Jinxes aren’t real, right? Not if the final week of 2021 has anything to say about it.
In the span of about four days, the world lost John Madden, a Super Bowl-winning NFL coach and commentator who was also the namesake for one of the bestselling sports video games in the United States, Harry Reid, a onetime boxer who worked his way up to the U.S. Senate and was instrumental in passing the Affordable Care Act, and Betty White, a beloved actress who made her name on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls and lived to the ripe old age of 99.
In other news, Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend and confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, was found guilty on five of six counts related to the trafficking of young girls to be sexually used by the ex-financier and his high-profile friends.
To ring in the new year, here are our Quotes of the Week.
“Stop. It’s a fake religion created by a psychopath. You aren’t bringing in new voters, you are turning them away. People are tired of pandering and BS.”
– Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene responding to College Republicans wishing followers a happy Kwanza.
“If science can’t be questioned, it’s not science anymore. It’s propaganda.”
– Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers questioning the science behind COVID-19 mandates.
“I mean, it’s the same playbook every time, but it’s not so much the smearing and whatnot. It’s the physical threats. … getting phone calls that are threatening … other family members getting threats as well, people posting our address on the internet.
“I absolutely support everyone’s right to have free speech as I did. … If you don’t agree with me, I can respect that. But I cannot respect the nasty physical threats against our lives. That’s not something that I can stand for.”
– Jared Schmeck, the man who told the president “Let’s go Brandon” on a phone call last week, talking about the criticism he received for the prank.
“That’s interesting to me that the president is so bold in saying that there is no federal solution yet continuing to impose mandates on the country. The fact is that he doesn’t have the authority to put these mandates in place.”
– South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on the Biden administration’s continued COVID-19 mandates.
“Because Democrats don’t have the votes to change it honestly, which would mean changing the text of the rule, they’d have to use the nuclear option. So, you’d end up with rules that say one thing, but we pretend they say another.”
– Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation on Democrats’ options for changing the filibuster.
“Nobody should be foolish enough to believe that if China would be allowed to break Lithuania, they would refrain from making more and stricter demands next time, if another government … does something they don’t like. … The appetite of this authoritarian system to force others to do its bidding is not limited, and we will have to act accordingly.”
– European Parliament China delegation leader Reinhard Butikofer on China’s economic pressure campaign threatening the European Union.
“I have a lot of opinions on John Madden. The creation of the Madden video game was not a great development for the U.S. It further glamorized violence and dehumanized black athletes, helping to establish plantation cosplay that has grown worse in the era of fantasy football.”
– Andrew McGregor, a professor of history at Dallas College, on John Madden’s legacy.
“It may seem silly to some, but the fact that ‘Jingle Bells’ was first performed in minstrel shows where white actors performed in blackface does actually matter when it comes to questions of what we use as material in school. I’m glad that our staff paused when learning of this, reflected, and decided to use different material to accomplish the same objective in class.”
– Brighton Central School District Superintendent Kevin McGowan defending the decision to not have students sing “Jingle Bells.”
“The first 100,000 [deaths in the U.S.] were probably not stoppable. And after that, I think there was clearly bungling.”
– Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on the U.S. COVID death rate.
“He was my leader, my mentor, one of my dearest friends. He’s gone but he will walk by the sides of many of us in the Senate every single day.”
– Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the death of former Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, once a Senate majority leader in his own right.
“[Biden] made clear that the United States and its allies and partners will respond decisively if Russia further invades Ukraine.”
– White House press secretary Jen Psaki on the president’s phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday.
“But the other important thing is that if you look at the children who are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID. … And what we mean by that — if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID. And they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s overcounting the number of children who are, quote, ‘hospitalized with COVID,’ as opposed to because of COVID.”
– Dr. Anthony Fauci on overcounting the number of children hospitalized for COVID-19.
“Justice must be done. Epstein and Maxwell’s victims deserve nothing less. The DOJ failed again and again and again when Epstein escaped justice. Maxwell must pay for her heinous crimes. This verdict shouldn’t be the end: The DOJ needs to go after every single scumbag who committed crimes with Maxwell and Epstein.”
– Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse following up on his 2018 message to the Department of Justice that more work needs to be done in the Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell case.
“Please tell the president thank you for the endorsement. With regard to the other issue, please tell the president he has nothing to worry about.”
– Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy suggesting he will forgo backing Sen. Lisa Murkowski in order to retain former President Donald Trump’s endorsement.
“That’s a shame! She was a lovely lady, 99 years old. My mother would say, ‘God love her.'”
– President Joe Biden on the death of actress Betty White.
