Sunday School 2/28/21

Seven senators made classroom visits today; with the House passing the stimulus package, and Dem plans to use reconciliation to get the minimum wage through the Senate being shot down, attention will turn to them, so that's where I'm focusing, too. 

Here are highlights of a few of them, starting with Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI), who spoke with George on This Week. Hirono was first.

• She's supportive of anything that will work to get the minimum wage increased, noting that it's mostly essential workers who are earning the $7.25 hourly wage, which she called "poverty level."
• The appropriate response to sexual harassment allegations against my Sonofa Gov is to listen to the people who come forward, "and then to do the appropriate investigation and corroboration of the allegations." The NY AG "would be the independent entity to conduct such an investigation."
• The Biden administration is showing leadership on anti-Asian hate crimes, having issued an executive memorandum requiring the new AG "to work with state and county officials and community groups to prevent and prosecute these kind of hate crimes."

Next? Sen. Portman, who voted to pass the Trump tax cuts and repeal Obamacare via reconciliation, but says trying to do COVID relief that way "would poison the well of bipartisanship." 

• He thinks what Biden should do is "...to start off with more bipartisan measures, so that we don’t poison the well, so that we can continue to work together. And in this case, it would be very easy to get Republican support for a COVID relief package."
• He poo-pooed the idea that Republican voters are in favor of the bill -"if, you know, checks are coming out to people's homes, that's going to be popular, but that doesn't mean that this is the right bill." He gave a list of things in the bill he says are not related to COVID.
• Working together "is not difficult. We can work together on this one and then continue to work together on infrastructure and retirement security and supply chain issues with China and so on. So my hope is that they'll change their mind before this over." 
• He doesn't think Biden has gone far enough on Saudi sanctions vis a vis MBS and Jamal Khashoggi, "although you have to give him credit" for increasing sanctions and travel bans on the people directly responsible for murdering Khashoggi - but he thinks there needs to be something directly targeting MBS. 
• He says former president Trump is "very popular" with the Rs, but policies are more popular - in fact, "there are a number of things we can talk about from a policy perspective that I think will help to move the party forward. And that's where we ought to focus."

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) was in the Meet the Press classroom; here are highlights.

• Brown's statement about not waiting for Rs to grow spines but having the Dems show Americans they don't have to "settle for a government that's set up to fail" was not defiant, but prescriptive. 
• He always wants to be bipartisan - he's a Dem in conservative Ohio, after all - and says the COVID bill is a bipartisan plan, will broad support, and "Just because Senate Republicans don't support it doesn't make it partisan." 
• He says " -- it's become a Trump party. It's not a party of reason. It's a party that has turned its back." He referenced Sen. Mitch McConnell doing nothing about COVID relief for months, the Rs failing to raise the minimum wage, and more. 
• He says they'll find a way to solve the problem somehow, noting "The corporate elite, the far-right elite in Washington have blocked it year after year after year after year, and we're going to make it happen."'
• We're not done yet on Saudi Arabia, he says, saying "We need to hold any foreign authoritarian, like the royal family, some of the members of the royal family, we need hold them accountable."

Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Chris Coons (D-DE) talked with Dana Bash on CNN's State of the Union. Here are excerpts, with Cassidy up first. 

• He said the Rs "have got to win in two years, we have got to win in four years. If we do that, we will do that by speaking to those issues that are important to the American people." That's more than "putting one person on a pedestal and making that one person our focal point."
• He also said that "CPAC is not the entirety of the Republican Party... we lost the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency. No president -- that has not happened in a single four years under a president since Herbert Hoover. "In order to win, they have to listen to all voters, not just the Trump fans. "That is a reality that we have to confront."
• He doesn't think Trump will be the nominee in 2024, and whether or not Trump is fit (Cassidy didn't answer), he said, "The point is, I don't think he is going to be our nominee..."
• He has "no clue" how the COVID bill will come out of the Senate, and that the Rs haven't been involved. He "started laughing" listening to press secretary Jen Psaki saying the Rs have been listened to, saying "that is such a joke."
• Bipartisanship isn't dead, though; he's working with Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) on a privacy issue, and, "Republicans remain willing and are working on issues that require bipartisan cooperation. We have done five on a COVID relief package in the past. It could have happened here. They made a conscious decision not to include us."

And, here're excerpts from the interview with Sen. Coons, a close friend of President Biden.

