I thought this would be a fun topic for a Monday: what’s the worst newspaper column you’ve ever read? Doesn’t have to be in the Times or WaPo, if you can find a link to it, it can be part of the competition. This (via Atrios), is strong contender:
You’re the straight-A student with a too-heavy bookbag and an after-school job at the YMCA. The cool kids are in Philly. They drink Sugar Wash Rum and tool around on shabby-chic bicycles. You pay car insurance and decide state and national elections; the cool kids would only carshare to your zip code if it meant wrapping their tattooed arms around a rare batch of Tired Hands milkshake India Pale Ale.
[….]When Donald Trump took the White House with a shocking win in Pennsylvania, it was voters in some of your zip codes (I’m talking to you, Bucks County) who, along with people in the far-away counties of the state, made it happen. Philly was pretty much a nonfactor in the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes.
Bobo’s Russia piece and all of Von Drehel’s recent pieces are up there too, but I give this edge because it mixes vapid NASCAR-dads-at-Applebee’s style political commentary with inane jokes about hipsters in a way that I haven’t seen in a while.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Headline from the NYT today
by Johnathan Martin and Alexander Burns.
schrodingers_cat
The Bobo column comparing macroecon to quantum mechanics has to rank way up there. It proved that he knew nothing about either subject.
A Ghost To Most
Any random column from David Von Drehle, Marc Theissen, Ed Rogers, Fugh Fuckwit, or other fascist columnist in the WaPo would be in contention.,
kindness
Bobo’s trying to make amends. His column from this weekend was honest.
I’d still put his slimy ass up against the wall if it was up to me though.
brendancalling
I’m from Philly, and for the first time ever I have enjoyed seeing someone trashed in the comments section.
well, maybe not the first time ever, but this one was richly deserved.
Onto the topic: I think the worst column ever written was one of Richard Cohen’s pieces. It’s a tie between “fool and a Frenchman” and “Steven Colbert isn’t funny, *I’M* funny”.
gvg
It would be better for preserving our intelligence if you just forget these waste of pixels as soon as you read them. Saving up these useless memories for threads like this is not productive use of our time.
Lets discuss how we would reform education, especially writing skills if we could have our way. what teaching methods work best?
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et Al.)
I grew up west of Philadelphia. As somebody from there, I want to go on the record saying how deeply, widely, tally, fucking embarrassing that piece is.
different-church-lady
Belligerence is always a good way to kick off a new relationship!
Matt McIrvin
I think the all-time worst I can remember was one I read around the 1991 Gulf War, about how Saddam Hussein was probably raised by liberal parents who didn’t spank.
Humboldtblue
Pretty much sums up trying to make it to the end of the year only to realize that only the calendar changes in January, all else remains. High school runner help competitor win marathon.
Matt McIrvin
…The one where William Saletan extolled the rigor of “The Bell Curve” was pretty bad too. But he walked that one back pretty fast.
oatler.
“productive use of our time” :)
Matt McIrvin
@brendancalling: Oh, yeah, I remember the first one that made me realize that Richard Cohen was a complete racist. It was his defense of shopkeepers in Georgetown who refused to let young black men into their stores. They were just playing the odds, he said, and the fact that the guys had to be young and male in addition to black meant it wasn’t racist.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@brendancalling: “Worst Richard Cohen Column” could be an all day, tbogg length thread of its own
randy khan
There’s too much competition to pick a worst column. And more or less everything in the bottom 5% is so bad that you want to put out your eyes after reading.
The Moar You Know
While sick, I read Friedman’s “Lexus and the Olive Tree”, which was so stunningly and obviously wrong in every way my body rebelled and got better, so I’d never read a book that bad again.
Not a column, but like a book of columns, all wrong.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: …come to think of it, I think that was in Slate, so technically not a newspaper column.
Aleta
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: Unfair to call Trump, the RNC and its money Liberal Outsiders.
Mike in DC
Anything Greenwald has written recently about the Russia investigation rates at least an honorable mention.
Amir Khalid
I nominate all the columns Bill Kristol wrote for The New York Times, that year he didn’t get through probation.
Aimai
@brendancalling: i remember those!
Butch
The only meaning I know of sugar wash rum is a way to make moonshine. Am I that uncool? What does he mean by that reference?
Bill Arnold
@kindness:
You’re talking about this David Brooks piece? I fully enjoyed reading it (and have also enjoyed a few other recent columns). Kudos to him for putting it in writing.
The G.O.P. Is Rotting
Amir Khalid
@Tilda Swintons Bald Cap:
I’m sure plenty of “conservative” non-Alabamans did too.
GregB
Pat Buchanan’s campaign in defense of Nazi concentration camp guard John Demanjuk.
The Moar You Know
@gvg: My wife’s a teacher, has been for 25+ years now. Her #1 “educational reform” idea: make high school optional, not legally mandated, and start charging for public schools. Enough so that the parents and students won’t just blow it off like they usually do, but take it seriously. Force them to have some skin in the game.
I must confess after a decade of watching parents and students view education as not a goal unto itself but only as a means of getting a piece of paper that is a college admissions ticket, and seeing my wife on the receiving end of bored, vengeful parents with nothing to do and an axe to grind that she has a point; one which I would not have agreed with before seeing how the system actually works.
As part of that reform, set up something to keep the kids who don’t want to be in school off the streets until they are 18. It should not be jail.
JR
That opening paragraph reads like a guy who is mad he didn’t get laid more in college.
Doug!
@schrodingers_cat:
What’s amazing about that column is that Bobo is able to turn a correct and quite important point — that neoclassical economics is discredited by the financial crisis — and turn it into such a stupid column
Splitting Image
I nominate George F. Will’s tirade against jeans from 2009.
Not only does he tell the entire country that they have to “grow up” and embrace the esthetic he remembers from his long-ago boyhood, but he says that the one cardinal rule of dressing for women is that if Grace Kelly wouldn’t wear it, neither should they.
Grace Kelly is noted as the actress who popularized blue jeans for women after wearing them in Rear Window.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Amir Khalid: Ha, I remember. “This is William Kristol’s last column.” The end that everyone expected.
schrodingers_cat
@Doug!: His main beef seems to be with Keynes though and Keynes never argued that the stock market is an example of an efficient market, that came later. DB is wrong on those facts as well.
But her emails!!!
@The Moar You Know:
So your wife wants to discriminate against poor people? Good to know.
Steeplejack
@Humboldtblue:
That’s heartwarming about one runner helping another, but can you win a race if you’re picked up and pushed across the finish line?
The Moar You Know
@Splitting Image: I first became aware of George Will around 1982 or so, read some thing he’d written for Time. Just the pic remains in my head, and the thought “who the fuck wears a bowtie? Christ, this guy is obviously an ASSHOLE.”
