President Obama was on Jimmy Kimmel last night. Both were very funny and entertaining.
Obama did get serious for a few minutes, when he talked about Ferguson, the two officers who were shot, the protesters, racial profiling and the DOJ report. [More...]
Some snippets:
"I think that what had been happening in Ferguson was oppressive and objectionable and was worthy of protest, but there was no excuse for criminal acts and whoever fired those shots shouldn't detract from the issue...."They're criminals, they need to be arrested."
"What we have to make sure of is that the folks who disregard and disrespect the other side, people who resort to violence, that they're marginalized..."But they’re not the majority, and in the same way that you can’t generalize about police officers who do an extraordinarily tough job, overwhelmingly, they do it professionally, you can't generalize about protesters who it turns out had some very legitimate grievances."
On the DOJ report:
You had city government telling the police department... 'Stop more people. We need to raise more money.' Folks would get stopped. They'd get tickets. Then, they'd have to wait in line to pay it, take a day off work. Folks would lose their jobs. In some cases, they were thrown in jail because they didn't have enough money for the fines. And then they'd get fined for that. So there was a whole structure there, according to the Justice Department report, that indicated both racism and just a disregard for what law enforcement's supposed to do.
Back to the funny stuff: Obama on tweeting and texting and using a Blackberry. He wouldn't give Hillary's email address to Jimmy.
It was good to see Obama so relaxed and I always enjoy watching Jimmy Kimmel. Even Kimmel's questions are funny. I can't imagine anyone else asking the President of the United States, "Do you ever wake up hungry at night and go to the kitchen in your underpants to get a sandwich?" (The answer was no, but he could.)
