John Oliver Becomes a Debt Buyer to Forgive Debt.

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On Last Week Tonight last night, John Oliver shocked pretty much everyone, including himself, by having the biggest giveaway in television history. Oliver’s segment this week was about debt buyers and how ridiculous the entire industry is. Central Asset Recovery Professionals is a debt acquisition firm that Oliver and some associates began for a mere $50. Oliver was then offered debt to buy for almost $60,000. How much was that debt? Close to $15 million. And then Oliver bought the debt and promptly forgave it. Warm and fuzzy, man. The entire segment is worth watching, but Oliver’s surprise begins around the 17:09 mark.
Monday Open Thread [6.6.16]

Monday Open Thread [6.6.16]

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Josh Marshall on the meltdown of Trump:
But after two rallies and a flurry of interviews there's no question Clinton has gotten to Trump in a big way. As she said, he is very thin skinned. (Emphatically denying that you're thin-skinned is not a credible rebuttal.) Given who he is, being denigrated by a strong woman must cut deeply. Underneath the angry talk, he appears befuddled and uncertain about just how to respond. That is mainly because even before her assault he'd maxed out his invective. She was crooked, a liar, untalented, a lightweight, a sexual predator by proxy. How exactly do you escalate from there? His furious effort to wring more aggression out of the English language has proved a rather unconvincing rebuttal to her central charge that he is temperamentally unfit, too emotionally unstable to serve as President. He now says flatly that she should be in jail, says he'll find an Attorney General who will imprison her. He now also calls her a "thief" which somehow is the reason she set up her own email server. Overshadowed by the "my African-American" stumble in Friday's speech in Redding was a bizarre interlude in which Trump gave a glowing evocation of the supporter who cold-cocked and beat a protester in Tucson on March 20th as an example of his little-heralded but purportedly expansive support among African-Americans. He's trying to escalate but has little room to go. He's maxed out. The transcripts of the two speeches read like compressed literary spittle. His affect is also different. Both rallies struck me as significantly hotter than anything we've seen before from Trump, more sweat, more chopping hands, more yelling - simply more electric, frenzied and angry. As Clinton and her team certainly anticipated, hitting him hard as mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency has placed Trump in a sort of Chinese finger puzzle of his own creation. The only mode of response he knows - an escalating and bellicose round of personal attacks with increasingly hyperbolic accusations - only confirms Clinton's diagnosis. The harder he fights the tighter the charge sticks.