Place your bets it'll probably be as safe as putting the money toward your 401K)

The p3 over-under for the moment (assuming it didn't already happen and I missed it) when a congressional Republican, or a member of the Trump inner circle, or one of their spokespersons goes on TV and proclaims that deficits no longer matter (again):  11:00am Sunday, November 27th.

Tie-breaker: Whether the interviewer pushes back in any detectable way.

Quote of the day: And for this America should be grateful?

With every new poll that is released, I comfort myself with the knowledge that Donald Trump is not willing to put in the hours to be a competent authoritarian, which is cold comfort, I know, but you take what you can get.

That cannot be said of the next guy to try it, and there will be a next time, because the basic tectonic plates beneath our democracy have shifted so as to make the next guy inevitable.

- Charlie Pierce, who sees the fault as not being in The Media, but in our apathetic,lassitudinous selves.

No big, funny mammal analogies today.

Quote of the day: The Caudillo's rhinocerous

If you assume, as I do, that simply telling El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago that he is a lying sack of hair who knows less about most major issues than a rhino knows about differential calculus would be frowned upon at the upper echelons of NBC, then there wasn't much for poor Lauer to do.

Charlie Pierce – the Sultan of Similies, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors – on the bad hand that Matt Lauer was dealt last night at the so-called Commander-in-Chief Forum.*

Other examples of his craft here.
______________

*Note that the fact that Lauer was dealt a bad hand doesn't get him off the hook for playing the cards he did get so badly. Even in bridge, with the worst hand imaginable, there's still a right way and a wrong way to bid and play it. (Really? Half of your Clinton questions about emails? Seriously>)

Quote of the day: This must be some new use of the term "explaining" I wasn't previously aware of

In explaining the decision, Comedy Central president Kent Alterman said Monday it came down to the show's inability to register with viewers. "Unfortunately, it hasn't connected with our audience in ways that we need it to," Alterman tells The Hollywood Reporter, "both in the linear channel and in terms of multiplatform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well."

- That's the head of Comedy Central "explaining" why Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show was abruptly canceled.

"Both in the linear channel and in terms of multiplatform outlets"?

"In terms of multiplatform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well"?

General David Sarnoff would have chased this guy up a tree and set fire to it.

Ten years ago last week at p3: Where I learned the virtues of meddling

To my pleasant surprise, I learned in early March 2006 that The Powers That Be were planning to resurrect (probably not the excruciatingly correct verb, purists would say) the story of a crusty old man and his granddaughter who went on the run in a rackety old Type 40.

Or perhaps we should call them The Powers That Be Be See.

Anyway, I wonder if it ever caught on?

Sunday morning toons: And I read about it in Willamette Week!

(Thanks for the nod, Batocchio! Some day I'll chew through the hunters' nets and set you free.)

Three days' worth of Non Sequitur cartoons, by Wiley Miller, were pulled from the Oregonian's comics page last week. (You can see the strips beginning here.) The editor's justification was that the strips, which gently ridiculed (though not by name) the Bundy brothers' takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, "seemed jarring and in poor taste given that someone now was dead." He added:

That decision has yielded a grand total of two reader complaints.

– although that may be more a gauge of shrinking Oregonian readership numbers than of any reaction to the decision to withhold the strips in question.

Alert p3 readers may recall that the O had a similar bout of the fantods (albeit suffered by a different editor) in 2012, also resulting in a week's worth of strips getting pulled. In that case the cause of the disturbance was a Doonesbury series ridiculing Virginia and Texas Republican legislators attempting to mandate transvaginal ultrasounds for all women seeking an abortion. (The p3 coverage of that dust-up began here, and continued here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

It's probably a coincidence that in both cases the O's editorial judgment came down on the side of gentle handling for right-wing extremism. Just an abundance of caution.

Today's toons were selected – with appropriate concern for the delicate sensibilities of our readers – from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Mike Luckovich, Jim Morin, Rob Rogers, Tom Toles, Signe Wilkinson, Matt Wuerker, and Monte Wolverton.

p3 Best of Show: Jeff Stahler.

Ann Telnaes sketched this week's Democratic Town Hall.

Mark Fiore ponders: Does the pointless focus on Iowa's caucuses prove the existence of God? Or something else entirely? Or . . . ?