And he was praising Reagan, so he confirmed my impression, because even as a young teen I knew Reagan was a monster.
So yeah, anything by Will is a strong contender.
Doug!
@schrodingers_cat:
That’s what’s so weird and stupid. He’s confusing Keynes with the Chicago school.
Ridnik Chrome
I nominate John Kass’ “Rat In The House” column in the Chicago Tribune just before the start of the Iraq War. I have a special dislike for Kass not just because he replaced Mike Royko, and has been mostly terrible at it, but because he was once a very good City Hall reporter. Getting that column brought out the worst in him. He went from being a very sharp and insightful critic of the Daleys to hating the Clintons (mainly for their association with the Daleys) to being a full-on stooge for the Bush-Cheney regime. The “Rat” column, for me, represents the final endpoint of that transformation.
The Moar You Know
@But her emails!!!: Not even a little, quite the opposite. But the very few poor students she has are not the problem.
Lotta middle class and rich kids don’t want to be in school. Keeping them there causes more problems than it solves. So, give them an option.
Amir Khalid
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
The NYT should have fired him after his first column. Letting him save face meant publishing 100 pieces of his rubbish.
chopper
mcmegan and her goddamn thermomix. ugh. or really mcmegan and her anything at all.
Barbara
Look, if you want complete howling gibberish week in and week out, Ed Rogers and Marc Thiessen of the Washington Post cannot be beat. But if you want pretensions of seriousness, Brooks and Edsall are the big budget Acadamy Award contenders with the high production values that nonetheless manage to spew out nothing better than garbage on a pretty consistent basis.
There isn’t just one Brooks columns. Brooks is like Gulliver, documenting in close, overwhelming and overwhelmingly irrelevant detail all of the things that supposedly make liberals responsible for the nation’s polarized state, including among others, paying too much attention to their children’s school work, attending barre classes, eating gourmet sandwiches, shopping at Anthropologie and what have you — all the while ignoring the giant turds that have been raining down from the sky ever since Nixon and then, doubling down, Reagan decided to go all in with the Southern style resentment of dark people in order to rape and pillage every kind of institution that had been set up for the protection of normal people. But for Brooks, it’s all about the material purchasing decisions one makes. Shallow ignorance masquerading as profundity never once fails to make me angry.
Thomas Edsall is a close second, what with his elision of “working class” with “white working class” thus rendering invisible and unimportant the “working” part and elevating the “white” part of being a member of the white working class, and in an incredibly neat combined trick, strongly implying that people of color don’t work at all and deserve the derision they receive from all those angry white men who made the U.S. what it is.
TenguPhule
Oh sure, pick a topic guaranteed to rile up every commenter here, Doug.
I would welcome our new fluffy bunny overlords instead.
JustRuss
So many worthy contenders, but WSJ’s classic Poor people are so damn lucky cuz they don’t have to pay taxes has never been topped. For pure point-and-laugh value, I nominate Maureen Dowd Meets Edible Marijuana.
MattF
I’d nominate the column in which Krauthammer called Hillary Clinton a ‘pathological liar’. Wrong and bad in so many ways.
efgoldman
@gvg:
i never went to catholic school, but I understand that a ruler or yardstick judiciously applied to the fingers, works wonders.
Worst columns? Anything by Jacoby, the faux-glibertarian who lives in tony Brookline (very different from the town in which I grew up, 50-mumble-years ago) and conspicuously sends his kid to Jewish parochial school.
Blue in SLC
It’s not a written article, but this is a perfect example. ESPN (or CBS Sports, or whichever entity he happened to be working for) asks its contributors to do 30-second opinion pieces on all sorts of topics. These can range from insightful to horrendous.
Colin Cowherd offered one a few years back. In it he ranted about the ineffectiveness of the NCAA. He nailed it: they are inept, generate incentives that undermine their (stated) goals, and are enormously corrupt. He used this as an example of the problem of governmental overreach and overregulation. So what’s the problem? The NCAA isn’t a government program; it’s a private industry self-regulating. He got it exactly backwards: it’s a perfect example of the problem of self-regulating in the absence of government oversight.
It still bothers me to this day, and captures—with incredible precision—an enormous amount of what is wrong with our political media.
(Cowherd is a wanna-be Rush Limbaugh. Sports media can actually be quite good, and against that backdrop his ideology-driven but factually-challenged rant was jarring.)
Steeplejack
@JR:
The author, Maria Panaritis, appears to be a woman.
geg6
@chopper:
This. Just pick a random column of hers. It will be the worst thing you’ve ever read in your life and you will curse yourself for murdering brain cells while doing it.
But her emails!!!
@The Moar You Know:
But that’s the impact of charging a fee to go to school. Poor students will either be unable to afford it, or it will hurt them and their families to pay even a fairly nominal fee. On the flip side, Middle and particularly upper class families would have no difficulty paying said fee.
I think about what happens during water emergencies where you end up with poor and middle class people scrimping on water, while the upper class and the businesses that cater to them still use water indiscriminately because they can afford the fines and penalties.
Amaranthine RBG
Anyone who wastes time reading opinion columns regularly ain’t too bright to start with
Villago Delenda Est
I haven’t read all the comments, but anything by the Noonington lush has to be included. The infamous dolphins column, for example.
Barbara
@The Moar You Know: I honestly don’t think it relates to making students pay. It relates to the overall low esteem in which education and teachers are held by members of the public. This isn’t true in many other countries even where students have a complete free ride all the way through college. Even private school teachers get ramrodded by resentful parents — they are just always sure to remind them that they are the ones paying their salary. Sure, maybe this doesn’t happen at really selective schools, but my sister taught in both public and private schools and felt much more beaten down in private schools.
rikyrah
With Republicans joining #Trump in his attacks on Mueller, our
democratic republic is in far more danger than it was even a few weeks ago. We are far closer to the edge than we want to think. My columnhttps://t.co/3OPTJjbwLM
— EJ Dionne (@EJDionne) December 11, 2017
The Moar You Know
@JustRuss: That one was epic – “I ignored all the repeated instructions for use and dosage I’d been given and had a shitty time, so marijuana must be awful stuff.”
Just like a teenager slamming half a bottle of vodka and spending the entire night throwing up, and then blaming the vodka. Except I’ve never met a teenager that stupid.
rikyrah
Uh huh
Uh huh
News outlets including The Associated Press filed a motion in federal court Friday arguing that a document containing the names of investors in some Kushner Cos. apartment buildings in Maryland should be unsealed and available to the media. https://t.co/vZT0HW1aBF
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 9, 2017
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Amaranthine RBG: Heh. Says the goofball who’s been trolling this blog for.. how many years, Steve?
rikyrah
It is so important to emphasize that Roy Moore’s background as a child molester is only one part of his unacceptable and sordid resume. Racist who believes the times were better under slavery. A man who prefers Putin’s Russia to our America. A man who spit on the constitution. https://t.co/HlyhuXHGEX
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) December 11, 2017
lgerard
Well it is not a column in the strictest sense of the word, only a lowly blog post, but this classic from Powerline’s John Hinderaker should never be forgotten
PPCLI
There are so many bad ones to pick from….
