"480 Minutes" - Leaders Accept Responsibility

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The Texas state government failed response to the dual Texas energy grid and weather crises this week revealed how decades of hands-off profit uber alles deregulation of essential services will invariably shake out for average citizens. The failure was so great and the culprits responsible so obvious, yet they took no responsibility at all. Where have I heard that before from a so-called :leader?" Said culprits immediately started scattershot deflecting blame going so far as to implicate the Green New Deal...which isn't a thing yet. The lies were transparently obvious and absurd as is where the blame so obviously belongs: Governor Abbott, Governor Perry, Governor Dubyah, their lieutenant governors, decades of Republican-dominated state legislature, and the Right's obsession with unfettered capitalism at all costs. Sadly those ridiculous red herrings have dominated discourse deflecting debate. American media is once again failing us.

With all that in mind it's not a huge surprise that less than 7 weeks into 2021 Republican state legislators have already introduced more than 100  bills aimed at restricting voting rights.

In other news the man whose toxic hate and lies primed the U.S. to elect a hateful know-nothing demagogue died this week. #HateRadio maverick Rush Limbaugh who downplayed the dangers of smoking even in recent years died of lung cancer. No, I did not make that up. Behind only Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, Limbaugh is the entity most responsible for searing and softening the brains of the racist conspiracy-prone know-nothing misogynist base of white grievance (aka The Deplorables) now at the center of Republican politics. It's not really necessary to trash the guy, one just has to read a few of his myriad hate-filled poisonous quotes which coarsened discourse and radicalized so many Americans.

It's been fun seeing "Christians" all upset that people are mocking said demon on social media when he built a career on mocking the freshly deceased for entertainment value. A friend of mine published *the* Rush obit to Facebook. If interested (and we are FB friends) you can find it posted to my personal page.

It's also been quite something seeing #ForeverTrumpers shrieking for accountability in NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's nursing home scandal after they just spent a year excusing Drumpf's malevolent mendacious incompetence which has resulted in 500k American deaths (so far). Don't get me wrong, Cuomo going down in ignominy and being replaced by an actual Democrat would almost make up for that last season of Game of Thrones as far as I'm concerned, but the impossible magnitude of this latest hypocritical faux outrage from #Cult45 is astounding. Yes, it's astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll.

Oh, and the music submissions this week totally sucked. Dreadful, many in the same reed-thin acoustic, falsetto singer-songwriter way. Release after release I kept hoping to hear something worth a deeper dive, something that would make me bob ny head, something that might rattle my cage a tad. Sadly the only thing I found worthy of airing is a single by José González (Gothenburg, Sweden, @_JoseGonzalez_), which is great, but it's a single, so there's nothing else to dive into as yet.

Seriously. One song. I wasted several dozen hours this week listening to crap  to bring you this one song, so you'd better fucking like it.

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480 Minutes / Year 17 - Episode 7/729