So hey, about sex and politics. Liberals tend to be both more ambitious and less satisfied with their sex lives than conservatives. Which makes sense, when you think about it. It’s my belief that a lot of the world’s problems can be solved with lowered expectations. Along those lines, does anyone remember this from MADtv?
WASHINGTON—Expressing regret over its reckless decision to infect the Democratic presidential nominee, the virus causing Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia was reportedly terrified Monday after remembering what the Clintons were capable of.
After this, I plan to shift back to less partisan/political posts I swear. But here we are, just a few days after Hillary Clinton’s speech and Mike Pence declined to refer to David Duke as deplorable. At first blanch, that looks really bad, and harkens back to Donald Trump’s refusal to disavow Duke.
The problem is that Pence did disavow Duke. Right before he declined to call him deplorable. So the narrative that there’s no extremist too extreme for Team Trump doesn’t especially hold. We can talk about how Of Course they’re willing to ditch Duke because even in Louisiana he’s polling really badly and how this doesn’t absolve Trump of anything. And that’s all true. The frustrating thing for me, though, is that it leaves me defending Trump again because that’s not how the media is covering it. They’re suggesting that he’s down with Duke.
The question is, though, why didn’t Pence simply say that yes of course Duke is deplorable? Especially given his actual willingness to disavow? I mean, this is easy spit and unlike Trump, Pence is a professional?
I think the answer is this:
Outside Donald Trump's rally in Asheville, NC: A "Deplorable Lives Matter" sign: pic.twitter.com/Fn1YbHFIm9
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) September 12, 2016
And this:
At KSU for Newt's townhall for Trump are three "deplorables" complete with basket. #gapol pic.twitter.com/uvBPbrXxQE
— Aaron Gould Sheinin (@asheinin) September 12, 2016
Which is to say, Team Trump has decided to own the sneer. They’re not worried about offending Duke, they’re worried about tarnishing their rally cry. Which makes sense. Is it a good move? I’m really not sure. It seems more of a batting down the hatches move for a campaign that needs to get to 51%. (It’s also dishonest, since it is reasonably clear that Clinton was talking about half but not all of Trump supporters, but nobody cares cares about that.) But there aren’t a lot of good paths for him, and this is one. It capitalizes on what even the Clinton campaign seems to concede is a mistake.
I can’t imagine such a move would garner my support for a campaign that otherwise wouldn’t have it, but if it were my candidate I could dig The Deplorables as a rallying cry. It could work.
(Of course, me being me, I’d want to work in a Les Deplorables in the spirit of Les Miserables. Classing up the meme and all that. But that might be the style of a candidate I might support. It obviously wouldn’t work for Trump.)
From Stephen Fry in America:
There is one phrase I probably heard more than any other on my travels: ‘Only in America!’
If you bear a Briton say ‘Tch! only in Britain, eh?’ it would probably refer to something that was either predictable, miserable, oppressive, dull, bureaucratic, Queuey, damp, spoil-sporty, or incompetent – or a mixture of all of those. ‘Only in America!’ on the other hand, always refers to something shocking, amazing, eccentric, wild, weird or predictable. Americans are constantly being surprised by their own country. Britons are constantly having their worst fears confirmed by theirs. This seems to be one of the major differences between us.
And here is Fry at an Alabama/Auburn football game:
Controversial 9\/11 Coke display in Walmart removed | WSB-TV
A Coca-Cola display has quickly been removed after it was criticized for depicting New York City’s twin towers.
The World Trade Center towers were destroyed and thousands were killed when two hijacked planes crashed into the towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
BuzzFeed News reported that Shawn Richard tweeted a photo of the display Tuesday while on vacation in Panama City Beach, Florida, with his girlfriend.
“We stopped and stared at it like, ‘Oh my god,'” Richard told BuzzFeed News. “Nobody seemed to be noticing it, it wasn’t very crowded, and I got the feeling that it had just been assembled. So we took some pics and went on our way.”
But were the soft drinks still $3.33 a case? I struggle to get cases for under $4 where I currently am. For $3.33 I’d buy them off a Daesh flag.
Police department posts warning of Zika in meth
A police department is turning to tongue-in-cheek tactics to fight a serious drug epidemic.
The Bath Police Department in Michigan posted on its Facebook page with a big “breaking news” graphic warning that read “meth possibly containing the Zika virus.”
The post goes on to say, “If you recently bought some meth, you can bring it into the Bath Township Police Department and we can test it for you.”
I’ll bet their lab is top-notch.
I haven’t thought about that particular question before, but I’ve thought a lot about the growth in presidential power and Congress’s inability to rein it in. My answer is, at the margin, yes, but how effective would depend on the structure of that unicameral legislature.
The Framers envisioned Congress as one institution set up against another institution, the two of which could check each other effectively. What they did not seem to realize is that Congress is not one institution, not in any functionally coherent sense. Even more, it’s not simply two institutions, as we might think because it is bicameral.
In 1885, when Congress generally dominated the president, Woodrow Wilson wrote his doctoral thesis on how Congress did not provide good leadership because each member being responsible to a regionally limited set of voters, it could not focus on the national interest, only on a competing set of regional interests.
So what has changed to make presidents more powerful? Not the structure of Congress, but the system of selecting presidential nominees. Congress could dominate presidents back then because party leaders selected presidential nominees. Today the general public selects them, so party leaders, including Congressmembers, have lost that power over presidential hopefuls.
Source: Could a Unicameral Congress Better Rein in Presidential Power? | The Bawdy House Provisions
Hillary Clinton Raises More Than Donald Trump From Oil Industry (Wall Street Journal)
Taken together, oil and gas donors have contributed roughly twice as much to support Mrs. Clinton’s campaign as Mr. Trump’s. Election rules bar corporations from giving directly to candidates, but donations from an industry’s employees can provide a reflection of where it stands.
At Exxon Mobil Corp., the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, employees have made 175 donations to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, totaling roughly $18,000, while Mr. Trump’s campaign has received just one donation from an Exxon employee. At the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s Washington lobbying group, no one has contributed to Mr. Trump. (These figures include donations of $200 or more.)
Like, actually every single thing you can think of, crammed into a single two-and-a-half-minute magnum opus.
Source: This Is an Incredible Ad for Instant Ramen
Please ignore anything below this, there is experimentation in progress