Besides the old standby: a cranked up AC.

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Adele hasn’t said anything about her weight loss, so why are we?

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If you follow the Joe Rogan Experience, even in a passive way, you’ll know how often the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein comes up. You can simply Google “Joe Rogan Experience Jeffrey Epstein” and pages of clips of Rogan and different guests spanning dozens of episodes will pop up. If you listen to Rogan a little more closely, you’ll also know whenever Epstein does come up, the infamous “Lolita Express” comes up too (Epstein’s private plane). Rogan usually brings it up in relation to former President Bill Clinton by saying (while emphasizing every single syllable), “Bill Clinton rode the Lolita Express no less than 26 times.” (Worth noting, Rogan rarely brings up how many times current President Donald Trump was on that very same plane.)

Which makes this week’s guest a curious pick for the podcast host. Rogan welcomed famed Los Angeles steakhouse chef Adam Perry Lang (APL Restaurant) to talk about steak and how Lang’s ultra-high-end restaurant is faring during the lockdown. Lang is a renowned chef and Rogan loves meat, so that bit holds water. But Adam Perry Lang worked for Epstein and Rogan somehow didn’t bring this up a single time during the two-hour interview. Instead, they talked about steak. And that’s pretty much it.

Lang was outed as a personal chef for Epstein when court testimony by Epstein’s pilot was unsealed. It was confirmed that Lang spent considerable time traveling with Epstein and his crew to all the spots where Epstein was allegedly flying in underage girls to attend lavish parties he threw for celebrities, politicians, billionaires, and royalty. Lang himself admitted he was on some of the flights and worked in Epstein’s homes, but told Eater in 2019 that he was unaware of any wrong-doing going on all around him.

“My role was limited to meal preparation,” Lang told Eater. “I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”

Lang hasn’t offered any more information since that conversation. In the years after Lang worked for Epstein at his New Mexico ranch, Palm Beach compound, New York penthouse, and private Caribbean Island, he’s become the toast of the Los Angeles food scene — working for Oprah, Mario Batali, and Jimmy Kimmel. The latter is such a close friend that Kimmel let Lang live in his beach house after his recent separation and divorce.

Why Joe Rogan, a man fairly obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein up to this point, choose not to ask a single question about Jeffrey Epstein while sitting across from his former personal chef who was regularly on the “Lolita Express” leaves a pretty big question mark. And he’s receiving a lot of ire from Rogan’s fans in on social media and in the comments section of the episode’s YouTube page.

Obviously, no one has to be fully accountable for their associates or employers, but this topic seems like a pretty large elephant to leave standing in the room.

One of the highlights of The Last Dance has been the old footage of the 1998 Bulls, particularly the locker room, practice, and plane videos.

This past week’s episodes featured more of that than the first four, which also made them two of the best episodes yet in the documentary. There was footage of Jordan golfing, Dream Team practices, and Jordan gambling with security guards over pitching quarters, but there was also a segment dedicated to all the various celebrities that came to games just to see Jordan and the Bulls.

One of those was Jerry Seinfeld, who got quite a bit of airtime as there was footage of him meeting up with Jordan in the Bulls locker room prior to a game. Michael pointed out some team employees that were huge fans of his show and the two talked briefly before Phil Jackson kicked Jerry out of the locker room. Seinfeld appeared on The Jimmy Kimmel Show this week and Kimmel asked him about that moment — after Jerry explained he hadn’t gotten around to watching the documentary yet.

Seinfeld remembers “teasing” Jordan about whose final season would be a bigger deal, Jordan and the 98 Bulls or Jerry and the Seinfeld finale that was also taking place that same year. He goes on to say the most starstruck he’s ever been in his life was when Keith Hernandez guest starred on Seinfeld in 1992, but by 1998 he wasn’t exactly fazed by talking with an athlete, even on the level of Michael Jordan.

I need some help here, folks, because I don’t understand how people defend the president of the United States blatantly, repeatedly lying to their faces. Yes, I know all politicians lie, but not like this. Not repeating the same easily disprovable lie over and over and over again.

This isn’t the first time, of course. Maybe I’m just extra irritated by it this time because, you know, global pandemic. But seriously, how do people defend this? How are we supposed to trust or respect someone who repeats the same lies incessantly?

