Here’s a surprise: after two months of massive job losses, we actually gained jobs in May:

The BLS tells us this: “The number of unemployed persons who were on temporary layoff decreased by 2.7 million.” That seems to explain things: as the economy reopened, laid off workers were called back and that accounts for the rebound in jobs. The increases came mostly in the areas of health care, retail, and hospitality (i.e., restaurants).

However, although this is good news there’s a big black cloud in the middle of it: the number of government employees shrank by nearly 600,000. Some of these workers might eventually be recalled, but unless Congress passes a rescue bill that includes aid to states and cities a lot of them will be permanently out of work. This would be a big headwind working against recovery, just as it was after the Great Recession.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 4. I’ve swapped out Mexico for Colombia so that we can follow all of North America in addition to our European countries. Mexico had a big spike in deaths on Wednesday and Thursday, which usually suggests some kind of reporting snafu. However, no one can identify what that might be, and news reports say that Mexican officials are “embarrassed” about the whole thing. In any case, it looks as if the higher death rate is real, not just some statistical malfunction.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

The mayor of Los Angeles has responded to the George Floyd protests:

As protests over police brutality and the death of George Floyd stretched into a sixth day, Los Angeles officials said Wednesday that they will look to cut $100 million to $150 million from the city’s police budget as part of a broader effort to reinvest more dollars into the black community. In all, Mayor Eric Garcetti pledged that the city would “identify $250 million in cuts so we can invest in jobs, in health, in education and in healing,” especially in the city’s black community “as well as communities of color and women and people who have been left behind.”

This is good to hear, but $250 million is probably not as big as it seems. The Black population of LA is about 400,000. This means that Garcetti’s pledge comes to about $600 per person if the entire amount were spent just on the Black community. But it won’t be. It will be spent on communities of color more generally, which amounts to about 2.8 million people. That comes to $100 per person.

I don’t mean to criticize what Garcetti is doing, only to give you a sense of how much money this really is. It’s about 2 percent of the city budget, and the police cuts are about 5 percent of the law enforcement budget. Roughly speaking, this is the increase they would expect in the next fiscal year, so a cut of this magnitude means the police budget stays flat.

Of course, the rubber hits the road when we find out what all this money will be spent on. In the Washington Post today, Condoleezza Rice recommends more attention on education:

I ask my fellow Americans: What will each of you do? My personal passion is educational opportunity, because it is a partial shield against prejudice. It is not a perfect shield, I know, but it gives people a fighting chance. In my conversations, I want to discuss why the learning gap for black kids is so stubborn and what can be done about it. What is your question about the impact of race on the lives of Americans? And what will you do to find answers?

I agree with Rice. I know that education has fallen a bit out of favor in conversations about the biggest drivers of racism, and Rice is certainly right to say that it’s far from a panacea of some kind. But I’m still old school, so to speak, and I continue to believe that the educational gap between Black and white students is one of the core drivers of ongoing structural racism. We progressives don’t talk a lot about that these days, but we should.

This is the LA skyline in the early morning. City Hall is on the far right.

This might be the luckiest picture I’ve ever taken. Not the best, just the luckiest. I was heading south on US 101 and aimed my camera out the passenger window without looking. Then I reeled off two or three shots and went on my way. When I got home, it turned out that two of them were nice and sharp and fit together perfectly to give a complete panorama of downtown. This never happens—not to me anyway. But it did this time.

Less of this, please.Ricky Fitchett/ZUMA

Laurie Robinson was co-chair of the 21st Century Policing Task Force, set up by President Obama after the events in Ferguson in 2014. Politico’s Zack Stanton asked her what recommendations they made for dealing with mass protests:

What we recommended for dealing with mass demonstrations was protecting the First Amendment rights of demonstrators. Certainly, when dealing with violent situations, you need to bring law enforcement forward to deal appropriately. But where you can, pull back riot police and minimize confrontation by putting officers wearing “soft look” uniforms in front. Minimize the use of military formations and militarized approaches, so that the crowd perceives that you are working with the community and are not an occupying force. That’s what our report was all about: The notion of law enforcement being guardians of the community and not an occupying force. Not warriors; working with the community to co-produce public safety.

Put “riot” police in back. Put less-threatening police officers in front. Deescalate whenever possible. Avoid militarized approaches.

Later in the interview Robinson says she thinks many police departments have made tremendous progress in the five years since the report was issued. Maybe so. But in every city that I see on TV, the cops are in full body armor and helmets; they’re put on the front lines as if daring the protesters to make a move; tear gas and rubber bullets appear to be on a hair trigger; and the streets are full of armored vehicles. This is the same approach used in Ferguson six years ago, and judging by the television coverage it’s still the unanimous choice of big-city police chiefs for dealing with the George Floyd protests.

Or is it? One other possibility is that there are plenty of cities that have adopted a softer approach, which has paid off in less violence. This means they don’t make the news and I never see them, so I assume that the hard-ass approach is universal.

I’d love to see some reporting about that: Are there cities that have dealt effectively with large protests? Are they using different approaches? It’s still early days, but are there any conclusions to be drawn from how different cities have responded to the protests?