Tom Tomorrow follows the election coverage so you don't have to.

Keith Knight thinks about the poor Iowans who will never get better.

As we approach the Super Bowl, Reuben Bolling reminds us that a neuronic cluster is only as strong its weakest ganglion. And there's no "I" in CTE!

Marriage: Tricky business. Marriage to Red Meat's Ted Johnson: Doubly so.

The Comic Strip Curmudgeon itemizes a million ways to die in a Dick Tracy strip, the newest of which appears to be narcotizing plot lines. (And yes, I know he only lists seven ways, but the one about the rats sounds pretty bad, and without the reference to a million I lose the hook for this entry.)

Comic Strip of the Day celebrates the only indigenous American art form other than jazz.

Mrrrff? Simon's Cat's latest adventure, "Tough Love," directed by Simon Tofield, is a convincing excuse for giving the whole Valentine's Day thing a miss. Come for the meditation on the fickleness of romance, stay for the hilarious moment of embarrassment for Simon's Cat (you'll know it; trust me).

The Comfort-Fit Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman got this shot in on The Man Whose Face You'd Love to Punch even before he'd smirked his way through the Fifth Amendment before Congress.

Maybe/Maybe Not Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen considers the virtues of knowing where he stands. (Thirty-six years ago, I had a dream of buying an old station wagon and driving the country roads of Iowa. Every time we saw a farm house, we'd pull up the drive, knock on the door, and ask the person who answered if they'd voted for Reagan. If they said yes, we'd laugh uproariously and drive on to the next farm. If they said no, we'd say Hop in – we're going to have some fun. 'Twas ever thus, I suppose.)

Matt Bors brings up a pretty widely-held sentiment. Lucky think he's not carried by the Oregonian, eh?

Jesse Springer thinks that popular Oregon passtime isn't as simple as its enthusiasts make it sound.

Test your toon captioning superpowers at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

Quote of the day: On being superior

That massive long-ago mistake has instilled in me a quality that is sadly too rare in today’s political journalism — humility.

- Walter Shapiro of Roll Call, recalling the night he blew the 1984 New Hampshire Democratic primary call for Newsweek. I don't know if he's ever flubbed a primary prediction since, but at least he's now able to reflect with some modesty that humility like his is a pretty rare thing in his line of work. So I suppose that must ease the sting of that memory at least a little.

Perhaps he meant it in the Hemingway sense.

Should have seen it coming

(Updated below.)

This story begins a few days ago, the American Dialect Society announced that singular "they" was their choice as Word of the Year for 2015. (Go here for pervious years' ADS WOTY selections.) The internet blew up, and I commented on my Facebook page:

Okay, first, we need to keep in mind that it's the American Dialect Society, and they cleverly do this once a year so people will remember they exist.

And American English is at least trying to find a remedy to this centuries-old problem. What's the alternative? "He or she" is clunky. We know the problem with generic "he" (or "she"). And "s/he" is unpronounceable. In an age when Webster's offers "figuratively" as a nonstandard synonym for "literally," the whole they/them thing just isn't the hill I'm prepared to die on. If I'm working under a style manual that forbids singular "they," I follow it. Otherwise I default to the Midwestern dialect of my youth, and save my disdain for things like "impactful."

A friend commented that the "they" problem can often be gotten around with a little care in re-writing, which is true, but that end-runs the problem rather than solving it. Basically, this problem is a pseudo-problem anyway, created by generations of prescriptive grammarians trying to force English and American English into the procrustean bed of Latin.

The next day, the story came out that Chris Hughes, the Facebook-co-founding billionaire who purchased The New Republic in 2012, was putting it up for sale. Hughes was not known to have any particular feel for the magazine or its long tradition when he bought it; it was simply a shiny thing he planned to turn it into a showcase for his largely-inapplicable theories about digital media. (Spoiler it went badly.)

Here are the first several lines from his announcement – online, naturally, because that's how it works – that TNR was for sale (emphasis added):

I have some difficult news today: I have decided to put The New Republic up for sale. I bought this company nearly four years ago to ensure its survival and give it the financial runway to experiment with new business models in a time of immense change in media. After investing a great deal of time, energy, and over $20 million, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for new leadership and vision at The New Republic.

