Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Protests near the White House last night drove a certain rat underground:

As anti-racist protests continued for a fourth night in Washington, D.C., the Secret Service rushed President Donald Trump to an underground bunker, according to a number of media reports.

Trump and his family were never in any real danger on Friday when they were relocated but the incident rattled them, sources told The New York Times, which was the first news outlet to report the extraordinary safety measure.

Trump spent about an hour in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, as the bunker is known, The Associated Press reported. The facility was established to protect presidents during emergencies such as terrorist attacks. First lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, accompanied the president to the bunker, per CNN.  (our emphasis)

Joe Biden models what a decent President would be doing. He needs to get out more (and it looks like that's the plan -- just do it safely):

President Donald Trump spent much of Sunday using Twitter as a bullhorn to urge “law and order” and tougher action by police against protesters around the country. Joe Biden quietly visited the site of protests in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, and talked to some of the demonstrators. Earlier, he wrote a post on Medium expressing empathy for those despairing about the killing of George Floyd.

That low-key, high-touch approach may be a sign of how the presumptive Democratic nominee presents himself in the five months before the presidential election, emphasizing calm and competence as a contrast to a mercurial president.

Here's a short vid of him having pics taken while visiting the site of protests in Wilmington, Delaware, yesterday:

“You’ve got to get that crazy guy out of office.”pic.twitter.com/RBuwYEiLs5

— Andrew Weinstein (@Weinsteinlaw) May 31, 2020

From Biden's Instagram account:

View this post on Instagram

We are a nation in pain, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us. We are a nation enraged, but we cannot allow our rage to consume us. We are a nation exhausted, but we will not allow our exhaustion to defeat us. The only way to bear this pain is to turn all that anguish to purpose. And as President, I will help lead this conversation — and more importantly, I will listen, just as I did today visiting the site of last night's protests in Wilmington.

A post shared by Joe Biden (@joebiden) on May 31, 2020 at 2:58pm PDT

If you missed his statement about the events of the last week, check it out.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but:

... Trump and some of his advisers calculated that he should not speak to the nation because he had nothing new to say and had no tangible policy or action to announce yet, according to a senior administration official. Evidently not feeling an urgent motivation Sunday to try to bring people together, he stayed silent.

Trump let his tweets speak for themselves. One attacked the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis; another announced that his administration would designate the antifa movement a terrorist organization; a third accused the media of fomenting hatred and anarchy; and in yet another, he praised himself for the deployment of the National Guard and denigrated former vice president Joe Biden.  (our emphasis)

Go back to your bunker and stay there, rat.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, a smart move taking the prosecution of killer cop Derek Chauvin out of the hands of the county attorney, who dragged his feet in bringing charges and still hasn't charged the three accessory cops:

In an unusual legal maneuver, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison will take the lead in the prosecution of the fired Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died last week in police custody.

Gov. Tim Walz said Sunday that he concluded Ellison needed to take over the case from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office at the urging of Floyd’s family, community activists, and some members of the Minneapolis City Council seeking a vigorous prosecution of the officer, 44-year-old Derek Chauvin.

They apparently smelled another rat in county attorney Mike Freeman.

In Brazil, you have the Trump of the Southern Hemisphere, autocrat president Jair Bolsonaro, modeling Trumpian malicious ignorance and sociopathy in dealing with his country's rising death toll from coronavirus:

On May 9, Brazil’s death toll from the coronavirus topped 10,000. Instead of marking the grim milestone with an address or a sign of respect for the victims, President Jair Bolsonaro took a spin on a jet ski. Video footage widely circulated on social media shows Brazil’s far-right leader grinning as he pulls up to a boat on Brasília’s Paranoá Lake where supporters are having a cookout. As he grips onto their boat, Bolsonaro jokes about the “neurosis” of Brazilians worried about the virus. “There’s nothing to be done [about it],” he shrugs. “It’s madness.”

Even by the standards of other right-wing populists who have sought to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s defiance of reality was shocking. From the favelas of densely packed cities like Rio de Janeiro to the remote indigenous communities of the Amazon rain forest, Brazil has emerged as the new global epicenter of the pandemic, with the world’s highest rate of transmission and a health system now teetering on the brink of collapse.

Never fear, though, Brazil!  The Trump regime is here to solve all your problems:

The United States has supplied Brazil with 2 million doses of hydroxychloroquine for use against the coronavirus, the two governments said on Sunday, despite medical warnings about risks associated with the anti-malaria drug.

Spreading illness and death is what Trump and his rotted out accomplices do, part infinity.

Once again, please do yourself a favor by checking out Infidel 753's link round-up to a wide range of posts with something of interest for pretty much everyone. (We found that Time article on Bolsonaro there.)