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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo suddenly had something better to do than attend last Saturday's Buffalo Bills-Indianapolis Colts National Football League playoff game.
The governor had said he planned to attend, but it was announced that he had to, um, rewrite his State of the State speech because of, um, the, um, shift in power in Washington, D.C.
So the governor, who marked a blindingly high number of nursing homes deaths from COVID-19 earlier this year by writing a book about his success battling the virus, said he would give his ticket to Ryan Field, a nurse at Erie County Medical Center.
The likely reason he chose not to attend the game is because of a petition that circulated to try to keep him away after he said attendance at the contest had to be less than 10% of the capacity of Bills Stadium.
As of last week, several days before the game, 44,000 people had signed the petition.
Yay, she's leaving
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo was expected last week to be nominated by President-elect Joe Biden as commerce secretary, and apparently for Rhode Islanders it couldn't come a moment too soon.
The Democrat ended 2020 as the most unpopular governor in the liberal Northeast, according to Morning Consult, and the third most unpopular governor in the country. She had a 35% approval rating and a 55% disapproval rating.
Raimondo, like Democratic Govs. Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California, among others, was caught last year doing what she told state residents not to do. While she said they had to stay home, and not even go visit a friend, she took a little trip to a wine bar for a Christmas wine and paint event. And she was photographed maskless there as well.
"Please, stay home except for essential activities & wear a mask anytime you're with people you don't live with," she said on Twitter after Thanksgiving.
Only a few days later, she was photographed breaking her own rules. She was breaking them, that is, unless the wine bar trip was essential.
The most unpopular governor, according to the ranking, was Hawaii Democratic Gov. David Ige, who had a 32% approval rating and a 58% disapproval rating.
His bias is showing
A screenshot of a CNN reporter standing in front of fires raging in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests in the city last year while the caption on the screen below him said "Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests" quickly went viral as an example of media hypocrisy.
Ali Velshi of MSNBC stood in front of a similar burning building during riots in Minneapolis last year - more than 170 businesses were damaged or looted and numerous fires were set throughout the city on the night he reported - and described the mayhem behind him as "mostly a protest."
"I wanna be clear on how I characterize this," he said of action by leftist mobs. "This is mostly a protest, it is not, it is not, generally speaking, unruly. ... There is a deep sense of grievance and complaint here, and that is the thing."
When people staged a protest supporting President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., last week and went on to breach the Capitol, an incident that like those last summer was despicable, Velshi characterized things a little differently.
"'TRUMP INCITES MOB' is the headline of this morning's New York Times," Velshi tweeted. "Any journalist who sugar coats their language or normalizes what has happened today isn't doing their job. Our job is to bear witness & tell the truth: Trump is attempting a coup, and inciting violence."
If it walks like a duck ...
Democrat Stacey Abrams was the loser in the 2018 Georgia governor's race, but she showed recently she fits well with her fellow Democrats during an appearance on CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time."
The former Georgia state senator, who for months following her defeat denied that she'd actually lost (like a certain president we know of), said on the show she "never challenged" the election results.
"My questions weren't about the outcome of the election," Abrams said. "I never challenged the numbers. I challenged the system, and I fought to make certain that every vote that got cast got counted."
Following the election, among other things, she said the election was "stolen," "tainted," that it "disenfranchised" voters, that her loss was "fully attributable to voter suppression" and that she won the election but "didn't get to have the job."
Based on those claims, and the results of last week's Georgia senatorial elections, she'll probably have a good shot at unseating Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022.