I posted loads of stuff here over the weekend so I'm going to go easy today.
I'm looking forward to the debut of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert tonight. A friend of mine who attended one of the non-broadcast "test" shows told me that what they've done to the inside of the Ed Sullivan Theater is spectacular but, he felt, distracting from the show itself. He said the show itself was excellent and wrote that "no one will be disappointed" by Mr. Colbert's transition from his screen character to himself…but he thought the program would have been better on a simpler (and therefore, more intimate) stage. We shall see.
I call your attention to this article by Jonathan Chait on what's up with the problems of Climate Change. According to Chait, the news is not all bad and is even encouraging on some fronts.
I keep reading pieces about Kim Davis, that clerk languishing in jail in Kentucky, that make me feel sorry for her…or as sorry as I can be for someone who has created such a mess for herself. You know, my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service and he hated a lot of the things his job called upon him to do. But he did them and didn't think that he was personally responsible for the actions of higher powers, nor did he think it would do a bit of good for him to refuse.
Watching Ms. Davis's lawyer being interviewed — and some of the people urging her to fight to the death in a battle of Gay Marriage they've already lost — it's hard not to think she's become a Useful Idiot in her own cause, which was just not to have her name on a marriage license she found offensive. If this case was still about just that, she might be home by now.
I continue to be amazed at articles that say the Tea Party folks and other Middle America Americans have taken to Donald Trump because they think, "He's like us." Hadn't realized there were so many obnoxious billionaires with weird hair in this country. There are some good things that can be said about Donald Trump but nowhere on that list is that "he's like us," no matter who "us" is. See you later.
[UPDATE, six minutes later: And now Kim Davis is out of jail but forbidden to interfere with the processing of marriage licenses in her office. I don't get why she that couldn't have been forbidden without them putting her behind bars but the law, like the Lord, works in strange and mysterious ways. I think she's out just in time to be a part of Mike Huckabee's big media event today where he'll argue that she was jailed for being a Christian, which as we all know is fast becoming a capital offense in this country. I just know the Obama Administration is thisclose to rounding them all up and tossing them all in the slammer.]