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Sunday, July 31
· Recap of the Week – Search for new U.K. prime minister
o Several quick little references/blurbs at the start of the recap. I loved this description of Sen. Joe Manchin actually agreeing to vote for a bill – “And in D.C., West Virginia’s nastiest little coal skank finally decided to act like a Democrat for once.”
o Also excellent? John’s defense of a walrus in Norway who’s going around climbing onto people’s boats in the harbor – “Freya is not a mosquito you can just swat away. She’s a 1300-pound water queen, and guess what? She’s the captain now!”
o While John celebrated Boris Johnson resigning as prime minister, he wasn’t enthusiastic about Johnson’s potential replacements – Of Elizabeth Truss, he said, “Somehow, Truss comes across as half kindergarten teacher, half kindergarten student.”
· And Now This – News anchors daydream about winning the lottery
o This exchange made me smile – “Have you ever won the lottery?” “I can’t say I have, ‘cause I’m still sitting here.”
· Main Story – Mental Health Care
o Oh, 1950s newsreels…. This one showed nurses going to a beauty parlor to learn some cosmetic therapy(?) skills – “I don’t know what is more alarming there: nurses being forced to take on the skills of a Sephora brand ambassador, or that fact that ‘Can Makeup Cure Sad?’ sounds like an episode that Dr. Oz definitely did.”
o This issue is even more urgent during the pandemic – In 2019, 1 out of 10 Americans reported feelings of depression or anxiety, a number that jumped to 4 out of 10 in 2020.
o John was appalled at children in need of residential mental-health treatment stuck in hospital beds for weeks while they wait for facilities to have an open spot – “You can’t just put off mental health care indefinitely. It’s not a check-engine light or a New Yorker article you’re ‘definitely gonna finish.’ (It’s been sitting next to the toilet since the Obama administration—accept defeat.)”
o We also looked at how mental healthcare access is even tougher for patients seeking a psychologist of color, since 84% of U.S. psychologists are white – “Wow. ‘I couldn’t find a Black man for my life’ isn’t something you expect to hear about finding a therapist. It’s something you more expect to hear about the crowd on January 6th or all ten seasons of Friends.”
o John described app-based therapy services, like Better Help or Talk Space, as “basically Uber for your brain.”
o Unfortunately, while those companies can get over some of the access hurdles, that doesn’t mean patients are receiving adequate care – One former Cerebral worker said, “It’s like a fast-food restaurant: get as many people in as quickly as you can.”
o Excellent, albeit brutal, summation – “That shortage speaks to a mental healthcare system that is so dysfunctional, it almost seems designed to prevent patients from accessing it or providers from entering the field.”
o Another issue is that, even when providers are available, insurance companies often do everything they can to deny coverage, as two mental providers detailed under strict anonymity – “For what it’s worth, it is just not a great sign that insurance companies are now so powerful that mental health providers feel they have to go on the news like they’re in witness protection after seeing someone get whacked.”
o Ouch – “It is often said that correctional facilities have become the largest providers of mental healthcare services in our country. Basically, we’ve gone from warehousing people with mental illness in buildings that felt like prisons to warehousing them in actual prisons instead. It’s very much the ‘New Look, Same Great Taste’ of America’s failures.”
· And Now This – The world’s horniest televangelist
o Just what it says on the tin, so creepy – “Everywhere I go, I help people to stroke the Bible, kiss it, then I say, ‘Rub it over your face.’”
o Of course, not all of his horny comments were about the Bible – Most of them were actually just plain horny, such as, “I don’t know why cut-offs are sexy, but they are.”
