Author: Raymond

 

 
From Tommy Christopher:

Trump Pick Stephen Moore Makes Unbelievably Cringeworthy Defense of His Racist Obama Joke

“By the way, did you see, there’s that great cartoon going along?” Moore said. “A New York Times headline: ‘First Thing Donald Trump Does as President Is Kick a Black Family Out of Public Housing,’ and it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one. Just a great one.”

In an excerpt from an upcoming episode of PBS’ Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, Hoover asked Moore about the joke, and after playing the clip for him, let Moore perform the news equivalent of an extended sad trombone.

“So, you know, that is a joke that I always made about, you know, Obama lives in, you know, the president lives in public housing,” Moore began, deploying the solid strategy of defending a racist joke by saying you make that racist joke all the time.

“But I didn’t mean it like a black person did,” Moore continued, despite the fact that the joke literally says “kick a black family out of public housing.”

“I just meant that, you know, you know, being in the White House, you know, for example, when I was working with a lot of women in families who were involved in the education voucher program, you know, here in DC, and people would say, well, you know, and these were blacks who would say, you know, why does Barack Obama get to send his kids to any school that he wants to and we can’t?”

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From Dave Dubya:

Third parties and voters choosing not to participate in elections

I get it. People get frustrated. We seem to have two kinds of candidates, disappointing and horrible.

It should be obvious that the most horrible are always Republicans. As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the Republican Party is at war with representative democracy, which means they want to suppress voters and voting rights.

The more people who turn out to vote, the more Republicans lose.

The Right has made this tactic abundantly clear.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

The 30+ years since the launch of Super Mario Bros. have given ample opportunity for scholars to study the game’s possible influences in academia and society at large.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

New NJ Beekeeper Regs Show Why Government Should Focus on Punishing the Guilty, Not Regulating the Innocent.

Certainly, everyone has a right not to be harmed (or their property) by neighboring operations, based on the principal of property rights. But neither should a person be interfered with by government for engaging in legal activities on his own property that harms no one else. Why punish the innocent?

And that’s the dirty little secret of government regulation; the punishing of the innocent for the wrongdoing of the guilty. A good poster child for this premise is Sarbanes-Oxley, the giant financial regulatory bill passed after the 1999-2000 Enron accounting scandals. Enron, Worldcom, and a few other companies defrauded investors—and were prosecuted under pre-existing laws. Yet Congress and President Bush passed Sarbanes-Oxley, allegedly to “prevent” future fraud but which in reality burdened the thousands of companies that didn’t cook the books with new regulations—in effect, punishing the innocent many for the wrongdoing of the few.

We see this pattern time and again. Somebody does something wrong, and regulations reign down on an entire industry or sector.

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From CATO Institute’s Julian Sanchez:

Barr testifies before Congress on May 1 and 2. And, with Barr having said publicly that he has “no objection to Bob Mueller personally testifying,” Mueller’s own appearance on the Hill likely won’t lag far behind.
 
We are recommending key questions that each should be asked about their work on the investigations of Trump-Russia links, their anticipations and recommendations for what comes next, and—perhaps most intriguingly—their interactions with, and expectations of, each other in the context of the Russia investigation.

1. Do you hereby testify that everything you said in your March 24, 2019 summary letter and everything you said in your press conference on the morning of the public release of the Mueller Report is true and accurate?

2. With whom exactly, outside of the Department of Justice, did you share a copy of the Mueller Report before releasing it to Congress? Did those copies of the report include the exact same redactions as the version you sent to Congress?

3. At the press conference on the morning of the public release of the Mueller Report, you said, “the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation.” How can you make such a claim when the report itself documents such conduct as the President (1) trying to fire the Special Counsel and (2) refusing the Special Counsel’s request for an interview?

4. The Mueller Report’s description of obstruction raises many questions about what exactly took place and how the Special Counsel’s Office interpreted some individuals’ actions and intentions. As one example, it is not clear why the Special Counsel concluded that the President was not asking KT McFarland to lie, given that the President asked her to make a written record of something she did not believe to be true. Between the time you received the Special Counsel’s report and issued your summary two days later, did you have any questions about the report that you discussed with Director Mueller? How many hours would you estimate you spent discussing your questions with him? What questions were foremost on your mind?

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From The Borowitz Report:

“Clients will come in and say, ‘Make me as young and vibrant as Donald Trump,’ ” Klugian said. “I have to warn them that that’s setting the bar very, very high.”

Having analyzed Trump’s fitness habits, Klugian has theorized that his startling youthfulness and off-the-charts vibrance might be the result of eight hours that he devotes each day to “executive time.”

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From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:

I am sickened and appalled that six months to the day of the Squirrel Hill tragedy, another synagogue in the US has been struck by a self radicalized, armed human horror show. First and foremost, I grieve with this community and lift you up in my admiration for your humanity and wish you strength, peace, and healing.

I wish I could separate this shooting from the bigger picture of intolerance and hate in this country, and even around the world, but I can’t. I am not unaware that addressing the specter of anti-Semitism in this moment is politicized, but who is it that drags this into their politics, and doesn’t know that events like this might follow?

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

I’ve been wondering about how it is that we are reportedly near full employment and yet no one seems to be making more money, no one is getting raises. It doesn’t make sense to me that employers are not increasing salaries hoping to retain employees. Everything about the economics of right now seems off script to me.

Further down the dictionary’s definition of gig is this one: a harpoon-like device used for catching fish or frogs. So I was thinking about the verb To Gig as I read the economy deep-dive email thingie from Axios, which is in many separate parts and altogether tells a story.

“More Americans are working than ever before, but a growing number of them aren’t 9-to-5 employees, nor skilled freelancers who negotiate their compensation, Dan and Kia write.

Instead they are your Uber driver, your DoorDash food deliverer or your Rover dog-walker.”

The remarkable unemployment numbers coming from our Vichy gubmint might be hiding that a large part could be to these gig employees…

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Before he announced as a candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination, I heard a lot of pundits on cable news talking about how Joe Biden was making a mistake by not entering the presidential race as early as others. They said the supporters and donors would already be attached to other candidates if he waited.

It seems those pundits were wrong (which they often are). The Biden campaign has revealed that they raised about $6.3 million in his first 24 hours as a candidate.

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