On what basis should we vote?

(Pearls Before Swine)

That cartoon reminded me of a discussion I had a long, long, time ago, when I was in graduate school, with a fellow student about voting. He said that each of us should vote based on our own narrow interests because that is the way that the democratic system works best. If each of us thought only of our own interests when voting, then the results would reflect the outcomes that the general population wants, whereas if we voted on the basis of what we think might be better for other people, then the results get skewed because we do not really know what other people actually want and are merely guessing, we only know for sure what we want.

I did not agree with him then but had to acknowledge that it was an interesting argument with a certain logic, the kind that geeky physicists would come up with.
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Trump’s outreach to Black journalists does not go well

He attended the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. It started out poorly and did not get better.

During a contentious and chaotic panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on Wednesday, Donald Trump parroted disinformation about immigration and abortion, questioned Kamala Harris’s race and accused a panel moderator, Rachel Scott – the senior congressional correspondent for ABC News – of being “rude” and presenting a “nasty question” when she asked him: “Why should Black voters trust you?”

Another report said:
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Jon Stewart on the past week’s events

The Daily Show was off the past week when all the excitement around the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris transition was taking place and so there was a lot for Jon Stewart to catch up on when he got back yesterday. He was in full form, mugging for the cameras as he described the events and how Republicans are flailing in their attempts to suddenly find a way to attack Harris other than to point out that (surprise!) she is a woman and a person of color.

He also says that there is a simple way for Republicans to address their complaint that it is unfair for the Democratic party to have Harris replace Biden as the nominee at this late stage: “You can replace your old guy too!”

John Oliver on JD Vance and the couch

Oliver’s weekly show ,em>Last Week Tonight starts out with a monologue on contemporary events followed by a long in-depth segment. It is only the latter that HBO puts out on YouTube a few days after the Sunday show is aired. Apparently he had a lot of fun in his monologue last week talking about Vance and the cushion.

I found this clip of it.

It will likely be taken down soon and we will have to be satisfied with this summary.

John Oliver checked in on the US presidential race and the state of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Sunday evening. The Last Week Tonight host ripped into JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and “Great Lakes Ron DeSantis”, who is not polling well with anyone.

The Ohio senator “sucks so much”, said Oliver, that the internet ran wild with a joke tweet that he was the first VP pick to have admitted in a bestselling book to “fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, with a citation to a page number from his memoir”.

That is not in Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, Oliver emphasized, “but I think the reason it spread so fast might be that A, nobody read that fucking book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe, because if you ask me to draw a man that fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he joked. “If you ask me to play two truths and a lie with this man, before he’d even open his mouth, I’d shout, ‘The truth is he fucks his couch!’ Because I’ve never seen someone with more couch-fucker energy.”

“He looks like he watched the Tom Cruise-Oprah interview and was jealous of Tom’s shoes,” Oliver continued. “If you told me that his first celebrity crush was the plastic sofa from Everybody Loves Raymond, I’d believe you without question. If you told me the reason you find coins in between couch cushions is because JD Vance always leaves a tip, I’d be like, ‘Yeah that sounds right.’”

Oliver also referenced the Associated Press’s decision to factcheck the tweet with a headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” The news site later removed the article with the explanation that the story didn’t meet its “standard editing process”.

“No shit it didn’t, because there’s an obvious problem with that original headline,” Oliver said. “And the reason I know that is we care a lot about facts and precise phrasing on this show. So I can tell you, you can’t say ‘JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch’ definitively. You can say that he didn’t write about doing that in his book because that is provable, but that’s not the same as asserting he never fucked a couch, especially because he hasn’t officially denied it.”

Oliver’s staff, he revealed, tried to contact the Vance campaign this week; when asked by phone if he ever had sex with a couch, the spokesperson hung up, “which is, and this is critical, not a ‘no,’ is it”? Oliver laughed.

“Who knows where this is going?” he mused. “The news is moving so fast right now – the RNC was only last week, it was only two weeks ago that Trump was shot and there are so many variables between here and November. We don’t know who Kamala’s VP pick will be. We don’t know which candidate will maintain momentum. The race is impossible to predict. But … until he tells us otherwise, I’m gonna assume that JD Vance fucked a couch.”

I wish that clip were freely available.

People are likely to ask Vance about the couch until he or his spokesperson explicitly denies it. Either way, it is not a good look for him.

The myth of migrant crime

On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver debunks the false narrative heavily promoted by serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) and right wing media like Fox news that the US is awash in a crime wave being committed by migrants. He shows that crime rates have declined dramatically over recent years and that migrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, and that a few events that have been shown repeatedly as examples of this rampant lawlessness in fact show no such thing.

This show was aired last Sunday, before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, but Oliver’s plea at the end about the importance of voting against SSACFT, whatever our reservations and concerns about Biden, are still valid.

Paying tribute to Biden

People from all over have lined up to talk about their high esteem for Joe Biden and to credit him for the decision to quit the race. For those of us on the outside, the decision may have been obvious and perhaps long overdue but we should not forget the seductive allure of power, especially for someone who spent a lifetime in politics and sought the job he now has and finally won it.

All of us older people tend to believe that we can still do what we have done before and that there is no need to step away. One can easily persuade oneself that there is more to be done and that you are the best person to do it. Furthermore, in the US, being a one-term president is a sign of being a loser. So the desire to run again must have been immensely strong and Biden must be credited with accepting the realization that the time has come to leave the stage for the good of the party and the country and hand the reins over to someone else.

It is not hard to imagine what might have happened on the GOP side. Even if serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) were to speak and behave in an even more deranged fashion than he currently does, so that it would be obvious to anyone outside his cult following that he should be under constant care, he would never leave the stage of his own accord and none of those around him in the party leadership would have the guts to be the first to state that the emperor had no clothes, even if he literally took off all his clothes in public, an image that I apologize for foisting on you.

Stephen Colbert was one of those who saluted Biden for his decision.

Bob Newhart (1929-2024)

The comedian died yesterday at the age of 94.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.
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Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely.

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