I stayed up way past my normal bedtime last night to catch Stephen Colbert’s debut as a late night talk show host. It has been many, many years, decades even, since I watched TV for any length of time and it reminded me once again of how much I positively hate watching TV.
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Rowan County clerk Kim Davis has been released from jail. The odious Mike Huckabee just happened to be there at the time and seized on the fortuitous opportunity to make himself the center of attention and force Ted Cruz off the stage so that he could get hog all the attention. Didn’t the Bible teach Huckabee to share?
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Ohio governor John Kasich has been getting some good press following his performance in the first Republican debate because he seemed to come across as somewhat moderate in his views. But Kasich appears moderate only when compared with some of the more extreme anti-gay, anti-Obamacare stances taken by his rivals. It is such a sad reflection on Republican positions that all Kasich had to say is that he attended a same-sex wedding and supported Medicare expansion to be seen as some kind of enlightened person.
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There are some people the working of whose minds are incomprehensible to the rest of us. Take for example, Frazier Cross, a 74-year old white supremacist and a former senior member of the Ku Klux Klan who shot dead three people outside two Jewish centers in Kansas last year, thinking they were Jews, though it so happened that they were not.
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I had ridiculed Donald Trump’s call to deport all undocumented immigrants as well as their children born in the US who are, of course, US citizens. I felt that not only was it unfeasible in practice to round up and deport 11 million people, it was unthinkable and illegal in the case of the children. So I was shocked to learn on NPR today that such a mass deportation had in fact occurred in the past during the time of the Great Depression when the pressure for jobs resulted in Mexican-Americans and their US-born children being sent away.
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Tonight at 11:35pm is when Stephen Colbert begins his new career as a late night talk show host. From what we can see, he is not aiming to revolutionize the format but keep it broadly similar to what been done before, the new wrinkle being that his guests would cover a wider range than just celebrities from the entertainment world, also encompassing politicians, writers, scientists, and other people of interest.
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A driver decides to calmly leave her car and stroll away while it is still in the middle of a busy boulevard in California and the engine is running and of course, as this dash cam video taken by the car behind shows, with highly predictable consequences. Fortunately, no one seems to have got hurt.
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[UPDATE: Federal judge David Bunning has ordered that Davis can be released from jail since five of the six deputy clerks have been issuing licenses to all qualified people and “provided that she shall not interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.” You can read the judge’s order here. It is not clear as yet if Davis agrees to those conditions. She is probably checking with Jesus who is wondering why the hell this woman keeps bugging him with her petty concerns.]
Rowan County clerk Kim Davis continues to be in jail for contempt for defying a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses. She has asked the governor of Kentucky to release her from jail so that, according to her lawyers, “she can do her job”, but he has refused to do so, which seems appropriate since not doing her job is what landed her in jail in the first place.
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I generally dislike talking on the phone. I can do it if necessary, and can talk for long times on occasion but it is always a relief to hang up. I don’t know why this is so but when I see so many people with their eyes transfixed to their phones, I assumed that I was in a minority. But it appears that that may not be the case.
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Here’s the late great Nat King Cole with a song that showcases his velvety voice and was a huge hit back in the day, its jaunty music balancing its somewhat ominous lyrics. I had not realized until today that the Clifton Clowers mentioned in the song was an actual person who lived on Woolverton Mountain in Arkansas, though the rest of the song is fictional. His nephew wrote the song and decided to immortalize his uncle by using his name.
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