Thursday, May 12, 2022

Today's News: Sad Trombone Sound

I guess expecting Canadian Conservative voters to listen to an actual DEBATE is just too much to ask of the Youngs today, not to mention really B-O-R-I-N-G, man! 
Paul Wells describes how uninformative this debate was:
What is it about the last two years that made the Conservative Party of Canada’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee decide Canadians are yearning for shorter conversations about sillier questions?
Who surveyed the issue landscape that will face Justin Trudeau on Thursday and would face his successor — war in Europe, inflation, labour shortages, stark conflict between climate targets and natural-resource export imperatives, long-cheated and still-difficult Indigenous reconciliation, exiting from COVID — and thought, “Keep the answers short. We want time to hear them out on what’s on their playlists”? 
As a mechanism for allowing Canadians to weight the judgment of six people, one of whom might, after all, be the next prime minister, the evening was a write-off. ...
Alberta Politics' David Climenhaga suggests a reason for why the format was so ridiculous: 
...they might as well have been asked to debate “Apples are nicer than oranges,” or “Spicy food is better.” 
The format of the debate – which was like nothing they’d ever seen before, all the professional commentators kept agreeing – was designed to be entertaining without being revealing. 
That is to say, the time for answers was so short that none of the candidates could get into trouble. 
If they did start to say something that might fire a torpedo below the waterline of HMS Tory – which is listing hard to starboard these days – the real moderator, Tom Clark, was there to step in and shut them up. 
By the time they got to any potentially dangerous topics, or anything resembling real debate, it was in the second hour, when anyone who needed to be paying attention had either fallen asleep like your blogger, or started nervously doom-scrolling through Twitter. 
 Before that we had quick snappers. Like, if you could have dinner with a dead person, who would it be? Seriously, people, I’m not making this up! ... 
Here are some of the tweets about this event. First, the actual Sad Trombone Sound:

Now the commentary: Apparently, yes...
And of course, this (cue Nelson: Ha Ha) Here's some good news from Ukraine:


As NBC News noted today, the first American women who will be affected by the US decision to re-criminalize abortion are already pregnant. 
Today Republicans refused to pass a law that would have protected the right to abortion (and of course, somehow, yes, this vote was all the Democrats' fault). 
Now that Republicans have caught the car they are starting to realize just how profoundly unpopular their forced-birth policies are, and how impossible it will be now to motivate anti-Democrat votes in the Midterms: Here is one COVID side-effect that will likely have the most significant long-term impact on our society - people have discovered how much they prefer to work from home instead of having to spend 10 hours a day going back and forth to an office: One amusing story from today: In other news, THIS is the news story that should be accompanied by a sad trombone sound: And speaking of bitcoins and the stock market and all the other ways our society pretends to make money, I thought this was hilarious:

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