Morning Roundup: Laughter & Leadership
January 31: Allow yourself to admire the growing number of voices who are refusing to submit to a tyrant, and allow yourself a chuckle, despite it all...
Good morning Contrarians,
Well, it’s been a devastating week. Incompetence, corruption, and chaos have been on display in ways we’ve talked about, written about, and dreaded…but perhaps had never fully absorbed that they would come to pass.
We are not sugar-coaters here, but we do want to occasionally remind our community (and ourselves) of those who inspire us and those who help us laugh our way through these unfathomable times. So we’ll start our Friday with two pieces: our Undaunted person of the week; and a comic from Tom the Dancing Bug.
Keep checking in throughout the day for a reckoning on Trump’s ghastly response to the devastating plane crash, a sprinkle of hard-hitting news, and our pet of the week to send you into the weekend with a smile.
Stay in the fight with us. And, in the words of our first featured honoree, “Hold on to the truth and to hope.”
Jen Rubin spotlights the Undaunted person of the week
Ruben Bolling offers you a morning comic strip from Tom the Dancing Bug
And in case you missed these pieces yesterday, we encourage you to read or view:
*Lavora Barnes on What We Need in the Next DNC Chair
*David Bernell and Ambassador Thomas Graham (Retired) of Democracy Defenders on Friends Without Benefits
*Jen Rubin and Dr. Georges Benjamin on the state of American healthcare (video)
The air disaster in Washington is a paradigm of the Trump Regime: get in early blaming anything bad that has happened on women, black people -- any minority. You report what he says, which is obviously false and a bad way to behave. But you don't ask, "Why is the Trump Regime lying?" I suspect careful surveys would reveal that what listeners heard was that the President of the United States and his apparatchiks announced within minutes of the air crash that DEI caused the air crash. By saying so immediately, regardless of and well before the statutory investigation even begins, the Trump Regime forced the press to report that DEI caused the air crash. To cope with this tactic, the press would have to reimagine its role as more than mere reporting: either it would have to ignore what the Trump Regime says entirely; or to report in advance each morning that, "today the Administration will announce that Democrats and DEI caused whatever bad happens today," before the Regime says it.
Acosta should join The Contrarian and be the WH reporter.