Monday, August 1
· Headlines – Biden resumes construction on areas of the border wall, Trump buries ex-wife at New Jersey golf club
o Trevor’s reaction to the Mega Millions lottery winner cracked me up – “It’s wild to me that we just gave a billion dollars to someone who has proven they’re bad with money. Why are you playing the lottery?!”
o Good line, re: Biden resuming construction on parts of the wall – “It looks like Biden is completing parts of Trump’s unfinished business. So… if I was Mike Pence right now, I’d be nervous as hell.”
o Loved this bit – “Fox News doesn’t know what to do with these kinds of stories, you know? Because they want the wall, but they also hate Joe Biden. You know? They’re like, ‘Did you see what Biden is doing? He was against the wall, but now he’s building it. I guess we have to vote for him? How does this work?”
o Trevor had an excellent rebuttal to the administration’s explanation that they’re walling off areas of the border at a river where it’s dangerous to cross – “Although if you really wanted to make crossing a river safer, why wouldn’t you just build a bridge instead of adding a wall?”
o So Trump’s first wife is buried on the grounds of one of his golf clubs… which now entitles the property to tax breaks for “cemeteries” – “Wow. A lot of people say, ‘I’ll pay taxes over my dead body!’ Trump means it. Just someone else’s body.”
o Great bit – “All this tax break does is incentivize you to be a weirdo. Who came up with this? It almost feels like the law was written by a serial killer. Just like, ‘There should be a law that if you bury a body in your yard you don’t have to pay taxes anymore.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, the senator whose interns keep disappearing makes a good point. The motion passes.’”
· CP Time (Roy) – House music
o This made me laugh – “But would believe that this genre of music has its origins in the Black community? Of course you would—it’s CP Time. You never heard me say, ‘Surprise! It’s Caucasians.’”
o I liked Roy’s aside during a description of “Disco Demolition night” in the ‘70s – “By the way, here’s a tip. If you’re ever at a mass burning, you’re probably on the wrong side.”
o One of the pioneers Roy singled out was Martha Wash, best known for her hit with the Weather Girls “It’s Raining Men” – “Unfortunately, due to climate change it’s raining men harder and longer than ever before.”
· Interview – Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg
o Buttigieg described some of the projects that last year’s infrastructure act are going to, like updates for a bridge in New Jersey – “This bridge, it’s the finest construction engineering from the Roosevelt administration. The Teddy Roosevelt administration.”
o Good point from Trevor – “This is something I found particularly strange in American politics. Everyone likes infrastructure. However, it seems like people are more or less likely to like it depending on who is building the infrastructure.”
o Buttigieg noted that, while many Republicans did vote for the infrastructure bill, many of those who didn’t have now written to his department asking for some of the funding it provided – “In the policy world, I’d call it the sincerest form of flattery. When they vote against your stuff and then they ask you to send it to their district.”
o Trevor asked about the DoT’s plans for rail transit – He asked why many current rail options are substandard, and Buttigieg answered, “Because you get what you pay for. And this country, for basically as long as you and I have been alive, has been underinvesting in rail. And when you do that, there is a real cost to that.”
o They also discussed the pearl-clutching over the claim that Buttigieg thinks “roads are racist” – Buttigieg’s actual explanation was more for measured, saying, “The very fact that we have the phrase ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ in American English language tells you something about how infrastructure—which is supposed to connect—can also be used to divide, often on racial lines, and we’ve got to face that, and we can do something about it.”
Tuesday, August 2
· Headlines – Nancy Pelosi travels to Taiwan, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri killed, Missouri Republican primary
o Funny reaction to a blurb about a traveler getting a hefty fine for bringing undeclared McDonald’s food into Australia – “When I saw this, I was like, ‘Do you know how poisonous you have to be to get banned from Australia??”
o I smiled at the description of China as “the original build-the-wall country.”
o Good bit – “And it’s crazy that Pelosi just ignored Biden like that. Well, I mean I assume she ignored him. Maybe she just couldn’t understand him, you know. Maybe he was like, ‘Listen, Jack, don’t skedaddle over to the… the Taiwanese, I mean… Come on, man, we need you here in America. You read me, skipper?’ She’s like, ‘You got it, Joe, I’m on my way.’ ‘No!’”
o Valid – “Goddamn. America clipped the world’s most wanted terrorist off of his safe house balcony? I mean, also at this point, maybe we should stop calling them safe houses. No, I mean every terrorist gets killed in a safe house. They should call it a house that you think you’re safe in, but you never know.”
