House January 6 panel subpoenas five Republican House Reps, including wannabe-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. At the risk of going out on a limb, I expect he'll defy the subpoena, because that's what hard guys do! Laws aren't for him; laws are for Those People! All that will endear him with Trump votaries, who hold these two beliefs as irrefutable truth. (As an aside, if justice seems to be moving a little slowly, recall that Joe Lieberman had subpoena power during the Enron hearings but didn't use it.)
Guess what else is causing our current baby formula shortage? Big corporations dissuading our FDA from conducting more regular/more stringent inspections, that's what! Because waaaaaaaah it'll cost us money, though Abbott Nutrition (the corporation with all the contaminated baby food!) spent $5 billion last year just on stock buybacks. Remember: when you give corporations more money, they don't do the right thing. When do they do the right thing? When we make them do the right thing, through vigorous safety inspection and regulation.
Is it nice to know that Tucker Carlson's recent drama about a purported "masculinity crisis" is older than dirt? I'm not sure anymore. Anyway, long before the bow-tied Hungry Man heir, Bernarr Macfadden trained Italian fasicsts and told us they were more vigorous than Americans, which sure turned out to be a laugh once World War II started and Germany had to bail them out, and even President Eisenhower's Council on Youth Fitness came about because we were afraid the Communists were more manly, though today's "Communists" are somehow 97-pound weaklings and unstoppable killers all at once. And if you're tempted to think the guy who went on an all-milk diet seems harmless by comparison, recall that we have just had a two-year education in how health fads can be most emphatically not-harmless.
Republican Governors Youngkin of Virginia and Hogan of Maryland tell our Justice Department to crack down on protests at Supreme Court Justices' houses, but I bet you just can't guess why they can't do that: because our Supreme Court long ago decided that going to the homes of Planned Parenthood workers was also First Amendment-protected free speech! Of course Messrs. Youngkin and Hogan know that; they're just stirring up drama, like all right-wingers do. "(P)reserve the integrity of our American judicial system" my ass -- Sam Alito just made up a rule aiming to scuttle 70 years of American jurisprudence.
Ho hum, Michael Grabell at ProPublica describes "The Plot to Keep Meatpacking Plants Open During COVID-19." Long story short: "the callousness of meatpacking executives and the level of industry influence over the Trump administration were far greater than previously known." Emblematic of that callousness, Tyson implemented mask-wearing and social-distancing on the chicken lines very quickly -- in China, not in the United States! Result: by July of 2020 you could tie over 6% of all COVID-19 cases to meatpacking plants, and then a few months later these meatpacking corporations were all desperate for schools to reopen, and you know why. I hope their 300% profit hikes get them into heaven, because I'm not sure anything else will.
Finally, Arizona Attorney General/Senate candidate Mark Brnovich's 2020 election lies are so brazen anymore that even Arizona Republicans have slammed him for it. I won't call this drama per se, since everyone can see the extensive documentary evidence of Mr. Brnovich's two-facedness on this issue, but I don't want to give Arizona Republicans too much credit, either, for without that evidence they might have more easily brushed off his evil works. See, thanks to January 6, I can hardly give Republicans the benefit of the doubt anymore. And I don't think that's my failing! Sooner or later, America has to get back to blaming the real villains.
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