February 22, 2023

Wondering on Wednesday 2/22/23

 

Ready... Set... Wonder!

A pregnant woman, jailed while awaiting trial in Florida, is suing to be released because her unborn child is being illegally detained. When you think of it, she's right, isn't she? If her fetus has personhood under Florida law, how can it be imprisoned when it committed no crime? I have to wonder - did any legislators consider this type of consequence when they rushed to assign personhood to a fetus? 

GOP Congressional leader Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-You Kidding Me?) has suggested we need a national divorce, in which we'd "separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government." She's also suggested that folks from blue states who move to red states should wait five years before being allowed to vote in their new state. Greene sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security and the Committee on Oversight and Accountability. I'll let you do your own wondering on this.

2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump, never one to shy away from the cameras, traveled to East Palestine, OH today. The town, the site of this month's chemical-carrying train derailment, was the perfect place for Trump to stand behind a podium with his fundraising banner pasted on the front and tell people he's having plenty of Trump-branded water delivered to them, along with water of "much lesser quality." I couldn't help wondering if he brought any bottles of his swamp water to throw into the crowd; it seems he forgot to do that.

Comically, on the national news tonight, an anchor said that the train derailment in East Palestine "had become political" with Trump's arrival. Why is that comical, you might be wondering? Maybe because the coverage on all the networks and cables has been about the politics of it: what FEMA is doing (or not); what the EPA is doing (or not); what the Transportation Department is doing (or not); what the mayor, governor, senators, and congresspeople asked for (or didn't); what Norfolk Southern, the owner of the train, offered (or didn't) and so on. Throw in the names of Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Trump, all once and possibly future presidential candidates, and the politics almost overshadow the derailment and the related health and safety issues it may have caused.

Oh - one more name we need to throw into the politically derailed derailment? Mike Pence. He can't stop talking about it including saying that the Biden economy "derailed the economy of East Palestine long before that train came through...", He also said that he would have gone to East Palestine before he would go to Kyiv. If you're wondering, like I am, if Pence is running in 2024, the answer is yes. If you're wondering, like I was, whether Pence has visited Kyiv or East Palestine, the answer is no.

This last item?  I'm wondering how long it would take for the echo of right-wing screams to die down if Maddow had gotten the entire cache of the January 6th video. And I'm wondering, too, if the American people deserve to see what really happened, as the Congressional MAGAists have said, why the footage was exclusively given to a pundit, not a newsman. To a single network, not to every network. To Tucker Carlson, of all people.


What's on your wondering mind these days?

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