members of the Senate, White House press corps and staff also tested positive.
• Saturday, Oct. 3: More positive cases among electeds and campaign staff were reported; it was revealed that Trump was actually known to be positive as of Wednesday and appeared, maskless, at one rally and two indoor fundraisers despite that.

It seems likely this pace will continue.

Meanwhile, during those same days:

• The Louisvile grand jury recordings from the Breonna Taylor were released on Friday. They were incomplete, because they didn't include the prosecutor's statements, such as what charges might be brought, but they still would have been major news in most weeks. As Roberto Aram Ferdman of Vice News put it on Twitter, "One of the clear takeaways from the Breonna Taylor grand jury tapes is the jurors asked a lot of strong questions, but many of those questions either weren’t answered in earnest or were shooed away with responses like 'we’ll get to that later' and then never addressed."
• Police were still attacking protesters in Portland (yes... just about every night!). A cop ran over a person with a motorcycle on Friday, for instance.
• Major financial exchanges launched water futures contracts to allow trading on the value of water. This does not seem like a good idea!
• Trump appointed climate deniers to run NOAA Climate. These people can't be easily fired even after he leaves office.
• 1,600 Department of Justice alum lawyers signed an open letter warning that Attorney General Bill Barr has suborned the department to prevent a free and fair election.
• Jobs numbers for the third quarter were released by the Department of Labor that were much weaker than expected, especially for women. Quoting Steve Greenhouse, retired New York Times, labor reporter, "Between August and September, 865,000 women workers dropped out of the labor force, a number that is four times higher than the 216,000 men who left the workforce." This is directly related to the COVID crisis in child care and schooling.

I have been tending to plants a lot. Reading a Harry Dresden book, in which somewhat good is battling mostly evil. Keeping my head above water.