A Mississippi state flag waves in front of the statue and tomb of Nathan Bedford Forrest, rebel general, slave trader and early Ku Klux Klan member.Mike Brown/Commercial Appeal via AP

It’s about time:

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) plans to announce Thursday that he will remove the towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from its site on Monument Avenue and put it into storage, according to an official in his administration. Word of the pending announcement set off jubilant roars among thousands gathered at the foot of the edifice Wednesday evening for a sixth straight day of marches protesting police brutality against African Americans. The stone base of the monument has been festooned with colorful graffiti calling for racial justice, with numerous expletives directed at police.

I’m keenly aware of the whole history behind these statues, but it’s just stunning that in the year 2020 there are still people fighting to keep them. Nobody who fought a war of rebellion in the cause of slavery deserves to be glorified. That’s it. There’s no more to the argument. Just take them down. All of them.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 3. Still plateauing away in North America.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This is another picture of a long stretch of straight road fading into the distance. It’s not bad, but it gets marked down for being a common interstate highway (I-15). However, unlike my other pictures of similar roads, this one makes a very nice black-and-white photo too, even if I did overdo the sky a wee bit.

Eagle-eyed viewers will note that the top and bottom pictures aren’t actually identical. They were taken three seconds apart. I don’t really remember why I did this, but it might be because I thought the truck looked good in the black-and-white version.

Sweden admits defeat:

Sweden’s top epidemiologist has admitted his strategy to fight Covid-19 resulted in too many deaths, after persuading his country to avoid a strict lockdown. “If we were to encounter the same illness with the same knowledge that we have today, I think our response would land somewhere in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Anders Tegnell said in an interview with Swedish Radio.

First off, isn’t this kind of amazing? A powerful government official admitting he was wrong? We sure don’t see that in America anymore.

But there’s a second thing: I wonder if Tegnell is admitting defeat too early? It’s true that Sweden’s death rate has been fairly high:

(The dots are the raw number of deaths reported each day, regardless of when the death actually took place. The gray line shows deaths by the actual date they happened.)

The idea behind Tegnell’s approach was that it was sustainable. That is, it could be maintained for an entire year or so. Conversely, other countries with stricter lockdowns might show more impressive declines, but when they loosened up they’d simply face another big increase in COVID-19 deaths. Then they’d lock down again, then loosen, then lock down, rinse and repeat.

So which approach will, in the end, produce the lower death rate? It all depends on what happens when lockdown countries ease up, and that’s something we don’t know yet. By the end of the year things might look very different than they do today.

UPDATE: In a follow-up interview, Tegnell says his remarks were “spun pretty hard.” For one thing, his “too many deaths” comment mostly referred to deaths in nursing homes, which he’s talked about before. As for Sweden’s general strategy, he says this:

Are there parts that we should have closed?

It’s not obvious from what we know so far. I don’t think it is. There are no activities that we can point to as extremely vulnerable. There aren’t.

It’s obvious that everything hasn’t gone as well as it could have. What would have made the situation better?

It is obvious that it could have been better. And that comes down to social distancing. If you close society and don’t let people out for six, eight, ten weeks you will have a more obvious social distancing than otherwise. But I think the fundamental strategy has worked well. I can’t see how we could have acted in a totally different way. Of course there are details which you can think about, and we do that continuously. We have also made small changes all the time, and will certainly continue to do so.

So it sounds like he hasn’t really backed off his strategy at all. He just thinks they could have done a better job with nursing homes.

Is this enough to keep the Republican bubble alive? Count me skeptical.Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via ZUMA

George Will is right. It’s not enough to boot Donald Trump out of office:

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what?

….Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come.

It has long been my belief that the Republican Party was on the brink of a devastating defeat that would ruin the party for decades. But I was always wrong. Somehow it never happened even though the demographic headwinds were always intensely against them. They kept hanging on, winning elections despite getting worse and worse.

But the same thing is true of all bubbles: they always last longer than anyone thinks they can, which makes the inevitable crash even worse. Republicans probably expected 2016 to be the year of the crash, but thanks to a desperate strategy and some good breaks, they somehow managed to eke out one more win. Unfortunately for them, the price for this was Donald Trump, who was always fated to be the doom of the party. Mitch McConnell knows this, which is why he’s so frantically filling judgeships. He knows Republicans are likely to lose in November, and it’s possible that this is finally the year that they lose the median voter too, entering the same decade-long wilderness that Democrats did in the 1980s.

Trump isn’t the only sign of this. The right these days is bereft of ideas. Literally. They have nothing new that they want to accomplish and no particular principles left. They just mechanically accede to whatever Trump happens to be saying this week. The left, by contrast, is brimming with ideas. UBI. National health care. $15 minimum wage. Child care. The revival of labor unions. Taxing the rich. The Green New Deal. Free college tuition. Decriminalization of marijuana. Criminal justice reform. DC statehood. Most of these won’t fly, but even if you’re a moderate who doesn’t care much for Bernie-esque socialism you can still sense the tumult of ideas roiling the progressive movement. There’s life and energy among progressives, while conservatives seem filled only with weariness and hatred. This is not a good foundation for four more years.

Then again, I might be wrong yet again. Maybe the Republican bubble still has some life left in it. Ask me again in November.