Sunday, June 28
·
Recap
of the Week – Coronavirus surge in the U.S.
o
In
response to the Trump administration wanting to get rid of the Affordable Care
Act – “If there’s one thing we have too much of right now, it’s healthcare”
o
So
true – “I will never understand why or how Republicans made ‘not spreading
disease’ part of a culture war”
·
Main Story – Evictions
o
Much
like Patriot Act did a handful of
episodes ago, we focused on this topic because of the looming eviction crisis
that will likely sweep over the country once temporary relief/stopgaps for the
pandemic end
o
Great
point that it’s obscene to hold evictions hearings over Zoom, “a platform
you’re only using because it’s not safe to leave your home”
o
Many
below the poverty line spend more than half
their income on rent – as John said, we already had an affordable housing
crisis, and like so many things in America, the pandemic only brought it into
sharper relief
o
John
did have to give an A-hole landlord credit for using “objectively the correct
way to end any email in 2020” – “…Now let’s get on with our miserable lives”
o
As
usual, the GOP feet-dragging on this is terrible – the footage of Mitch
McConnell languidly suggesting they’ll address the crisis “in a couple weeks”
was bad enough, but then John pointed out that the clip was over a month old
·
And
Now This – Palm Beach County meeting on face masks
o
I
truly don’t understand what it’s like to live in these people’s minds
·
Finally
– Papa John is on TikTok now
o
In
Papa John’s TikTok tour of his enormous ginormous, John fact-checked his
“eagle-mating” sculpture/clock, noting that eagles don’t actually mate in
midair – Cirque du Soleil are “the ones who trapeze-fuck the shit out of each
other way up high”
o
John
described the context in which the now-disgraced former pizza mogul used the
N-word (during a conference call about avoiding PR scandals) as “far and away
the worst, tied only with every other
context”
Sunday, June 28
·
Main Story – Taxes
o
Funny
commercial of people writing raps for TurboTax – “That man is so embarrassing
for white people, his dog actually turned into a Black Panther”
o
The
story was on sites like TurboTax that advertise themselves as free but force
people to pay for their service most of the time. Loved this response about a
woman whose fee ate up a third of her refund – “A third? TurboTax, who do you
think you are, Ticketmaster?”
o
Oh
man, the footage from those old congressional hearings with Republicans
repeatedly calling the IRS “Gestapo-like” – “I don’t know what’s more
anti-Semitic here, minimizing the Holocause or implying that millions of Jews
died from being audited”
o
I
had no idea that the IRS has had their funding so reduced in recent years – in
addition to benefitting the tax-prep lobby, it also means they can’t really
afford to audit rich people
o
Much
like their own site, TurboTax made two sites in their offer to “help” the IRS
with stimulus checks, one linked to their own for-pay site and a harder-to-find
one for the actual IRS (a very intentionally-boring one, Hasan pointed out –
“There is no Squarespace template called Soviet Union DMV”)
·
Staying
sane in the age of corona
o
Not
a full Article II, but Hasan included a brief message to wrap up this episode
cycle, talking about how everyone’s feeling right now
o
So
much truth – “I wake up and I reach for my phone instead of looking at my wife,
and I’m like, ‘Let me figure out what’s wrong in the world, let me see what’s
broken.’ I just take an espresso shot of anxiety right to the brain”
o
I
really liked what he said about the difficulty of living through history, as
opposed to reading about history
where “we know how the story’s gonna end”
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