Friday, January 15, 2020
Exactly a week after violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, the president of the United States got himself impeached for his role in the whole sad, sordid and downright shi**y episode in our nation’s history. The bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives makes Donald Trump the first president to be impeached twice. There have now been four presidential impeachments in U.S. history, and Trump has half of them. Trump does impeachments bigly. Best impeachments ever. Many people are saying that. No one has ever seen anyone do impeachments better.
While 10 GOP House members bit the bullet and voted to impeach, the vast majority held their ground in support of the president. Many cited “cancel culture” as the Democrats’ motivating force for trying to remove Trump, including newly-elected congresswoman and aspiring rocket scientist Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wore a mask with “censored” emblazoned across it while she spoke on the floor of Congress to MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHILE EVERY MAJOR MEDIA OUTLET COVERED IT! Irony is dead and buried.
Minutes after the vote, many of the same people who lectured the nation on the evils of cancel culture called for the ouster of the third-ranking Republican in the GOP Conference, Liz Cheney, because she voted yes on impeachment. You smell that? Irony is not only dead; it is now starting to rot.
Editor’s Note: It is possible to write a paragraph about Congresswoman Liz Cheney without noting who her father is. She is a success in her own right.
This just in: our own U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey has officially filed for divorce from his party’s president, calling on Trump to resign. This is very unlikely to happen, but kinda fun to envision how many Inauguration Day hats, t-shirts and mugs would be immediately useless if Mike Pence briefly becomes POTUS 46 instead of Biden.
After the riots subsided last week, there was a post circulating on social media that purported to be from Olive Garden, claiming that the company had revoked Sean Hannity’s lifetime pasta pass. For all the Hannity fans out there, fear not. Both he and the president are reportedly still welcome at Olive Garden and can have as many breadsticks and as much pasta that they want.
After the smoke cleared in D.C., it became apparent that the relationship between Trump and his loyal sidekick, Mike Pence, is forever ruined after Pence decided to follow the law. Word has it that the president sent Pence a hand-written note saying, “Welcome to Dumpsville. Population: You!” Hard feelings indeed.
Closer to home, a federal judge (appointed by Donald Trump, BTW) ruled that the election in PA’s 45th Senate District was played out pretty much according to Hoyle. This resulted in the seating of Democratic state Sen. Jim Brewster, which had been delayed a week and, from what we could tell on Twitter, brought the republic dangerously close to destruction.
Pennsylvania slogged through the deadliest week of the pandemic last week, a stark reminder that while covering attempted coups and state senate races is all fun and games, people are dying in very large numbers across our Commonwealth and the nation. Wear the damned mask.
Last night, President-elect Joe Biden announced a sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus package that includes lots of money for everyone under the sun, including state, local and tribal governments. Should the package become law, Pennsylvania lawmakers will be relieved of the awesome responsibility to raise the minimum wage, as Biden’s plan also calls for $15 an hour. Biden also made it clear that this stimulus bill is only part one, and that he will ask for more in the coming months. That sound you just heard was every deficit hawk in Congress passing out and hitting the floor.
The nearly year-old pandemic has kicked the nation’s school districts right in the textbooks, crushing their finances along the way. Absent some sweet Biden cash, this is bad news for some of the more chronically underfunded PA schools. When the pandemic lifts, the number of bake sales is gonna be insane!
Biden also signaled this week that he intends to extend the suspension on student loan payments. This is merely the appetizer for the big enchilada in the Sanders/Warren wing of the Democratic Party: student loan forgiveness, which we have been led to believe will also cause the republic to collapse. If we cannot continue to crush an entire generation of kids under mountains of debt, what is life for? And for those of us who foolishly paid our loans back, can you make this retroactive?
Pennsylvania is, like most states, grappling with the rollout of COVID vaccines and has a plan to turn it all around in short order. Not only will the Commonwealth no longer hold the second vaccine for folks who already got the first, the state announced this week it will be doing mass vaccination events. These events are typically held at stadiums, which means Joe from Passyunk who spends his days calling into WIP radio will FINALLY get his chance to be on the field at the Linc.
The Pennsylvania General Assembly kicked off the 2021 fun and games this week with an oldie but goodie from 2020. A powerful House committee on Wednesday advanced a constitutional amendment that would split the state into regional districts for the purpose of electing judges. The unhappiness that the current GOP legislative majority has for the Democratic Supreme Court majority knows few boundaries right now. A “Fire-of-a-Thousand-Suns” hatred is also an apt description.
As the week drew to a close, what began as a few companies expressing displeasure with what happened in the U.S. Capitol last week has turned into a wave. Company after company (mostly little mom and shop companies like Wal Mart and AT&T) have decided they will no longer donate to any member of Congress who did not support certifying the election results. Mark this one down as the first of many LARGE headaches that Rick Scott will need to deal with as he moves the national GOP forward. This poor guy should just order Advil by the dump truck load.
The Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry wants you to know that the additional UC payments are on the way. Also, they haven’t slept since March and have eaten nothing but junk food so BE PATIENT!
The first-ever virtual Farm Show happened this week, and we are here to tell you, nothing is more depressing than drinking a virtual milkshake through a Zoom call.
Speaking of virtual milkshakes, our good friend Dean Minuto is calling all the boys (and girls) to the yard for his next online presentation, Sales Skills for Non-Salespeople. Register here! Damn right; he’s better than yours. 
In our We Can’t Make This Up segment, we take you to Australia, where officials were about to whack a pigeon named Joe (in honor of Joe Biden), thinking it had flown 8,000 miles from the U.S. and therefore posed a threat to their ecosystem. Even though the pigeon was spared when the confusion was cleared up, would it really have been necessary to off the thing? Murder just seems rather drastic when you could just give Joe a plane ticket and send him back.
That’s what passes for news around here as January rolls on, looking a helluva lot like 2020 never left. Join us next week for another rousing round of news, brought to you by your favorite public affairs squad. From all of us at Team Triad, have a great weekend!