Odd Bits - The Dead Pool Edition

Let’s talk about some things that happened:

The Mitch is Back

I saw that Mitch McConnell thinks the labor shortage will end once people run out of stimulus money. He said: “You've got a whole lot of people sitting on the sidelines because, frankly, they're flush for the moment. What we've got to hope is once they run out of money, they'll start concluding it's better to work than not to work."

Right. The $1400 they gave out a year ago is keeping unemployed people from getting jobs. People talk about politicians being removed from the common man but this guy embodies entitled ignorance. How far does this guy think $1400 goes when you’re not working for a year or more? Even considering that some states paid out higher amounts in unemployment, and that stopped ages ago.

No, Mitch, people are tired of scraping for loose change earned by doing shitty jobs. People can’t get child care for less than they’d make doing menial part-time work.

Mitch just pines for the good old days when people would flop all over each other trying to pick up the tidbits tossed out by the rich, like so many carp in an amusement park pond. He couldn’t be further removed from the average Kentuckian if he was assembled from a kit and lived in a crate under his desk.

“Did I Do Thaaat?”

Big surprise… That guy whose plight was carried by all the right-wing “news” outlets because his garage was burned and defaced with spray paint saying “Biden 2020”, and blamed it on Antifa and Black Lives Matters, actually staged the whole thing himself. It was an attempt to scam $300,000 out of his insurance company, $61,000 of which was actually paid out.

See, this is why conservatives’ first reaction to any obvious malfeasance on their own part is to claim it was a false-flag operation. Why? Because that’s what they do, over and over again. The longer I observe, the more obvious it becomes that whenever Republicans make accusations against Democrats, it’s something that they’re already doing.

I presume TFG, down in Mir-a-Lago, asking if he can get this guy on the payroll.

And Speaking of TFG…

Who had Ivana Trump in the death pool? That was kind of a surprise. And the timing of it, right before The Donald and his spawn were due to testify under oath? I’ve seen a small undercurrent of liberals wondering if maybe she was “helped” down the stairs as a way to keep kicking that “under oath” thing down the road. But there’s been nothing from the big players.

Can you imagine if the pump was on the other foot and something similar happened to Hillary before ex-President Clinton was supposed to testify about something? The entirety of the right-wing political and media apparatus would be howling about it being evidence that Clinton is an evil, murderous, mastermind. Hell, Rush Limbaugh would come back from the dead just to get in on that feeding frenzy.

Come to think of it, maybe the authorities should look into this situation more aggressively. It totally IS something Republicans routinely accuse Democrats of doing (mostly the Clintons), and as I just posited above, they’re not blaming if they’re not already doing it themselves. I wonder if they still have a tap on Roger Stone. This seems like his kind of dirty work.

Now Hear This

The January 6^th Committee just keeps stacking the bricks, don’t they? Last week they brought on a 2-pronged offensive. First, Pat Cipollone basically confirmed everything Cassidy Hutchinson said the week before, and I presume much more. They only presented him confirming prior testimony but said they’d feature him more in the next hearing. So we have THAT to look forward to, which is nice.

They really raked Sydney “The Kraken” Powell over the coals, and deservedly so. She seemed nuttier than a shithouse rat, and that was based on recorded testimony. Who knows what kind of crazy is released behind closed doors.

The telling thing to me is that when she was defending herself against the Dominion lawsuit, she said, “No reasonable person would think what (she) said was true.” But there she was, selling that bullshit to the President and his legal team, right there in the Oval Office. So obviously we can conclude that TFG isn’t a reasonable person, although there’s a lot more than just this incident on which one can make that assessment.

He actually wanted to put her in charge of analyzing the fraud charges they were drumming up, despite her having zero applicable experience. The only qualification she needed was being a complete toady, who would draw conclusions first and then make the facts fit later on. Had she been the Georgia Secretary of State, she definitely would have found those 11,000 votes he was looking for.

The other prong was the testimony of two outsiders, one guy who worked with the Oath Keepers, who testified to their essential nature. (White nationalism and racism.)

The other guy was just a random schmo who showed up in DC for the rally and followed the crowd into the Capitol building. He said he really believed the election was stolen because that’s what he heard on Fox “News.” But by doing further investigation, he realized that he’d been lied to. (Imagine that.) All it cost him was his job and his house.

When asked if he learned anything from his experience, he said, "Take the blinders off and see what’s going on.” That will never happen to anyone who continues to rely on Fox for their information.

I hope these guys got into the Witness Protection program when they were done because they’re just regular guys who don’t get a security detail. Both of their lives are going to become a living hell of harassment, intimidation, and death threats. I wish them well.

The Voting Bluz

Tomorrow is Election Day for Maryland’s primaries. Sweetpea and I have already turned in our ballots. We got them in the mail a few weeks ago, and once completed, we submitted them at a drop box about a mile down the street. You can also mail it but I like that finality of putting it in the box ourselves. I wish every American could vote that easily but judging by all the barriers erected by the Red States, that’s the last thing Republicans want.

Sweetpea and I know we're fortunate that we live in a state that works to make it easier to vote, rather than suppressing it. We signed up online to have ballots mailed to us in perpetuity. (There was also an option for just this year but we like this method of voting and plan for it to become our norm.)

Primary Day is the de facto BIG election around this reliably Blue state, except when it comes to the governor’s race. You never know who’s going to pop for Governor. In the recent races the Republicans won, I thought the Democratic candidates were empty suits, devoid of personality. They were aggressively unmemorable. One was a woman, and another was Black. Neither characteristic drove people to the polls.

There was a whole slate of Democrats running for the nomination. Frankly, I’d be happy with several of them. I ended up voting for Peter Franchot, who is our current Comptroller. He’s not the most inspiring but I figured he knows how State government runs and should be able to step in and be effective right away. Tom Perez would also be a fine governor, but former Obama cabinet members don’t seem to have much juice when running on their own. Wes Moore is backed by the teachers' unions, so I’d be OK with him too. Having a solid Education guy would make Sweetpea (the elementary school teacher) happy. I haven’t heard any of them speak or debate and you can’t really go by their commercials, so I have no idea who may be a stiff and who is not.

It’s kind of a cage match on the GOP side, with Trumper Dan Cox vs Gov. Larry Hogan cabinet member Kelly Schultz. I think the Democrats are involving themselves in this one to promote Cox because he’d be much easier to beat. Larry Hogan won two terms because he’s a non-wingnut Republican (who knows he has to deal with a veto-proof legislature). I’m sure things will clarify long before this November.