"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Friday, July 3, 2020

News Satire Roundup: June 28th


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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