Alas, the Boston Celtics’ attempt to make history, a la the 2004 Red Sox, fell woefully short last night. Now we’ll have a Denver and Miami team in the finals. No offense to Nugget and Heat fans, but I’m pretty sure the TV coverage for the series would have preferred another matchup. I predict low ratings.
Republicans, as they always do, are playing chicken with the debt ceiling, knowing they can vote against raising it if they don’t get the cuts they want - without raising taxes or cutting defense, of course - while Democrats, as they always do, will blink, bite the bullet, and accept the cuts they don’t want and vote to pass it because they’re, unlike MTG et al., unwilling to have the disaster of default.
Rep. Comer essentially admitted that his committee’s investigation into Hunter Biden is to hurt the president’s favorability and boost Trump. Well, everyone knew that already. But still. Shades of McCarthy bragging back in the day that the purpose of the Benghazi hearings was to bring down Hillary Clinton.
Putin has put all those prosecuting Trump or refusing to give in to his election fraud claims on his list of sanctions. And that the woman killed trying to storm the Capitol was a simple protestor who was assassinated. This from an autocrat who routinely imprisons protestors of his regime. Never has his relationship with Trump been more blatant. Hey, I’m a thriller writer, but I wouldn’t have dared put this plot into a fictional story. No one - until now, I guess - would find it credible!
Can Congress please pass a law banning pharmaceutical ads on TV? Only one other country in the world does that - New Zealand. No offense, kiwis, but what’s your excuse? Ours is Congress in the tank for big Pharma. So we won’t ban the ads that pit patients against their doctors. “Why can’t I have that drug? Everyone who takes it seem so happy on TV.”
No, I’m sorry. CNN didn’t just air that “town hall” because, after all, Trump is a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. They not only hosted the event, they created it! And what “towns” are populated only by Trump supporters? To use Trump’s often used excuse for a bad showing: It was rigged! I feel sorry for the moderator, Kaitlin Connors, who felt it was her duty to push back on the lies her bosses surely knew would be spewed by Trump. This isn’t 2015-2016 anymore.
I did some research! While I can see the rationale taken by The Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, the AP Stylebook and others for capitalizing “black” when referring to a person of African lineage (the Chicago Manual of Style favors lowercasing unless the author or publisher deems otherwise), the reason for lowercasing “white” seems contrary to that rationale. Why can’t White represent European lineage, with all the cultural and ethnic history that entails?
Retired surgeon, now a novel writer (thrillers mostly) in North Carolina