• He hasn't seen the details of Sen. Ron Wyden's Plan B proposal to tax companies that don't pay $15/hour. More importantly, "And if I'm someone who is always willing to negotiate with Republicans, I'm willing to negotiate with Democrats as well." Everyone - Ds and Rs alike - agree the minimum wage is too low, they just need to find a way to agree on a number and a path. 
• As do most Dems, he pointed to polling overwhelming support (76% of all Americans, and 60% of Republicans), so they should listen to the voters. And he's glad to hear Cassidy is still willing to work across the aisle, noting they've done that together in the past.
• He also said ..."Biden and the Democrats in Congress gave several weeks for there to be a serious negotiation that came close to the scope and range of this challenge. The proposals that came forward weren't anything like" what we're up against. "And so, frankly, we're moving ahead with a bill that probably will get no Republican votes in the Senate, but will have broad Republican support in the country."
• He said the Dems shouldn't "throw up the white flag and say, well, there's no way that we can work with Republicans, when this is literally the first major piece of legislation to come through. We will have other chances to pass bold legislation in this Congress, in this year, but we have to give bipartisanship a chance."

Dr. Anthony Fauci made four classroom appearances today (This Week, MTP, FTN and CNN SOTU), so I'm going to leave you on your own for those interviews.

See you around campus. Follow the COVID guidance, please, or I'll have to excuse you from class and assign additional homework. 

In Case You Missed It (v68)

What a week las week was...  I only managed to get three posts out of my head and onto the interwebs. Here's your week in review. 

For Sunday School, I highlighted the so-called interview that Chuck Todd conducted with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Meet the Press. As I noted in the post, Todd has a history of going off the rails when he talks with Johnson, especially since he got so much credit for being 'tough' in a previous interview. In this one, he made himself out to be a fool, in my opinion. 

This portion of the interview came after Todd accused Johnson of being one of the arsonists who lit the fire of baseless voter fraud allegations, and Johnson accused Todd of the media being the arsonists because of their bias, and more. Johnson's words are italicized so you can tell them apart. 

So you believe -- It's not quackery -- You believe in -- It's not conspiracy theory ---You believe -- It's what's going to be required. Let me ask you this. Then why didn't you hold hearings about the 9/11 truthers? There's plenty of people who thought 9/11 was an inside job. So you're basically saying is -- I mean, Chuck -- if there's enough people who believe a conspiracy theory -- I could have held hearings on all kinds of things. I held hearings on -- If there's enough people who hold -- what I figured was the most relevant issues -- Are you going to do a -- how about the Moon landing -- And obviously this election -- Are you going to hold hearings on that?

And then he said that, while there are all kinds of things he'd like to have hearings on, but that you have to pick your battles.

Right now, we have this election. We've got tens of millions of Americans that think this election was stolen. We need to get the bottom of it. Again, what's explained, we need to explain it, get that off the table. We also have to acknowledge there were some real problems here --

Yup, we do. This interview being one of them.

I didn't offer you a Sunday School Extra Credit las week - I mean, the whole week was an Extra Credit post, wasn't it? And I sure hope you were - and are - paying attention.

There was more than enough fodder carried over from the week before to give us a Trump in Transition post on his 18th phone call to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia's Republican Secretary of State. This one, Raffensperger answered, and legally taped. The audio and transcript were released when the president lied about the nature of the call and Raffensperger fought back. 

I had thought about pulling some OrangeVerse out of the transcript, but Trump clearly was in full-blown crime boss mode, so I decided to take it more seriously.  Anyway, here's a slice of that, where Trump responds after hearing Raffensperger's first rebuttal.

"Well, Brad." That's what the president said next. "Well, Brad." And then, after talking about other states, and saying "we have all the votes we need," he went back to his favorite theme: he won. He won, and he proved there's way more votes than needed, but he only had to show one more than 11,779 because that's how many he lost by in the bad count from "Well, Brad."

Not only that, but

...what's the difference between winning the election by two votes and winning it by half a million votes. I think I probably did win it by half a million. You know, one of the things that happened, Brad, is we have other people coming in now from Alabama and from South Carolina and from other states, and they’re saying it’s impossible for you to have lost Georgia. We won. You know in Alabama, we set a record, got the highest vote ever. In Georgia, we set a record with a massive amount of votes. And they say it’s not possible to have lost Georgia.

