Job Hunting Tip

Interviewer:
What did you like best about your last job?

Candidate:
Sometimes people had birthdays and they'd have free cake.

Revisit And Relearn

An explainer from Carlos Maza at Vox - one I keep going back to.

Today's Tweet

Gotta love a good Twitter Poem

Resentment (#poem)

Heigh-ho resentment,
the magic elixer
lovingly
brewed
by the greedy,
tweaked
and spiced
and stirred
until
the right moment,
sprayed over a country
to free the last
bits of money out,
leaving the dregs
in a useless,
bloody ruin.

— Sue Stone (@knittingknots) October 28, 2017

 

How Green Was My Campaign Fund

Playing both ends against the middle - and vice versa

Those bills again are:

• 2013: HB 2261
• 2014: SB 459 and HB 848
• 2015: SB 1334 and SB 1349
• 2017: HB 1760 and HB 2291

I didn't check all the bills mentioned, but the ones I did check were all passed by percentages in the 90s - like a couple of votes short of unanimous.

The old saw holds that sausage-making is an ugly thing.

And the closer you look, the uglier it gets, especially when big corporations have government locked in a grip that seems unbreakable. 

But it's not any worse now than it was in the early 20th century.

That doesn't mean we just sit on our asses and wait for shit to get better - that should be obvious, but that's exactly what an awful lot of us seem to be doing.

Anyway, it's not easy; it's not supposed to be easy; the fact that it's hard to do is partly what makes it worth doing.

"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win."

--JFK

Samantha Bee

As usual these days, we get better news coverage of the stuff that matters from half-hour comedy shows.

And stay with it to hear the Ingrid Michaelson tune.

Badboy Behavior

"...by my calculation, seeing Bill O'Reilly's dick is 21,000 times worse than radiation poisoning."

Keith

"It's painful to contemplate, but he is the FDR of Twitter"

A Breakdown

A Russia-born observer helps us understand what that John Kelly show was about.

Masha Gessen, The New Yorker:

Consider this nightmare scenario: a military coup. You don’t have to strain your imagination—all you have to do is watch Thursday’s White House press briefing, in which the chief of staff, John Kelly, defended President Trump’s phone call to a military widow, Myeshia Johnson. The press briefing could serve as a preview of what a military coup in this country would look like, for it was in the logic of such a coup that Kelly advanced his four arguments.

Argument 1. Those who criticize the President don’t know what they’re talking about because they haven’t served in the military. 

To demonstrate how little lay people know, Kelly provided a long, detailed explanation of what happens when a soldier is killed in battle: the body is wrapped in whatever is handy, flown by helicopter, then packed in ice, then flown again, then repacked, then flown, then embalmed and dressed in uniform with medals, and then flown home. Kelly provided a similar amount of detail about how family members are notified of the death, when, and by whom. He even recommended a film that dramatized the process of transporting the body of a real-life marine, Private First Class Chance Phelps. This was a Trumpian moment, from the phrasing—“a very, very good movie”—to the message. Kelly stressed that Phelps “was killed under my command, right next to me”; in other words, Kelly’s real-life experience was recreated for television, and that, he seemed to think, bolstered his authority.
2. The President did the right thing because he did exactly what his general told him to do.

3. Communication between the President and a military widow is no one’s business but theirs.

4. Citizens are ranked based on their proximity to dying for their country.

Today's Tweet

What I've said for a long time: Go ahead and re-criminalize abortion. But be sure you include the law enforcement resources necessary, because you'll have to be ready to investigate every pre-menopausal woman in this country every month.

And understand that you're not making abortion unavailable. If my daughter is pregnant, and she doesn't want to stay pregnant, we're on a plane to Montreal tomorrow.

You haven't done anything but make safe abortions unavailable to poor women - and I'm wondering why that's never included when "conservatives" rant and whine about "Class Warfare".

On Nov. 1, Congress is holding a hearing on a bill that would ban virtually all abortions. #NoAbortionBan https://t.co/9kh6QkkVLC

— Verrit (@verrit) October 28, 2017

 

Today's Pix