I’m sure I can think of many that are even worse, but I don’t want us to forget the NYT’s Anna Quindlen’s classic of sheer credulity, fueling the 80s/90s child ritual abuse hysteria, “Believing the Children”, when even a cursory scrutiny of the child interview transcripts and court testimony makes it clear that something was clearly off the rails in the Kelly Michaels case. Bonus points for her little innuendo/smear at the end suggesting that even though the McMartins had been found not guilty, they were guilty of something.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/29/opinion/public-private-believing-the-children.html
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: Also, a cheap crook and a grifter
MattF
@lgerard: If you’re letting in the peanut gallery…
Just One More Canuck
@Mike in DC: “Anything Greenwald has written recently about the Russia investigation rates at least an honorable mention.”
You could have stopped after “written”
geg6
Andrew Sullivan’s 9/16/01 Times of London column about anti-Iraq War Americans being a fifth column.
Never quite forgave that, despite his many walk-backs and explanations.
catclub
@Bill Arnold: I think he writes that column about once a year, then goes back to not actually objecting to what they are doing the other 51 weeks.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: But it would be defeatist and gloomy to bring up any possibility of tyranny or violence from the Republicans. //
The Moar You Know
@Barbara: This is at the core of all problems with public education in this country regardless of income group.
Public school teachers get the same thing, both from parents and students. Daily.
@But her emails!!!: I don’t have an answer for you. I don’t teach. What I do know is that you’ve got about ten years left to go before the lifetime teachers all retire and the “Teach for America” and other temporary and totally unqualified teachers start running the show, because no teachers are willing to stay for longer than five years. People will not stay in a system that gives them no respect, but that’s what public school teachers are being asked to do. They’ve already forfeited good pay and most of them don’t get retirement anymore either – and school teachers are not eligible for Social Security. No money, no retirement, no Social Security and abuse every day. Would you stay?
The system is not working and it’s because the people it is serving flat out don’t think it’s valuable, just a hoop to jump through to get that college degree.
And it is not lost on these teachers that the kids and their parents take college far more seriously than high school – because they’re paying for it.
Humboldtblue
@Steeplejack:
She was credited with the win as she crossed the line first.
And any column that contained the words “pink Himalayan salt” has to be included on Santa’s list of trash columns.
Ridnik Chrome
@Villago Delenda Est: All of Thomas Friedman’s “the next six months will be the most critical” columns on Iraq should be on the list, too.
lgerard
@MattF:
But it was Time’s Blog of the year!
Ridnik Chrome
@geg6: The war in Iraq produced a veritable treasure trove of shitty op-ed writing.
TenguPhule
We have a contender for 2017’s mind boggling stupid column of the year.
Republicans should free up Americans’ retirement assets
SFAW
@efgoldman:
Yeah, he gives Kristol, Feith (not as a columnist, of course), Cohen, and a raft of others a run for their money in the “fucking stupid” department.
SFAW
@TenguPhule:
It’s Hewitt, what did you expect?
Hungry Joe
I’d cast my vote for Will’s bluejeans column, with MoDo’s shrieking dope rant and the WSJ’s gobsmacking “lucky duckies” in a dead heat for second place. But somewhere in the top ten, as a group, are columns written in the second person and columns that proclaim themselves “An Open Letter to …. “
TenguPhule
Why we must raise defense spending
What have you unleashed, Doug?!
MattF
@TenguPhule: Yeah, saw that. Combining ideas from Hewitt and Inhofe…
SFAW
Outside of Larison, you could probably insert the name of any conservatard pundit/columnist in the answer box. They’re all a combination of crazy/stupid/evil, in varying percentages, depending on the day.
The Ancient Randonneur
@rikyrah:
This! A thousand times this. The “thirty something man dating teenage girls was part of our culture” excuse makers are the same people who make excuses for his overtly racist, and well documented, public comments. Of course, it is pointing out and naming racists that is the real offense. Those delicate flowers can’t handle the truth.
Shalimar
Cal Thomas. Anything from his 1990s heyday. He was a template for the current rash of horrible.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
So, basically, you want to bring back full-time child labor for kids 14 and up, because that’s what your idea would mean for the vast majority of them.
TenguPhule
Help, stuck in moderation because Wapo has decided today is the day to unleash all the stupid columns it could find.
I blame Doug. And Baud, because he’s not here to defend himself.
PJ
@The Moar You Know: The option would end up being the same thing as high school (as you put it, to keep them off the streets), but without any pretense of learning. So, I’m imagining some kind of detention facility, maybe with a gym and a cafeteria. The point being, we don’t have enough jobs for adults, let alone 13-year olds, and I can’t imagine our government investing in any kind of apprenticeship program.
TenguPhule
@SFAW: I didn’t expect them to be so open about wanting to rob us blind.
Ian G.
@MattF:
Can anyone point me to anything Krauthammer has written about Trump? It’s telling to me that I know right off the top of my head that much of the neoconservative chorus hates Trump (Frum, Kristol, Rubin, Boot, Podhoretz), but I honestly don’t know what Krauthammer thinks.
But I’m having a hard time thinking of an easier target for Richard Spencer’s goons to throw into the gas chambers than a Jewish intellectual in a wheelchair, so maybe Chuck needs to get with the program.
trollhattan
Anything by Cal Thomas. But in the spirit of introducing y’all to new talent I present self-loathing Californian and Manhattan Institute wingnut welfare recipient Ben Boychuk. A recent sample.
Or, how about….
The Moar You Know
@TenguPhule: Gosh. Who
paid
for
this?
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
Middle and upper-class parents will force their kids to stay in school, and yell at your wife because they’re paying good money for her to teach them and why can’t she do a better job?
The only thing you will succeed in doing is getting poor kids to drop out, leaving only the most obnoxious rich kids. Great plan.
rikyrah
Did anyone else watch the Psych Movie last week?
I enjoyed it; they are still all crazy in that universe of theirs.
AliceBlue
Surely anything by Camille Paglia has to be in the top ten. Especially her “Letters to Camille” column that used to be in Salon. (It was painfully obvious that the “letters” were written by her).
Mona Charen and Maggie Gallagher for honorable mentions.