Let’s look at just this one:

In a press briefing on April 24, 2020, President Trump said that the U.S. had conducted 5.1 million tests, claiming, “That’s more than all countries combined.” Then he repeated, “All countries combined.”

Remarks: Donald Trump Signs Coronavirus Stimulus Bill at The White House – April 24, 2020

www.youtube.com

That wasn’t true. In fact on April 24, we hadn’t even performed more than just the next three countries combined.

Here’s proof. You can view testing by country on the Our World in Data website, so I plugged in Russia, Germany, Italy, and the U.S. for the week of his claim. (Germany only updates their testing total once a week, so the two charts show April 19 and April 26.)

ourworldindata.org

As you can add, just these three countries had a greater combined testing total than we did. And there are dozens upon dozens of other countries doing testing, several with more than a million tests done. So no, not more than all countries combined. Not even close.

ourworldindata.org

But that hasn’t stopped the president from repeating this same big, egregious lie over and over again over the past two weeks.

He wrote ithe same claim on Twitter the next day—using the word “major” this time, which is still totally false.

He repeated the lie again in a briefing on April 27, where he said, “We are the best in the world on testing. We’ve tested much more than anybody else, times two — or every country combined. We’ve tested more than every country combined.“

Still wasn’t even close to true.

In a video posted to the White House Twitter page on April 29, Trump again said, “We’ve tested more than all countries put together.”

Not true then, either.

But he keeps repeating it no matter how many times people point out that it’s false.

Yesterday on Twitter, for instance:

And again, this morning:

Donald J. Trump/Twitter

It’s blatantly, verifiably not true. It has always been not true. It hasn’t been true in total testing numbers, and it hasn’t been true per capita. Not even close.

There’s no way the president doesn’t know this. (If he doesn’t, that’s a whole other problem.) So what I want to know is, how do the president’s supporters handle the fact that he is repeatedly lying to their faces about something so easily disproven?

In response to other lies, I’ve heard some say, “Well, all politicians stretch the truth.” That’s true. But this lie isn’t stretching the truth, it’s completely demolishing it. And isn’t the big selling point of Trump that he isn’t a politician and he “tells it like it is”? Because this isn’t telling it like it is. This is lying. Repeatedly. About something that is easily proven to be a lie.

Who does that? And who accepts and defends it? I know there are like 482,000 issues we could discuss when it comes to this presidency, but the repeated, blatant, and obvious lies should concern every single person on this planet. I’ve seen presidents twist the truth, but I’ve never seen a president do this. Heck, I’ve never even seen another human being do this.

It’s bizarre, folks. This man is attempting to create his own alternate reality, and he’s doing it from the most powerful position on the planet. He has codes to our nuclear arsenal, for goodness sake. How does anyone reconcile this in their head?

Fact checkers have found that Trump averages 15 untrue statements per day. But as exhausting as it is, I think focusing on this singular lie is valuable. It’s easy to brush off accusations of constant lying, as some falsehoods people can justify as a slip of the tongue or spin as a misunderstanding. But when a bold-faced lie gets repeated many, many times, that’s not a mistake.

This lie about testing more than all other countries combined is indefensible. I want to hear someone defend the president of the United States blatantly lying over and over to our faces. Is honesty not important? Does it not matter if we can’t trust the president to present basic, factual information?

Please, defend this. I need to see how this works, because I genuinely don’t understand.

The Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in a consolidation of two cases on Wednesday: Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Pennsylvania. The hearings were held via teleconference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The case is centered around the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) requirement that employee health plans include free birth control coverage for women.

After the ACA was passed, exceptions were made for religious organizations that do not wish to provide birth control to employees via insurance.

Recently, under the guise of religious freedom, the Trump Administration has attempted to expand on those exceptions by allowing employers to exempt themselves from the requirement. The allowed employers ranging from colleges to public companies to prevent their female employees from getting free birth control.

The states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey challenged the exemptions and won a nationwide injunction. Now, the case is being heard by the Supreme Court with Solicitor General Noel Francisco representing the Trump Administration.

Eighty-seven-year-old liberal minority judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg heard the arguments via telephone in her hospital bed at Johns Hopkins University. Although she was admitted Tuesday for a gall bladder condition, she still had the strength to fight back against Francisco.

