I had always assumed he was an unpaid intern. (Which could have helped motivate that scowl.) So, at least he got paid. He’s got that going for him. Which is nice.
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It’s made me re-evaluate my former appreciation of Colbert’s humor.
How is it possible to have NO Black comedy writer on your staff in 2020? I mean, you have to work really hard to segregate that completely at this point.
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Paul Jay: One of the best examples of what you’re talking about is how Obama turned all the Treasury Department, all his economic policy to the expertise of Wall Street because only they could understand the complexity of global finance. Only they would know how to dig out of the hole of ’08. And of course, they did in a way that it totally enrich themselves and created the conditions for a Trump.
Thomas Frank:
Everything that we’ve said in this episode in the last 20 minutes, Paul, you can summarize it and I hope your listeners have watched the other interviews that you and I have done, because you and I have talked about this subject many, many times, and I keep coming back to the same theme, which is that experts tell us, you know, the sort of people who call themselves experts, the professional class, let’s put it that way, people with advanced degrees who basically make the world that you and I live in. They are the ones who make our laws, who design our buildings, who set up our corporations, the people that Richard Hofstadter thought he was writing a manifesto for, this class of people presents themselves to us as neutral, disinterested experts. They will make the right decision on our behalf.And what I have said again and again and again is that like any other social cohort, these people will act in their own self-interest and they will help each other out, and they will help themselves when the chips are down. And you saw that in the financial crisis, in the most extraordinary way, where one set of elites bailed out another set of elites and there was zero accountability. There is zero accountability for these people who had crashed the global economy. None of them got “canceled”. They’re all still there, they still have theIr goddamn jobs. It’s the most amazing thing.
Paul Jay: And there’s talk that Biden is going to bring them back into run the Treasury Department.
And the people I’ve heard saying Oh, when Obama spoke at that heroic black guy’s funeral, i cried just to hear his voice again! 
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Is that the case now in 2020? The article is from 2007. I wouldn’t be surprised for there to be one now.
(One can look up the credited writers on IMDb, but I don’t feel like chasing down their bio/pictures to suss this out.)
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Oh, good catch! Didn’t even notice the date.
But even so: 2007 isn’t that long ago.
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I guess indirectly it led to a job on the Daily Show, because that’s where I knew Carlos Jordan best from…
(I never watched the Colbert Report all like that.)
Still, that’s mighty fucked up, even for 2007-2011.
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I do hope his writing room is far more diverse. We know that Seth Meyer’s seems to be…
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Indeed. And that does at times give me pause… but also Amber and Jenny are both hilarious and it’s good that he’s given them a platform over the years. I especially appreciated Ruffin’s week of talking about her experiences with the cops.
Also… DIORAMASSSSS!!!
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I’m not faulting him for it; on the contrary, I’m glad he points it out regularly.
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True. I like that too… but I do always wonder about public shows of such things? I’m probably being too skeptical here.
Also, Amber is apparently the first Black woman to write for a late night talk show in the US, beginning in 2014!?!?
And she’s only slightly younger than me!
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Sure, there might be smidge of virtue signaling in there somewhere, but it’s not just performative lip service, so I can tolerate it.
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Yeah, that’s fair enough!
And I think we’re all better off for knowing her work!
I’m really just using this as an excuse to post gifs of Amber Ruffin now… Sorrynotsorry
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Oh, concurred; I fluv me some Amber…
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Long may she reign, Queen of comedy! 
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I’m less doubtful about it now, because inequality in hiring (like salaries) is easier to get away with when it is hidden.
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Totally agreed. Even if there’s an element of Meyers patting himself on the back for doing the right thing, at least he’s doing it at all, whereas so many others in his position are not…
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That’s something an old person would say 
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So the man who murdered Garrett Foster says it was self defense. He was supposedly working for a car share company and “didn’t know there was a protest there.” But he lives in Ft. Hood, 68 miles away Why was he doing rideshare in downtown Austin? He also posted several tweets from a now deleted account along the lines of “we’ll show you how texas treats protestors!”
He’s military. I hope the military is investigating too. I dont trust Austin PD.
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