Shalimar
@Mnemosyne: Not educating most of our voters also seems like a horrible idea. We already have enough trouble with people basing their decisions on vapidly poor logic, and that is with mandatory education
catclub
@TenguPhule: I found one large lie – double counting as usual:
except it does not include the tax revenue that is lost as that same ( approximately) 25% of retirement accounts comes out over ten years – and is taxed at ordinary rates- , anyway.
Plus, plenty of people have relatively small incomes in retirement, so their tax rate is already around 10%.
Humboldtblue
Oh, and that video of the poor bullied kid from Tennessee who filmed by his concerned mom and then the video went viral and he got love from all corners of the globe?
Turns out mom has a deep, deep, love for all things confederate including their traitor’s rag.
@Ian G.:
I just did a quick google search for Krauthammer on Trump. He’s not a fan.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: It was interesting. But I dunno, it just didn’t seem to have the magic of the tv show.
burnspbesq
It’s a blog post, not a newspaper column, but I think this may be a contender.
https://medium.com/@LeftistScumbag/doug-jones-is-a-terrible-candidate-acde501603c1
WaterGIrl
@rikyrah: Thanks for saying that – I had known it was coming in December, but then it fell off my radar. Your comment is just in time – there is one more showing of the movie – and it’s tomorrow (Tuesday). Yay!
SFAW
@The Moar You Know:
Although a number of parents go way over the line, I think the general shift in focus (from “knowledge for its own sake” to “my kid has to get into the best college”) is a not-unnatural response to the country’s economic state, and a public education system, in decline. The public education system is in decline because the Rethugs have been trying to destroy it for 40 years or more, and the country’s economic decline is as much a case of the Rethugs being lapdogs for business and the wealthy, as anything else.
For some unknown reason, the economic decline, including the decline of well-paying middle class jobs, gets parents nervous that their kids will be the first generation (more or less) to be worse off than their parents were. So getting the most advantageous placement vis-a-vis college becomes far more important than it used to be, because the stakes are so much higher; that can lead to parents doing things that would have appalled them 30 years ago.
I blame Obama, of course. And Hillary.
Shalimar
@The Moar You Know: Explain how charging people to attend isn’t going to discriminate against people who can’t afford to pay.
lgerard
I spent a half hour listening to Alabama talk radio this morning….nonstop Roy Moore ads, most featuring the Kumquat Kim ranting. Lots of Pelosi puppet and baby killer themes. The host claimed that only by electing Roy will we be able to find out the truth as to whether or not he is a pedophile. Awesome logic!
schrodingers_cat
@burnspbesq: Who funds the site Medium? Some commenter had also linked to post on the same site, which proclaimed that fascism has come to America wearing p hats and waving rainbow flags. Written by some leftier-than- thou Australian, who calls herself a left liberal or something like that.
trollhattan
BTW, can recommend the Ben Bradlee biopic airing on HBO. The man lived large–I had no idea.
Turgidson
@kindness:
Bobo will leap back into the GOP/conservative movement’s arms at the very first sign that they might kinda, sorta, maybe, probably not, be moving on from the anti-intellectual Trumpist depths towards what he deems to be respectability.
He thought the 2014 elections, in which the GOP nominated a bunch of extremist lunatics, showed that the GOP brand was restored and they were replenishing their ranks with adults. This was the year they ran Joni “Agenda 21” Ernst, Tom “Nuke Nuke Nuke, Nuke Nuke Iran” Cotton, Tom Tillis, and Corey “I smile a lot so I’m totally not a right wing dipshit” Gardner.
Basically, they had candidates who were just as demented as ever, but remembered to wipe the spittle off the corners of their mouths every so often. That was enough for Bobo to fall in love with his party all over again.
He’s an intellectually dishonest fucking fraud and will never be on our side.
Julia Grey
Since we’re talking about paying off mortgages, it’s maybe a good time to note that house prices may very well collapse after the mortgage interest and local property tax deductions are eliminated.
SFAW
@AliceBlue:
The first time I saw “Christ! What an asshole!” in print was in a Molly Ivins column regarding some Paglia idiocy. (Of course, Molly probably wrote “Sheesh!,” not “Christ!” but you get the idea.)
I miss Molly. (Among others.)
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: You know me better than that. But to be clear, I don’t. In fact, the one thing that can’t happen is those kids can’t be allowed out in the labor force at all, because we are entering an era where there is definitely not a job for anyone who wants one and can do it, and that’s about to get a lot worse, not better.
@PJ: Pretty much. My hope is that most of them get bored after a year and go back to school. Not all of them will. I, too, cannot imagine any American government investing in an apprenticeship program (I went through one of the few that’s ever been offered in this country, and we all knew at the time how rare it was) but we need to start moving in that direction.
I am very in favor of apprenticeship programs. Thanks to the one I had access to in high school, in addition to my degree in sociology, I’m a fully certified welder. And that program is what kept me in high school. I liked making things. Still do.
J R in WV
Haven’t read the comments, but I want to nominate M. Dowd’s cannibis chocolate bar OD column. A peak stupidity revelation on her part!!
We visited CO not long ago, and because we were in a high-class hotel, we went for edibles, which were delicious truffle candies with giggles installed. Had a wonderful time, Denver is a great place to visit with good food and great bookshops. We always travel with a couple of empty duffel bags just so we can buy stuff (books!!) and just check it for the return flight.
When we flew out, we had to consume the last of our candy (or wastefully throw it out!), which made the flight home one of the most relaxed and pleasant airline flights we’ve ever had.
And the state, counties and municipalities are all building for their future with the taxes from a new economic sector!!
SiubhanDuinne
@MattF:
William Safire, in a January 1996 NYT column, called her a “congenital liar.” It was wrong and bad in so many ways then, and it’s wrong and bad in many ways now.
The Moar You Know
@Shalimar: You don’t charge people who can’t afford to pay.
I am literally advocating nothing more than how colleges work, applying that to high school. This is not hard.
Steeplejack
@Humboldtblue:
I get that. I don’t think it’s right.
SiubhanDuinne
@AliceBlue:
No
lovehate for Peggy Noonan?MattF
@SiubhanDuinne: Y’know– it’s possible that’s the column I was thinking about. Safire always managed to piss me off. One supposes that it was intentional.
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: No, they absolutely will not. They’ll happily yank them out if the kids don’t want to go. You have no idea of the contempt that today’s parents have for schools.
So, no change for her working conditions.
TenguPhule
@The Moar You Know:
And how would this work? Because I assure you, trying to define this will ensure it never comes to pass.
Julia Grey
I have to second the nomination of any Cal Thomas column from back in his day. Tendentious jerkwad of the lowest caliber.
Steeplejack
@trollhattan:
Correct. It was designed to allow sparsely populated rural states to effectively dictate policy to the rest of the country.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah:
I take it that is not your nomination for bad columnist/stupid column. ?
