Reagan himself, with a more polished touch, stripped away a lot of the "traditional Republican" gentility. Reagan Republicans were barbarians at the gate to old guard rockribs like George H.W. Bush and Nelson Rockefeller.

I think Ryan has a studied indifference to whether what he says is true or not, but probably believes it because it's more pleasant to believe it. He's not a guy given to introspection or deep thought. The Onion article about his speech being 20 minutes of concerned staring hits at the core of the man: he's an…

Doctors are not men of science. Doctors like to think of themselves as scientists, and some of them are scientists in addition to being doctors, and all of them use knowledge derived from science, but at the end of the day, a skilled doctor is a practitioner and no more a scientist than a race car driver is an…

I had internet from a very young age, so I think that cuts more along socioeconomic/cultural lines than anything. The internet was different back in the '80s and '90s, though. I mean, my earliest memories are of all text-based interfaces and logging on through a connection to a local college. You could send and…

Get off my lawn

How well do you remember 9/11? That's the cutoff for me. I think 1983 is the cutoff for who is and isn't a Millennial (I was also born in '83). People my age turned 18 in 2001, meaning we hit the age of majority in the new millennium, justifying the stupid name, and also turned 18 the year the towers came down. …

Here's Marine Corps Order P1020.34G: http://www.marines.mil/Port…

Taking it another step, Christmas was actually a very minor holiday well into the 17th century. Many protestants vigorously opposed its celebration, and it did not gain significant popularity in the Anglo-American world until the 19th century. It wasn't even a federal holiday in America until 1870 (1958, for…

Are you kidding me? This is an organization that literally disciplines members for rolling their sleeves the wrong way or putting their hands in their pockets when they get cold. If it were interested in picking things to "make it easy" to follow the rules, drawing the line around raping fellow servicemembers seems…

This is like the visual equivalent of "there are three words in the English language that end in GRY". Yes, there's an iPhone on the carpet—an iPhone in a floral patterned case with the same color scheme as the carpet. That's what makes it take a while for people to find it. They think it's some kind of optical…

Pretty sure it's that second thing.

Yes, that's the fundamental problem. The market is not going to police this behavior. To the contrary, the market is going to reward it.

Yes and no. The media is not to blame for Trump for the reasons it has sometimes self-flagellated for being to blame—that is, that it spent too much time covering him relative to other candidates. The media is to blame for Trump, and indeed for much of the awfulness of the current political climate, in that it has…

A segment, on an angle that CNN has covered. Stewart was able to make the media uncomfortable by zeroing in on things that they didn't see as wrong. If you ask a cog in the 24 hour media machine about how they aided Trump's rise, they'll tell you it was an error, but that understates the issue. It's not that they…

Stewart's primary angle was always media criticism. That's the problem with Noah's show—whenever I see it, I see him taking potshots at the politicians themselves. He wants to make fun of Donald Trump, which is well-covered ground and doesn't add to the conversation. Stewart would have made fun of Trump (and his…

Growing pains were over within about six months. I remember being disappointed that Kilborn was gone and this weird, Gen-X stereotype from MTV had taken over. I think a lot of that was Jon doing transition work, though, like keeping "5 Questions" for the first week, even though it wasn't his bit.

It seems like you're kind of missing the point. These are articles about women (who are people) but they spend most of the time describing their bodies (which are things). It's not as black and white as that in some ways, because celebrities sell their image and their body is part of that, but there's a line between…

"The dick is in the eye of the beholder."

Wow—"societal debris" used to describe people who don't buy comic books. Do you even read comics?

If I could figure out how to search my comments, I would point you to an article on this site where Chulk caused quite a stir.