Ginsberg has a long history of advocating for gender equality and women’s reproductive rights.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg destroys Trump Solicitor General over contraception exception

www.youtube.com

During the oral arguments, Ginsberg made the point that providing exceptions went against the original aims of the law.

“What the government has done in expanding this exemption is to toss to the wind entirely Congress’ instruction that women need and shall have seamless, no-cost comprehensive coverage,” Ginsburg told Solicitor General Noel Francisco.

“They can get contraception coverage by paying out of their own pocket which is exactly what Congress did not want to happen,” she added.

The justice also pointed out that far too often the freedom of religious people takes precedence over the rights of those who want freedom from religion.

The justice said that a “major trend in religious freedom is to give everything to one side and nothing to the other side.”

She then referenced Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.where the SCOTUS found that private corporations could be exempt from the birth control mandate.

“You have just tossed entirely to the wind what Congress thought was essential. That is that women be provided these services with no hassle, no cost to them,” she said.

via Wake Forest University / Flickr

She also made the point that women’s lives shouldn’t be controlled by the religious views of their employers.

“Instead, you are shifting the cost of the employer’s religious beliefs to the employees who do not share those religious beliefs,” she added. “The women end up getting nothing. They are required to do just what Congress didn’t want.”

Francisco then argued that churches could not have an exception to the contraception rule if it was available to for-profit businesses as well. Ginsberg countered by saying the Constitution has always treated churches differently.

“The church has enjoyed traditionally an exception from the very first case… the church itself is different from these organizations that employ a lot of people who do not share the employer’s faith.”

A decision in the case is expected sometime this summer.

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We’re probably not getting another batch of Black Mirror any time soon — life right now is already depressing enough as is! — but at least we’ll be getting another anthology show to fill its place. As per Deadline, FX has ordered a two-part pilot for an as-yet-untitled program from The Office alum B.J. Novak. And it already has a killer cast.

That cast, by the way, includes, in the first episode, Lucas Hedges, Kaitlyn Dever, O’Shea Jackson, comic George Wallace, and Ed Asner. The second, meanwhile, boasts Jon Bernthal, Boyd Holbrook, Amy Landecker, and Beau Bridges.

What will they be doing? Who knows! Not only is there no title yet but no details beyond Novak and cast have been made public, with Deadline only claiming that it “uses the boldest issues of our times as a jumping off point to tell singular, character-driven stories about the world we live in today.”

That’s a lot to live up to, but remember: Novak isn’t just Ryan Howard, nor even merely one part of the Inglourious Basterds. He was a The Office writer as well, his name credited on such classics as “Diversity Day,” “Sexual Harassment,” “Threat Level Midnight,” and many more, on top of writing and directing select episodes of The Mindy Project for fellow alum Mindy Kaling. Presumably there will be some jokes amidst the bold issues.

(Via Deadline)

Welcome to this week’s Wednesday Night Wars open discussion thread. This week we’ve got the in-ring debut of Matt Hardy on AEW Dynamite in a tag team match with Kenny Omega against Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara (Le Sex Gods), going up against an episode of NXT featuring an NXT Championship match, an NXT Women’s Championship match, and probably more random parking lot kidnappings.

On tonight’s cards:

AEW Dynamite

• Kenny Omega and Matt Hardy vs. Le Sex Gods (Chris Jericho and Sammy Guevara)
• AEW World Champion Kenny Omega vs. Frankie Kazarian
• Cody Rhodes vs. Joey Janela
• Lance Archer murdering QT Marshall (please send flowers)
• the return of MJF

NXT

• NXT Championship Match: Adam Cole (c) vs. Velveteen Dream
• NXT Women’s Championship Match: Charlotte Flair (c) vs. Io Shirai
• Dominik Dijakovic vs. Johnny Gargano
• the in-ring debut of Karrion Kross, with Scarlett
• Finn Bálor “seeing justice” against his mystery attacker

As always, +1 your favorite comments from tonight’s open thread and if we get enough comments, we’ll include 10 of the best in tomorrow’s Best and Worst of NXT and AEW reports. Make sure you flip the comments by selecting “newest” in the drop down menu under discussion, and enjoy the show!

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