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
There are already thousands (if not millions) of Americans who can’t afford college, and now you want to make it impossible for them to attend high school, too?
And, again, the only thing your plan would mean is that your wife would be stuck only with the rich kids whose parents would be doubly angry that she’s not getting each and every one of them into Harvard because do you know how much we’re paying for this?!?!?!
And if you think colleges have no problems with parents and students demanding grade adjustments and other special treatment because the parents are paying money for college, you need to talk to a few college teachers.
WaterGIrl
@J R in WV:
That is some high-quality Betty Cracker level writing there.
Cacti
Anything from Glenn Greenwald re: the “heroic whistle-blowing patriotism” of Edward Snowden/the good character of the Russian Federation.
Anything from Maureen Dowd, period.
TenguPhule
@Julia Grey:
Faint Damnation of Cal Thomas. If ever a person deserved to be fed into a woodchipper feet first, Cal Thomas is that man.
WaterGIrl
@Steeplejack: I don’t think it’s right, either.
Emma Anne
@geg6: I knew someone would get to the Fifth Column piece before I did. Still makes me angry.
AliceBlue
@SiubhanDuinne:
Of course! How could I forget Nooners??
opiejeanne
A Herb Caen column in the SF Chronicle, near the end of his life.
There was a little boy , age 5, who was molested in the restroom by some much older boys. Might have been at a private school. It was a terrible case and he took it on himself to just call the little boy a liar in his column.
I never forgave him. I mean, this was a cruel column and he went out of his way to be cruel. He had one of those columns where he could write about whatever tickled his fancy and he chose to do that.
(Caen was an institution, so much that I knew about him in HS in SoCal. Our English teachers talked about him at a time when they probably should also have pointed out our LA Times writer, Jim Murray, who should have been noticed by them. He wrote a daily sports column that I read from the time I was 11 until he retired in 1989, didn’t matter whether it was about the Indy 500 or the Dodgers.)
SFAW
@burnspbesq:
That column/post was pretty foul; fortunately almost all of the commenters called (in various manners) the writer an idiot. Jones not pure enough, so she’s not voting? GMAFB.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
Oh, sweetie. Unless you’re advocating a way for those parents to send their kids directly to college at age 14, there is NO WAY IN HELL that upper-class parents will let their little snowflakes drop out. The only kids who will drop out are the poor ones whose parents can’t afford high school.
Only for the worse. And if you think things can’t possibly get worse for her, hang onto your hat and see just how miserable those parents can make her when she has no relief whatsoever.
NCSteve
I believe we will have a definitive answer to this question sometime in the next six months or so.
sukabi
@Aleta: pretty sure they were referring to Obama…he’s weighed in on the race and cut a pro Jones ad.
Huggy Bear
I always despise the columns leading up to an election where some elite op-ed writer deigns to go to “the neighborhood” and put up some random haberdasher or gal Friday as the bellwether for predicting why their preferred candidate will win. I typically wonder how many of these local folks the columnists have to ask before they get the preferred answer.
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: My brother is one. Department head, in fact, at a pretty prestigious school in Chicago.
He gets about one parent a semester showing up yelling. He calls security. They don’t have to put up with that shit, and they do not.
I’ll call an end to this pissing match and let you win. I am obviously Satan incarnate for proposing a solution. My apologies.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
And do it on minimum wage, because her union will be dead when the SC guts mandatory contributions.
Cacti
Also, anyone who ever wrote anything in defense of the Iraq war.
SFAW
@TenguPhule:
There used to be a commenter here like that. I wonder what happened to him?
BlueDWarrior
@burnspbesq: It just goes to show that left-wingnuts are going to wingnut. But it’s funny how right-wingnuts seem to grasp the concept of beating a party down by dominating the primaries until only your candidates are left, and yet left-wingnuts want to run and scream for the hills and for all the institutions to be razed to the ground whenever they lose a singular primary.
J R in WV
@But her emails!!!:
Have you never heard of the school lunch program? Poor kids don’t have to pay for lunch anymore. In schools where enough kids qualify for the subsidized lunches, no one pays for lunch.
I think the original poster made it quite clear that the proposal is to make well off families pay for school, not the poor. So you are twisting the original proposal in order to lie about its effects. Troll~!!
SFAW
@BlueDWarrior:
Well, it’s only the rigged primaries. You know, the ones where the Party puts more weight on 11 million more votes in primaries than it does on caucuses. [NB: ”11 million” might not be completely accurate, but you get the idea.]
opiejeanne
@The Moar You Know: Bow ties are not the problem. My beloved Chemistry teacher from HS, Mr Thaller, wore bow ties. He was a great teacher and made the class interesting in ways that our parents would not have approved of.
We all chipped in for some really loud paisley bow ties when we found out when his birthday was, and he wore them for us.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
I don’t know what the worst column I’ve ever read is (too much competition), but the most prescient news story I’ve ever seen is undoubtedly this news clip from the Onion, November 7, 2012:
After Obama Victory, Shrieking White-Hot Sphere Of Pure Rage Early GOP Front-Runner For 2016
Mary G
Andrew Sullivan wanking about whether or not he supports the baker in the gay wedding cake controversy.
jc
Can’t point to the specific articles, but back when Bush-Cheney were in office, the NY Times ran numerous sycophantic pieces, about Iraq, and patriotic correctness, and climate change denial. It taught me a profoundly negative lesson.
schrodingers_cat
@Mary G: I understand the individual words in that sentence but it makes no sense as a whole. WTF does it even mean?
The Moar You Know
@J R in WV: They don’t wanna hear it, so leave it. I’m certainly over it.
opiejeanne
@AliceBlue: Oh God, her column about how wonderful Sarah Palin was!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Also a terribly dishonest column. IIRC someone interviewed the guy who sold her the chocolate and he told to her take it slow.
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
I missed it, but I’ve got the DVR set to record it at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow (on USA, for others who missed it). I’m usually suspicious of “reunion” shows, but I could use a dose of new Psych.
Sometimes I have a little trouble watching the reruns on Ion. I keep wanting someone to smack Shawn, mostly Juliet. Some of his shtick doesn’t age well. But the great bits usually make up for it.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
Its Sullivan. The only gay person considered worthy of life under a Nazi regime is himself.
geg6
@The Moar You Know:
Wow, no idea where you live, but that is certainly not the case around here.
Shana
@The Moar You Know: I imagine that your brother is at UChicago, it sounds like how they’d respond to that kind of crap, but I hope it’s all the schools in and around Chicago.
John
What Defeating ISIS Would Look Like by Kurt Schlichter. Hands down best/worst column of all time.
TenguPhule
@SFAW:
I’m sure this must just be some violence pron fantasy.
