Year: 2016

Made Even Better by the Crowd Reaction

It is pretty clear that he looked at Colbert’s now famous talk 10 years ago, and decided give me some more of that:

Comedian Larry Wilmore held no punches at the 2016 White House correspondents’ dinner, taking aim at presidential candidates, reporters and Bill Cosby. (Erin Patrick O’Connor/The Washington Post)

It’s always the big question after the White House correspondents’ dinner: Did the comedian flop?

Opinions vary wildly, but there’s no question some of Larry Wilmore’s jokes received a very frosty reaction inside the Washington Hilton on Saturday night.

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But that was nothing compared to when he tried out his jokes about the media — to a crowd filled to the brim with journalists.

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On TV, the reaction sounded like hushed murmurs. Our colleagues inside the dinner reported the line bombed. “Boo!” someone yelled. “Hiss!” yelled another.

Wilmore laughed nervously. “No — alright, fine, I like Wolf.” He was booed again when he took another shot at Wolf’s network: “I don’t know about you guys, but I cannot get enough of that CNN countdown clock. Now we can see exactly when they hit zero in the ratings.”

Another joke that didn’t go over so well? “A little bit about me, I am a black man who replaced a white man who pretended to be a TV newscaster,” Wilmore said. “So yeah, in that way Lester Holt and I have a lot in common.”

There were audible, very loud gasps at that joke that obviously called out Brian Williams, replaced by Holt on “NBC Nightly News” after it was discovered he exaggerated or misrepresented stories over the years.

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Melissa Harris-Perry, whose messy departure with MSNBC was specifically referenced in the routine (Wilmore says MSNBC now stands for “Missing a Significant Number of Black Correspondents”), tweeted support for Wilmore, which is unsurprising:

It was a good talk, made even better by the frosty reception of the room, who are still as thin skinned as they always were.

The best line was not a dig at Fox, but by a line about MSNBC, “MSNBC got rid of so many black people I thought Boko Haram was running that network,” though the best moment when Don Lemon flipped the bird in response to a dig at him.

He also dropped the N-bomb.

It was good, and he had to know that he would piss off most of the guys in the room.

Well played Mr. Wilmore.

Here is the complete transcript .

1 May 2016, 7:22 PM

Not Enough Bullets

1 Comment

It appears that the banks are asserting that they have a constitutional right to dividends from the Federal Reserve:

A trade group for the nation’s largest banks has asserted a constitutional right to risk-free profit from the Federal Reserve.

Rob Nichols, the chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, argued in a comment letter Thursday that a recent federal law reducing the dividend on the stock that banks purchase as part of membership in the Federal Reserve system, violates the Fifth Amendment clause banning the uncompensated seizure of property.

Congress reduced the dividend as part of a deal to pay for transportation projects. Dividends for the stock, which cannot be bought or sold, had been set at 6 percent since the Federal Reserve’s inception in 1913. Banks cannot ever lose money on the stock; they’re even paid out if their regional Fed bank disbands. So the dividend represented a risk-free profit, earning back its investment in full every 17 years.

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Given those facts, [American Bankers Association chief lobbyist Rob] Nichols’s argument amounts to saying that the 6 percent dividend rate itself is constitutionally protected, because it’s been around for a long time. Nichols effectively asserts that the risk-free dividend is bank property.

Seriously?

I cannot see how a government subsidy can be considered property, particularly not a dividend which, as anyone who knows anything about investments, knows is subject to change without warning.