You Can't Vote Red If You're Dead

By Molly Osberg  |  August 5, 2020 | 9:16pm
NewsPolitics
You Can't Vote Red If You're Dead
Photo: Samuel Corum (Getty Images)

As negotiations over the next coronavirus relief bill drag on, our elected officials appear to primarily be sparring over a difference of $200 or so: According to the Washington Post, Democrats remain steadfast in their insistence that the next bill should reinstate the extra $600-a-week unemployment benefit, while Republicans are generally lobbying for something closer to $400 a week.

“I’m confident that we will have an agreement. The timing of it I can’t say because I don’t know, it just depends,” said Nancy Pelosi today, which will surely be heartening for the 51 million Americans estimated to be currently unemployed.

Republicans, of course, are insisting that the additional $600 a week disincentives Americans to return to work, despite the fact that hiring continues to slow during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But one crucial group, according to the AP, is willing to compromise: The Republican Senators who will shortly be up for re-election and, much like the people they are supposedly representing, may soon be out of a job.

As the AP reports, a number of vulnerable Republicans are being uncharacteristically generous in their positions:

Sen. Martha McSally, who has fallen behind in polls in Arizona, is breaking with conservatives to endorse a temporary extension of a $600-per-week supplemental benefit. Republicans up for reelection such as John Cornyn of Texas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina are demanding results before returning home to campaign. And Sen. Susan Collins is in overdrive, backing help for cash-starved states and local governments — and Maine’s shipbuilding industry.

As always, it’s heartening to be reminded that the life of a constituent is only as valuable as the bubble they fill in at the voting booth.

[AP]

Sean Hannity’s nonsense Latin subtitle has disappeared from his book, no doubt at some cost to the TV host’s publisher: As the heroic classics student Spencer Alexander McDaniel wrote in May, the words intended to translate to “live free or America dies” actually read to a student of the language more like “let’s live or he … passes away from America for the detriment of a free man.”

“The words in Hannity’s motto are real Latin words,” wrote McDaniel, “but, the way they are strung together, they don’t make even a lick of sense,” though he did note that the translation was what appeared if you tried to use Google Translate.

The text on Hannity’s book jacket now reads Vivamus liberi ne America pereat, which actually does translate to a sentence in English: Let us lie free so that America will not die. There has been, so far, no public admission of this mistake.

[The Guardian]

Sally Yates has joined the rest of the nation in being rather exasperated with the world-historically unlikeable Ted Cruz: