Category: Good Writing

Larry Willmore Slayed at the White House Correspondents Dinner

No Comments

Made Even Better by the Crowd Reaction

It is pretty clear that he looked at Colbert’s now famous talk 10 years ago, and decided give me some more of that:

Comedian Larry Wilmore held no punches at the 2016 White House correspondents’ dinner, taking aim at presidential candidates, reporters and Bill Cosby. (Erin Patrick O’Connor/The Washington Post)

It’s always the big question after the White House correspondents’ dinner: Did the comedian flop?

Opinions vary wildly, but there’s no question some of Larry Wilmore’s jokes received a very frosty reaction inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.

………

But that was nothing compared to when he tried out his jokes about the media — to a crowd filled to the brim with journalists.

………

On TV, the reaction sounded like hushed murmurs. Our colleagues inside the dinner reported the line bombed. “Boo!” someone yelled. “Hiss!” yelled another.

Wilmore laughed nervously. “No — alright, fine, I like Wolf.” He was booed again when he took another shot at Wolf’s network: “I don’t know about you guys, but I cannot get enough of that CNN countdown clock. Now we can see exactly when they hit zero in the ratings.”

Another joke that didn’t go over so well? “A little bit about me, I am a black man who replaced a white man who pretended to be a TV newscaster,” Wilmore said. “So yeah, in that way Lester Holt and I have a lot in common.”

There were audible, very loud gasps at that joke that obviously called out Brian Williams, replaced by Holt on “NBC Nightly News” after it was discovered he exaggerated or misrepresented stories over the years.

………

Melissa Harris-Perry, whose messy departure with MSNBC was specifically referenced in the routine (Wilmore says MSNBC now stands for “Missing a Significant Number of Black Correspondents”), tweeted support for Wilmore, which is unsurprising:

It was a good talk, made even better by the frosty reception of the room, who are still as thin skinned as they always were.

The best line was not a dig at Fox, but by a line about MSNBC, “MSNBC got rid of so many black people I thought Boko Haram was running that network,” though the best moment when Don Lemon flipped the bird in response to a dig at him.

He also dropped the N-bomb.

It was good, and he had to know that he would piss off most of the guys in the room.

Well played Mr. Wilmore.

Here is the complete transcript .

F%$# Me, I Agree with the Orange One ……… Not Trump, the Other Orange One

1 Comment

I mean John Boehner, who is most assuredly not a fan of Ted Cruz:

“Lucifer in the flesh,” the former Speaker said. “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”

That’s my sense of Ted Cruz as well.

I have never in my life seen someone as widely loathed as Ted Cruz in public life.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

But first, what would motivate any young person today to pull the plug?

Well maybe they should consider this for a moment. Who most wants you to stay on the grid? The advertisers. Your boss. Human Resources. The advertisers. Your parents (irony of ironies – once they distrusted it, now they need to tag you electronically, share your Facebook photos and message you to death). The advertisers. The government. Your local authority. Your school. Advertisers.

Well, if you’re young and have an ounce of pride, doesn’t that list say it all? So f%$# you, I’m Going Off The Grid.

—Stephen Fry

(%$%# mine)

Good Point, But Wrong

No Comments

Over at The New Republic, David Dayen observes that observes that that transcripts from Hillary Clinton’s speeches to the Vampire Squid are irrelevant, because she has always been in Wall Street’s pocket anyway:

I don’t want to see the transcripts from Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches.

 ………

 The actual transcript is unnecessary because we already have enough in the public domain to know the real issue with these speeches: the rapport and camaraderie between political leaders and financial institutions, which results in a frame of mind that accepts their arguments and privileges their views. In fact, the best example of this comes from a speech that Clinton habitually touts as an example of her get-tough approach to Wall Street.

 On the stump and in debates, including last week’s in Brooklyn, Clinton highlights a speech she made at Nasdaq in December 2007, in the thick of the foreclosure crisis. “When I was serving as the senator from New York, I did stand up to the banks,” Clinton said last week. “I did make it clear that their behavior would not be excused.”

 In the speech, available here, she castigated Wall Street for “playing a significant role in the current problems,” for fueling irresponsible mortgage lending through securitization, and for having “shifted risk away from people who knew what was going on onto the people who did not.” Clinton has been criticized for this speech, however, because of a few lines where she said “there’s plenty of blame to go around” for the housing bubble, and that “homebuyers who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income should have known they were getting in over their heads.”

 You can read this as a throwaway nod to personal responsibility, a typical politician’s remark, when the thrust of the speech indicts Wall Street. I would argue that spreading around responsibility for something that was a demonstrably criminal action by lenders fits with Wall Street’s moralizing about deadbeat borrowers who should have known the risks. It’s a form of public shaming. And it arguably led to the lack of accountability we saw for the financial crisis—after all, if everybody is responsible, then ultimately nobody is responsible

 ………

 When something could have been done to pressure mortgage servicers, Hillary Clinton, like many politicians, adopted their argument that they were prevented from helping homeowners. She believed their claims that they were hamstrung, when they weren’t. And I have to believe that’s attributable to proximity, access, and whose arguments get priority of place.

