Mike Pence may have actually been onto something

Mike Pence took a lot of flak for the array of excuses he offered for refusing to wear a mask while touring the Mayo Clinic late last month. One excuse in particular turned Pence into an easy target: “I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health care personnel, and look them in the eye and say thank you.”

The excuse doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense at first sight. Alexandra Petri demanded to know, “Sweet God, where are Mike Pence’s eyes?” Stephen Colbert quipped, “You can still look them in the eye with a mask — it’s not a blindfold!” (He also noted, for good measure, “For Mike Pence, looking you in the eye is second base.”) And I’m not even going to repeat what Jon Lovett had to say (starting at 6:08), for any number of reasons.

As you can see, making fun of Mike Pence is easy — but here, we prefer to do things because they are hard. That’s right: I’m about to defend him.

Trevor Noah spreading harmful coronavirus misinformation

Last week, Trevor Noah spent a few minutes discussing the recent reopening of Shanghai Disneyland — and spread some worrying misinformation about the coronavirus by identifying two “coronavirus symptoms” that actually aren’t:

The Times actually fact-checked that New Yorker cover

If you read the New York Times’ recent article titled “White House Rattled by a Military Aide’s Positive Coronavirus Test” online, you might have noticed a somewhat puzzling paragraph. It’s just two sentences long, and it starts promisingly enough — here’s sentence one of two:

Blaming Trump for those calls to poison control isn’t just lazy – it’s wrong

Just over two weeks ago, I wrote about several reporters who rushed to blame Trump’s Bleach Speech for an increase in calls to Poison Control. Specifically, I pointed out that the basis for their claim — an increase in calls over an 18 hour window compared to the same period in 2019 — completely ignored other important differences separating last year from 2020:

Colbert butchers Star Wars twice in one par-segment

Late last week, presumably in anticipation of the upcoming celebration of May the Fourth, Stephen Colbert went to Star Wars twice in just over two minutes (starting at 3:37) — but got some basic ‘facts’ wrong each time.

First, he described NASA’s plan to shine lasers at the moon:

What provoked Elon Musk to tweet about Tesla’s stock price

This past Friday, Elon Musk came under scrutiny for tweeting “Tesla stock price is too high imo” and causing that price to go down.

But it was actually (at least) the second time in short order that what Musk had to say drew headlines. So let’s backpedal to just last Wednesday, when he used Tesla’s earnings call to slam California’s “fascist” stay at home order (which forced Tesla’s Fremont factory to close):

Why is the New York Times white-washing Bleachgazi?

It seems reporters at the New York Times were so happy new White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany decided to do her job — by taking their questions for the first time in 417 days — they decided to do it for her. (To channel a well-known New York rapper who frequently name-drops the New York President, you might call what happened a favor for a favor.)

Here’s what happened.

New Mexico’s candidate taking “Crypto-Jew” to a whole new level

Now that the presidential primary has been decided, there’s room to focus on down-ballot races. And in New Mexico’s primary, which is now just one month away, one of the contenders has something of a national profile. Even if you don’t remember Valerie Plame from back when she was making headlines in the second Bush administration, there’s a good chance you remember seeing this ad when it was released late last year:

How colleges can take advantage of a year without the SAT

The Daily Pennsylvanian’s editorial board recently took the position that Penn Admissions should not require any standardized test scores for applicants in the coming academic year. The decision would follow an example set by Cornell and several other schools around the country. Admittedly, I took the SAT half a lifetime ago so I’m not exactly an expert on the subject, but that’s never stopped me from weighing on things I read about online. I’ll also stipulate that while I refer to Penn throughout this post, what I write would apply equally to any school that currently requires test scores.

The editorial board supplied several reasons to support its position. The first is that because both the SAT and ACT have already canceled several testing dates between now and the fall, students will have fewer opportunities than usual to take it. More troublesome still, because different areas of the country are reopening at their own pace, tests may happen in one state but not another, which would mean some students had more access to the test than others.