I'm family friends with a guy who got laid off from his job for some bullshit reason and just days afterwards learned that his daughter had a brain tumor. An absolutely terrible situation.

Really? I fabricated that? Do you think Fox News's motivation for running those stories was that they were concerned about the plight of religious bakers, or that they believed viewers would identify with the subjects and think that they, too, would be required to do things that they didn't want to?

I'm sorry, but size of affected populations should matter in terms of the level of importance we should give to an issue.

Geez, I thought the use of quotation marks around certain phrases (including "everyday Americans " and "harm") and the sic made it crystal clear that it was not.

I think this is a good explanation for this phenomenon.

No, but I realize that news coverage is a zero-sum game. People only have so many fucks to give about so many important issues. That's my starting premise. If my reasoning is flawed, then I'll happily change my view.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Good reading comprehension.

That's not exactly a good analogy for this situation.

There are so many fuzzy aspects of that statistic (the source, the use of "attempt," etc.). We only have 41,000 suicides a year in the United States, and trans people don't make up nearly that amount. Only one in every 25 suicide attempts is successful (I'm quoting CDC numbers here).

Respectfully, I do not understand how trans individuals became the cause de jour of late. They are an incredibly small minority — literally, if you look at Census data collected of people who have changed names to one associated with another gender, or changed sex identification, you get around 90,000 in the United…

Try campaigning on that line — "Hey, your rates went up after the ACA…but they're going up slower than they would have! Really, we have these charts and everything that we'd love to show you and…"

I don't want to get in any sort of political debate here, but there's an assumption here that most voters would just love the ACA if they just knew more about it. That's not going to be true for the majority of folks, who have insurance and are satisfied with it (whether they should be satisfied is another story). …

Nah, there's a big difference between a complete buffoon like Trump and a guy like, say, Lindsey Graham.

Yeah, I always saw Gwynn as part of the earlier generation with guys like Boggs, Mattingly, and Puckett. Bonds is only a couple years younger than those guys, but he was in his (PED-enchanced) peak when they were retired or close to retirement.

In early 2009, Obama seemed to be insurmountably popular, to the point where the question was how much would the Republicans accomodate him and just how transformative his presidency would be. Cheney was the first and most vociferous "serious" critic of Obama (not a judgment of Cheney's views, but more a distinction…

I'm not sure Stewart successfully went off Cheney given that, you know, he was vice president for two terms and then was a shockingly successful critic* of Obama during his first term. Cheney was more the great while whale that Stewart would've loved to have brought down, but never succeeded in doing.

sorry, double post.

If I'm one of the people who Stewart lambasted, I'm not sure I'd find it appealing to be part of a segment that groups me with the likes of Donald Trump.

Barry Bonds was the best hitter of his generation, period. He's also the best slugger of his generation, but that comes with a huge asterisk. There is an enormous difference between Pirates and Giants-era Barry Bonds, and pre- and post-PED Barry Bonds, in terms of home run prowess.

I thought the first episode was great, it started losing me beginning with the introduction of Schaal, and got a lot better as they introduced more characters, particularly Todd and Mary Steenburgen's.