Extract from The Guardian
Late-night hosts recap the GOP-backed, error-prone Texas lawsuit to overturn other states’ election results, and the anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook
Seth Meyers
Despite the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in all 50 states, Seth Meyers reported on Thursday’s Late Night, Donald Trump’s allies continue attempts to overturn the result. “Trump and his allies in rightwing media are going all in on creating a false mythology around his election loss,” Meyers explained, “an unhinged fantasy where he actually won and votes for anyone else are illegitimate.”
Their belief in Trump’s victory is not rooted in “any actual proof of voter fraud, since there is none”, Meyers continued. “They just take it as an article of faith that there is no way Trump could’ve lost.” For example, a lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, to override the election results in Pennsylvania and three other states is so “flimsy and error-prone” that to support the claim that Trump’s loss was statistically impossible, the Trump lawyer John Eastman, peddler of a conspiracy theory against Kamala Harris’s citizenship, tweeted that Trump “won both Florida and Ohio; no candidate in history – Republican or Democrat – has ever lost the election after winning both states.”
“Which is true – if you just start counting after 1960,” Meyers corrected (Richard Nixon won both Florida and Ohio but lost the election to John F Kennedy).
“Do these guys do, like, any research before they write this stuff?” Meyers wondered. “Can they not afford a Siri or a Clippy? Just swallow your pride and Ask Jeeves for God’s sake.”
Nevertheless, Republican attorneys general in 17 states have joined the Texas lawsuit, with public support from Georgia senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. “This is what Trump and the Republican party obsessively focused on as thousands of Americans die every day from a pandemic they clearly don’t care about,” Meyers lamented. “At some point, you just run out of words.”
Stephen Colbert
On The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also touched on the Trump team’s Hail Mary lawsuit in Texas to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results. “Hmm, what do you call it when a bunch of states band together to say that the other states elected the wrong President?” Colbert deadpanned. “Some sort of grouping or … confederation of states? I see why they kept all those flags now.”
Success for the case is extremely unlikely, a fact even acknowledged by some of the president’s supporters. The Texas senator John Cornyn, for one, told CNN’s Manu Raju that he read the summary of the case and “frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it”.
“Let me explain, senator: the Texas attorney general is just carrying water for the president,” Colbert explained, “citing the landmark case of Brown v Nose.”
In other news, the US government and 48 attorneys general filed anti-trust lawsuits against Facebook on Wednesday, calling the tech behemoth an “illegal monopoly”.
“Yes, it’s just like monopoly,” Colbert said, “except every time you pass go, instead of getting $200, Zuckerberg sells your data to a Moldovan spam farm.”
The Federal Trade Commission is arguing that the company, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, must be broken up. “To be clear, Facebook has not broken up yet, but it has changed its status to ‘it’s complicated,’” Colbert quipped. “Of course, if Facebook does break up, it has the daunting task of going through and manually untagging the photos of it together.”
Jimmy Kimmel
And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel urged Americans to trust the impending Covid vaccines, after a survey revealed about half of Americans intend to receive one. “A lot of Americans are saying they want to wait and see, which is a strategy that’ll result in the unnecessary death of a lot of people,” he explained.
“If the majority of us don’t get it, it won’t work as well. Half of us are worried about putting this substance in our bodies because we don’t know what’s in it, and yet we have no problem down 16oz of something called Monster Energy Assault.”
“If you are in the half of Americans who do want the vaccine, you still might not be able to get it,” he added, as it was revealed this week that over the summer, the Trump administration passed on a deal with Pfizer to secure 100m more doses of its vaccine, which will now go to other countries.
“By not pre-ordering enough vaccines, deal-maker Don put America way behind Canada, the UK, Australia, and all 27 countries in the EU,” Kimmel said. “Until we get the vaccine, we just have to be careful – which we are not.”
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