URLs du Jour

2017-01-25

Let's get to it:

  • I will freely admit to watching Saturday Night Live since its inception. Yes, even now. But it's been in the news this week with its obvious partisan biases: (1) Writer Katie Rich tweeted that 10-year-old Barron Trump would be the "first homeschool shooter." (2) The show closer this past weekend was a completely creepy rendition of "To Sir With Love" by two cast members, a "goodbye" to President Obama. At Reason, Robby Soave provides advice: "SNL Should Have Suspended the Writer Who Planned the Obama Song, Not the Writer Who Made Fun of Barron Trump". Fact check: True!

    My take on the episode: I didn't laugh once during the opening bit (shirtless Brent Bell as Putin). Aziz Ansari's monologue was also laugh-free. But it got better. Then it got much worse.

  • At NR, Jonah Goldberg is "Missing All That Racial Healing", noting Melissa Harris-Perry's "poem-essay-thingamabob" at the Women's March, a long rant on America's shortcomings.

    But what does it say that, after eight years of Obama’s transformational leadership, some of his biggest fans think — at least in some figurative, imaginary, paranoid way — that slavery and other evils are once again live questions in American life? Everyone here knows I am not Donald Trump’s biggest booster, but he is not poised, or interested in, dragooning blacks into the hulls of ships, and suggesting otherwise with haughty sanctimony to great applause is not the path back to winning the White House for Democrats.

    Nor is making Angela Davis a featured speaker, but I've said that before.

  • I have slagged the Trump Administration's thin-skinned ego-driven approach to truth. But Power Line's John Hinderaker does an able job in defense, noting the Associated Press's "war" on Trump.

    Here, as we saw during the campaign, Trump can be accused of exaggeration. But the liberal press is far more guilty of outright falsity, and its accusations vastly overstate Trump’s purported sins.

    Contra Hinderaker, I think Trump's problems with the truth go beyond "exaggeration". But his point remains: the press, associated or not, should play it straight.

  • Hey, the Oscar noms are out. And were immediately sliced, diced, and pigeonholed into racial categories. At Heat Street, Emily Zanotti documents the results: "Activists Not Happy with Diverse Oscar Nominations, Say It’s All for Show"

    The 2017 Oscar nominations were announced Tuesday morning, and it was immediately clear that after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite fiasco, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had gone out of its way to improve diversity in the acting categories.

    But a number of activists are already suggesting that it’s is just tokenism.

    If you want to play that game, you'd have to argue that Asians are pretty low in representation. (The lone nominee this year in the major categories seems to have been Dev Patel, for Lion.)

  • With the WSJ's "Best of the Web Today" feature on hiatus awaiting a new curator, someone's gotta do it:

    Bottom Story of the Day

    Mark Zuckerberg Says He’s Not Running For President.