Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Republicans don’t trust women.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

Let’s finish the job.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Please don’t feed the bears.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

Days Since JD Vance Insulted Women Across America: Zero

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

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49Comments

  1. 1.

    NotMax

    They don’t write ‘em like this anymore.

    On the front page, that’s a Shakira video posted not quite 3 weeks ago.

    On the comments page, it is another video entirely.

    At least, that’s what’s there on my view.

    Common occurrence at BJ with YouTube vids (for me, anyway), but thought I’d mention it again.

  5. 5.

    Violet

    @NotMax: That used to happen to me over at Andrew Sullivan’s place when he was at the Atlantic. Would drive me crazy. I’d have to reload the page a bunch of times to get the video I wanted to watch. I don’t have that problem here. Windows machine, Firefox.

  6. 6.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    Coming to you from the Pacific Surfliner — brother in law and I are headed up to Ventura for the day. Amtrak wi-fi is insanely slow, but at least it’s free!

  7. 7.

    Dee Loralei

    I highly recommend The Oxford American as an absolutely well written magazine. Yes, it’s mostly about the South, but my god some of their long pieces are amazing. And every year they do a music issue and if you’re a subscriber you get a CD of well over 30 songs, most of them great, most of them by lesser known local artists, or by well known artists lesser known songs. And they sample music from pretty much every era.

    I can’t recommend the magazine or their music section enough. Been a subscriber since their second or third year of publication.

  8. 8.

    EconWatcher

    My wife generally doesn’t like classic films (except for Casablanca and, more oddly, It’s a Wonderful Life). So I’m left sneaking them as if they’re blue movies when she’s asleep and I’m up.

    I watched Gilda last night. All I gotta say is, holy smokes. There has never, ever been a hotter actress than Rita Hayworth. And if you say differently, you’re wrong.

  11. 11.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @EconWatcher:

    Hayworth’s career was made with that movie, but she was always a little rueful about how iconic the role was, because, “Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me.”

  13. 13.

    Glocksman

    @ranchandsyrup:

    I didn’t write this, but it sums up my feelings perfectly.

    From the TPM comments:

    From a strictly academic standpoint, sounds like the grocer has cause to fire the guy, for disrespecting a customer.

    But that customer wasn’t a garden-variety customer. He was the embattled Governor of the state, seeking to use the interaction for political theatre. When it didn’t go the way the Governor wanted it to, the Governor proved himself a WATB for getting his widdle fee-fees hurt and complaining to the manager, transforming a personal political disagreement into a workplace-performance issue.

    I can’t imagine Obama, the Clintons, or even some Republicans such as former Indiana Governor Bob Orr bitching about being ‘disrespected’ over politics.

    I can see Chris Christie storming into the manager’s office, though.

  15. 15.

    srv

    FoxNews World-Net-Daily EXCLUSIVE! Former campaign volunteer says Hitlery singlehandily instigated all of the investigations/smearing of the bimbo eruptions.

    “Hillary Clinton is the war on women, and that’s what needs to be exposed here,”

    What is it called when you think you’re trying to use triangulation from the Single-Dimension Wingularity?

  16. 16.

    ranchandsyrup

    @Glocksman: Yup. Spot on.

    Horrible optics to take away a man’s livelihood. Also, too and as well, if the guv had a (D) after his name, there would be some garment rending about ZOMG 1st amendment! The worker took it pretty well.

  19. 19.

    Elizabelle

    @ranchandsyrup:
    @Glocksman:

    Yes, McCrory is an asshat, but how can the store owner allow employees to treat customers like that? I think I would have suspended the employee for a week, and apologized to the governor/asshat customer.

    Message sent that this shop respects civility, even to corrupt one-term governors.

    And McCrory’s staff pointing out the employee wanted to burn the governor in effigy, making that into a “physical threat”?

    Isn’t that an own goal? I’d laugh my ass off if I was a North Carolinian. Don’t think of an elephant!

    Class. This governor don’t got it.

  20. 20.

    currants

    @DougJ: refresh browser? I mean, close it out entirely and start anew? I’m not having that problem, but when I have (and I have), it’s worked.

  23. 23.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @NotMax:

    Amtrak won’t let me stream videos. :-( But it does seem that, to the extent that any woman could be, Hayworth was the love of Welles’ life. But both of their insecurities ran too deep for the marriage to work out. (Plus there was Hayworth’s deep dark secret of having been sexually abused by her father, which wasn’t something that psychiatrists or psychologists of the time were equipped to treat.)

  24. 24.

    Elizabelle

    @ranchandsyrup:

    From the Charlotte Observer:

    The governor’s office initially declined to comment on the story. On Monday night, McCrory’s communications director Joshua Ellis told the Observer that Swope had also made an obscene gesture to the governor during the conversation.

    Swope denied that earlier Monday. “I wasn’t raised that way,” he said.

    Ellis also said McCrory didn’t yell at Swope or ask or suggest that he be fired.

    And Ellis said that Swope has said “things about physically harming the governor as well.”

