This is not normal

Hell, this is not lucid. It's about an even split between things that are wrong and things that are gibberish.

These are great people. I think they are great people and they are going to, I have a lot of confidence in them. So hopefully things will straighten out. But I inherited a mess, I inherited a mess in so many ways. I inherited a mess in the Middle East, and a mess with North Korea, I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, ok. And I inherited a mess on trade. I mean we have many, you can go up and down the ladder. But that’s the story. Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not. You know. Say hello to everybody OK?

Huh?

Cry 'Havoc!'...

...and let slip the dogs of Warren!

Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s pick to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, faced a critical blow on Thursday as Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would join with other Democrats in attempting to filibuster the nomination — a move that could complicate his confirmation and lead to a total revamp of how the U.S. Senate conducts its business.

Pete Buttigieg, rising as fast as any rising star in the Democratic Party, is talking about his congressional district, which is currently represented by a Republican.

Seems noteworthy.

Romney Revisionism

I don't know if he thinks lying makes it better, or if he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Generally, I follow Hanlon's Razor, and try not to attribute to malice what can just as easily be explained by stupidity, but either one seems plausible at this point.

Talking about what went wrong, Romney said they didn't get the turnout from minority voters that they needed and he acknowledged his campaign was outmatched by his opponent's massive organization.

"I think he had as many as 10 times the number of ground workers, paid staff, that we had, because he could afford them and we couldn't," he said.

Uh, Romney's campaign directly spent over $480 million. I'm pretty sure they could have afforded a better field program than the one they actually built.

The Obama campaign had more ground workers and paid staff because they managed their funds a lot better than Romney did and prioritized their field and data programs higher than Romney's. Mitt squandered a fortune on consultant fees and wildly mis-targeted his media buys, which wasted millions of dollars that could have gone to build a more competent field program.

He also came off as a self-important, dishonest, uncaring jerk, which might have had some impact on his low-dollar fundraising efforts. But either way, he could easily have afforded a better campaign, he just didn't have the skill to build one.

Chris Christie knows what he's doing

Calling for a special election in October, when there's already going to be a general election in November, is an expensive hassle that will annoy voters and pundits alike. That's probably the best that Christie could have hoped for. The worst-case scenario for him would be going up against the Cory Booker GOTV machine, simply because the biggest obstacle to his reelection is the likelihood that Democrats will simply mob the polls in this off-year election.

When you look at it that way, it's worth $24 million to Christie to call for an October vote. It's terrible financial stewardship for crass political purposes, but they're really important crass political purposes.

Just when you thought racism couldn't get any more racismer

Kinda makes me wanna sing a verse of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." But not in the happy way:

Who would have thought that breakfast cereal would trigger the latest racial battle line? In this case, a Cheerios ad much like every other homespun Cheerios ad — with a heart healthy message and loving family – ran into trouble from some commenters because of the kind of family it featured. Mom is white, dad is black and their cute little daughter is a mix of the both of them.

That’s it.

Cheerios had to disable comments on YouTube – I’m not going to repeat them but you can imagine the general witless racism with stereotypes about minorities and warnings of race-mixing as the end of civilization. Late Friday night, after a day of widespread news coverage, the ad had more than 8,400 thumbs-up votes on YouTube, versus about 900 thumbs-down.

If your conception of the American state or your core convictions can be shaken by a commercial for bland cereal, you've got bigger problems to worry about.

And you're also an asshole.

Harvard Law, folks! Let's give them a round of applause.

I'm beginning to wonder if the GOP might not be making an attempt to undercut the President's legal background by having some of its own HLS grads act like complete idiots.

First example: Congressman Cotton of Arkansas.

Sure, I'm obligated to point out how obliviously unconstitutional the Cotton Amendment was. But stunning stupidity aside, there's something really depressing in his follow-up:

“I sympathize with their plight if they are harmless, innocent civilians in Iran. I doubt that that is often the case.”

He seems to be suggesting that it's more likely that people from a country governed by a domestically oppressive, murderous regime are coming to America in order to attack us than that they're coming to seek shelter and aid from us.

Setting aside the rest of the offensively paranoid racism, that's a really sad--and very unpatriotic--sentiment to hear from a Congressman. I tend to think people from countries that murder demonstrators in the streets who come to the U.S. are probably more interested in taking shelter in our freedoms than attacking them. When the world looks up at the Shining City on a Hill, does Rep. Cotton really believe they're thinking "hey, a shining city on a hill! Let's attack it!"?

Next we have someone who I don't think will ever run dry as a fount of entertainment (unless he's actually elected and put in a position of power, in which case I don't think anyone will find it funny at all): the GOP nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, E.W. Jackson, who doesn't think federal disaster relief is constitutional, says that the idea of GLBT Pride Month "makes me feel ikky all over," and, of course, this:

In an April 28, 2011 statement while he was a Senate candidate, conservative minister and lawyer E.W. Jackson held up the three-fifths clause as an “anti-slavery” measure. The context of his statement was to attack President Obama after a pastor at a church service he attended referred to the three-fifths clause as a historical marker of racism.

“Rev. [Charles Wallace] Smith must not have understood the 3/5ths clause was an anti-slavery amendment. Its purpose was to limit the voting power of slave holding states,” Jackson, an African-American, said in his statement.

The Three-Fifths Compromise was the way that the South was able to dominate American politics until the Civil War. It's why more than half of Presidents before Lincoln were Southern slave-owners. It's why the list of Speakers of the House before the Civil War is dominated by Southerners and slave-owners. To claim that it was an "amendment" is bad enough for someone from HLS (the sort of mistake we expect from the laity), but to claim it was "anti-slavery" is stupid beyond all mortal ken.