 Wall Street purchases that priority of place simply by donating to campaigns, bringing politicians in for chats, marinating them in its worldview. Finance executives can make very compelling arguments about the complex intricacies of the financial system. They can sound charming and smart and logical. And in a moment of truth, they can get the payoff, when a powerful politician like Hillary Clinton makes a reasonable-sounding statement about mortgage servicers needing legal immunity.

On a strictly factual level, DDay is right:  We do not have to read her transcripts in order to know that she is, always has been, and likely always will be be Wall Street’s stooge.

The only question is whether Hillary and her Evil Minions™ or not she will be a bigger stooge than Barack and his Evil Minions™.

Needless to say, this sucks like 1000 Hoovers all going at once.

That being said, her the fact that she is a suck up to Wall Street means nothing without sound bites for the press to make it a real issue for most of the voting public.

That is the reality of our culture, media, and political system,

Hillary Clinton Is the Kindest, Bravest, Warmest, Most Wonderful Human Being I’ve Ever Known

No Comments

Over at Daily Kos, a diary has the best title ever:

Hillary Clinton is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known

By Steven D Monday Apr 18, 2016 · 1:45 PM EST 2016/04/18 · 13:45

I’ve finally come around, after seeing so many diaries on Daily Kos extolling her deserving qualities and virtues, to realizing that Hillary Clinton really is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known. Laugh all you want, but I can prove that she possesses each of those in abundance.

Read the rest, it’s marvelous snark.

I Could Care Less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs

No Comments

Earlier today, my wife mentioned that the Stanley Cup playoffs were starting tonight.

She is a hockey fan, specifically the New York Rangers.

I am most assuredly not a follower of the sport.

Upon observing my lack of enthusiasm, she said, “You could care less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs.”

I corrected her, and said, “No, I couldn’t care less about the Stanley Cup Playoffs,” because this is the proper linguistic formulation to describe supreme apathy.

It turns, as is often the case, she was right, and I was wrong.

There are things that I care about a LOT less than specifically.

The I saw a report about the tweets of Craig Mazin, who was Ted Cruz’s roommate in their freshman year at Princeton.

He has made a bit of a hobby tweeting about how Cruz was back in the day, and it is clear that he has never been a fan of his.

Well, in response to accounts of Cruz’ running the defense of the Texas’ ban on “Sexual Appliances”, Mr. Mazin tweeted the following:

Ted Cruz thinks people don’t have a right to “stimulate their genitals.” I was his college roommate. This would be a new belief of his.

— Craig Mazin (@clmazin) April 13, 2016

Sharon was right, I was wrong, I care about this a LOT less than the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

I really did not need that image in my head.

Snark of the Day

No Comments

I feel this may well be a turning point. It’s one thing to lose a 12-minute version of “Sherry Darling,” or the first-round of the 2072 NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament. But when the state legislature finds itself besieged by hundreds of angry, blue-balled, hairy-palmed, half-blind preachers, that’s when you’ll really see things move. Venceremos, my comrades!

—Charlier Pierce on XHamster blocking porn viewers from North Carolina from viewing their pr0n in response to the state’s anti-gay laws.

Heh.

What the Hairy Saroff Said

1 Comment

Heh

My hirsute brother observes that while Bernie supporters may see the invitation of Sanders to a talk at the Vatican, it is also wrong on a number of levels:

I have a feeling that the latest campaign news, Bernie Sanders plans short hiatus from New York campaign trail to speak at the Vatican, will make so people happy.

 I am not one of them.

 Whatever virtues the current Pope has, to my mind this is inappropriate.

 The Pope is a foreign leader (Prince Bishop of the Vatican City State), so he (like Netanyahu) should have no role in American elections.

Go read the rest.

He’s right, even if it made the Clinton’s heads explode.

This is Not a Surprise………

No Comments
Sacramento Mayor, former NBA star, and spouse of School privatization bunco artist Michelle Rhee, has left an amazing trail of corruption in his post basketball career:

Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He’d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. He’d helped elbow out racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed a little of the spotlight for himself in the process. He’d been named president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

He and his wife, Michelle Rhee—once the brightest star in the corporate-backed “education reform” movement—showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. An adviser told Johnson’s hometown newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, that the couple was a “modern-day version of Bill and Hillary Clinton.” There was talk about a run for California governor or U.S. Senate.

At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepreneur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a “world-class” city where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter schools, “never check out a library book,” and have “more smart devices than toothbrushes.”

