Let’s just see how far conservatives have fallen in their ability to kick the shit out of liberals and Democrats.  In 2004, nothing tore through that overcautious cipher John Kerry like the “I actually voted for the war before I was against it” meme.  That, and the associated “flip-flopper” attack made it clear who was [...]

Seriously.  Who buys this? If someone built a toxic waste facility in the South Bronx that cost $210 million, that’s the same amount of money, and some steadier jobs thrown in on top.  Similarly, if you tear down Bushwick, Brooklyn and build a park, you will cause undue consternation and extract lots of money from [...]

It occurred to me that it’s just not intellectually permissible to rail against chains, without distinctions.  So here are some chains that I like.
States with Ikea, states without Ikea.

States with In-n-Out, states without In-n-Out.

States with Crate and Barrel, states without Crate and Barrel.

States with Trader Joe’s, states without Trader Joe’s.

California has everything!  New Hampshire [...]

Here is a map of the South (or the South-plus) colored by which party controls seats in the state Houses.

The Texas border is blue because it’s majority-Latino.  As is the case with much of New Mexico.  What’s especially odd is how red states like Florida and Missouri are, considering how purple they are at the [...]

Actually saw it a week ago, and it was pretty decent.  Unlike the rest of the film series, it was stylistically closer to a Star Wars prequel, and although I’m something of an Attack of the Clones partisan, it surpasses all three of those abortions.  Some of the critical reception is puzzling; more than anything [...]

Glenn Beck must not have read Jorge Luis Borges, because his new conspiracy theory alleges that “everyone is on the list [of people the government is out to get].”  That’s how dire the situation is.  First Chrysler, then 6.6 billion other people.  Everyone is going to be rounded up, stripped of their guns, and herded [...]

Peter King: the last Republican congressman from Lawn Guyland (and one of only 3 in all of New York!)
First of all, this is a man who loves terrorists.  He is a strong supporter of terrorism, as long as it is practiced by white people who speak with charming brogues.  (If you are from Long Island, [...]

If you want to be reductive and mainstream about it and pretend that the gay rights movement started when drag queens upset by Judy Garland’s death slapped some cops around inside the Stonewall on June 28, 1969, and everything before that was a precambrian epoch where the fossil record is too spotty to tell us [...]

I remember back in the bad old days of, oh, 2005, when the Democrats held 45 Senate seats and were reduced to waiting for hurricanes to accomplish what they themselves could not: convince America that Bush and his party were incompetent and dangerous for the country.
So beleaguered and pathetic were the Democratic senators that the [...]