With black lives and white audience in Seattle

Protestors Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford take the podium at a Sanders rally Saturday.

Protestors Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford take the podium at a Sanders rally Saturday.

On Saturday, protestors aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement shut down a Bernie Sanders rally in Seattle. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I think police violence against black people is a huge problem that the United States is, for the most part, still ignoring. I think activism—particularly activism by protest—is by definition disruptive and unpopular. You know what reduced institutional racism in Ferguson? Rioting in the streets. So you cannot criticize an act of protest for being inappropriate, because that’s the point. You can, however, criticize a protest for being ineffective, and I question whether Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford achieved what they wanted on Saturday.

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Friday links! From each according to his abilities edition

Rick Santorum donates another unit of language to internet culture.

Rick Santorum donates another unit of language to internet culture.

You think it’s his hand that makes this GIF funny, but it’s his facial expressions. Does Rick Santorum understand the awesome contributions he has made to internet culture? Letting us re-coin his name would have been plenty. But last night, he give us a meme we can use to belittle one another on MMA discussion boards for centuries. Richard John “Rick” Santorum walks the history of online discourse a god, remaking the terrain as he goes, yet he thinks he should settle for being president. Yeah, bro, our society needs your leadership skills. Today is Friday, and each of us contributes according to abilities he may not know he has. Won’t you take according to your needs with me?

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Zinke joins Gohmert, King to demand foreign women prove they aren’t pregnant

Seat open

Position available

This century, Montana’s Representatives-at-large have included Denny Rehberg—who denies he was drunk when he fell off a horse in Kazakhstan—and convicted goblin Steve Daines. Rep. Ryan Zinke has a tricky act to follow. Montana’s sole delegate to the House must join a coalition if he hopes to effectively represent our interests, but he also risks being swamped by national politics. Probably wisely, even if disappointingly, he seems to have taken up with the tea party caucus. But at least one of the bills he has co-sponsored with that bloc seems like a misstep.

[Four-hour break to vomit and sleep]

Oh, hey, is Thursday over now? It feels kind of over. I do not like using this blog to write about events of my personal life, but I sure have been throwing up a lot lately. I’m going to call expedience the better part of expression here and just link to today’s column in the Missoula Independent, which argues Zinke’s sponsorship of the Stop Birth Tourism Act is a poor political calculation. We’ll be back tomorrow with a one-way digestive tract and Friday links.

Combat! blog checks essential systems, isn’t useful

A system

A system

Here we are in the after-noon, and Combat! blog has spent the whole day probing its essential systems. This morning I went to the ENT, who passed two hours marrying orifice to object. When I finally got home and fired up Old Lappy, she too was mysteriously ill. I’ve been isolating variables since and can now report cautious optimism. She seems fixed. Thanks to the placebo effect, I’m really noticing an improvement in performance. It’s like a whole new machine. Except for the time it took to get it—it would have been much faster to go to Best Buy and purchase a new laptop. But such waste would attract Kardashians, and we eschew it.

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Ted Cruz uses machine gun to cook bacon, become president

“There are few things I enjoy more than, on weekends, cooking breakfast with the family,” Ted Cruz says at the outset of this video in which his family will not appear. “Of course, in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most people.” Then he wraps bacon around the barrel of a machine gun and fires it until the bacon cooks, sort of. Then, I presume, he rides a stallion through the window of the Oval Office and knocks Barack Obama out of his chair. We haven’t gotten to that part yet. But surely this guns-and-bacon viral video will clinch the presidency for Cruz, and eventually the Chinese will be our masters. Breakdown after the jump.

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