Boy, was I fooled. For a while there I thought Delaware had entered the 21st century — not on time, mind you, but within the 5-to-10-year lag period it always takes Delaware to catch up with the rest of the East Coast. Then I read Kevin Ohlandt’s item at Exceptional Delaware about — gasp! — a nudist party at one of the swimming pools owned by Rep. Mike Ramone. Kevin wrote about it on a tip, and the story was picked up by the mainstream media, Ramone had to scramble to explain that he rents his facilities to private parties and, by the end of the day, the nudist group — after 20 years of renting the pool — told Ramone it wasn’t worth the hassle. Kevin is a valuable voice on education issues, but he was used here by someone who just wanted to embarrass Ramone and perhaps suspected Kevin would render the tale in the tone of a Victorian scold, which he did. Perfectly in keeping, one supposes, in a state that puts onerous restrictions on titty bars.
It’s been interesting to watch the opposing reactions to student protests from school officials. In Slackjaw America, they’re threatening students with suspensions and, lo and behold, they’re doing the same thing in the slackjawed sections of Delaware.
Elect an ammosexual, watch him get arrested. That’s life in Missouri, where Gov. Eric “50 Shades of Gray” Greitens was arrested after a grand jury indictment charged him with “invasion of privacy.” Apparently, the alleged nude photo of the hairdresser he allegedly blindfolded and allegedly duct-taped to his Bowflex was transmitted electronically at some point, leading to the indictment, which sounds pretty flimsy to me. Greitens is a former Navy SEAL — America sure knows how to churn out sociopaths — but his once-promising political career is dead in the water.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has studied how the Florida high school students commanded the national stage and boiled it down to four lessons the Resistance should learn. Number 2 is especially apt: Don’t waste time fighting with people who don’t share your values or goals:
The Stoneman Douglas students don’t seem to be wasting their time debating or negotiating with the gun lovers on the other side. They are simply working to get gun legislation passed, to raise awareness, and to energize other young people. As someone who has devoted the greater part of the past year to an intramural media debate about whether to give up completely on the other side or to strive to change hearts and minds, it’s refreshing to see that this doesn’t really matter.
Bad news for anyone who’s banking on Mueller’s investigation to nail Trump: Those new charges against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates mean that they haven’t flipped on Cheetoh-Face, even as they stare at decades in federal prison. I have a theory on that — better alive in the joint than killed on the street by one of Putin’s assassins.
Poor little rich girl Rebekah Mercer wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week that I didn’t read, because it was behind a paywall (count on face-lifted shar-pei Rupert Murdoch to charge people to listen to the lies of a billionaire). Michael Tomasky did, though, and he calls bullshit on the second-generation plutocrat who claims she’s misunderstood — she says she wants to help the downtrodden, but does so by funding Breitbart and other RWNJ enterprises.
A Delaware lawyer is raising a ruckus over the state’s mandated bipartisan balance on its courts. He won a federal order against the state, which he says the state is now ignoring, which seems to be true. He’s got an excellent point. There is no provision made in the state Constitution for unaffiliated judges. If the goal is a non-partisan judiciary, a bipartisan one is a poor substitute, especially considering that there are more unaffiliated voters in Delaware than there are Republicans.
Among the institutions that are dead but don’t know it yet, the NCAA ranks right up there. Its desperation shows in its latest court filings about why it should profit immensely from the unpaid labor of its “student-athletes” — it cited a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows unpaid labor by prisoners. Glad to see these modern-day slavers admit what they’re running.