10 "moderate" Republicans make their COVID-19 counterproposal -- and their plan is less than a third of the size of Mr. Biden's. They imagine that if he ignores them they'll be able to say he wasn't really willing to work with them, but Jesus Mary and Joseph we all saw what happened on January 6, and there aren't that many folks who thought we should "work with Republicans" in the first place. And dig Rob Portman of Ohio citing the deficits he helped run up by voting for the 2017 tax "reform" and the two previous corporate welfare-drenched COVID relief packages as a reason not to do something bigger now. A little self-awareness would go a long way.
Mother Jones catches a big pro-Trump online forum actually scrubbing all of its posts between December 19 and January 6 -- which would just so happen to include posts relating to the attempted coup on the 6th. And thus the moderators open themselves up to charges of evidence tampering, since some of these posts had, like, maps of the Capitol and such. Right-wingers whine that all kinds of things are Orwellian these days, but literally removing almost three weeks of posts from your site's historical record is actually Orwellian.
Houston-based immigration lawyer finally says goodbye to the Republican Party, after apparently trying to make his fellow Republicans see the error of their ways these past four years. "I don't pray to any man" makes me want to like him, and I don't want to appear to criticize his apparent laser-focus on immigration policy, but I've been in an unforgiving mood lately, for reasons you might imagine, so I still wonder what, if anything, Mr. Monty had to say of his fellow Republicans calling us "traitor" for opposing the Iraq war back in the day.
Speaking of being unforgiving, I literally don't care that Steve Bannon actually challenged Rudy Giuliani's latest pile of hot-and-steaming on the former's podcast, not so much because challenging Rudy Giuliani is fish-in-a-barrel territory these days, but because Mr. Flood-the-Zone-With-Shit knows that pretending to be "independent" and pretending to "take on your own people" freezes people so you can go in for the rhetorical kill. But I would hope it freezes fewer people than it used to.
Finally, CNN and MSNBC appear, at long last, to compete with Fox News on a level playing field, not so much because CNN and MSNBC are gaining viewers as because Fox News is losing them. I long to live in an era where we hear the words "right-wing news channel" and immediately think "crazy so don't watch even for the laughs," but in the meantime, suffice it to say that even a junkie can only take in so much junk, and once you have multiple sources of junk available to you, well, it's hard for any one dealer to rise above the rest. Did I say junk? I meant rage. Insofar as there's a difference.
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