Bad people

 "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind," wrote John Donne, but some days I don't feel so involved.  I can't believe the world is left worse by the deaths of Jerry Springer or Carolyn Bryant Donham.  In a small way, they overlapped:  Donham was responsible for the torture and murder of Emmett Till and one of Springer's appalling TV shows was titled "I'm a Breeder for the Klan."  They will be mourned by someone.

Last year Springer told an interviewer, "I just apologize.  What have I done?  I've ruined the culture."  Mrs. Donham, on the other hand, never apologized for fingering Till to her husband and his half-brother.  You can argue that Till's death, and the refusal of his mother Mamie Till-Mobley to let the matter rest, jump-started the modern civil rights movement in 1955, surely the last thing the Bryant-Milam family had in mind.  Nevertheless, I can't find any grief this morning.

"If I were in your shoes I'd be having a conversation with your client," Judge Lewis Kaplan told Joe Tacopina this morning, because he has been made aware of social media posts by Eric Trump.  Afraid that his father's sociopathic rantings were not getting the job done or might result in a criminal charge of jury tampering, Spare decided to jump in and discredit E. Jean Carroll's case because it is "being funded by a billionaire...out of pure hatred, spite or fear of a formidable candidate, is an embarrassment to our country."  Imagine, a billionaire funding something besides the vacations of a corrupt Supreme Court justice.  Outrageous.  (Spare's post was deleted but nothing disappears on the internet.)  Yesterday Dad was already online before the trial started:  how could he, "being very well known, to put it mildly," have raped anyone.  And celebrity has what to do with it? wonders R. Kelly.

Everything's bigger in Texas, including civil rights lawsuit settlements.  The family of Holly Barlow-Austin will receive $7 million because LaSalle Corrections, a private prison, allowed her to die without medical care at its Bi-State Justice Center in 2019.  Denied medication for HIV and mental health issues, she was blind and unable to walk at the end.  If it was anywhere else we might celebrate the end of for-profit prisons, but Texas...

He's back!  "The other thing you notice when you take a little time off is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are," said Tucker Carlson by way of not explaining why he got the hook at Fox News.  "Where can you still find Americans saying true things?  There aren't many places left but there are some and that's enough."  Vague enough for you?  He could be selling subscriptions to the Christian Science Monitor.  

Margie Greene is always willing to make a fool of herself on a grand scale.  Today she implied that step-parents are not real parents.  Questioning Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers about her credentials she demanded, "Are you a medical doctor?  Are you a mother?"  Neither is in any way involved with running a union but Empty was on a roll.  She accused Weingarten of being "a political activist," as if there's something wrong with that.  For the record, Weingarten is a parent to her wife's biological children legally and in every other way; the Neanderthal stopped short of demanding, "Are you even a woman?"  If she wants to take on step-parents, there are more than 30 million in the US, including Jill Biden and Kamala Harris.  Might even be some in Georgia.

Nikki Haley should get a lab to analyze the skin whitener she is using.  She's starting to look like a mime.  On the other hand, it seems to have made her clairvoyant.  She says a vote for Joe Biden is effectively a vote for non-cosmetically-altered Kamala Harris:  "The idea that he would make it until 86 years is not something that I think is likely."  Don't hold back, Madame Nimarata -- who do you see winning the Derby next month?

People in Southeast Asia and southern Europe are already dying of the heat but Ron Johnson says Americans should "take comfort" in catastrophic climate change, especially those in Wisconsin because it gets cold there.  Some poor economics professor kept trying to get him to see that Wisconsin is not the world.  It's been tried before.  Johnson is very, very stupid.