Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is, to put it mildly, known for his scorn for anything resembling “affirmative action”. So why was Thomas joining a bunch of, you know, liberals, in Cooper v. Harris to affirm a lower court ruling overturning a little scheme cooked up by North Carolina Republicans to pack all the black…
The Vials of Republican Wrath
Over at the National Review, the often (though often not) “honest conservative” David French has an interesting post “Stop Making Terrible Arguments For Blind Loyalty”, complaining that he often hears pleas from “real Republicans” to be, in effect, as bad as the Democrats. As French puts it, the argument goes something like this: “The GOP…
H.R. McMaster, a shande far di civilians
Yes, all of us lucky folks who don’t have to salute Donald Trump1 can have a chuckle at the fate of H.R. “Herbie” McMaster, and particularly have a chuckle at his defenders, like Michael Crowley at Politico and Fred Kaplan at Slate, who join in the cry “Say it ain’t so, H.R.!”, reacting to McMaster’s…
Of course, when that happened during the Obama Administration, he threw them in jail
“Some brave patriots in intelligence and law enforcement and elsewhere in the federal government have taken risks to get the facts out.” Thus quoth WashPost columnist Dana Milbank, celebrating the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor for l’affaire Russe. As Dana sums things up, a little too generously, “With the stroke of a pen,…
David Helbock’s Random/Control—“Trinkle Tinkle”
Tired of Trump? Yeah, baby! David Helbock lets us escape with a multi-instrumental approach to Monk’s music, featuring Dave, Johannes Bär, and Andreas Broger playing, well, a lot of things. Recorded live at the Jazzahead 2015 in Bremen (DE).1 Posted by David Helbock “Bremen (DE)” is German for “Bremen, Germany” (as in “DEutschland”). ↩︎
Gen. H. R. McMaster: I only lie when I really need to
Okay, Gen. McM didn’t really say that. But he has been willing to lie before, when it was, you know, necessary, like when Congress might not give the Army all the money that it really, really needed. When H. R. first got the job as national security advisor, I recalled in a brief post, “Lt….
Trump trumps Trump
I was going to write a column saying that “we” (i.e., Democrats) were extraordinarily lucky that President Trump managed to sabotage the Comey dismissal as completely as he did. The original deed was clumsy enough, but adamant denials surely would have put a lid on the matter in a week or so. Only when Donald…
Rod Rosenstein, a shande fur di goyim
As I’ve already noted, the New York Times has called upon Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to save “us” and himself by somehow leveraging his “sterling reputation” to make the Trump Administration’s ax murder/defenestration of now former FBI Director James Comey not look like the gaping wound in the body politic that it so obviously…
Meaner than a snake and smarter than one too: Inside the mind of Mitch McConnell
I once called Mitch McConnell a “reptilian vote-counter”. Well, that insult still goes, because it’s true. Mitch can count votes, and here’s what he comes up with. The last time the Republican candidate for president won an “honest” majority was George H. W. Bush in 1998. And if George H. W. ran today, he’d get…
Thank God for Charles Krauthammer! Pretty much.
Yes, Charles Krauthammer, whom I’ve often harangued and harassed, “sometimes … displays a sense of honor” (to quote myself), and one of those times is right now, as he weighs on Trump v. Comey with a well-titled commentary, “A political ax murder”. True, Charlie clings to the now-standard right-wing meme that FBI Director James Comer…