Surprise, surprise! Donald Trump says that Democrats have "probably rigged" the California recall vote, because of mail-in ballots and, also, because "I guess you even have a case where you can make your own ballot." "I guess" -- sometimes he can't help but tell you he's full of crap. He's seen how the recall polls have been going lately, and I suppose he could be getting his excuses ready like a manager talking about injuries before the season even starts -- or he could be suggesting folks who would oppose recalling Mr. Newsom (or, more precisely, folks who would oppose a right-wing knucklehead replacing him as Governor) should stay home tomorrow because it's in the bag anyway. (No, I don't think Republicans and independents inclined to recall Mr. Newsom will stay home because the race is "rigged" -- if anything, I think they'll be more inclined to show up.)
U.S. District Court Judge rules that Florida's "anti-riot" law is unconstitutional, because it was "vague and overbroad" and written in crayon. OK, I made that last part up. Or did I? At least one reputable commentator has wondered how a Harvard Law graduate like Gov. DeSantis can keep losing cases in court, but I suspect that for Gov. DeSantis, winning isn't the point -- play-acting the tough guy is the point, as it is for all of his kind now. What are they going to do, point to their good works? Not the Governor of the state still responsible for around one of every 10 new COVID cases daily in America, that's for sure.
When I hear that Donald Trump's cronies are paying high-school age boys to create internet memes, I say of course he got teenage boys to do his work for him! Who else has that much time on their hands, that little responsibility, and that little awareness of how they come off to sane people? OK, pre-teen boys are worse in all those regards, but they're less able to act like adults, which makes them less dangerous. It gets better: the Trump cronies monetize the memes with obscurely-placed links because of course they do. You might think these teenage boys get a decent slice of that money, until you remember that a human soul is beyond price.
When I hear that "Anti-maskers and Anti-vaxxers Now Present a Real Threat of Violence," I do find myself asking then why are these fools not in jail? Particularly if they're going around filming themselves threatening other people's lives, as some of them are doing. I sure hope it's not because our police secretly sympathize with them. (As an aside, I'm so, so glad to see America's Frontline Doctors getting unearned attention again. If they provide any service at all to our civilization, they prove that advanced degrees do not necessarily correlate with knowledge -- even as they use their advanced degrees as a shield with which to attack the actually informed. Irony really sucks sometimes.)
Mike Giglio at The Intercept worries that "The Forever Wars" we used to fight abroad "Are Coming Home." "War, especially interminable war," he writes, "makes people want to claim the sanctity of combat for themselves and to inject the stakes of conflict into their lives," thus now we have right-wingers calling George Floyd protestors "terrorists" and "insurgents." Surely watching dozens of cop shows whose protagonists get into approximately 22 life-or-death shootouts every calendar year doesn't help, but the fact that "a sense of purpose" is too often "missing from American society" hurts us even more. I wonder where we might have lost our sense of purpose. I kid, of course -- we lost it when President Reagan started dismantling the New Deal state that reinforced that purpose and ensured its endurance.
Finally, as we remember the 20th anniversary of 9.11, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting "(l)ook(s) back on two decades of media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography." And malice, FAIR is perhaps too polite to add -- though some Fox News personalities get covered here, I don't think they did what they did out of weakness or cowardice. Think back now: did you know the Fox News Channel existed before 9.11? Me neither. And now we can't even get our cable corporations to drop them, even as they've lately done much worse than just "get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House."
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