Democrats' nightmare
It was bad enough for Democrats when Republican businessman Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky last week in a race almost nobody gave him a shot at winning, but the elected Republican lieutenant governor checks all the boxes Democrats say should make her one of theirs - but didn't.
Jenean Hampton is black, female, conservative, the child of a poor, single-parent family and was raised in overwhelmingly Democratic Detroit.
But she did all the things Republicans say make the American dream possible for anyone who wants it and is willing to work for it. She toiled in the auto industry for five years to pay for college, then earned an industrial engineering degree at Wayne State University. Then she joined the Air Force and became a computer systems officer who wrote code. Her seven years there included a deployment during Desert Storm. Following that, she earned an MBA at the University of Rochester and worked for 19 years in the corrugated packaging industry, including a stint as plant manager.
"A huge part of what formed my opinions was the peer pressure that I got to fail," Hampton told the Louisville Courier-Journal. "These were kids who questioned my good grades, questioned the way I spoke, questioned my choice in music and the fact that I was reading all the time. I just remember wondering, 'Well, jeez, when do I get to just be Jenean with my own likes and dislikes?'"
More words you can't use
MSNBC guest Alfonso Aguilar recently was discussing Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., becoming speaker of the House when he described the congressman on one of the low-rated network's shows as a "hard worker."
That didn't sit well with host Melissa Harris-Perry, who told him such a phrase was politically incorrect and could offend blacks.
Huh?
"I just want to pause on one thing because I don't disagree with you that I actually think Mr. Ryan is a great choice for this role," Harris-Perry said, "but I want us to be super careful when we use the language 'hard worker.'
"I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like."
Harris-Perry went on to rant about work-life balance and "moms who don't have health care" whom we call "failures" for "sucking off the system."
If the MSNBC host was a little bit more of a hard worker herself, she might understand how offensive her remark is to all races.
Now they're serious
This week's global warming casualty: your sex life.
A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research called "Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates" indicates there is a large decline in births eight to 10 months after days on which the temperature exceeds 80 degrees.
The takeaway, naturally, is that if the planet warms more, people won't have babies, and the rate of population growth will be reduced in the next century. Further, the study says, climate change will shift even more births to the summer months when third trimester exposure to dangerously high temperatures increases. Based on an analysis of historical changes in the temperature-fertility relationship, the study also concluded - wait for it - that air conditioning could be used to substantially offset the fertility costs of climate change.
However, before temperatures reach such alarming heights, such environmentally unfriendly niceties such as air conditioning, machine-made ice and showers are likely to be banned.
Makes you wonder how couples got by before they knew about global warming.
Freedom of the press - but not for you
Officials at a supposedly public pro-immigration rally at the University of Colorado-Boulder recently didn't care for at least one attendee - an MRC-TV reporter asking about Kate Steinle and Kate's Law.
Steinle, of course, was the San Francisco resident who was murdered by an illegal immigrant felon who was released from prison but not deported because of the city's status as a sanctuary city - a city in which officials refuse to cooperate with federal authorities concerning the deportation of illegal immigrants. Kate's Law was written to impose mandatory minimum sentences for illegal immigrant felons but was blocked from passage in Congress by Democrats.
The MRC reporter, Dan Joseph, talked to several attendees, then was asked to leave by so-called security for the rally. "I don't like you asking people here the questions that you're asking," the man said. "Why are alternative viewpoints and asking people these really tough questions about a really tough [issue] - why don't you like that?" Joseph wondered. "You won't ask these questions to anybody else here," the man bullied. "You are not welcome here it's a special event."
To make a point about the importance of freedom of the press, with the security official looking on, Joseph interviewed another nearby attendee, then left with what he said was plenty of material.