Bits & Pieces #151

 

The Media has finally learned a very important lesson as seen when Martha Raddatz recently opened This Week with a shot of the four young, intelligent newswomen spread across the screen as that week’s commentators. It illustrated that networks are finally getting it. If you want smart comment you hire women. Weren’t they always the smartest kids in every class you took in school?

Cecilia Vega, Mary Bruce, Rachel Scott and Mary Alice Parks showed us how to do it, as the show’s panel. They were clever, insightful and informed and they gave us a great show. Let’s see more of that.

*****

Lindsay Graham is already babbling about running Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara in North Carolina. Does she have anything but a big mouth to recommend her to those voters?

Seems like Lindsey will do anything to get a few free rounds on the course at Mar-a-Largo

*****

Financier Fred Eshelman is suing, True the Vote to get back the $2.5 million he gave them to help uncover and prove voter fraud in the last election. Don’t know what Mr. Eshelman financed to earn that kind of dough but it couldn’t have been too complicated. He was dumb enough to get scammed by the likes of Donald Trump and his “rigged election” bullshit.

*****

One of the most important items the Biden administration will have to deal with in the coming months is gerrymandering. At this moment the damaging reality is that there are many states that have a majority of Democratic voters but legislatures that are Republican.

How can that happen you ask? The answer is fairly simple. The state voting districts have been rearranged by incumbent Republicans in a manner that buries Democratic votes in districts that far outnumber them with GOP votes. There’s nothing wrong with this when it happens as a result of natural population movement but when voting districts are rearranged to force this to happen it must be exposed as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Just changing the boundaries back only lasts until the next election. The only real solution is to elect all representatives statewide so that the whole state voted for all the legislator’s not just individual districts.

*****

There has been a lot of uncomplimentary noise about how Andrew Cuomo has handled the reporting of death statistics in the pandemic. It has gone back and forth a lot but none of those who have accused him of misrepresenting the numbers and where the deaths occurred has so far shown that anyone actually died because of this failure to report accurately. That, however, does not exclude the possibility.

If Cuomo has truly misreported the facts he must be held accountable. But for what? So far despite a lot of research this commentator has failed to see a clear result of the possible misrepresentation.  I have heard reporters talk about what a bully Cuomo has been over his career and if that’s true, he absolutely loses stature in the eyes of fair-minded people everywhere.

Even taking all this to be true and significant there can be no argument that what Cuomo has done so far during the pandemic has been as functional as anyone in our nation’s hierarchy. He has been inspiring in his logical approach to the problems caused by the ravages of the disease. No one can take that success away from him, regardless of what he may have he has done to outrage the public.

*****

The Biden Administration has nominated Xavier Becerra as head of HHS. Not surprisingly there has been some significant GOP pushback against him. The GOP noise has been about the fact that Becerra is not a doctor. It sounds logical but it’s actually political. Sure he’s not a doctor but he is a lawyer who has been involved in some of the top legal brouhahas in the medical field. The job of running HHS is not about curing cancer. It’s about running a huge and unwieldy organization that has an enormous place in the health of the nation. What is needed in this job is an organizer and functional doer.  That’s what the GOP doesn’t really understand because they never had anyone in Trump’s administration that possessed what was needed to fill any of the jobs that Trump filled with sycophants and ass kissers.

I am unfamiliar with Mr. Becerra’s background so I will not comment on his abilities except to point out that Biden’s nominees have so far been an exemplary group and that the GOP complaint that he is unqualified for any reason is a joke considering the bunch of grossly unqualified hacks that Trump put in enough jobs to almost destroy our government.

*****

Nancy Pelosi’s idea of forming a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riots is a good one but the form she is promoting is ridiculous, especially considering the lack of any kind of bi-partisanship in the current congress.

Packing the numbers with Democrats and not giving the Republicans subpoena power just makes the commission a political shit show and we already have more of those than we need.

I know it’s hard to imagine and probably even harder to do, but this writer’s suggestion is to have someone like Dick Durban meet with someone like Lynn Cheney and hammer out a group of current or former respected politicians that come without the normal nasty craziness, to man the panel. Such an agreement would automatically exclude the likes of Jim Jordan, Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley along with their compliments on the left and other nut cases that refuse to face the truth.  Along with the responsibility of picking a side, each of the choosers would be allowed an agreed upon number of challenges just to help assure that we keep the nuts out. This is the only way we will ever get to the truth about what happened. Anything else will only result in the kind of travesty we have already experienced in the Mueller Hearings and both impeachments.

******

We all know that the New York Post, except for its sports pages, is a hopeless rag, deficient in any kind of intelligent POV or the ability to screw together a whole thought on any given subject. They prove it every day, most recently by the seven pages of coverage they gave to the noise about Cuomo and the nursing homes, a story that didn’t make page one or two in any other paper that day.

At one point the Post had a pretty vibrant entertainment section, led for the past two decades by its drama critic Mike Riedel. Riedel started out as a gossip columnist for the Post, doing his best to get famous by publishing nasty lies about unsuspecting actors. The last time I saw Mike he was on his knees in Sardis apologizing to Broadway mega star Bernadette Peters for something negative he had said about her years before.

The Post lists only Lou Lumenick and Michael Medved as film critics but they have, unfortunately, made space on their pages for one Johnny Oleksinski who masquerades as a writer and a commentator on film. Why is Mr. Oleksinski there? Good question. Not a clue. He wrote a mean spirited column on Friday attacking an actress named Kate Hudson who has been nominated for best actress at the Golden Globes for a film that Oleksinski hated. I’m not a particularly big fan of Ms Hudson although I enjoyed her very much in her first film, Almost Famous, a couple of decades ago. I haven’t seen much of her since but it seems Oleksinski has. He goes after her like a ravenous rat, and all I could think was why? She didn’t write, produce or direct this film. Like most actors she was just making a living and doing what most actors like most to do, act. On top of that she has been nominated for an award.

I would normally not be writing about this but this creep’s attack was so vicious that I decided it had to be countered and he needed to be excoriated for it even as Riedel had been when an actor punched his lights out one night in Angus McAdoo’s pub.

It seems publisher Rupert Murdoch and his slimy rag breed these kinds of viperous slugs for the entertainment of their purposely-ignorant readers. It’s no wonder the paper has rarely made money.