o I loved this observation – “I will say, though, I will say, you know, when you see stories like this, when you see stories about what America’s capable of, this is where you realize there’s really no excuse for the amount of domestic terrorism in America, right? Because Zawahiri lived all the way in Afghanistan, right, in some random safe house in the middle of nowhere, and America knew what time of day he liked to go out onto his balcony. But when a white supremacist posts on Facebook that he’s gonna murder everyone and then buys an AR-15, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, there was no way to stop this, yeah. Oh, if only he liked balconies.’”
o This made me laugh – “And I know some people are saying, ‘Oh, who cares? America killed Al Qaeda’s leader, but Al Qaeda isn’t even in the game anymore. This is like taking out Tom from MySpace.' That’s not the point. The point is, American never forgets. Unless it’s slavery, but everything else, America never forgets.”
o You and me both, Trevor – “They got him with a missile—I’m still stuck on this—a missile filled with swords. This is how I know I’m not cut out for the war room and, like, all of the things you need to do as commander in chief, all these… I know, if I was in that room, I would not have been able to keep my cool in there.”
o Great reaction to Trump simply endorsing “Eric” in a Missouri primary where two candidates were both named Eric – “What an asshole. Turns out the dude even brings infidelity into his endorsements, you know? He’s the first politician to have a side Eric.”
o Ronny was the headline correspondent, and he brought his usual disdain to the headline stories – “What kind of idiot brings McDonald’s to another country? Every country has McDonald’s, okay? There’s McDonald’s in every airport.”
· Interview – Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis
o Karakatsanis advocates that public safety doesn’t mean more police, and his focus on that topic covered a lot of ground – For instance, he called out the media because, “it can narrow our conception of what safety means. We’re constantly being told that there’s all of these threats around us, but the threats that the media and the police and certain large corporations want us to be focused on are not the things that actually most determine our safety.”
o Here one example – “Wage theft alone is about five times the value of all robbery, burglary, larceny, shoplifting combined. And why are we not hearing about it?”
o This was a powerful statement about “law enforcement” officers – “In reality, they only enforce some laws against some people some of the time.”
o The crux of the matter was this – “The actual root causes of harm in our society are not the fact that we’re not policed enough, right? We have the most police of any society, we have the most prisons, prosecutions, courts, judges, probation, parole. If probation, parole, prosecutors, judges, courts—if money spent on that made us safe, we would have the safest society in the history of the world. We don’t.”
o Another good example of things that endanger Americans far more than crime – “Did you know that there are 100,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, and ten million across the globe, because of air pollution? That is five times the number of homicides in the U.S. alone.”
· Interview – Comedian Ms. Pat
o I liked Ms. Pat’s explanation for the heavy subjects she explores in her sitcom, The Ms. Pat Show – “What was great about this show was, we took everything that I’ve been through, and we threw it in with comedy ‘cause that’s what I do with my real-life stand-up. I take the darkest things and I try to find the funny, and then I tell people, ‘You know, you can’t change the past, so why cry about it?’”
o Trevor had a nice description for the show – “Every single episode of the show brings you into a world that you may not be familiar with, but it makes you understand people.”
Wednesday, August 2
· Headlines – Republican primaries, Kansas rejects an amendment to remove abortion rights from the state constitution, Beyoncé makes changes to new album, Alex Jones trial
o Opening blurb on Brad Pitt causing a stir by wearing a skirt to a movie premiere – “It’s also been, like, 200 degrees out every day. The question isn’t why is Brad Pitt wearing skirt, it’s why isn’t every guy wearing a skirt?”
o Relatable – “I’m just gonna say this. This country has too many elections, all right? Yeah, every week it’s like, ‘It’s time to vote.’ ‘But we voted last week.’ ‘No, that was the vote to vote for who we’re voting for this week. Then we’ll vote on when we’ll vote for the next vote.’”
o This cracked me up, in response to Kansans voted not to remove abortion rights from their constitution – With a map of the Midwest in the graphic, Trevor said, “Congratulations, Kansas! It’s days like today I wish I knew which one of these states you were.”
o After Beyoncé removed an ableist slur from a song on her new album, Monica Lewinsky made note of an old Beyoncé song with a sexist reference to her – “Technically, it should be ‘He Bill Clinton’ed on my gown.’ He’s the guy who did all the jizzing! You got to remember who did the thing.”
o I loved this response to Alex Jones’s coughing fit after the prosecutor proved that he’d perjured himself – “You know you’re in trouble when the truth chokes you up like you’re on an episode of Hot Ones.”
· Main Story – Student debt
o Great description – “Student debt is a lot like an STD. Yes, you can get it by accident in college, but then it follows you around for the rest of your life.”
o The story looked at how many older Americans still have student loans, with about a quarter of U.S. student debt held by people over 50 – “Yeah. When you picture someone with student debt, you might think of the cast of Girls, but you should be thinking of the cast of Golden Girls.”
· Interview – Documentarian Ryuji Chua
o Chua studies fish and makes films trying to demonstrate their level of consciousness, in the hopes of convincing people to treat animals more humanely – He repeatedly shied away from Trevor’s attempt to look as his views from a moral standpoint, instead saying, “It’s not about judging people and saying, ‘You’re not as good as you think.’ It’s more about thinking about it from the animal’s perspective.”
o I liked this quote – “For a lot of these animals, we stereotype them in ways where we think that… You know, we call animals in farms livestock. Right, we almost look at them like a something, not a someone, when, in fact, all of them—they can play and have families and build connections, just like dogs, cats, and other animals.”
o For Chua, once he gained a greater understanding of animals, their capabilities, and their experiences as livestock, the issue became very simple – “Because they suffer and suffering matters to them, that’s why I flag it as an issue.”
Thursday, August 4
· Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That – Europe addresses dependence on Russian gas, Brittany Griner sentenced to 9 years in prison, Aaron Rodgers talks about ayahuasca experience, Choco Taco may return, scientists revive organ cells in dead pigs
o This made me laugh – “Vladimir Putin clearly believes all those Instagram quotes about never giving up on your dreams. Goddammit, Vlad! We need more memes about realizing you suck and quitting.”
o Spain has restricted certain businesses from setting their AC below 27°C/80°F to conserve gas – “If you have to set your AC to that temperature, what is the point of even having AC? You might as well just hire some guy to breathe on you.”
o Trevor was disappointed that Aaron Rodgers wasn’t playing football while he was taking ayahuasca, saying, “I’d love to see what kind of plays a quarterback would think of while they’re on the journey, you know” – “Dubowski, I’m going to need you to hug that rainbow, man. Just hug it real hard. All right, Coleman, stop floating.”
o Trevor was hyped about scientists revive dead organs in pigs – “Sweet Jesus in Heaven. Scientists have found a way to bring dead cells back to life. Whole organs, people. Hearts beating again.”
o I loved this – “I feel like you guys are f**king around right now. Pigs are coming back to life, people!”
o Roy, however, was more concerned about the Choco Taco as the headline correspondent – “You don’t want food hopscotching in and out of your life, like the McRib or Lobsterfest. If you gonna be in my life, either be in my life or don’t.”
· Correspondent Piece (Michael) – “Fill Me In”
o Michael’s man-on-the-street game show bit in Times Square – I laughed at the exchange, “Marco Rubio is a…” “Asshole.”
o Disturbing that a news story involving a Skittles lawsuit resulted in the fill-in-the-blank answer “unfit for human consumption”
· Interview – Actor Amandla Stenberg
o Trevor asked Stenberg about how their new film Bodies Bodies Bodies handles its shifting tones (horror/comedy/social commentary) – They said, “It’s definitely a mixed bag of a film. And we were nervous about the tone at moments. But we just wanted people to have fun. I feel like the easiest way to deal with the ugliest parts of ourselves is to have fun while dealing with those things.”
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