Matt Taibbi has an interesting piece about Corey Stewart, the Republican nominee for the senate seat in Virginia where he is challenging Democratic incumbent Tim Kaine who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate. Taibbi says that Stewart has distilled the essence of Trumpism and given us a glimpse of what that would look like without Trump.
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The American ‘justice system’ is a scandal, laying a heavy hand on the poor and otherwise marginalized communities while allowing the big criminals who create misery on a massive scale to walk free. I have written many times about one of the abuses and that is the bail system that is used punitively, setting bail amounts that defendants clearly cannot afford. This harshly and adversely affects poor people who often languish in jail for long times for even minor offenses even before their trials, simply because they cannot come up with the money to make bail. Spending time in jail, apart from being a traumatic experience for most people, often leads to a whole sequence of other adverse effects such as losing jobs, being evicted from one’s home, and losing custody of their children. All because they do not have a few hundred dollars in cash readily available.
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While people celebrated the rescue of the Thai students from the cave, a remarkable operation, this cartoon captures what has been going through my mind these past few days.
(Via)
… first up we have Matt Bors to remind us
Then Jen Sorensen.
I got into a discussion recently with a wealthy Republican supporter about the tax bill. He was arguing that it would benefit everyone by pointing to Republican talking points that focus on the average value of the tax cuts. I tried to tell him that when a distribution is not roughly symmetric about the average value (also called the mean) but is skewed, then the average value is not an accurate reflection of the situation. Since he is a physician, I was surprised to discover that he did not seem to know the difference between the mean and the median.
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The co-hosts of Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segment make the case for why Donald Trump should resign but also explain why he won’t.
I will be on the road for the next few days and so blogging will be light to non-existent until Wednesday.
Now that Roy Moore has won the Republican senate primary in Alabama, the chances of the Democratic candidate Doug Jones of winning the election on December 12 have gone up slightly, though they are still not great given that we are talking about Alabama where religious extremism thrives. The question is whether the Democratic party establishment throws its weight and resources behind Jones. Jones has been quietly raising money for his campaign.
Jones has some good credentials but the party has not as yet enthusiastically embraced him.
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I have always been intrigued by optical illusions, seeing them as providing fascinating insights into how the brain works as well as warnings that what we think we see may not accurately represent what is actually there. I found this illusion (via David Pescovitz) to be particularly intriguing because the contradiction is so stark. You know that the four horizontal blue lines must be parallel because the background black and grey objects are all the same size, and yet to my eyes the top and third line unmistakably slope up to the right while the second and bottom lines slope down.
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