They couldn’t possibly mean what it sounds like. //
Miss Bianca
@J R in WV: I’m just hoping that Evil Keebler Elf Jeff Sessions gets busted for his Russian connections before he can make good on his threat to start going after recreational cannabis in the states that legalized it.
Steeplejack
@SFAW:
He entered a pie-eating contest.
TenguPhule
But believe those anon sources, never mind trying to vet them first.
Shana
@opiejeanne: My father always wore a bow tie. He was an architect and said that regular ties would drag on the drawing board. He could have worn a tie clip, but came of age in the mid to late 50s and I think bow ties were a more fashionable alternative that they later became.
Ruckus
I’ve got a question.
Why (and how) do the people in the pie filter keep getting out?
Yesterday I had two people in it, today they have been released and my filter list is empty. What’s up with that?
cmorenc
@Cacti:
True, but Maureen’s column on her personal misadventure exploring legal pot in Denver was such a masterpiece of unintentional self-parody and dumbfuckery, that it passed through the looking glass of awfulness into the realm of absurdly un-self-aware humor.
raven
@Ruckus: What’s up!
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGIrl:
Great line! Caught my eye as well.
TenguPhule
@Ruckus:
The whole Balloonjuice site has been balls up for the last couple of weeks since Alain wasn’t here. Lag, eating up RAM, memory purges, etc.
Vlad
The original is gone from the web, but an archive.org cache remains: “Bucs’ ‘fans’ don’t know meaning of the word”, Mike Seate, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, January 29, 2008.
It includes the following paragraph:
SiubhanDuinne
@Ruckus:
Are you using a different device?
Gelfling 545
@The Moar You Know: Charging a fee would not help. I briefly taught in a private school as have many people I know. They still don’t care. And the parents think they’re paying for high grades, not that their kids should work harder because it costs. Example: Trump’s education was quite expensive and look how much good THAT did.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
So perhaps the problem is not that the parents don’t pay enough for public schools, but that public schools are unwilling to back their teachers up like private universities are. You managed to learn the exact wrong lesson here. Why is your wife not allowed to call security and have an abusive parent thrown off school property? It ain’t because the parents aren’t paying enough money to the school.
You’re not Satan. You’re just a dumbass who will make things even worse for both teachers and students while insisting you’re making them better because shut up, that’s why.
catclub
TPM headline:
… ‘Vote for the GOP clown like I always do.’
catclub
@TenguPhule:
Just like the Chinese government and teaching history!
Tyro
I can’t even comment on the content of that column— it is simply by far the worst quality writing I have ever seen in a newspaper.
TenguPhule
@Tyro:
I believe this is called tempting fate.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
Those private school people were paying to get their helpless, horrible little darlings educated. And because they were helpless, horrible little darlings, educating them is hopeless. Those parents were paying extra for all that and getting nothing. Because there is almost nothing a teacher can do when the student doesn’t give a shit. A lot of people aren’t as stupid as we think they are. They understand that a good education will pay off dramatically. They also understand that we play games with education, trying to turn it into a profit making enterprise, which it actually would be if we stopped trying to squeeze out every penny for the quarterly report. The profit is not the money we save it’s the increased education that everyone can enjoy and use and the increased earning potential from that education. IOW even before I was in school the thought was that if it doesn’t have an immediate profit that can be stolen, then it’s being done wrong. The only reason we’ve gotten this far without shutting it all down or blowing it all up is mandatory public education. A lot of teachers try their damnest to make it work, but the rich people who don’t give a shit about anyone but their snowflakes are the problem.
And how many of our societal problems are due to overly rich people who are some of the most short sighted assholes on the planet?
O. Felix Culpa
In the good news department: Judge denies Pentagon bid to delay Jan. 1 deadline to accept transgender recruits
ThresherK
@catclub: Until proved otherwise, Rice sounds like she’s preparing to run for the Senate, representing the State of Solemn and Considerate Bi(partisan)-Curious.
Hope Susan Collins doesn’t mind the competition. Or Flake, Portman, McCain, Johnson…
guachi
There was columnist who used to write about sports and then, for whatever reason, started writing about science. He was terrible. Sullivan would link to him occasionally.
His stuff was generally embarrassing but I can’t remember his name though I’m sure I’d remember it it I saw it.
Schlemazel
@A Ghost To Most:
you made a small typo – that should be Huge Fuckwit but I can’t disagree with your point
Kathleen
@Humboldtblue:Brought tears to my eyes. I’ve run several marathons and have been on receiving end of so much kindness from perfect strangers. Great opportunity to restore faith in people. I ran Dallas 7 years ago.
WaterGIrl
@Ruckus: Using a different browser? Using a different device? Did you clear cookies or cache or anything of that nature?
catclub
@ThresherK: What state? I thought she had most links to California and Stanford.
Steeplejack
@Ruckus:
Do you use Firefox, by any chance? And have auto update turned on? Firefox had an update available in the last few days, and I believe updating cleans out the pie filter. Dunno why.
Schlemazel
Really you need to have categories of bad. I mean how can you rate the bad economics of a Megan McFarthole to the vapidity of Bobo or the pure racial animosity of Dick Cohen? Each is horrific in it own special way and deserves to be ‘honored’ by sub(human) category.
Sad that I have not seen Jame Lilacs name here yet, he is local & very bad but he does have a blog so he deserves more humiliation.
Ruckus
@raven:
Monday.
So nothing good.
You?
@SiubhanDuinne:
Nope, same computer. I did upgrade FF but that has never emptied it before.
Jacel
I can’t find any instances of his columns on line, but the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1950s-60s had a column under the name of Count Marco, intended for women but with a relentlessly demeaning tone towards them. That column was a misfire with an amazing wave of local columnists who shared the distinction of generally hating the field each was assigned to write about: Politics (Arthur Hoppe), television (Terrance O’Flaherty), or sports (Charles McCabe). Those were brilliant, but Count Marco’s message had the flaw of punching down.
Corner Stone
@guachi: Think you may possibly mean Gregg Easterbrook.
Ruckus
@Gelfling 545:
Educating a incredibly stupid but wealthy toad is going to get you exactly what we see in drumpf, an incredibly stupid toad.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: Of course, what shithead here refuses to acknowledge as that ideologies once well OUTSIDE the mainstream are being normalized into it by fascist scum like him.
Cacti
As far as recent articles go…
Richard Fausset’s NYT puff piece on the Ohio Nazi.
Deplorable.
Shell
Does Sarah Huckabee begin every answer to a reporters question with “Look…”
Schlemazel
@SiubhanDuinne:
shouldn’t make fun of people with serious drinking problems
WaterGIrl
@Shell: I don’t watch her so I don’t know, but I wonder if that’s her verbal tic, her “tell” that she is about to lie. Since she lies constantly the fact that she appears to begin every answer to a question with that just supports my theory.
