Hank Kalet

John Oliver sums up the problem with native advertising and the dissolution of the wall between editorial and advertising.

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The right likes to talk about how much illegal immigration costs the United States, usually by ignoring information like this. Kudos to Vice for the story (and for Mike for posting it).

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I have an explainer up at NJ Spotlight about the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

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I was going to write something about today’s George Will column effusively praising Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, one of the most progressive members of the Senate, but Dave Weigel beat me to it and did it much better than I could have.

Will’s column is nothing but rank hypocrisy, as Weigel points on Slate. Brown, says Weigel, hasn’t made any noise about running, so raising him as an alternative seems pretty curious.

Weigel takes it a step farther, though, reminding readers of several Will columns in which the pundit praised Republican candidates solely because they were either a) women or b) non-white.

I tried to find a recent Will column in which he took on Republicans for their swerve into identity politics, and their failure to nominate some white guys who might have been better candidates on the merits. Came up short.

Weigel doesn’t ascribe motivation, but it seems from Will’s writing that this was never a column meant to raise Brown as a potential candidate. How many progressives, after all, are likely to take advice from Will? This was all about cutting the legs out from under the two most familiar Democrats in the race — Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren — and Brown was a just a sharp blade that Will found in the kitchen drawer.

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This probably could be the theme song for the crisis at the border. (They inexplicably bleeped out “piss on them,” but the verse is still pretty damning.)

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