Back in late December Reuters published an excellent investigation of all the problems Tesla cars have been having – which the corporation has known about, and has been blaming on drivers. Ha ha ha it’s your fault your front right suspension has completely collapsed while you were driving! But we make the best cars! And come on, give us some room to grow, we haven’t been around for 400 years like Ford! This could only happen in an America where shareholder wealth is more important than customers’ lives.
French researchers find that hydroxychloroquine may have killed almost 17,000 folks, in six countries (Italy, Belgium, France, Turkey, Spain, and the United States) over a period of four months (March to July 2020) at pandemic’s beginning. One is tempted to say that must be a very small percentage of folks who died from COVID (the U.S. reached 2,000 deaths almost every day in April of 2020, for example), but you won’t find that reassuring if it happened to someone you love. What a hoot it was to have our President tell people to take it, saying “what do you have to lose?”
Americans for Tax Fairness study finds that Americans worth $100 million and up are holding an astounding $8.5 trillion in untaxed wealth. How is this possible? Because most ultra-rich wealth isn’t exactly liquid – it consists of unsold (or “unrealized”) real estate and hifalutin investments, which rich folks then use as collateral to take out low-interest loans to subsidize their lives (apparently adding five points to the prime interest rate didn’t stamp out these low-interest loans as I’d hoped). Thrilling that efforts to tap into this untaxed wealth “have virtually no support among Republicans.” Remember that if Donald Trump tries to run to Joe Biden’s left, because he’s shameless enough to do that.
When I hear that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on an Iranian ceremony (commemorating the Revolutionary Guard commander assassinated by President Trump in 2019), I am reminded that every fundamentalist thinks his fundamentalist forebears are sellouts. Remember when young right-wingers took shots at William F. Buckley, Jr., after he came out against the Iraq War? Like any of those little snot-noses would have been anything without him! Anyway, think the Tha Bush Mobb gamed out a member of the “Axis of Evil” finding itself in the crosshairs of a terrorist threat midwifed by the Iraq war? Of course they did! The “war on terror” is just the gift that keeps on giving! And it’s well past time we broke this wheel.
With the completely shocking news that FAA officials have ordered the grounding of over 170 Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after a window blew out on one of its planes while it was in the air, let’s take the wayback machine to 2019, when two Boeing 737 Max planed crashed in five months. You may not be surprised by the story’s critical elements: shareholder wealth being more important than customers’ lives, banksters running out engineers and making absurd demands of them because love of money. Yes, engineers should run more of America than they do. Certainly banksters shouldn’t! Banksters ruin everything!
You already know that Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley has lately omitted slavery while listing Civil War causes – but you may not know that she managed to deploy the phrase “I had Black friends growing up” in explaining that omission. Her larger point, apparently, was that slavery was so obvious it didn’t need to be mentioned. Of course describing slavery in the passive voice, i.e., “(i)t is a very talked about thing,” reveals that Nikki Haley fears offending assholes. Never fear offending assholes! Assholes live to be offended, and if you don’t offend them, they’ll just pretend you did!
Finally, Donald Trump actually claims that we could have “negotiated” the Civil War rather than fight it. Of course we should not “negotiate” enslaving Black men, women, and children – and that was why we fought the Civil War; just read President Lincoln’s private letters, in which he won’t STFU about how much he hates slavery and how happy he’ll be when it’s gone – but we should also remember that The Dealmaker only makes deals that benefit him, and he’d prefer making deals that benefit only him. Sadly, he’ll probably have the sense to skip over the next rhetorical step – World War II is something that could have been negotiated! You’d never have heard of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! – and just blame Teh Libruls for the Holocaust.
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