Late Night Video — A Nun on the Bus Raps Dinesh D’Souza on the Knuckles

Sister Simone is the leader of Nuns on the Bus, and she was on Bill Maher recently when Maher brought up the topic of Mitt Romney's newfound support for a higher minimum wage. D'Souza tried trotting out the BS talking points and Sister Simone shows him that his talking points on poverty wages were a masked support for corporate welfare. I was on my feet and applauding at the end of this:

Friday Open Thread [5.9.14]

"A comprehensive, single piece of legislation on any topic, but especially on immigration, is going to be very difficult to achieve ... We keep talking about the same issue now for 15 years, and everybody is doing this all-or-nothing approach. And all-or-nothing is going to leave you with nothing."
-- Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), quoted by Politico, on the prospects for immigration reform. This quote reveals what is fundamentally wrong with the understanding of the legislative process among Republicans. The reason you have comprehensive big bills on subjects like immigration is BECAUSE there is a divide of opinion on the issue. So a bill becomes comprehensive in order to accommodate compromise.

Thursday Open Thread [5.8.14]

"The sound you may hear in the background is that of the goalposts of American punditry being moved up and down the field. Not so long ago the common wisdom held that Bush 43 was shredding our alliances with a swaggering unilateralism, refusing to acknowledge the complexities of the early 21st century world. Now, in the blink of the historical eye, Obama is being routinely maligned as professorial, an ineffective multilateralist (a damning combination, that) who is acting like a latter-day Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary who was willing to entertain the possibility of talks with the Axis in 1940." Ah, the Washington Talking Head. Perennially Schizophrenic.

Tuesday Daily Elsewhere [5.6.14]

Alright. I think we have posted every picture taken of Delaware, ever. So we are going to take a break from our Daily Delawhere picture and start a new series called the "Daily Elsewhere picture" for a few weeks. I have taken lots of pictures over the years in various different locales, as my real world job allowed me to travel to places that I probably would have never gone to voluntarily. I will not give you any hints as to where the picture was taken. You have to guess. Some will be easy. Some will be hard. Here is your first one....
Incarceration Nation

Incarceration Nation

Much is being written recently about the appalling status of incarceration rates in the U.S.A. Not much is being done. All sorts of causal factors are cited: the War on Drugs, poverty, moral breakdown, the economy, mental illness, demise of the social contract.....the list is endless.

Monday Open Thread [5.5.14]

The graphic on the right is amazing. I think we can safely say that racists became more vocal and proud of their racism upon the election of a black President, which is something that most observers, myself included, did not see happening. And that is because their racism could now be legitimatized as partisan opposition. Meanwhile, A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that "Americans in large numbers want the U.S. to reduce its role in world affairs even as a showdown with Russia over Ukraine preoccupies Washington." This goes against what we see in the media and what is espoused by pundits. According to them, President Obama should have wrestled Putin and a Siberian Bear to death on live TV by now, and defeated Russia, all the while without provoking a thermo nuclear holocaust that would surely result from any war with Russia. And last week, when the 250 girls in Nigeria were kidnapped, the first question asked by Erin Burnett on CNN was "Why isn't the US doing anything?"