A friend of mine remembers being told by her mother at some point in early adolescence, “You’ll never be pretty. It’s important for someone who looks like you to keep yourself neat and tidy, and wear the right colors.”

Nearly 60 years ago a parochial school in Chicago, Our Lady of the Angels, burned to the ground. More than 90 children died in the blaze, along with three nuns. Dozens of others escaped with injuries ranging from minor bumps and bruises to major, devastating burns.

If Republicans are going to use their bizarre “zero-risk” principle on Syrian refugees, then we should probably demand that it be applied to anti-choice activists as well.

I actually did that once. I have to admit I was on drugs at the time. Bathroom floor got really clean, too. The relevance here, I guess, is that I’d have to be on drugs before I’d go to a Trump rally. Really, really good drugs.

There’s nothing that says Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus, like having a fucking public tantrum over the religious neutrality of a goddamn cup.

And yet 9/11, the lies that got us into disastrous and destabilizing (although highly profitable for investors) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, blatant war-profiteering by members of the Bush administration, Katrina, and the spectacular collapse of the global economy on Bush’s watch—all these (and more) are still not…

Because any acknowledgment of any flaw, from our stark and heartbreaking racial reality to workers’ rights to environmental issues, creates an opening for left-leaning politicians (or even simply just sanity-leaning politicians) to propose solutions.

Oh my sweet Lord this dog is adorable.

Her audience consists of a lot of angry old men married to even angrier old women, plus a handful of tragic boys who aspire to be frat boys and jocks but fall short of the requisite qualifications. For these men, male identity is indeed a fragile and wounded thing, and their fantasy lives are filled to the brim with…

I just hope the Democrats aren’t stupid enough to waste so much glee on Trump that when the Republicans pick one of their subtler monsters, like the Kochs’ favorite Scott Walker, they have cried “wolf” so often that nobody notices a real wolf slavering and slinking into power.

It goes back way before Atwater, all the way back to the McCarthy era, the 1950s, when—against the wishes of his corporate superiors at CBS—Edward R Murrow took on the fascist senator from Wisconsin and humiliated him for all the world to see, simply by showing him for what he really was. America’s reactionary right…

There’s a whole industry in the posthumous smear campaign going back to Trayvon Martin and the cult of Zimmerman.

That’s not why the cop says he stopped her, but maybe you know better.

It’s not just Trump. The most terrifying goddamn thing imaginable is that a large number of people could (and will) be persuaded to vote for ANY of these sleazebags. From the Stay Puft Marshmallow fascism of Scott Walker to the bespectacled shaft of white noise that is Rick Perry, not one of these men has the…

I am firmly convinced that the real objective of the Republicans is to peel off young white men, effectively splitting the youth vote—that they are the real objects of this exercise.

I’m as unforgiving and self-righteous as the best of us, and I suppose it’s sport of a sort, to kick someone who can’t kick back, but I can’t bring myself to spend a lot of time hating on this sad, broken, arrogant, pitiful old woman whose whole life has been utterly drained of any meaning it ever had.

Nobody’s actually pretending that so much these days. Everyone who acknowledges the problem of institutional racism at all (mind you, way too few Americans acknowledge it, but that’s another story) understands that it is a national problem, not a regional one. Anyone who has ever lived anywhere in America knows that…

That would not make a buzzing sound, just a high, indistinct whine.

Diptheria “In the 1920s, there were an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 cases of diphtheria per year in the United States, causing 13,000 to 15,000 deaths per year.^[17] Children represented a large majority of these cases and fatalities.”

Well, everybody she knows is this stupid.