(This Modern World)

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 $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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The list of tragic deaths of innocent people caused by police and SWAT teams blasting into people’s homes in the middle of the night with battering rams and with their guns firing continues to grow. Some jurisdictions have stopped the use of so-called ‘no-knock’ warrants that allows them to break down doors without warning.

But John Oliver on last week’s Last week Tonight says that there is little difference between a ‘no knock’ warrant and a warrant that requires knocking, since the police are only required to wait only 20 seconds after knocking before breaking down the door. Since they usually arrive in the middle of the night, the 20 second limit is meaningless. Hell, it often takes me longer than that to answer the door even when I am awake and dressed and it is in the middle of the day.
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We are now fed a regular diet of outrage about the most trivial of things. The latest are the ones about the Muppets, the Potato Head toy, and some Dr. Seuss books

These things are definitely ginned up in order to get viewers and clicks. I am pretty certain that the people on Fox News and similar sites (even the most dimwitted) know that these things are silly even as they feign outrage over these pseudo-controversies. But I wonder about their target audience of older, white, right-wing viewers. Do they view these things as serious issues and get angry or do they see them as merely entertaining? I am sure that some do get genuinely fired up but I cannot imagine that it can be a large number. Maybe there is an unspoken agreement in which the people in the media pretend to be outraged and their audience pretends to be angry. Or maybe I am just naive in thinking that adults can’t surely care that much about such things.

Stephen Colbert had a very thoughtful segment on the Dr. Seuss books faux-controversy and gives some children’s books recommendations of his own.