This week on the podcast...we’re blindly reacting to news headlines because we didn’t do our homework. Hold onto your hats!

Get a vaccine so you too can record a podcast in the same room as your co-host!

Brain Trust Live is (still) Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. Having proved himself a terrible senator, we’re now seeing why Rand Paul didn’t hack it in the medical field either.

2. Joe Biden loves to compromise so much, he’s decided to do it with himself

3. The squad is finally coordinating with each other! Just maybe not in the way you’d hope

4. Turns out one way to end a war is for everybody to declare victory at once and avoid specifics.

5. Abortions: Men and Amy Coney Barrett don’t want you to have them. 

6. In further proof that the space/time continuum is busted, it’s time to start talking about elections again!

Congrats to the winners of our anniversary trivia game, The Buttons!

Brain Trust Live is (still) Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. CDC’s new mask guidance is to just embrace the chaos. We all have to die sometime.

2. It’s finally okay to work in DC and not want to kill Palestinians! Baby steps.

3. NYC Mayoral Debate season is upon us! Lots of 2020 vibes.

4. Let the one lesson we learn from the pandemic be that you can extract more from your governors if you threaten to fire them.

5. Message to Joe Biden: Success isn’t measured by how many meetings you take with asshat Kevin McCarthy. It’s measured by whether you actually pass a bill.

6. Horse junkies are sweeping the horse races!

Also:

CALL YOUR REPS. ABOUT EVERYTHING. Make this number your profile picture. Tweet it every day. Add it to your phonebook:

Capitol Hill Main Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Brain Trust Live is (still) Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. Derek Chauvin is a man who will be going to jail and that’s a nice thing. We could have this warm fuzzy feeling about the justice system anytime if we tried.

2. Joe Biden allows John Kerry to ride a Lime scooter on camera even though, as his boss, he probably could have put a stop to that.  

3. Andrew Yang loves lesbian bars but apparently not the lesbians who congregate at them.

4. Nancy Pelosi vs. Squad: A battle with no winners

5. Please commit to hating the Caitlyn Jenner candidacy for the right reasons

6. New American Psycho: The Josh Hawley Story

Also:

CALL YOUR REPS. ABOUT EVERYTHING. Make this number your profile picture. Tweet it every day. Add it to your phonebook:

Capitol Hill Main Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Brain Trust Live is (still) Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. The further right you get on the political scale, the more you should not be allowed to dance in public. And yet...CPAC still happened.

2. The House passed Biden’s stimulus bill, but was the less-than-$2000 really worth staying up all night for?

3. In classic Biden fashion, he figures out how to send bombs to Syria before checks to your bank account.

4. Kids in cages are being shuffled around to different cages under the Biden border plan.

5. Listen, kids, here’s some advice to live by: Never run for a third term in New York.

6. More vaccines are coming! So you can think about that while you continue to not be able to get an appointment.

Also:

CALL YOUR REPS. ABOUT EVERYTHING. Make this number your profile picture. Tweet it every day. Add it to your phonebook:

Capitol Hill Main Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Brain Trust Live is (still) Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. We finally found a competent Trump official! His airplane choreography guy was top notch. Goodbye to a legend.

2. The Inauguration was just one stop on a list of errands Bernie Sanders had to run on Wednesday

3. Joe Biden’s version of "Infrastructure Week" might include actual policy

4. Introducing the 117th Senate: A place of chaos!

5. Nobody wants to hear a peep out of any of these fools until we have $2000 burning a hole in our pockets

6. The Trump era’s collateral damage: conspiracy theorists were left sad and confused

Also:

CALL YOUR REPS. ABOUT EVERYTHING. Make this number your profile picture. Tweet it every day. Add it to your phonebook:

Capitol Hill Main Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Brain Trust Live is (still) Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. White House adds a second bad bill to our grand American stimulus mess. Current count is bad bills: 2, good bills: 0.

2. Even SCOTUS wants there to be a government

3. Biden promised his administration would be a “bridge to the next generation.” We didn’t realize he only meant Boomers. 

4. People of various levels of fun and not-fun are announcing runs for office

5. Let me just defend Iowa for a moment: It was the DNC that actually ruined the caucuses.

6. It’s too bad we waited for Facebook to ruin America before deciding to break it up

Brain Trust Live is Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. Can you request a reimbursement from the Biden transition fund now that they finally have the money your taxes contributed?

2. Diaper Don loses his shit

3. Biden writes The Return of the Blob: The Blob Strikes Back...with drones

4. You have to have worked at one of three specific consulting firms to work in the Biden administration

5. Our calls and deranged emails worked! DiFi is out at Judiciary, and, hopefully soon, our lives.

6. The Taiwan parliament shows some literal guts...in the form of pig guts

Brain Trust Live is Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. We’re on track to shatter our voting turnout records at a whopping...62%! Cool. One-third of you guys are still like, “nah.”

2. Trump’s closing argument at debate #2: Things could always be worse. 

3. White House staff loved COVID so much the first time, they decided to try it again!

4. We comment on his zombie-like stares all the time, but is Mitch McConnell actually one of the undead?

5. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins never had any principles, guys.

6. Fake Melania’s on a plane!

Brain Trust Live is Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, helicopters, barking dogs, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!

In Which We Discuss:

1. If you run progressives, you sometimes can elect them, and that is the definition of being electable

2. Eating out is nice and all, but what about staying at home and drinking alone...forever?

3. Donald Trump: Where white nationalism and Russian nationalism find their Grand Wizard

4. Progressives can defeat mainline Democrats by thinking long-term

5. DC gets one step closer to statehood. Puerto Rico...still batting zero.

6. California Democrats try a crazy experiment...moving the party forward in a unified way.

Brain Trust Live is Lila Nordstrom and Brent Thornburg's look at the week in electoral and political news. Join the millions of quarantiners, helicopters, and computer beeps who love our podcast and tell your friends about BTL!  Then rate us on iTunes or find us Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Stitcher, or Instagram!