Fascinoma

I've got to admit that Rachel Maddow does some good work. But she doesn't really nail it very often, and it seems like it's sometimes because the tough questions don't occur to her or because she's afraid to ask them. I watched her chat with Rand Paul the other night and while I liked the way she kept after him, it seems to me that she didn't really get to the essence. As Mark Kleiman points out, she should have asked him, "Well, enough about public accomodations; do you think a private employer should be able to turn down qualified applicants because they're black? Should they be able to pay black people less for the same work?"

And beyond that, she should have asked, "Isn't your stance really just a racist dog-whistle, another in the long-standing Republican tradition of coded signals, signals to bigots that you'll work to keep power in white hands? Otherwise why tilt at a matter of settled law?"

Regardless of your own subjective attitude towards other ethnicities, if you exploit racism you're a racist -- period.