Ruckus
@Steeplejack:
No auto update!!!!!!!!
But yes FF and I did update. This is not actually the firs time it’s happened but then FF did a major upgrade not long ago and changed everything, I think just to change everything. But the pie filter is the only thing to change, so I’m kind of wondering how that could be the issue. Not that it’s impossible but Cleek’s filer would retain the names for years, even with response to upgrades. The site filter doesn’t seem to be quite as “robust.” Still, as long as a name is in there it works great. It’s possible that someone needs to upgrade the filter as often as Cleek used to have to do, which was seemingly every time FF upgraded anything.
Ben Cisco
Doug!, this isn’t fair. Way too many nominees; they’re like Lay’s – can’t pick just one.
Bobo
Chunky Bobo
McMegan
MoDo
Nooners
Sully
Cal Thomas
George “Failure of the” Will
Not going to be able to do it!
HeleninEire
@kindness:
No. No he is not. He is trying to make his “against the wall” number as high as possible.
TenguPhule
@Schlemazel:
Tumbrel Order Number.
TenguPhule
@HeleninEire:
What comes before immediately?
WaterGIrl
It seems like we have been having fewer threads lately. Is it related to baud being on his trip? Have most of the front pagers lost their will to live? I mean, post?
PS. Less frequent posting from jackals, too, and fewer jackals posting. Have we all been needing to take a break after the hideous Al Franken threads?
Ruckus
@HeleninEire:
Does anyone take him seriously enough to rate a low number?
His “writing” should, just for it’s blatant badness, but I’m sure we have a lot of people with far worse tallies, which of course lowers their against the wall placing.
catclub
@WaterGIrl:
like ‘believe me’ with Trump.
Ruckus
@WaterGIrl:
They probably have the same political malaise most of us have. It’s a bad political overload issue. How do you select what to post about, it’s all such a huge pile of crap. Of course that is part of the not so secret republican plan, overload us with such a level of crap that we can’t find the forest for the brown. And boy have they been throwing the brown.
Death Panel Truck
@The Moar You Know:
Depends on where you live. My wife is a special ed teacher in the state of Washington. She’s covered by Social Security.
Brachiator
@Mary G:
Wow. This was so stupidly empty that I had to link to the actual column to see what point that Sullivan was trying to make.
More stupid.
I get tired of the false idea that religious convictions must be granted some kind of priority in a secular, multi-cultural society just because they are “deeply held.”
And when you look more deeply, these issues almost always swirl around having to accept deeply held Christian beliefs. Other religions can go pound sand.
raven
@Ruckus: Overplanning for the rose.
HeleninEire
@J R in WV: Good nomination.
Brachiator
@Shalimar:
Crap. I can’t remember the details now, but Thomas wrote one particular column that really pissed me off. He tried to assert that hard headed science confirmed some point he was trying to make about culture and society. I wrote a letter to the editor, with a few examples, explaining how everything that Thomas had written was wrong. The letter got published (LA Times) in its entirety.
Big Picture Pathologist
From the column:
“I am obsessed with hoagies.”
Heh.
Anyhoo, assuming it was posted in the paper version, Kyle Smith had a review last year for the movie ‘Captain Fantastic’ that was just an excuse to rail on the left. It was a complete embarrassment and a dereliction of his duty as a reviewer.
chopper
@The Moar You Know:
why walk away? she called you “sweetie”, didn’t she?
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
Don’t really know, but can make a couple of guesses. Do you clear cookies to regain access to limited web sites like WaPo? I think that data is in a cookie(s). Different browser? Different device?
I imagine major^4 could offer more informed guesses. Interesting that you list emptied out!? they can and do change their names just to piss you off, but that wouldn’t empty the list.
? Martin
@The Moar You Know: The problem with high school is that it was primarily designed to keep young people out of the job market. If K-8 was focused on the basics of literacy and math and so on, and high school bifurcated into a number of different types of institutions, that might be a better approach. As it is now, it serves almost nobody well.
JR
Not the worst column, but one about a terrible person.
Remember Keaton Jones? Or more specifically, his mom?
Brachiator
@? Martin:
Well, we’ve got the economy doing that now. You have people who were laid off or retired taking jobs that teens used to do. Other jobs have been eliminated because of automation.
J R in WV
@Steeplejack:
I update Firefox ASAP when updates come out for my environment, and have never lost my pie list. That I’ve noticed.
bemused
@lgerard:
That’s a classic!
eemom
I debated whether to enter this contest or bang my head on the wall. The wall won. ?
WaterGIrl
@Ruckus: I am going to periodically copy the names from my pie list to a file, so if mine get wiped out it will be easy enough to put them all back.
Maybe M4 could add a “copy a file with your pie list” option instead of having to add each one individually.
trollhattan
@Death Panel Truck: “Back in the day” those covered by CalPERS and CalSTRS pensions could vote to opt out of Social Security. The practice ended with a change in the law but those who opted out have that non-contribution period calculated into their SS benefit amount when they begin to draw it.
guachi
@Corner Stone: Indeed it was Gregg Easterbrook. Epic fail almost every column.
gvg
@The Moar You Know: I think you and your wife just need to think some more. Your proposal wouldn’t do anything to improve education.
It’s not actually an education method. It’s actually giving up. An education method is something like teaching a certain way, or training teachers a certain way.
It does in fact hurt the poor and middle class and give the rich more advantages.
It does in fact leave kids on the street with nothing to do and hurt parents who need to work.
I am a college financial aid counselor. College does NOT usually manage an income related tuition cost. Some colleges try to. Very few though because it’s too hard and extremely unpopular. We lack the resources to actually give enough aid to all of the poorest students. Basically, it’s like a lottery system. some percentage each year get lucky, then we run out and the rest try to make it on loans. Tuition creeps higher and the demographics trend richer.
School districts are funded by county mostly so the poor districts have fewer resources. Charging the rich more wouldn’t even help much because people live in clumps of economic likeness.
About 1/2 of the states, teachers get social security. The ones that don’t are screwed and it needs to be fixed except Congress is currently trying to screw us all but after we defeat that threat, we should try to fic that.
IMO a lot of the problems around here are related to decades of crap like teacher accountability that really mean punish the teachers of poor students so the answer is not to be a teacher of struggling kids or special needs and the schools try to drive them away because they really can’t afford them. there seems to be an underlying religious paranoia that there kids are going to get away from them, with racist fears too. I also think the homeschooling movement is part of it and the testing needs to be stricter. Florida had some serious loopholes that the religious ignorance worshipers misused. Charter schools need to be accountable as much as public since they use public money. Here the tying pay to test scores has made schools use gamesmenship instead of just teaching. Also insisting schools have to improve every years or lose money means everyone loses eventually. Quitting using failed strategies isn’t a teaching method either, but I still want to propose we stop doing things that have made things worse.
