The California recall election shows dramatically that you can only cry wolf so many times before people stop believing you. Trump-loving Larry Elder spent most of the election day claiming that he had discovered patterns of fraud in the vote tallies. There’s just one problem — as most of us know, vote tallies are not released until the election is over.
The final tallies won’t be in for almost a week, but it is clear that Newsom won in a landslide, with record turnout especially by democrats.
But some people believed the Republicans anyway. I wonder who that might have been. Maybe this comparison of two graphics can shed some light.
Stephen Colbert cheers on Biden’s speech, getting tough on requiring people to get vaccinated.
Electoral-Vote also has a good story about the hypocrisy of people who think the President doesn’t have the legal power to require people to get vaccinated.
At a school district board meeting in Texas on Monday, a father used irony and sarcasm to make the point that there are rules that we all should follow for the good of our country and our fellow citizens. He mocked the current crazy psuedo libertarian mindset against wearing masks and getting vaccinated with several examples:
On the way over here, I ran three stop signs and four red lights. I almost killed somebody out there, but by God, it’s my roads too. So I have every right to drive as fast as I want to, make the turns that I want to. I got over here to the school today and the parking lot’s full, and I decided I was going to park wherever the hell I want to. Which in this case happened to be handicapped.
While he was saying this, he stripped down to his underwear, saying he “hates clothes”. Watch the video:
He made an excellent point. Ain’t it the naked truth!
How ironic is it that today is the day that just under 9 million Americans lost their unemployment benefits. On “Labor Day”. These are special benefits enacted because of the Covid pandemic, going to people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
During the Great Recession, jobless benefits were extended from when the recession started in 2008-2009, all the way until 2013. The current pandemic is more severe, and isn’t even over with new variants appearing, and yet the benefits were killed in less than 2 years after the pandemic started.
Some (mostly Republican) states ended their jobless benefits even earlier, but multiple studies have shown that ending benefits had almost no effect on increasing the number of people looking for work. Some states ended benefits because of a false belief that the benefits were encouraging lazy people to not work.
Instead, with less money being spent by people who are unemployed, it is believed that ending the previous unemployment benefits will actually hurt the economy, and lead to additional job losses.
I’m getting convinced that unless a significant portion of the people who believe the coronavirus is a hoax suddenly wake up and decide to get vaccinated and wear a mask, the pandemic will never end, and will just be something we live with (or die with).
There have been a couple of really good opinion pieces in the Washington Post recently about Tucker Carlson and his trip to Hungary (or was it Mordor?).
For example, Michael Gerson writes under the headline of “Tucker Carlson’s Hungarian adventure gives right-wing populists a new tagline: Disdain America first“. Here’s a little taste:
Tucker Carlson and the right-wing populists’ weird fascination with Viktor Orban’s Hungary — revealed during Carlson’s recent valentine visit to the country — is slightly less weird when you consider the context.
The country such populists leave behind when flying to Budapest — in their telling — is in pretty dismal shape. The United States is a nation in which the valiantly unvaccinated are assaulted by disease-ridden border violators and subject (in Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s words) to “a biomedical security state.” It is a nation in which the most recent presidential election was stolen by a nationwide conspiracy of Republican state election officials, Black mayors and Communist Chinese hackers. It is a nation in which pedophile socialists comprise a “deep state” dedicated to the confiscation of guns and Bibles. It is a nation in which Marxist advocates of critical race theory teach children to disdain America for all the wrong reasons — things such as slavery and segregation — rather than for the right reasons, such as the removal of Confederate statues and the very existence of Drag Queen Story Hour.
What’s a right-wing populist to do? Why, trade all that they hate about America for a two-bit authoritarian regime. Especially one that is racist. And especially one in which they don’t have to live:
All but the most committed political pilgrims will eventually fly home to the United States from Hungary. And what a disappointing return that will be — to a diverse, colorful country of gloriously varied traditions. But at least MAGA World now has an easily summarized foreign policy: Disdain America first.
But wait, there’s more! And there’s satire, which always gets my attention! Alexandra Petri headlines “Forget Hungary. Tucker Carlson is all about Mordor now.” (You knew I’d get back to that Mordor quip eventually!)
I certainly did enjoy my fun speaking engagements in Hungary and quality time with Viktor Orbán […] But that is all behind me now.
