Reports on Thursday that Donald Trump may be picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate led Mark Joseph Stern to reflect that Pence may be just the ticket: “Pence is a fatuous yes-man, a milquetoast mook with no strong convictions other than a desire to win and be popular,” Stern writes. “He will faithfully follow Trump’s whims and commands.”
Meanwhile, Reihan Salam calls Pence a “drearily conventional figure,” and Jim Newell wonders whether Pence can even survive the mind-bending rigors of being Trump’s running mate: “Pence has had his disagreements with Trump throughout the campaign, and if he is indeed VP he may struggle to keep up with Trump’s relentless bullshit.”
Dahlia Lithwick looks at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent attacks on Trump and wonders whether longtime Ginsburg fans are right to cheer her candor. “She may be trying to speak on behalf of the judicial branch itself, a branch that has been almost completely silent in the face of six brutal months of attacks from the right,” Lithwick writes, trying to suss out RBG’s reasoning. “In one sense, by speaking up for a judicial branch that has absorbed one body blow after another in recent months, she did nothing but level the playing field.”
Watching the Facebook Live video Diamond Reynolds made after the shooting of Philando Castile last week, John Kelly notes how Reynolds used politeness as “a powerful tool for dignity and subversion.” Reynolds, Kelly writes in a meditation on her repeated use of “sir,” “transforms a title of respect into a refusal to accept brutality, a performance of transcendent dignity, and a disruption of the status quo.”
Willa Paskin surveys this year’s Emmy nominations and finds them full of “good taste and blind spots.” Hooray: Mr. Robot for best drama; Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch for Best Actor in a Comedy; many nods for The People v. O.J. Simpson. Boo: No Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? No Jane the Virgin?
For fun: When did you first fall in love with breakout Ghostbuster Kate McKinnon?
Tiny oomails,
Rebecca
