“But scholars have argued that such sentiments are not atypical of male friendship in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

She’s kind of a cross between Amelia Bedelia and Leni Riefenstahl.

Republicans are set on pushing it through because that entitled old prick Charles Koch told them he won’t give them any money for next year’s fierce mid-term elections unless they break the safety net, cut his taxes, and free the fossil fuel industry from the last vestiges of regulation.

I’m sure the Republicans could explain to them about “personal responsibility,” only they’re too busy right now breaking the US safety net because Charles Koch wants it gone.

Goes without saying, but I probably should have said it anyhow.

Charles Koch has the privilege of making billions of dollars off of, among other things, the generosity of the US tax code to wealthy heirs, plus various special arrangements with the US government (which has always been very, very good to fossil fuel billionaires), and yet he still gets to buy the Republican Party…

“Jane Austen. Good stuff.”

Don’t worry, we balance out the redemption for men like Spicer and O’Reilly by hounding, humiliating, and doing our level best to silence any number of difficult women.

He’s not effective enough, yet, to be an Erdogan, Assad, or Putin, and he’ll never be wily enough. But less than a year into his presidency, he does seem to be pulling off a middling Duterte knockoff.

For me, what makes me feel really old is, every time somebody (often it’s me!) says, “Hey, I didn’t know thus-and-so was still alive!” “Really? Thus and so is still alive?” “Yeah! Well, no. He just died!”

The entire Republican Party is in a process of devolution so vast and rapid it fairly makes your head spin. Everything they do—literally everything—is a kind of cheap, coarse, talk radio/Fox and Friends troll.

Wee little royal Brits are always so scrumptiously dressed. Even my royal-hating, small-d-democratic, ruling-class-loathing heart is melted by the spectacle.

It’s sort of classic, if primitive, “networking,” isn’t it? Perhaps she’s congratulating herself for all the “Important Contacts” she’s making—it’s not who you know, it’s who you get to know, right, Ivanka?

A “don’t lump us all in” response is probably not the most Christian thing to say in this circumstance.

There’s a generational divide on this at my house. My daughters can’t get past the obvious screen splitting tactics when Hayley is onscreen with Hayley, a problem Hollywood managed more smoothly by the time Lindsay and Lindsay did the remake. They can’t get past the fact that except for the Hayleys, no two people in…

God, I miss Michelle.

He’s the Republican paradigm. He’s what their stinking party has become. He’s the face of the blessed, bloomin’, blasted, “party of Lincoln.”

Parents I knew back then were divided: some fell for the hype and became hypercautious and paranoid about every little old grandpa who smiled at their kids at the supermarket, while some shrugged it off as the nonsense it was and let their kids live pretty normal lives—running around, playing, being reasonably free:…

You’re right. Everybody jumped in at the deep end. Nobody questioned the organizations that were putting forward bogus numbers like “50,000 missing children,” even though these organizations had a vested interest in scare tactics, so nobody questioned the numbers.

I remember this horrible craze so clearly—in terms of the horrible, destructive impact on our country and our culture, it was a case of journalistic malpractice as egregious as the political coverage that destroyed Hillary Clinton and gave us Mad Donald.