The gripping congressional hearings on the events of January 6th

I generally follow US political news fairly closely so you would think that the public hearings on the riot on January 6th would not contain much that is new to me. But I have been impressed at how well put together the hearings have been, with the committee combining live testimony with previous closed-door testimony to lay out a clear and coherent picture of what happened and why. What it laid out was a damning indictment of what a lying, lawless, person Donald Trump is.

What the hearings reveal is that what happened on January 6th was the culmination of a plan hatched by Trump and a few of his close political advisors, based on a hare-brained theory concocted by a lawyer named John Eastman, that Mike Pence had the power to unilaterally overturn the results, a theory that all the legal and other sane people working in the White House and justice department thought was utterly crazy and possibly criminal. They told Eastman and Trump so but they went ahead anyway, which shows criminal intent.
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Satire at the NRA convention

The NRA had its convention right after the school massacre n Uvalde, Texas. At the event, a prankster named Jason Selvig took the opportunity to make a short speech that was ostensibly praising NRA head Wayne LaPierre but was actually a slap at their absurd responses to the massive gun violence in this country. The satire was subtle enough that he was allowed to speak uninterrupted for two minutes and was even applauded by some in the audience but the internet knows satire when it sees it and it has gained wide circulation, with 10 million views on Twitter alone.


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The problem of tech monopolies

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed how four companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are each monopolies in one area and how that works against innovations and makes us unable to escape their clutches, and they use their power to suppress any new company that might hope to compete with them.

He argues that we need to invoke anti-trust legislation to break them up. Those companies warn us, as they always do, that they provide good products and services and forcibly breaking them up would harm consumers. Oliver reminds us that AT&T made that same argument when they were a telephone monopoly but that breaking it up resulted in a flood of innovations that we cannot imagine being without now. He makes the point that consumers may have been happy with AT&T because they had no idea what was out there in terms of possible innovations until the monopoly was broken up.

Samantha Bee on the degeneration of the NRA

She discusses how the National Rifle Association began as a movement to support safe and responsible gun ownership and usage and then became a lobby to prevent any and all restrictions on the ownership and usage of any almost kind of weapon, however deadly, and how so many politicians now grovel before it.

Correspondent Amy Hoggart went to the NRA’s convention last weekend in Houston. Texas, just 300 miles away from the recent massacre in Uvalde, to talk to the attendees about the spate of mass shootings and she had to endure the usual evasive, obfuscatory, excuses from them as to why these repeated tragedies do not reveal what is so obvious to everyone else, that the US just has too many damn guns that serve no purpose than allow some murderers to kill large numbers of people in a very short time.

Defenders of unlimited access to guns get desperate

There have been 18 mass shootings in the US so far just this year where a mass shooting is defined as one in which at least four people are shot, including survivors. This does not include the at least 60 shootings that left three people dead but don’t technically count as mass shootings. If those are included, we have at least three such shootings per week, a horrifying statistic.

After the recent wake of mass shootings, there seems to be a sense of desperation among those politicians who are subservient to the NRA about how to deflect attention away from the obvious problem, that “It’s the guns, stupid!” Their previous attempts at deflection, such as stationing armed guards have failed repeatedly and now they are flailing away by suggesting even more outlandish solutions.
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Environmental racism

On the latest episode of Last Week Tonight John Oliver discusses how historic racial discrimination practices have resulted in poor and minority communities ending up living in highly polluted areas, where the life expectancy can be ten years below nearby communities that are not similarly polluted. He describes one community where the lead levels are hundreds of times above acceptable limit, so that signs are posted on yards telling children not to play on the grass or in the dirt! That is like asking children not to breathe the air.
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Trump and toilets

Seth Meyers had a pretty funny A Closer Look segment where he discusses, among other things, Trump’s obsession with low water flow from faucets and that toilets no longer flush properly.

I have no idea what Trump is complaining about. I never experience any of the problems that he describes and I don’t even live in the luxury world that he does. Meyers has a theory about why Trump is convinced that toilets don’t flush properly. It is because he repeatedly tries to flush documents down them, as aides have said.

Trump also has an obsession about windmills. He seems to spend a lot of time at his rallies talking about both. It may simply be that when he speaks at these rallies, he is on autopilot, just wandering through the various topics he has spoken of again and again, so that no new material or real thought is necessary. That may be why he forgets the names of the people he is supposed to endorse, even though the rally was held for that specific purpose.

What a weird, weird, man.