………

By the fall of 2015, Johnson’s political career was effectively over. He was under scrutiny, again, for allegedly molesting a sixteen-year-old girl two decades before. And he was facing a new allegation of sexual misconduct; a city employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint. The City of Sacramento’s legal advisers warned Johnson not to hug or touch anyone at city events. So Johnson, deciding two terms in office were enough, announced that he will not seek reelection this November. His exit will coincide with the opening of the new arena, easily his most significant mayoral achievement.

Meanwhile, debt service on the bond-financed arena will reach about $18 million a year, draining money from the city treasury. Sacramento’s city finance department is warning that the city’s spending is already “unsustainable” and budget deficits are imminent. For now, however, Johnson is being credited with a dramatic makeover of the new arena district—where a decaying shopping mall had been before.

It goes on and on, and it gets more petty and sordid.

It’s not surprising.  At the core of his political success has always been the Hope Academy charter school, which much like most of the charter school empires, is built on a foundation of broken promises and dubious statistics.

H/t Atrios

Corruption is as Corruption Does

No Comments

It appears that Brian Newby, the Executive Director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, got his job there because his patron,Kansas Secretary of State Chris Korbach, pulled strings to insert him at the agency, where he later made transparently illegal moves to further Korbach’s goal of suppressing minority votes:

A Kansas county elections official used close ties to one of the nation’s leading advocates of voting restrictions to help secure the top job at a government agency entrusted with making voting more accessible, and then used the federal position to implement an obstacle to voter registration in three states.

An email provided to The Associated Press through open records requests offers a glimpse into the mindset of Brian Newby, executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who decided — without public comment or approval from bosses — that residents of Alabama, Kansas and Georgia can no longer register to vote using a national form without providing proof of U.S. citizenship.

As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: “I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to.”

Voting rights advocates were stunned by Newby’s action once he got the job and have sued to overturn it. Activists say it flies in the face of the commission’s mission to provide a simple, easy form to encourage voter registration.

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that states must accept and use the federal voter registration form, and an appeals court ruled in 2014 in a lawsuit filed by Kobach that states could not force the commission to require residents to provide proof-of-citizenship documents on the national form.

………

Documents obtained by AP show Newby’s ties to Kobach, the architect of voter ID and other restrictive voter registration laws around the nation that he says are needed to prevent voter fraud. Critics say there is very little voter fraud and Kobach’s measures hurt voter registration and deprive eligible voters of the right to vote.

Kobach had appointed Newby to be a county elections commissioner in Kansas, and helped him get the federal job that he took in November.

“I wanted you in the loop, in part because of other issues in the past with the EAC,” Newby emailed Kobach. “I also don’t want you thinking that you can’t count on me in an upcoming period that will tax our resources.”

………

Kobach said Wednesday that he spoke to one, and possibly two of the Republican commissioners, about Newby prior to his hiring.

………

But documents from open records requests and interviews by AP show that as early as April 2015 and continuing in the months leading to Newby’s hiring by the commission, Kobach and his staff met with county officials to discuss concerns about Newby’s job performance in Kansas. Those concerns led officials to call for an audit of the Johnson County election office Newby led.

Kobach told AP he never informed the federal commissioners about those problems, and insisted they would not have affected Newby’s performance at his federal job.

The audit released earlier this month found Newby intentionally skirted oversight of government credit card expenses, wasted taxpayer funds and improperly claimed mileage and travel expenses while at his former job in Kansas. Newby has called the audit inaccurate and misleading.

………

Newby told Kobach that he never would have been considered for such a high-profile position if it weren’t for Kobach’s support, adding that he would be saying “repeated prayers of thanksgiving for that.”

You can find more about the audit here, and it appears that this guy was stealing the taxpayer’s money, on pretty chickensh%$ stuff, like getting reimbursements for limo service to the airport despite having a car allowance.

As Yael T. Abouhalkah of he Kansas City Star so pithily states, “Kris Kobach’s voter fraud slime now stretches from Johnson County to Washington.”

H/t Charlie Pierce.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

The luck has come due to the ability of the Conservative party to fill the void in our lives left until the new season of Game of Thrones starts by providing an ongoing referendum-induced saga involving regal intrigue (Queen Elizabeth II, rumoured Brexiter), ambition (Chancellor George Osbourne), betrayal (former welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith) bizarre-o religious weirdness (Stephen “Pray Away the Gay” Crabb, his replacement), tits (Home Secretary Theresa May) and bestiality (London Mayor Boris Johnson). They’ve given us everything but the dragons. That said, there’s still a few months to go yet so we don’t want to be premature.

—“Clive” at Naked Capitalism

The post is titled, “Brexit: This is What We Call a Muppet Show,” and it is quite amusing.

What Bill Moyers Said

No Comments

There are two Democrats whose resignation from office right now would do their party and country a service.

