Hello Friend

In re: the whole Old Man Ricketts and His Terrible, Horrible, No-Good-Very-Bad Idea, I totally almost forgot to read Charles P. Pierce on the topic! Which would have been a huge mistake: 

Now, though, there’s no need to fake it once you make it. The offices were devalued as we convinced ourselves that “government” was an alien entity, and we accepted the fundamental absurdity of people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to run for office because they were “not a politician,” and running for positions in a government that they pretended to distrust, instead of laughing those people off the national stage as the charlatans they obviously are. Political office became a career move, a vehicle to continue your career in business through other means. And, as this became more and more the rule, actual public service waned, and government began to fail, and the cycle fed on itself until, today, our campaigns are judged and rewarded as though candidates were pitching an ad campaign, with success measured in the same way.

We have done a remarkable thing in this country. We have privatized both political slander and political corruption.

You went to Cranbook/that’s a private school: 

The story paints a detailed portrait of [Cranbook School] as having a kind of Hogwarts grandeur. “In the chandeliered dining room, students waited on fellow students and sat on straight-backed spindle chairs bearing the school’s insignia of a proud crane. After dinner, they wiped their mouths with cloth napkins,” The Post wrote.

What’s the matter dog? You embarrassed?/ This guy’s a gangsta? His real name’s Clarence

And Clarence lives in home with both parents/ And Clarence’s parents have a real good marriage

I assume I am not the first person to make this joke, but the fact that Eminem once used Mitt Romney’s former school in a fake rap battle during a movie called “8 Mile” pleases me to no end. 

“I’ve said it many times,” Mr. Mourdock said. “This is a historic time, and the most powerful people in both parties are so opposed to one another that one side simply has to win out over the other.”

That sort of talk has Democrats seething. “He says there’s a problem, Mourdock does, of too much bipartisanship and he can be counted on to obstruct,” Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said on Tuesday. “Well, there are a lot of things wrong in Washington, but too much compromise is certainly not one of them.”

Richard Mourdock’s Many Pursuits Don’t Include Bipartisanship

The vote was the Senate Republicans’ 21st successful filibuster of a Democratic bill this Congress, which started in January 2011. Republicans have blocked consideration of President Obama’s full jobs proposal, as well as legislation repealing tax breaks for oil companies, helping local governments pay teachers and first responders, and setting a minimum tax rate for households earning more than $1 million a year. Republicans say the measures were flawed and potentially harmful to the economic recovery.

Senate Republicans Block Bill on Student Loan Rates

When my student loan interest skyrockets and causes my inevitable rage-driven self-immolation, it’s nice to know my local first responders will be there to … ha, wait, nevermind.

The standard Hollywood storytelling model insists that every commercially viable narrative be an inspirational bubblegum version of the Hero’s Journey, and that we all sit there in the dark buying into the self-flattering fantasy that we, too, are the heroes and heroines of our own little movies, and that everyone else in our lives is but a glorified supporting character or background extra, and that they’ll all launch into a collective slow clap when we finally get married or land the big promotion or whatever. Mad Men lets the characters think this way — they’re as self-centered as you or I, which is why their selfish or self-destructive actions are often so disquieting — but it consistently pulls the rugs out from under them, and from us. The times change, history rolls on, the characters get older; they try to improve and know themselves, yet they keep doing things for inscrutable reasons, and keep waking up in unfamiliar circumstances wondering, to quote the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” “Well, how did I get here?”

— Matthew Zoller Seitz