First of all, if you’re interested in the Mississippi Senate race, you need to be following following Sam Hall, a reporter with the Clarion-Ledger. He’s just the man on this race. And he’s got an active Twitter which is a good way of keeping up on the race. I mention him because I just saw this article he filed today on this fascinating, very awkward or perhaps delicate dimension of the Cochran-McDaniel runoff.
The McDaniel campaign is pissed and a bit freaked that Thad Cochran is heavily courting Mississippi’s African-American community for the Senate runoff later this month.
Colbert Mocks Fox Reaction To Benghazi Arrest: Hillary Still At Large! Watch.
I thought I’d take a moment to say my piece on the blossoming controversy over the Redskins being called “the Redskins.”
I imagine I’m like many my age who at one level just intuitively think about the Redskins and the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves as just part of the natural landscape of American culture. Even now, when I think about the Redskins, part of me is like, ‘We’ve been saying this forever.’
Big news on the Scott Walker breaking. And not good news at all. More in moments.
After I published the piece below about the “Redskins” I had a few interesting and thought-provoking exchanges on Twitter. Folks raised examples I confess I hadn’t considered, though I don’t think they contradict my basic point. Still, important food for thought and it at least allowed me to refine my take, if not change it.
The first question was what if there were a Memphis Maccabees or the Houston Hebrews? Would that be a problem?
Despite my two posts on the subject today, I’ve paid pretty little attention to the whole controversy. But what I have seen has mainly made me wonder if Redskins management could possibly have come up with a way to mishandle the controversy any worse than they have. In fact, it makes me wonder whether, for all the division and acrimony, the two sides couldn’t come together to agree to settle the matter by renaming the team the “DanSnyderDumbshitSkins”.
Coming on the heels of our discussion yesterday about sports names, self-description, slurs and the rest comes this mix of amusing and bizarre arcana. Courtesy of TPM Reader RM we have this clipping 4 June 1908 edition of The Sharon [Pa] Telegraph reporting on a baseball game between the “Kikes” and the “Slyders”. And the Kikes won.
Go Kikes! (I can say that. I’m Jewish.)
Today the government of Iraqi Kurdistan completed its first successful sale and shipment of oil to Israel (Kurdish regional government statement here). Knowing that the Iraqi central government would not allow the Kurds to sell on their own account and certainly not to Israel, when I first saw the reference to a Kurdish shipment by tanker, knowing the geography of the region, I thought, “Wow, that’s impressive.” The explanation is that the oil was transshipped via a Kurdistani pipeline into the Kirkuk-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline. In other words, it travelled almost entirely through Turkey to the port of Ceyhan and shipped from there to Israel.