The system is broken; there's no doubt about that. The culture of law enforcement — paternalistic, quasi-military, secretive, socially unjust and yes, pro-white — is hard-coded in many departments' DNA. As a former police commissioner, I'm not going to lie and say that it's an easy fix — it's not, and it requires a…

You have clearly never worked at a racetrack.

Many of these laws are much like the mandatory-minimum/Rockefeller drug laws, which provide extreme punishments for what many times are lower-level offenses, especially involving teens between the ages of 16 and 19. Because some of the crimes are so horrible (like the abduction, rape and murder of the child for whom…

Not the fear of a coworker, but the knowledge that dude was batshit enough to come in and shoot up the place.

Ugh. Phoenix is like that in August. Not bad in January, though.

This festival was banned from Giants Stadium a few years ago for this same issue. Some venues refuse to host EMFs exactly because of this.

X plus extreme heat equals nothing good.

Oh, I know that feeling!

"Failing upward" or being "kicked upstairs" is a fine American tradition.

Sadly, the Memphis airport has nothing but some version of headline news and if you're stuck in that terminal overnight, you are going to be very alone.

Why *are* people protesting sharia law? It's not practiced in the US or in any country they care about. I can't ascertain a purpose.

Only black berets? Not raspberry berets?

Sometimes. Not often enough, sadly…

You can be pro-business and pro-cop while still being pro-social justice and pro-civil rights. It's just that most people find it morally and intellectually easier to be uniformly for or against an issue.

I loved NCIS until Cote de Pablo left. Never saw it as overtly conservative, though.

Is that the pit that's filled with water so toxic that birds die just from landing in it?

Sometimes, we're all our own worst enemies. Manchin was the one who got the UMW retirees' benefits reauthorized after they nearly expired this spring, but the Rs are still seen as the champions of coal miners.

Ohio is doing fuck-all about it, though, except talking about rolling back expanded Medicaid, because they're in thrall to voters in the former coal mining counties and the Cincinnati area. The Cleveland Clinic is launching their own healthcare plan, so you think the state would get on that train, but not so far…

Here's the problem: coal mining, along with heavy manufacturing and numerous other labor-intensive, relatively dangerous jobs, paid a lot of money to folks without a lot of education. There was no real incentive to invest in infrastructure in areas that depended on these types of jobs so other economic development…

Anyone see Bleed For This? It had some spectacularly bad ads, but reviews were relatively positive.