I am honored to announce I will be speaking next week at the Mordor Summit in Barad-dur at the invitation of Dark Lord Sauron! This is the future of conservatism, and I’m excited to throw open the Overton Window and let in the nazguls.
God, what a difference from America. Honestly, my country makes me sick, and I look forward to croaking that out next week before a rapt audience of trolls and, if I’m lucky, a balrog. A pluralistic democracy founded on free and fair elections in which what binds us is not ethnicity or the shared fear of the watchful, unblinking eye of Sauron, but an idea? Disgusting.
According to a few sources, Donald Trump has decided to run for president again in 2024.
Is it time to start planning a move to another, more sane country?
Of course, this is probably one of Trump’s trial balloons — he sends out rumors that he is going to do something controversial, just to see how the public (especially his base) responds to it (and to feed his ego, of course). So this could just be more noise.
I pray it is.
In other Trump news, I saw someone refer to him as “Pobrecheetoh” — I love it!
According to FiveThirtyEight, the popularity of Covid vaccination mandates is now increasing (probably in response to the Delta variant). These mandates can come from the hospitality industry, such as bars and restaurants that allow only vaccinated people to enter, employers who require their employees to be vaccinated, schools or universities, or even from federal or state governments.
According to a recent poll, 64% of Americans approve of the government mandating that everyone get vaccinated.
As you might expect, most of the support for mandates comes from people who have already been vaccinated. After all, if you trust the vaccines, and have seen the news that virtually all new Covid cases are happening among the unvaccinated, then of course you want other people to get vaccinated. In fact, right now a fully vaccinated person has a higher probability of getting accidentally electrocuted, than of developing severe coronavirus symptoms.
But here’s the irony: 28% of unvaccinatedAmericans support mandatory vaccination. How could this be?
You want to get vaccinated, but your spouse or (if young) your parents won’t let you. You want someone to help!
Your friends are anti-vaxxers, and you don’t dare cross them.
Like a lemming, if everyone has to, then that will convince you.
Does anyone have any other good ideas? I can’t figure this out!
SeditionTracker.com tracks people who are suspected of participating in the January 6 Capitol riot. This includes:
559 suspects, who have been charged with a crime
Of those charged, so far 267 have been indicted (48%)
Of the indicted, 1 has died, 1 has had their case dismissed, and 26 have been convicted
Of the convicted, 1 has been sentenced
The site shows photos of the suspects. You can also track them by date (the first people were charged on Jan 7), by name, by state, and by status.
Note that people are continuing to be charged. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but at least they are still turning. I’m still hoping they indict the Congresspeople who participated in the insurrection.
In this case, SOS stands for Save Our Snopes. I’m sure all my regular readers know who Snopes is. But do you know that Snopes has been under attack? There is a chance that we could lose them, so they are sending out an SOS call. If you want to find out more about this, and what you can do to help, see https://www.snopes.com/sos/
Comics don’t need to make anything up anymore, because reality is more bizarre than anyone can actually imagine. Trump’s base has absolutely gone off the deep end, and because they can change the result of a Republican primary, they are taking Republican politicians with them. Where do we go from here?
Last week, Newsmax host Rob Schmitt was talking with a Texas A&M professor on the air, and got philosophical:
You know, one thing I’ve always thought, and maybe you can guide me on this because, obviously, I’m not a doctor. But I’ve always thought about vaccines, and I always think about just nature and the way everything works. And I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there — maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that. Do you follow what I’m saying? Does that make sense to somebody in medicine?
This seems very ironic to me. Schmitt is suggesting that nature is purposely killing off some specific population, and we shouldn’t mess with it.
However, maybe he is on to something there, but there is a twist. Almost all Covid-19 cases are among people who have not been vaccinated, and the people who refuse to be vaccinated are overwhelmingly white and Republican (and supporters of Donald Trump).
If these people are unwilling to protect themselves from a deadly disease (over 600,000 Americans have died from Covid), who are we to argue with Mother Nature and convince them to protect themselves?
Was it ever in doubt that as soon as we started getting vaccinated, that people would get complacent and the first holiday weekend that came along would cause a spike in Covid cases? What’s really ironic about this is that the cases are all located in places where people haven’t been getting vaccinated much. You know, places that voted for Trump for president.
So I’m back to wearing a mask in public again. Just in case. Besides, I’ve been wearing a mask so long, it really doesn’t bother me.