Their disappearance might also help Hillary Clinton convince skeptical Democrats that her nomination, if it happens, is about the future, and not about resurrecting and ratifying the worst aspects of the first Clinton reign when she and her husband rarely met a donor to whom they wouldn’t try to auction a sleepover in the Lincoln Bedroom.

In fact, while we’re at it, and if Secretary Clinton really wants us to believe she’s no creature of the corporate and Wall Street money machine — despite more than $44 million in contributions from the financial industry since 2000 and her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, not to mention several million more paid by other business interests for an hour or two of her time — she should pick up the gauntlet herself and publicly call for the departure of these two, although they are among her nearest and dearest. And we don’t mean Bill and Chelsea.

No, she should come right out and ask for the resignations of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee Chair — and Florida congresswoman — Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In one masterstroke, she could separate herself from two of the most prominent of all corporate Democratic elitists.

Each is a Clinton disciple and devotee, each has profited mightily from the association and each represents all that is wrong with a Democratic Party that in the pursuit of money from rich donors and powerful corporations has abandoned those it once so proudly represented — working men and women.

………

This is why Emanuel and Wasserman Schultz must go. To millions, they are enablers of the one percent, perpetuators of the Washington mentality that the rest of the country has grown to hate. What a message such servants of plutocracy send: Democrats — a bridge to the past.

Hillary is not going to do this, but it would be a savvy political move.

Also, putting Emanuel and Wasserman-Schultz in the political cross-hairs would be good for the party and their constituents.

This is Amazingly Wise

No Comments

Ted Cruz had the single dumbest response to the bombings in Brussels.

He suggested that we engaged in increased police and armed militia patrols in Muslim eighborhoods.

Needless to say, anyone with half a brain realized that this was batsh%$ insane.

It’s would create a violent, oppressive, and abusive environment which would drive some people in Muslim neighborhoods to terrorism, and others away from society and law enforcement.

Over at Talking Points Memo, a reader made a brilliant connection.

Specifically, our “Anti-Gang Get Tough on Crime” policing has done exactly that with gangs in poor neighborhoods:

The root of his error is right there in his defense: “If you have a neighborhood where there’s a high level of gang activity, the way to prevent it is you increase the law enforcement presence there and you target the gang members to get them off the streets.”

This is not some radical right-wing Trump-esque sentiment. It is the status quo of law enforcement in this country, and has been for decades. (You may even personally remember California’s 1988 STEP act — an eerily prescient precursor to the USA-PATRIOT act’s acronym idiocy that stood for Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act. STEP made gang participation illegal and massively increased sentences for members—and even for people who just looked like members, by raising the prospect of a gang-related indictment, leading to harsher plea-bargain agreements).

Targeting gangs like this is pretty widely accepted, and the few who push back face toxic accusations of wanting to protect criminals. That’s how escalating anti-gang and anti-crime rhetoric (think “super-predators”) swept everyone in its path in the 1990s. All Cruz did here was swap out “Muslims” for “gangs”.

As you say, that proved a step too far, and now he’s trying to walk it back to “radical Muslims”. But what’s so fascinating to me, as a gang researcher, is the reason folks like the NYPD and O’Reilly (!!) — who surely approve of anti-gang laws — object to Cruz’s idea: they see that it will backfire, that persecuting non-radicalized Muslims will ultimate push them toward radicalization.

They are right. But this is precisely what is wrong with excessive anti-gang laws! They essentially make being a male adolescent of certain ethnicities a motive for arrest and likely incarceration. If the criminal justice system already sees you and treats you as a gang member, you might as well become one — at least you’ll get some protection, especially inside prison, where gangs rule the roost. And for parents, spouses, and children, targeting is more likely to inspire a sense of injustice than a desire to cooperate with law enforcement.

………

We’re finally beginning to acknowledge the counterproductive nature of mass incarceration policies. But walking back over-zealous targeting laws is still a hard sell, especially among law-and-order, conservative types. Yet it is obvious to them that the same policy applied to Muslims is idiocy.

This is truly profound.

Snark of the Day

No Comments

………

See what happened there? Slick, wasn’t it? My man Chuck Todd asked Schmidt why the anti-Trump Republicans weren’t banding together to support the clear runner-up and Schmidt started babbling about small-d democratic processes wah-dee-doo-dah. The direct answer to the question…

So, why isn’t the cavalry rallying around Cruz?

“Because Tailgunner Ted Cruz is a messianic and friendless theocrat whose policies are a mix of the Book of Revelation and The Fountainhead, and anyone who looks at him thinks of the skeevy uncle whom they tell their kids to avoid at Thanksgiving, and anyone who listens to him who isn’t already lost in Jesus wouldn’t trust him to park their car.”

—Charlie Pierce

Mr. Pierce owes me a screen wipe.