Over/under on this one getting revealed as a hoax?

Excuse me while I do something rude: to wit, introduce brutal reality to a perfectly good witch hunt.

Harvard University police are treating the discovery of strips of tape placed across photographs of black professors outside of a lecture hall as an act of hate, officials from the university said Thursday.

In an e-mailed statement, Martha Minow, dean of Harvard Law School, said police are investigating who defaced portraits of black faculty members displayed at Wasserstein Hall.

Continue reading Over/under on this one getting revealed as a hoax?

Elijah Cummings contemplating running for US Senate in Maryland.

Well, I certainly hope that Elijah Cummings decides to run: “The 64-year-old Maryland Democrat is mulling whether to run for the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski who will not seek reelection in 2016 after nearly 30 years in office.” Then again, I’m more familiar with Maryland Democratic politics than other people are.  Or possibly just more cynical.

Here is the basic situation. There are nine Democrats in the Maryland Congressional delegation: two Senators, and seven representatives. Of those nine, seven are white people.  And you might be asking yourself, “Isn’t that a little weird?” After all, in 2012 Obama lost the white vote in Maryland, and got pretty much all of the black vote; which implies that the Democratic party in Maryland is going to about… well, based on my back-of-the-envelope (literally!) scribblings; about half black, half white. So why is it that African Americans are so under-represented in the Democratic party’s Maryland Congressional delegation? Continue reading Elijah Cummings contemplating running for US Senate in Maryland.

What Trevor Noah’s plagiarism tells us about Comedy Central’s racism.

It’s rather… cosmopolitan racism on Comedy Central’s part, actually.

Trevor Noah has been telling a joke that sounds remarkably similar to one that Dave Chappelle told nearly 20 years ago.

The new “Daily Show” host has been accused of stealing joke in the past, but The Hollywood Reporter pointed to a standup routine he performed Saturday that was closely similar to material once performed by another Comedy Central star.

OK, let me admit it: Dave Chappelle has made me laugh – but uncomfortably, because the man is rather good at poking at taboos.  This gives him a certain power, because American culture gets to be rather antsy when it comes to admitting that we even have speech taboos. Nonetheless: Dave Chappelle is a ferociously good comedian, and that’s really all that The Daily Show needed to replace Jon Stewart, right?  So why did they hire instead a guy who just rips off Chappelle, instead of Chappelle himself? Continue reading What Trevor Noah’s plagiarism tells us about Comedy Central’s racism.

Ed Schultz suggests that Barack Obama’s ONLY legitimacy comes from being black.

Imagine, for a moment, the utter feces storm that would result if a Republican had said this.

“So why give the president fast track authority? Because he’s African-American? I don’t think so. I don’t care if the president’s Asian, African-American, from Nigeria, if he’s a fat white guy from Minnesota, it doesn’t matter.”

Although I am not even remotely surprised to discover that Ed Schultz is apparently a closet birther. He’s representative of a really, really ugly thread that goes through a certain portion of the Democratic party, although Schultz is usually barely smart enough to hide it. At any rate: I’d recommend that Ed Schultz leave Barack Obama’s racial background out of any dispute that he might be having with the President. It’s… unseemly. And more than a little bit trash behavior, frankly.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s (D, Pennsylvania) Supreme Court pick’s racially insensitive email.

Basically, Tom Wolf just can’t catch a break.  Unless he caught it on his chin, maybe:

One of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s nominees for the state Supreme Court from Central Pennsylvania may have forwarded a racially insensitive email to 22 people.

The 2013 Christmas greeting card depicts a black man in an orange jumpsuit, sitting behind a glass prison partition, talking on the phone with a black woman outside the glass. “Merry Christmas from the Johnsons,” the card says.

Thomas K. Kistler, the president judge of Centre County Common Pleas Court, could not be reached.

Go figure. Does the man regret running for Governor, at this point? – Because he’s apparently one of God’s Six Fish right now.

Via @SalenaVito.

This would have been a post about a @kickstarter project, but they hire racists…

…as noted here – so it’s not a post about a Kickstarter project.  Many of my readers would have been really happy to hear about that project, too – but, hey. A company’s priorities are a company’s priorities, am I right?

Moe Lane

PS: Oh, I’ll still personally sign up for a Kickstarter project.  That primarily benefits the producer. Free advertising on my site, on the other hand, benefits Kickstarter itself a little bit too much for my liking right now.

PPS: I am not even remotely expecting that this will make any significant difference, of course: if nothing’s been done** in the last three months then nothing will be done, and this is a 2K hit/day blog. But I find that I simply cannot just let this sort of thing slide without some kind of response.

*Yes, it’s a story from December.  I can hold a grudge as well as anybody.

