Ayanna Pressley

Tensions ran high this week after Jordan Neely, a homeless street performer with a record of violence, was killed by Daniel Penney, a twenty-four-year-old Marine. Penney placed Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway train. The usual suspects, such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, swung into action, calling the incident “murder” and a “lynching” respectively. Conservative media was alive with dire warnings of potential violent protests in response to this death of a black man at the hands of a white man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the riots: they didn’t occur. So what makes this situation so different from incidents of racially tinged violence in the recent past?

Cockburn had thought he'd seen it all. But now he learns that DC has reached a new low in the annals of Swamp incompetence. Democratic staffers in Representative Ayanna Pressley's office can't figure out how to turn their phones back on after setting them to go straight to voicemail for over a year and a half. Every Capitol Hill rat would agree that the worse job in a congressional office is answering the phones. From dusk to dawn, deranged boomers light them up, demanding Representative Joe Blow do something about their loud neighbors, or fix their TV, or help them pay their rent. Many of these callers don't even live in the lawmaker's district or state. It's an exhausting task usually reserved for the lowest of the low — interns.

Well la-dee-dah. The House votes to condemn 'President Trump for his "racist comments" about four Democratic congresswomen of color.'First, I am glad that 'racist comments' was in scare quotes. Why? Because there was nothing racist about the president’s tweets inviting creeps like Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar to leave the United States if she doesn’t like it here.  Second, I wish people would give the phrase 'people of color' a rest. Everyone is a color — even, I suppose, Albinos (is that 'racist' now, too?). I, for example, am a pleasing pink. But the fact that someone is dark-skinned imparts to him no special virtue, just as the fact that someone is Caucasian saddles him with no special liability. Except, alas, that it does.