Great moments in hyperbole

A 65-year old woman was arrested because she refused to wear a mask inside a bank in Texas.

Police issued a warrant for the arrest of Terry Wright, 65, of Grants Pass, Oregon. The incident on Thursday at a Bank of America in Galveston was captured by the officer’s body camera, the Galveston County Daily News reported.

Police said they had obtained an arrest warrant on resisting arrest and criminal trespassing charges.

Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, has ended statewide orders requiring people to wear face masks in public places, declaring businesses should decide for themselves what Covid-19 precautions to take on their properties. Many businesses have kept their own mask rules in place.
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Wright told the officer the law said she didn’t have to wear a mask. As the officer took out handcuffs, she pulled away and began to walk toward the door. The officer stopped her and forced her to the ground. After she was handcuffed, she complained her foot was injured.
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Police said Wright suffered minor injuries during the struggle and was taken to a hospital for treatment.

Wright told the Washington Post she has never covered her face inside stores, even when the statewide mandate was in place.

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What does it mean to ‘run the rule’?

I was reading this news item and came across this sentence.

Melanie Zanona at Politico this morning is running the rule over some of the eager young Trumpist Republicans in the House who might be eyeing up the Senate seats that are about to become vacant in the next election cycle.

I was struck by the phrase ‘running the rule’ because I had never heard that idiom before. The context in which it appears does not make clear what it means. The plain language seems to suggest applying some rule but since the rule itself was not specified and is not obvious, that does not help in deciphering the meaning.

Merriam-Webster does not recognize it. The Cambridge dictionary says it is “to examine something to see if it is good enough or right for a particular purpose”. Wiktionary says that to run the rule is to “examine carefully and thoroughly” but Lexico says that it means to “examine cursorily for correctness or adequacy”.

So we have three different meanings. One is just to examine, the other is to examine carefully, and the third is to examine cursorily.

I think I will avoid using the phrase.

What is happening to the Republican party?

When a candidate loses an election for president, they usually brace themselves for blame. When they take down their party with them, they would normally slink off into the sunset while the party regroups and rethinks its strategies. In the case of Donald Trump, he not only lost the presidency, during his time the Republicans lost their majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. And yet, when Trump made his first public outing to the annual CPAC conference, he was treated like a conquering hero and party leaders are making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring and going on TV to swear allegiance to him.

In a long article in The New Yorker Jelani Cobb takes a shot at answering the widely discussed question of what this means for the Republican party and he thinks its prognosis is not good.
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Children still being held in cages on the southern border

It appears that the appalling conditions under which migrant children were held during the Trump administration are still continuing under the Biden administration.

Hundreds of immigrant children and teenagers have been detained at a Border Patrol tent facility in packed conditions, with some sleeping on the floor because there aren’t enough mats, according to nonprofit lawyers who conduct oversight of immigrant detention centers.

The lawyers interviewed more than a dozen children Thursday in Donna, Texas, where the Border Patrol is holding more than 1,000 people. Some of the youths told the lawyers they had been at the facility for a week or longer, despite the agency’s three-day limit for detaining children. Many said they haven’t been allowed to phone their parents or other relatives who may be wondering where they are.
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John Oliver on how badly the US handles unemployment

Losing one’s job is not only a traumatic experience, it often leads to a cascade of disasters such as losing one’s home. Unemployment insurance is meant to tide people over until they find another job. But some political leaders, especially Republicans, seem to view it as a reward for lazy people. He describes how hard it is for people to get unemployment benefits and how some states like Florida cut the premiums that companies are supposed to put into the unemployment fund and then go out of their way to make things difficult for people to apply for relief.

50th anniversary of an epic break-in of an FBI office

On March 8th, 1971, antiwar protestors broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, PA and stole every file they could lay their hands on. These people were not criminal masterminds. They were ordinary people involved in peaceful antiwar movements, such as college professors, a homemaker, a taxi driver, and the like who called themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI. The documents they stole and released revealed the existence of secret and illegal surveillance programs to infiltrate, harass, and discredit peaceful antiwar groups. The existence of these programs was widely suspected but unproven.
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Don’t mess with Katie

Congresswoman Katie Porter has shown time and time again that she prepares carefully for congressional hearings and yet industry executives keep trying to patronize and snow her and she keeps putting them in their place as happened again recently.

They never seem to learn that she does her homework.

I have been vaccinated, Now what?

On Wednesday I received my covid-19 vaccine. I had become eligible for it the previous Wednesday but finding an appointment was not easy and took me a few days. I finally got one at a CVS drug store. The downside was that it was in San Jose which is about a 90 minute drive for me. The upside is that they were giving the Johnson&Johnson vaccine which is a single dose. So I am now done. I also enjoyed that for the first time in a year, I actually went further than a couple of miles from my home and I enjoyed the change of scenery. Soon after the lockdown began last March, I filled the gas tank in my car in case of an emergency and when I checked on Wednesday before I set out, I had done only 240 miles for the entire year. The trip to San Jose added about 150 miles in just one day.
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