**I couldn’t even find a sorry-you-were-offended.

The cognitive dissonance on lowered Virginian crime rates is startling. No, really.

Oh, my.  Question: “Virginians have been buying more firearms than ever,even though crime has been steadily falling. Why?” This winner’s answer? Paraphrased, crime is down because ‘poor’ people are getting abortions*, and people are just buying more guns because they fear and hate Barack Obama because he’s black.

:pause:

I gather that this article is part of an experiment by the Washington Post.  Some might say** that this experiment has visibly failed…

Moe Lane

*The author did his best to not make it obvious that this is his opinion, but ‘some say’ is a pretty reliable tell.

**See previous footnote.

Remember convicted sex fiend Del. Joe Morrissey (D, VA)? Guess what they didn’t tell you!

I was going along, minding my own business: just trying to get my coffee in on an up-too-early Saturday morning.  Then I hit this sentence about the problems the Democratic caucus in the Virginia legislature is having with one of its members having been convicted of sleeping with his 17 year old receptionist (bolding mine): “There was a racial undercurrent to some of the arguments made at the meeting, the participants said, given that [Joe] Morrissey and a majority of the General Assembly are white, and the 17-year-old at the heart of his conviction is black, as is a majority of his Richmond-area legislative district.” Continue reading Remember convicted sex fiend Del. Joe Morrissey (D, VA)? Guess what they didn’t tell you!

Topic for discussion: was Prohibition the Progressive movement’s *greatest* disaster?

Having been reminded that today (January 16th) is the anniversary of one of the greatest social policy disasters (if not the absolute worst) in American history:

…I am left to wonder: was it also the greatest policy disaster of the Progressive movement? Because, let us be honest here: Prohibition/temperance was a Progressive scheme from start to finish. The popularity of it among rank-and-file Progressives at the time is well known, and only surprising to those who have not received an adequate enough education on the subject*.  But was it the worst Progressive policy ever?

  • Arguments for yes: Prohibition, of course, resulted in a decade-long exercise in societal hypocrisy where a large section of the population routinely broke the law – and the more affluent parts of said population easily evaded the legal consequences from doing so.  We also, again of course, managed to encourage the rapid growth of organized crime in this country by giving them the opportunity to make a ridiculous amount of money from acquiring and disseminating an illegal substance… and as soon as Prohibition was over, that existing infrastructure went right into branching out into other illegal drugs with nary a hiccup.  Finally – and this is not trivial, actually – domestic beer quality dropped catastrophically; a dropt that it took us almost a century to recover from.
  • Arguments for no: Well, let’s see.  There was the income tax. There was the direct election of Senators.  There was the drastic increase in the size of government that resulted from the previous two points. There was the entire institutionalized racism** thing – oh, yes, Woodrow Wilson was acting in perfectly Progressive terms, in no small part to the entire eugenics thing***. All in all, when you compare Prohibition to widespread segregation and dubious genetic policy… the mere banning of the sale of alcohol can appear to be, and forgive me for saying it, rather small beer.

I think that you can make an argument either way, honestly. What does everybody else think?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Which, admittedly, probably means ‘most people.’

**Which, by the way, was even more widespread than you might think.  Unless you happen to have Italian, Irish, Polish, or Jewish ancestors who came to the United States before about 1930 or so. In that case, you probably have any number of family stories to ensure that I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know.

***I give Salon(!) credit for tackling the subject, but the ugly truth of the matter is that, absent World War II, the eugenics movement would have probably been a viable concept in American political discourse right up to the 1950s and the Civil Rights movement.  And wouldn’t that have been a mess.

Fake Steve Scalise racism story shopped to blogger by vengeful Scalise opponent.

Not much to add to this story, except for two things:

  1. The Hill should probably start telling its readers soon that Steve Scalise actually talked to a local residents’ association, and not a white supremacists’ group.  Because the Hill’s readers are of the type that will hear about it anyway, and they might start wondering why the Hill hasn’t.
  2. …Rumormonger Gilda Reed lost by fifty points, huh? But didn’t want to use this story because of all the supposed racists in Steve Scalise’s district.  It will shock precisely zero of you that Dr. Gilda Reed is an academic and Democratic agitator of long standing in Louisiana: she was last seen trying to save Mary Landrieu from herself – unsuccessfully.  She’s also demonstrating what I’d call a galloping case of the paranoid jitters if I was any sort of medical health care professional; but I’m not, so I’m just going to note that I’m pretty sure that the Louisiana Republican party probably doesn’t send operatives out to burn down people’s houses*.

Actually… let’s talk a bit more about the second point, for a moment.  Or perhaps a bit ‘around’ the second point.  Might be fruitful. Continue reading Fake Steve Scalise racism story shopped to blogger by vengeful Scalise opponent.