Seth Meyers says that their hero Donald Trump largely becoming a non-entity since leaving office and the popularity of Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief has resulted in Fox News lurching from one ridiculous set of talking points to another in their efforts to try and find something, anything at all, that their viewers can get outraged over.
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Some of the most common rules are riddled with exceptions, such as this one.
Eddie Izzard also has a bit on this topic.
A 65-year old woman was arrested because she refused to wear a mask inside a bank in Texas.
Police issued a warrant for the arrest of Terry Wright, 65, of Grants Pass, Oregon. The incident on Thursday at a Bank of America in Galveston was captured by the officer’s body camera, the Galveston County Daily News reported.
Police said they had obtained an arrest warrant on resisting arrest and criminal trespassing charges.
Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, has ended statewide orders requiring people to wear face masks in public places, declaring businesses should decide for themselves what Covid-19 precautions to take on their properties. Many businesses have kept their own mask rules in place.
…Wright told the officer the law said she didn’t have to wear a mask. As the officer took out handcuffs, she pulled away and began to walk toward the door. The officer stopped her and forced her to the ground. After she was handcuffed, she complained her foot was injured.
…Police said Wright suffered minor injuries during the struggle and was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Wright told the Washington Post she has never covered her face inside stores, even when the statewide mandate was in place.
Losing one’s job is not only a traumatic experience, it often leads to a cascade of disasters such as losing one’s home. Unemployment insurance is meant to tide people over until they find another job. But some political leaders, especially Republicans, seem to view it as a reward for lazy people. He describes how hard it is for people to get unemployment benefits and how some states like Florida cut the premiums that companies are supposed to put into the unemployment fund and then go out of their way to make things difficult for people to apply for relief.
You know how it is when a small child is bored and they discover something that annoys people and repeatedly do it just to get attention? That seems to be what is happening with Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon). After being stripped of all her committee assignments for being an unreconstructed conspiracist, she has decided to use one of the procedural rules to slow down the work of Congress. Her choice of tactic is to put forward a motion to adjourn, something that has to be dealt with before business can continue and can take up to half an hour. She has started using it so often that even some of her Republican colleagues are getting fed up at the waste of time with nothing to gain, and more and more of them are voting against her motion. Her latest effort was opposed by forty Republicans, double the week before. Basically, Greene is generating bipartisanship!
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How Kyrsten Sinema went from progressive to Washington swamp dweller
When Kyrsten Sinema was first elected from Arizona to the House of Representatives back in 2012 and later to the Senate in 2018, she broke through several barriers
Freshly elected to the Senate, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D) represents a slew of “firsts.” She will be Arizona’s first female senator. She was the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress and carries that first with her to the Senate. And the former Mormon was the first person sent to Congress to claim no religion. After winning her congressional seat in 2012, she was sworn in on the Constitution, forgoing the Bible chosen by Christians – the dominant religion for members of Congress, especially those from Arizona.
This cartoon gets it exactly right. Fox News and the other members of the nutty right wing echo chamber go on and on about the estate of Dr. Seuss withdrawing six of his earlier books because they have offensive images but they never show the images they are defending. If you want, you can find these images on the internet, like here.
This is so obviously offensive by today’s standards that even the whitest Fox News viewer would cringe at seeing it. And that would ruin the whole schtick. If Fox viewers realized that the images in question actually were offensive, and not just the fever dreams of some lefty social justice warriors, they’d realize that Fox was duping them.
So no pictures for Fox! Much better to rail endlessly and let their audience assume that this is just some ridiculous liberal freakout over nothing. That’s much better for ratings.
The weird guy known as QAnon shaman who was part of the insurrection in the US Capitol and sat the Senate president’s chair and even said a prayer is now in jail. The past weekend, he gave an interview to the CBS show 60 Minutes+. Without his makeup and regalia, he cuts quite a different figure. It appears that he lives with his mother who was also interviewed and she seems to be an enabler of his idiocy.
The $1.9 trillion stimulus package proposed by Joe Biden is on the way to becoming law. The US senate passed by a strict partisan 50-49 vote a version of it that was different from what the House of Representatives passed earlier in the week. One Republican senator was absent which meant that vice-president Kamala Harris did not have to cast a tie-breaking vote. Republicans delayed the process as much as they could by introducing amendment after amendment that was defeated, with one senator even invoking a rule that resulted in aides reading aloud the entire text of the 628 page bill, a futile process whose only effect was to waste 11 hours of time.
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