Civil Commotion

An account of some of the fallout from the Gannett merger drops-in this gem:

When he was laid off Wednesday, he was told he had to get out by noon Friday.

A spokeswoman for Gannett, which owns the newspaper, confirmed he was laid off and said one editor​ would now oversee all the chain’s newspapers in southern Indiana. The decision, she said, had to do with a merger last year between Gannett and the parent company of GateHouse Media, not the economic fallout from the coronavirus.

Good luck with that.

Seriously? Trump and … Lincoln? Maybe he has such a straitened, uninformed, ignorant view of American history that he thinks the genuinely great men of our past were self-serving frauds and con-artists just like himself?

The U.S. government’s best estimates project a daily death toll rising to 3000-people per day by the end of June.

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

The bald numbers don’t tell the entire story, however. In my home county of Franklin, North Carolina, there are 104-case of coronavirus, and there have been 19-deaths.

Death number 19 was the first death of a non-nursing home resident, something that wasn’t made public until it occurred. In other words, the first 18-deaths were concentrated in nursing homes, and it was news when a death occurred that wasn’t related to a nursing home. I had no idea, and neither did the news media; apparently, a county official casually mentioned the fact to a reporter.

The implication is this:

1. I was worrying unnecessarily when I went into a store to pick-up this or that, and …

2. Now I should be worrying; instead of receding, the pandemic is just getting started in Franklin County.

Churches in Kentucky, Virginia, and Illinois have lost their demands for exceptions to assembly bans. There are doubtless churches in other places that are challenging the bans but haven’t had their day in court yet.

Malls, restaurants, casinos, sports venues, schools and colleges — the tens of dozens of places where people gather — are sucking-it-up and waiting for this hell to end. Why do churches think they ought to be excepted? A couple possibilities come immediately to mind.

• Financial need. The shutdown has been especially hard on churches, because the overwhelming majority of them are barely making it and a sharp, 6-weeks long decline in revenue can be ruinous.

• Ignorance. Many churchgoers simply lack the intellectual subtlety to understand that belief is protected but not privileged, that the same laws which apply to everybody else includes them, too.

Fortunately the courts have — so far — had the good sense to reject the demands.

So begins the Book of Donald, a sacred text to the MAGA-cult and most Southern Baptists.