Samantha Bee takes a close look at the absurd claims being made by anti-mask zealots that include conspiracy theories.
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Mano Singham
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Samantha Bee takes a close look at the absurd claims being made by anti-mask zealots that include conspiracy theories.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Seth Meyers is back from a break and he does not pull his punches about the way Trump, his administration, and his Republican enablers have completely lost the plot on dealing with the crisis.
The NFL’s Washington football team announced today that they are dropping the racist team name and the logo. After sponsors and advertisers abandoned him, Snyder finally capitulated, despite vowing in 2013 never to change the name and logo.
Washington owner Dan Snyder announced in a 3 July statement that his team were launching a “thorough review” of the 87-year-old nickname and that the NFL supported the idea. That came in the aftermath of the team’s prominent sponsors, FedEx, Nike, Pepsi and Bank of America, asking them to change the name. Until that corporate pressure was applied, Snyder had shown no indication he would change the name since buying the team in 1999. Indeed, in 2013 he told USA Today that he would not change the team’s name and the newspaper could put his quote “in all caps”.
FedEx is the title sponsor of the team’s stadium in Landover, Maryland, and the chief executive, Frederick Smith, is a minority owner. Nike and other companies have pulled team equipment from their online stores.
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Because Trump has made such a hash of the response to the pandemic, we are going to see a cascade of problems, each one following the other like dominos. And the very next one is going to hit very soon, as John Oliver points out.
The above sign, without the mask requirement, is commonly found posted at the entrance to many business establishments in the US and has been so for a long time. As far as I am aware, it has not caused any controversy and shirtless or shoeless people have not threatened the businesses with lawsuits. And yet, because mask wearing has been made into a culture war issue by Donald Trump, we now have the bizarre spectacle of people doing just that. Take this case:
Hugo’s Tacos, a beloved LA chain, announced Sunday that it was temporarily closing both its taco stands after its employees reported increasing harassment from customers who refused to wear masks during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The harassment – ranging from racial slurs to food and objects being thrown at employees – “has taken a toll” on staff, CEO and part-owner Bill Kohne told BuzzFeed News. Kohne said he wants to give his employees a break as the company works toward solutions to better protect them.
The recent protests and demonstration have largely featured young people of diverse backgrounds facing off against the police or Trump-supporting counter protestors. But Saturday saw something different at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida that has very wealthy, almost exclusively white, residents. It is seen as a reliably very right-wing Republican stronghold and has hosted many fundraisers for such candidates including Trump.
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Is there anything more boring than seeing the vacation photos of other people? What makes it worse is that the people who show you these photos are usually people you know well, making it hard to politely extricate yourself from the situation, as neighbor Bob realizes.
This clip from John Oliver’s show was from back in 2017 but is still timely in the current context of removing statues and other monuments honoring confederate leaders and renaming military bases named after confederate generals.
Seth Meyers weighs in on Trump defending confederacy
At the best of times, the state of US prisons are a scandal but what is happening during the pandemic is unconscionable, with inmates kept in conditions that guarantee that almost all of them will be exposed to the virus. John Oliver examines the problem and provides some common-sense steps that could be taken to ameliorate the situation but of course they are not being done because being seen as soft on criminals is seen by many politicians as a electoral death sentence, even though there is no way to confine the virus to just the prison population.