    He said he was referring to a January Facebook page about a planned protest for a McCrory visit to Statesville in February. On the page, some commenters said that they should burn an effigy of the governor. One commenter wrote they could “kick (the effigy) around,” to which Swope replied, “square in the” (groin).

    Swope could not immediately be reached for reaction to the effigy comment.

    …Last year, at attorney Bill Diehl’s 69th birthday party at the Fillmore at the N.C. Music Factory, McCrory was booed. He also heard boos at a concert last summer at the Bechtler Museum when he was introduced.

    Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/02/17/3631042/after-comment-to-governor-mccrory.html#storylink=cpy

    And under McCrory’s picture: link to this story:

    Early – really early – poll finds NC governor’s race a toss-up

  26. 26.

    Amir Khalid

    @ranchandsyrup:
    McCrory didn’t have to do that, even if he was within his rights to complain. It smacks of the arrogant big man smacking a little guy around.

  27. 27.

    Violet

    @Elizabelle: Yeah, I agree. The guy posts on some Facebook group and his contribution is saying they should kick the effigy of the Governor in the nuts:

    And Ellis said that Swope has said “things about physically harming the governor as well.”

    He said he was referring to a January Facebook page about a planned protest for a McCrory visit to Statesville in February. On the page, some commenters said that they should burn an effigy of the governor. One commenter wrote they could “kick (the effigy) around,” to which Swope replied, “square in the” (groin).

    Swope could not immediately be reached for reaction to the effigy comment.

    A Facebook comment. About kicking an effigy in the nuts. Yep, that’s threatening personal bodily harm to the Governor himself if I’ve ever seen it. Good lord, can you see this Governor’s veins and internal organs through his thin skin?

  28. 28.

    Elizabelle

    @Violet:

    I can see the Koch Brothers and Art Pope dollars in his pocket.

    Otherwise, not too interested in the contents of this governor’s trousers.

    Will leave that for tarheel state residents.

  32. 32.

    Ben Cisco

    @Glocksman: It’s not enough for them to be assholes, they have to be WORSHIPPED for it.

    Contrast this episode with what President Obama has been subjected to.

    Now substitute PBO for McCrory and imagine the firestorm that would have erupted when the worker bee got FIRED for…

    (snerk)

    Sorry, I just can’t say that with a straight face.

  33. 33.

    Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)

    @ruemara:

    It seems to work best when we stop at the stations. Out on the track, not so well.

    Funniest conversation overheard so far, the conductor to a couple of limited-English young women traveling together: “Are you asking for the restaurant or the restroom? Restaurant or restroom? (Sigh.) Okay, to eat or to poop?”

    (They just came back with food, so I assume they found the right place.)

  36. 36.

    shelly

    Read Cole’s late night post on a diabetic diet ( and preventing it).
    I’m just curious though. Banning pasta, all breads. Aren’t they part of the so-called Mediteranian Diet? Italians have pasta with almost every meal, and no Frenchmen would be without his baguette. And the Chinese and Japanese have white rice with every meal, but we don’t hear abou† diabetic and obesity epidemics over there. So I always wonder about demonizing individual foods. Processed and fast food, yes.

  41. 41.

    Trollhattan

    Don’t know whether this has been mentioned already, but NY Mag’s Kevin Roose crashed a secret Wall Street fraternity party and verified they’re the very out-of-touch paranoid douchnozzles we always presumed. While this is the equivalent of “water discovered to be wet” it makes me suspect things are actually worse than I’d imagined.

    It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand.
    …
    The last thought I had, and the saddest, was that many of these self-righteous Kappa Beta Phi members had surely been first-year bankers once. And in the 20, 30, or 40 years since, something fundamental about them had changed. Their pursuit of money and power had removed them from the larger world to the sad extent that, now, in the primes of their careers, the only people with whom they could be truly themselves were a handful of other prominent financiers.

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html

  44. 44.

    Southern Beale

    @Trollhattan:

    It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club.

    Isn’t it long past time we did away with these ridiculous secret fraternities that the 1%ers so enjoy? Skull & Bones and all of that nonsense? Surely we can get some secret video of a ridiculous initiation or something and shame them out of existence?

    It’s so fucking lame. “Chad and Skip go to college and get to bond with their fellow elites” and all that.

  46. 46.

    Southern Beale

    @shelly:

    The mediterranean diet isn’t nearly as bread and pasta heavy as Americans think. It’s mostly simply cooked foods: lean meats and fish, vegetables, etc. And it’s not true that Italians have pasta at every meal. That’s some BS made up by Chef Boyardee or Barillo Pasta.

  48. 48.

    Baron Elmo

    @Plantsmantx:

    Amen, Plantsmantx. O.V. Wright was one of the greats, and those are two stunning examples of Down Home soul at its finest. (You forgot the chill-inducing “Eight Men, Four Women, though.) The CD pictured in this video clip is a must-own set that’ll run ya about five bucks used. Go buy it, folks.

    I also have to agree with you about Willie Mitchell’s production. You can detect his taut strings and hard-hitting kick drum sound from a mile away. Best known for producing Al Green’s classic Hi recordings, but Willie had quite a few other champs in his stable.

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