One certainty about the Trump coup is that this lumbering mound of seething resentment and ignorance — Trump, that is — isn’t smart enough to have done all this himself. Though the news-consuming public doesn’t seem to care, there are people at work determining who provided that help, and the most interesting facet is where the money is coming from.
The idea that anyone in Trump’s orbit knows what they’re doing is a hard sell because the right wing fever swamps are full of people like this guy, who claimed to be an expert mathematician with proof of voting irregulatiries. He was actually a swing-set installer. This came out as part of the lawsuit filed by Dominion, the voting-machine company, against OAN, one of the “Faker That Fox” new outlets that have sprung up to victimize the rubes.
Anybody who’s ever lost money in the stock market can feel for this guy, sort of: Some hedge fund manager managed to lose $20 billion — billion with a B — in a matter of days back in the spring. Now he’s lying low in New Jersey while the banks he soaked for billions look for ways to get it back. Insert Nelson Muntz “ha ha” here.
The Texas Supreme Court upheld a law that authorizes the arrest of Democratic state lawmakers who refuse to return to the state so the legislature will have a quorum. Fuck secession — isn’t there a mechanism for throwing that shithole state out of the country?
Don’t look now, but big changes are on the horizon for factory farming because a newCalifornia law banning many hideous practices goes into effect soon. It mandates that breeding sow no longer be kept in cages so small they can’t move, and that chicken cages have enough space for the birds to spread their wings.
A lesson in how the media manipulates the news: WDEL covered an anti-mask protest at Christiana Hospital last week that drew a couple of hundred people, so they covered a follow-up protest this week. The headline, “Rallies Continue Against Christiana Care’s Planned Employee Vaccine Mandate,” would lead you to believe that this second rally was as big as the first. The photo that accompanies it tells a different story — there are maybe two dozen mopes out there this time around. I know how this happens, and it’s not because of any intent to mislead — it’s because once an assignment editor sends you out to cover a story, you have to file a story, whether what you witnessed deserves any coverage or not.
One silver lining to Covid — it’s taking a toll on right-wing talk show hosts in Florida who railed against masks and vaccines. One yap-flapper is dead — the headline on that link is “Lessons From the Death of a Dick” — and another is hospitalized. If these people want to die, I wish they’d kill themselves in a manner that didn’t clog up the ICU.
The floor’s yours.