VIA HOTSHOTS
Nice try, you toupee-wearing loser.
Welcome back to the Big Mad, the RFT's weekly roundup of righteous rage! Because we know your time is short and your anger is hot:
Expansion Scheme: The best part of the ongoing lawsuit between St. Louis and the NFL is the delicious schadenfreude of having Rams owner Stan Kroenke and his billionaire buddies come groveling back to the city they betrayed. The second-best part is the possibility that the NFL pays St. Louis a stupendous amount of money. There is no third thing. Yet, with the lawsuit heating up, legal analysts and sports commentators are raising the possibility that the NFL could try to reach a settlement to give an expansion team to St. Louis. To supporters of this, we say: For real? We place more trust in Sam Bradford’s cursed knees than any promise from the NFL, an organization that gladly encouraged owners to pressure cities into using public funding to build stadiums — such was the racket that led St. Louis to burn $18 million on a new stadium plan in 2015 that the league and Kroenke never had any intention of considering. So, give us the cash, and if there’s additional sweetening needed for the settlement, don’t give us a team, but something we actually want: a Black Mirror-style television special where Kroenke has to eat Imo's for 24 hours straight while complimenting a slideshow of St. Louis' historic churches, and every time he mispronounces a street name Kurt Warner comes out and hits him with a pork steak. You know, justice.
Nursing a Grudge: In a time where we, as a society, are quite literally hanging on by a thread, you would think everyone would take a moment and be nicer to each other. Instead, we have people who are openly assholes in public just to prove a point. A story published last week by Kaiser Health News shone a light on just how fucked our society is, with patients and their families exhibiting a range of poor behavior from assaulting medical staff to threatening to bring guns to hospitals that have COVID-19 protocols they don’t agree with. Missouri alone has had a tripling of physical assaults, causing nurses at one hospital to carry panic buttons on their badges. Let us emphasize that for you: a tripling. One nurse has noticed the ongoing problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic, with people taking their political anger out on nurses just trying to do their jobs. It is infuriating to watch this happen to anyone, let alone people who saved a decent chunk of our asses last year fighting an unknown deadly enemy. Now it’s time to do your part: Get vaccinated against both the flu and COVID, stop attacking people, and thank a health-care worker. We owe these people a hell of a lot better than just “don’t assault them,” but hey, we could at least start there.
Hot Coffee Hot Takes: Remember in 2017 when people were throwing their coffee makers off balconies in fealty to Fox News hosts? It seemed at the time like the height (oh, yeah!) of stupidity. But if we’ve learned anything from this pandemic, it’s that things can always get more stupid. Now, we’ve got people throwing their whole damn careers out the window for equally dumb ideas. Newly former KMOV reporter Kim St. Onge proudly announced her profession-shucking decision this week in a public Facebook post after she refused the station owner’s requirement to either get vaccinated or follow strict safety protocols. “I refuse to stand for a company dictating medical decisions for its employees, especially when it comes to an experimental vaccine,” St. Onge writes in a screed that was long on “freedom” references and short on science. “I want my future kids to know their mom stood up for her beliefs, her morals, even though it cost their mom her job.” Say what you will about a Keurig, but at least it works.
F12 the Mainframe: The list of things that the Governor of Missouri doesn’t understand is long. There’s microbiology, of course, considering his disastrously hands-off approach to COVID safety measures. There’s economics as well, leading Parson to discontinue enhanced unemployment benefits based on nothing more than “conversations” rather than data, a move which national studies have shown had no positive effect on jobs report numbers. So it makes sense that the governor might be bewildered by the inscrutable sorcery of computers, leading him to accuse a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of being a “hacker” over his ability to click an F12 button and view a pile of social security numbers freely available in the source code. It’s believable, but honestly we suspect he’s being disingenuous on this one, and moreover, a great big weenie. Attacking a journalist for doing his job is a perfect way to throw some red meat to his base while simultaneously deflecting blame for the outrageous security flaws that happened under his watch, but it also fuckin’ sucks. Just take the L, man.