I didn’t think the public schools were that great in my day, but 30 years later, I think they are worse.
Politicians denigrating teachers for the last 30 years has encouraged abuse. I really hate that and think it marks someone who says it as untrustworthy. My mother was a teacher. She was one of the few people I know who loved her job till retirement, in fact she had trouble retiring, kept putting it off.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
Do periodicals count? Because this LEAVE COSBY ALOOOOONE missive from Ryan Holiday (of the NY Observer) is James Taranto-level awful.
The Moar You Know
@chopper: Sweetie and dumbass. Which is a combo I am very used to. But somehow I’m just getting something, a “vibe” if you will, that while the beginning would be intense and the stuff of which great movies and tales of romance are made, over the long haul, well…hate to say it. I just don’t think we’re really made for each other.
Sorry to disappoint.
catclub
@Big Picture Pathologist:
kind of downmarket version of “I am haunted by waters” from “A River Runs Through It”
Kay
I feel like the people who said Trumpists were driven by racism have so won the argument that it’s not even worth talking about.
You only need one piece of evidence. The question was would Trumpsters stick with Trump if his economic policies mostly benefited plutocrats.
We have the answer- yes. THEREFORE this mystery is solved. It wasn’t “the economy, stupid”.
The people who said it was race won. This debate is over. If it was really “economic insecurity” or a yearning for infrastructure investment we would hear something about those things from Trumpsters. But we don’t. Instead we get child molesters and attacks on AA football players. O-V-E-R.
Kay
Compare Trumpsters with the liberals who abandoned Obama. Liberals were mad about POLICY. They were mad about the public option and Wall Street and the stimulus.
Trumpsters aren’t mad at Trump at all over policy. They’re thrilled that he’s still a nasty racist. That was the appeal.
They never gave a shit about any of the “populist” policy and they still don’t give a shit about it. As long as he lashes out at a black or brown person weekly they’re happy.
So take a bow, “it’s the racism, stupid” people. You were right.
TenguPhule
@Kay:
How much you want to bet it comes up in the Democratic primaries?
The Moar You Know
@Kay: I would have vastly preferred to be wrong. That way I wouldn’t have to write off half my fellow citizens as amoral monsters.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I’ve always been impressed with Brook’s ability to write enter books without really saying anything. Brook’s essasy will be the Lorem Ipsum of future generations.
notoriousJRT
Easy. WSJ editorial on “Lucky Duckies”
Crusty Dem
Can we include a special category for worst inforgraphic? Because the WSJ wins with this piece of shit..
Steeplejack (phone)
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I dated a girl in college named Lauren Ipsum. But she met a foreign student named Pablo Dolor, and it was all over. I think they got married later. Wonder whatever happened to her.
MoxieM
I’m gonna nominate the odious Hitchens piece on how “Women Can’t Be Funny” (ever, implied.)
Who’s got the last laugh now, asshole?
Citizen Alan
@The Moar You Know:
So what will you propose? Coal mines?
Citizen Alan
@The Moar You Know:
Before Matt Smith’s version of the Doctor came along and popularized bow ties in nerd culture, I had a standing rule of thumb that everyone who wore a bow tie was presumed to be an evil moron. I think it was Tucker Carlson who instilled that belief in me.
Citizen Alan
@Barbara:
I’ve said repeatedly for the better part of 25 years that I would never have gone to law school and would still be a high school band director if I had never had to talk to anyone over the age of 18. My decision to leave the field of Education was 100% due to obnoxious parents and idiotic administrators who seem to be auditioning for the role of the pointy-headed boss from the Dilbert cartoon.
David Smith
After Carter’s malaise speech M. Stanton Evans wrote a column denouncing him for not dispatching the 82nd Airborne to Saudi Arabia to seize the oilfields. His reasoning was our demand made their oil valuable, so we had the right to set the price. He thought $5.00 a barrel was fair.
Citizen Alan
@Mnemosyne:
Actually to be honest, I suspect a lot of Parental hostility towards the public school system will dry up and disappear once the middle and upper-class snowflakes don’t have to go to school with “those people” anymore. After all, what is the charter school movement really other than a stealth mechanism to resegregate the school system.
Brachiator
@gvg:
One day in an appropriate thread, I would like to do my rant on the educational complex. My biggest question is how do we get, train, unleash and encourage good teachers and get the crappy teachers (and administrators) out of the system?
SFAW
@Brachiator:
Have them all start out in Lake Wobegon? Or have Chuckles Murray cull them?
Or, for a start, maybe elect a Congress that isn’t actively trying to destroy public education?
SFAW
@Citizen Alan:
Asshole parents will still find a way to be assholes, if the (perceived) stakes are high enough, which they will be no matter where their kids are.
TenguPhule
@SFAW:
Serious suggestions only. //
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
First, figure out how to do it with Congress and work your way up.
SFAW
@TenguPhule:
I know you’re just busting my stones, but that’s a big part of what it’s going to take. And there needs to be a solid Dem Congress for at least 10 years (assuming a Dem President in 2021). Keeping the majority is the harder of those two.
But the hardest part will be restoring a thriving — or at least, not anemic — manufacturing economy in the US. Even were that possible, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see it. So I guess I should start working on it sooner rather than later.
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
@SFAW:
Congress ain’t the problem. Certainly not the main one. School districts are still local, with state administration.
SFAW
@Brachiator:
Of course it is. Or do you believe the decades-long underfunding of the public education system started as a grassroots movement in the myriad school districts?
Brachiator
@SFAW:
Hmmm. I guess, then, by this logic, public education has always been underfunded since the federal government has never been the primary provider of education funding.
kent
Not an actual column, but I will never forget a “What do you think?” from the USA Today about, oh, probably 20 years ago now. I don’t even remember the question, but here was the answer they saw fit to print:
“It’s all about supply and demand. There is a lot of demand for [whatever it was], so they can afford to lower the price.”
Not the Onion.
SFAW
@Brachiator:
It’s not the primary direct funder, but it certainly creates the environment and sends money to the states.
Brachiator
@SFAW:
The fed’s share of education funding has never been large. A chunk of it is not even directly related to education itself.
TenguPhule
@SFAW: I know. But its going to take a whole mindset/frame of reference change across a lot of people for that to happen.
Memories are short and we have to learn the mistakes over and over again.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: We rely on the federal government to set the floor and to the States for the ceiling.
momus
An OpEd in last week’s Chicago Tribune about the US Citizenship test characterized Ben Franklin, the man who negotiated the alliance with France, as a peripheral figure in the American Revolution.
AMM
“Good Taste Returns to the White House this Christmas”–Erik Root