And I could tell you by our rallies. I could tell you by the rally I’m having on Monday night, the place, they already have lines of people standing out front waiting. It’s just not possible to have lost Georgia. It’s not possible. When I heard it was close, I said there’s no way.

He went on, and on, again. But here's where Well, Brad steps up his game.

Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. 

That's just one of the president's challenges - they are many.

My last post of the week offered up My Middle-aged White Lady Perspective on last Wednesday, and some of what's transpired since. I maintain that what we saw is who we are. The totality of it - not just the incitement and the storming and the violence and the destruction, but also the reactions, the calls for retribution, and excusing and accusing... all of it, whether we like it or not, is who we are.  

Here are a couple of reasons why we were all present on Wednesday.

We are without irony (1). We riot, we storm the Capitol, to "take back our country" and do so carrying a pole with two flags - the one bearing the name of a man above the Stars and Stripes. We riot, we storm the Capitol, to "defend our constitution" and support those who are literally trying to bypass the Constitution. We protest things being stolen from us by trying to steal the same thing from others. We lash out at perpetrators - those who do exactly what we want them to do, what we encouraged them to do - and then vote the way they want us to. What is wrong with us?

We are without irony (2). We saw protests, and rioting, around the country last summer; in some places it went on for weeks. We have a hard time separating protests from riots, and we have a hard time being consistent in our distaste for either or both: it all depends on the reason, the voice, the message. We will tolerate 'protests' if we agree with the reason, but tolerate them much less if we don't. We will tolerate rioting, argue that it's OK if a few people lost their businesses because it's for the greater good, but we won't tolerate rioting if the 'good' is not great enough in our eyes. We appreciate 'our rights' but the rights of certain others, less so. Rights red and blue. Protests red and blue. Riots red and blue. Irony red and blue.

Comments are always welcomed on any post. Have at it. 

And, that's it - you're up to date on the week that was.  I'll be back later for Sunday School, in one form or another.

Right Meme, Left Meme, Gun Meme

As is typically the case, when we have a mass shooting such as the one last week in Roseburg, the memes make their way onto social media sites.  Left meme, right meme, left meme, right meme, marching across our Facebook and Twitter feeds, collecting likes and dislikes, upwardly pointing thumbs and middle fingers held just as high.

Yeah, we can't have an actual conversation but we sure can meme!

Here are a few I've seen in the past couple of days.

This one's absolutely correct - making drugs illegal did not stop everyone from doing them. But it did give us the opportunity to get lots of drug dealers off the streets, and lots of meth labs out of our back yards.

Laws against drunken driving don't keep every idiot from getting behind the wheel when they're impaired either - but it has helped, as have speed limits and seat belt laws and a whole bunch of other laws that are not obeyed by every single American - only by most of them. Does that mean that we shouldn't try?

There was also this one. I never met God in any school I attended, and I suspect most people who didn't attend some kind of religiously-affiliated school didn't run into God in their school either.

Sure, we said the Pledge of Allegiance (which only added "under God" in the 1950s, in response to the scourge of Communism, by the way), but we did not collectively pray or practice religion in any other way. Nothing stopped anyone back then, or anyone today, from having a silent prayerful moment of their own.

I recall the Catholic kids leaving early, I think it was Thursday, for religious ed, and us heathens -- the Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians and the rest -- stayed behind and played King Chase Queen with erasers on our heads and stuff like that. But even then, God wasn't in the school, I think He was down the street at St. Pat's.

Besides, doesn't God only give you what He thinks you can bear? So, whether He was in the schools or not, would He have stopped any of these mass shootings, or would they still have happened under the theory that our faith needs to be tested, and strengthened, in the face of terrible tragedy?

And then there's this meme, posted by many, including former Minnesota Congresswoman and permanent RWNJ Michele Bachmann.

Because we all know that the only reason why people shoot up schools is because they are 'gun free zones' right?  Or churches, not a lot of guns there or even in movie theaters. Yeah, when the angry people, the grudge-holders, the racists, the whatever-you-want-to-call-them are looking to shoot someplace up, they specifically read the signs in the windows looking for one that's a gun-free zone.

Stop it.

You know why they choose schools? It's because they're students there, or recently were; it's because they know the lay of the land, where the exits are, where the people they don't like are, what classes the teacher they hate will be in, and, more importantly, it's because they know they'll get the attention they seek if that's where they commit their heinous crimes, compared to, say, shooting up a Walmart.

But, by far, my favorite gun meme is this one: