Edward Burmila at The Nation says we should be looking at why ABC decided to resurrect Roseanne in the first place.

The simplest, least satisfying explanation of why this happened is money. An industry reduced to mining nostalgia for an endless parade of reboots, remakes, and sequels could not resist reviving one of the essential, culture-defining sitcoms of the nineties. In this light, ABC saw the new Roseanne as no different than Fuller House—mindless, derivative, easy to churn out, and profitable.

The more complicated answer involves the media’s drive to “humanize” and explain those who see Trump as their long-awaited salvation. Like the endless journalistic forays into the Rust Belt to profile Trumpers with shuttered steel mills as

Joining torturer Joe Arpaio…

Will be giving a Full Pardon to Dinesh D’Souza today. He was treated very unfairly by our government!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2018

Using the pardon power to dole out transactional favors is an insult and injury to the office of the presidency. It is a breach of the faith of the American people. It is wrong. https://t.co/fKNF1C8FoD

— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) May 31, 2018

It is hard to overstate what a naked abuse of the pardon power it is for the president to use it almost exclusively to reward criminal members of his own party.

— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) May 31, 2018

Trump’s Dinesh D’Souza pardon today, on top of his pardons

Bill McKibben on Justin Trudeau and Big Oil:

In case anyone wondered, this is how the world ends: with the cutest, progressivest, boybandiest leader in the world going fully in the tank for the oil industry.

Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Tuesday that it would nationalize the Kinder Morgan pipeline running from the tar sands of Alberta to the tidewater of British Columbia. It will fork over at least $4.5bn in Canadian taxpayers’ money for the right to own a 60-year-old pipe that springs leaks regularly, and for the right to push through a second pipeline on the same route – a proposal that has provoked strong opposition.

Uh oh.

That opposition has come from three main sources. First

Fact checker Linda Qiu checks facts:

During the rally, Mr. Trump also reiterated many claims that The Times and others have previously debunked: that Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, supported MS-13 (she never said this), that illegal border crossings had declined 40 percent (they recently increased), and that tax cuts he signed into law last year were the largest in history (they rank 12th). He also incorrectly described other countries as not “sending their best” through the diversity visa program (applicants enter of their own volition), claimed construction had begun on his border wall (it hasn’t), and said that the suspect in the Manhattan truck attack in October

Barr is scorching the earth and sowing it with salt.

Roseanne Barr’s Twitter saga didn’t end with the cancellation of her show Tuesday. Early Wednesday morning, she was back at it, first blaming Ambien and defensively comparing ABC’s response to her racist and otherwise offensive tweetstorm to those of other celebrities who have made controversial comments.

But what she said yesterday wasn’t just “controversial” – in fact in sane circles it wasn’t controversial at all, it was unmistakably and crudely racist. “Ape” is not ambiguous.

Barr seemed to liken the reaction from her co-stars and those a supporter called “her underlings” to the way President Trump complains about members of his administration being “disloyal.” In response to tweets calling

You kids wanna buy some archetypes? #JordanPeterson #jordanbpeterson #12rulesforlife #Atheism #kanye pic.twitter.com/sVSTODVtY6

— Jason Gussen (@JasonGussen) May 3, 2018

… Read the rest

We need to deal with everyday racism, Don Lemon says.

CNN’s @donlemon: I give ABC credit for cancelling “Roseanne” – but this wasn’t the first time, so why was she given this opportunity in the first place? https://t.co/XuT2RWthhp pic.twitter.com/rvLNVSOD1X

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) May 29, 2018

… Read the rest

Preet Bharara said a thing.

"It's hard not to be proud of John McCain." Agreed. Whatever your politics. Yes, I'm watching the HBO special.

— Preet Bharara (@PreetBharara) May 29, 2018

“It’s hard not to be proud of John McCain.” Agreed. Whatever your politics.

Wellll, thought I. No. No it’s not. He chose Sarah Palin as his vice president. That means he chose her for president should he win the election and then die in office. That all by itself makes it not hard to refrain from being unmixedly proud of John McCain.

A friend pointed out another one, that I don’t think I was aware of. Ed Pilkington in the Guardian in September 2008 (two months before McCain … Read the rest

CNN reports:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for a controversial Arkansas law that blocks medication-induced abortions to go into effect.

The law, passed in 2015, says that any physician who “gives, sells, dispenses, administers, or otherwise provides or prescribes the abortion-inducing drug” shall have to have a contract with a physician who has admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

So that will make it much harder to get the drug.

Planned Parenthood said it will “swiftly” make another challenge to block the law in US district court.

“Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion,” Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens said in a statement. This dangerous law also

It seems the government may have underestimated the number of deaths caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico just a tad. The new estimate is roughly 4,600, compared to the previous count of…64.

An analysis of vital statistics by The New York Times last December found that 1,052 more people than usual died across the island in the 42 days after the storm. Other news organizations, including Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism and CNN, and Alexis Raúl Santos, a demographer at Penn State, have also challenged the government’s figure, finding evidence for hundreds of excess deaths in the weeks following the hurricane.

Researchers for this latest study visited more than 3,000 residences across the island and

So that’s over.

Stellar ratings and an apology weren’t enough to mitigate Roseanne Barr’s racist comments, and now ABC is pulling the plug on “Roseanne.” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey says the network has decided to cancel the “Roseanne” reboot.

Dungey said in a statement, “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”

It was either that or see everyone connected with Blackish walk out. They kept the better show.… Read the rest

Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune sees Roseanne Barr the way I do – trivial herself but a portent of the world we now live in.

Barr quickly defended her Tuesday morning tweet as a “joke.” She then tweeted that she was leaving Twitter. Five minutes later, likely feeling pressure from ABC — the network making stacks of money off Barr’s reboot of the old sitcom “Roseanne” — she returned to Twitter with a more formal and entirely unbelievable apology:

“I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”

When the