Does he know what he says?
Biden administration officials must have been chewing their nails when 78-year-old President Joe Biden went onstage last week to participate in a live town hall hosted by CNN. And before the night was over, they were, in fact, telling folks what the president meant to say.
Talking with host Anderson Cooper, the president said, "It's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator - how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?"
However, the first coronavirus vaccines began to be distributed in December, more than a month before Biden took office. In fact, photos were made of Biden receiving both his first and second inoculations. Indeed, the week before Biden was inaugurated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 10.6 million Americans received a vaccine.
The White House, contacted about the statement, suggested the president might have been thinking about a vaccine reserve.
Midler, God and Texas
As Texans suffered from a winter storm that caused widespread power outages and killed nearly two dozen people last week, singer/actress Bette Midler suggested the storm might be "payback" from God against U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both R-Texas.
Calling the senators in a tweet "hateful," "vicious" and "cruel," she said, "I feel for the people suffering thru this weather, but #God doesn't seem to like #TedCruz or #JohnCornyn. These two also never recognized that #Joe won. If this isn't payback, I don't know what is."
While Midler also tweeted that Al Gore predicted such weather events years ago, she didn't mention that some of the green energy sources favored exclusively for power by the former vice president were rendered useless during the Texas storm due to the ice and snow.
It wasn't the entertainer's first brush with retribution. In 2019, she tweeted that Hurricane Dorian, which remains one of the most powerful hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean in terms of one-minute sustained wins, was nature's "revenge." It did extensive damage in the Bahama Islands and also caused damage in Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina.
Midler, meanwhile, hadn't checked her facts about the two senators. While Cruz did object during the Electoral College count of the 2020 presidential election in January, Cornyn did not.
Why Johnny can't do math
The Oregon Department of Education recently encouraged its public middle school math teachers to sign up for training in "ethnomathmatics," which is a project for "dismantling racism in mathematics."
What is the racism in mathematics? you might ask. Among other things, according to the "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," it is the belief that getting the "right" answer and being required to "show their work" are ways in which "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms."
"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," the course toolkit, said to be a partnership between the San Mateo, California, Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others, many of which have been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."
The mind boggles as to how scientists could have sent a man to the moon or come up with a vaccine for the coronavirus if it didn't matter what answer they arrived at with their calculations as part of such breakthroughs.
Tag, you're it
A contributing editor for the left-wing Daily Beast went trolling for conservatives last week and got his head handed to him.
Justin Baragona, a frequent critic of Republicans in the publication, made the claim that Fox News host Tucker Carlson had doctored an image he used of U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, that made her eyes look abnormally large.
To a tweet with a screenshot of the photo, he wrote, "So it appears Tucker's producers added googly eyes to AOC in this image."
However, the image was real, and the upshot was the journalist insulted the congresswoman with his remark.
Some on the twitterverse leaped to his defense and called it an honest mistake, but others weren't having it. "It's not really an honest mistake," one wrote. "He just naturally assumed the worst about Tucker, and from that assumption, assumed they added the eyes. There's nothing 'honest' about that."
Baragona, to his credit, apologized, saying, "Every day you log onto Twitter, you hope to get through it without being it. Tonight, I was it. And I absolutely deserved to be.
"Word of advice - if you don't want to be IT, make sure you don't send out factually inaccurate tweets that can be easily verified and debunked."