Over the past few years we have made good progress in reinvigorating this institution. Our readership has grown younger and more diverse, largely as a result of our digital strategy. Our journalism has been widely recognized as impactful, impassioned, and more relevant to our nation’s challenges than ever.

p3 wishes Mr. Hughes well in his next endeavor, which we sincerely hope won't be education reform.

Update (1/30/16): Looks like the Washington Post isn't going to save Private Ryan anymore, either.

A quantum of umbrage: This is it. Right here.

This is why I've had it with blockbuster movie franchises.

Less than four weeks after the ultra-hyped Star Wars: The Force Awakened opened to the biggest box office in film history, this crap is already in my news feed:

Note that's not even Episode 8. It's Episode fricking 9! It isn't scheduled to premiere until 2019! 

Hey, director of SW:9 and Disney and your whole drip-drip-drip water-torture theory of social media marketing. Bite me.

The unforgiving minute: Trump uses the air game to establish the ground game

(Updated below.)

One advantage of living in a late-primary state is that Oregonians won't find their airwaves littered up with trash like this in the next couple of months:

The Short-Fingered Vulgarian's first campaign spot, a fitting punishment for the hubris of voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, recycles some of the early campaign bluster that observers thought would kill his campaign chances months ago, and pounds on his campaign slogan.

So, Mr. Trump, when was the last time America was great? Not saying it's not. Not saying it never was. Just wanting to know when you think it was.

See, it's just that word "again" in your campaign slogan "make America great again." That means you think that, although America isn't great anymore, there was a time when it was great. Can't be great again if it wasn't great at least once before. When was that?

Note that you can't wiggle out of this question by reciting your standard list of grievances against the status quo, or by saying, however vaguely or incoherently, what policies a Trump administration might pursue.

Make it easy on yourself: just name a year. You don't even have to justify it; we can get into that later. Just name a year when you think America was great.

I'm betting you don't have an answer, and not just because you didn't learn much in the history classes at the New York Military Academy. Straight answers to that would be a distraction -- or worse, a disappointment  -- for your base and its uninformed resentments.

A straight answer, however unlikely, might also add to the private embarrassment of some of the celebrity journalists who are doing land-office business off of the coverage of your antics. (But they can be expected to soldier bravely ahead.)

Minute's up.

Update: A partial answer to my question can perhaps be found here.

A long-forgotten brush with Republican celebrity

Ànd, for good measure,  it distantly connects me to Peyton Manning's current embarrassment, which I believe to be a first for both of us.

Back in my salad days at Purdue, I worked on an election committee for two candidates for student body president and vice president. I strongly suspect I did it to make headway with some attractive coed also on the committee, although no particulars come to mind at this late date. It's just that I remember nothing about the experience now except these three disconnected bits: (1) the last name of the fellow at the top of the ticket is Italian for "chicken pox." (2) his running mate was Joanie SerVass, daughter of Beurt SerVass, then publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and at about the same time part of Nixon's entourage on his historic trip to Moscow, and (3) although they lost, as I recall there was rumor later that they got a mild slap on the wrist for nevertheless dropping three times the allowable maximum on campaign expenditures - a story that, if true, I always supposed was more than coincidentally related to  (2), above.

This all came to mind because of a puckish bit of connecting the dots that Charlie Pierce shared yesterday. I like to think my modest contribution around the margins of the story adds a little something extra.to an admittedly complicated tale.

Clearly, the woman I remember as Joanie hasn't let the grass grow under her feet in the intervening years. At the time, I was unaware of her father's larger and apparently somewhat more complex business interests. Callow young  Democrat at the only Big 10 school to go for Nixon in 1972 that I was, it didn't occur to me that owning the Post wouldn't be enough right there. (According to Google, she inherited the magazine from her father in 2014.)

Funny old world, huh?

My other favorite brush-with-Republican-celebrity story is, fittingly, a New Year's Eve story: Part One: and Part Two.

Sunday morning toons: Short and sweet

(Updated below.)

Since a number of cartoonists are taking a little time off this week (although a few managed to do so while still sending out work, if you know what I mean), we're going to keep this edition of the p3 Sunday toon review short, too.

Part One:

Whatever they're paying Fred Hiatt, the nominal editor of the editorial page at the Washington Post, not to do his job, I bet I could not-do it just as well for a lot less money. Seriously, guys – call me.

It all began innocently enough on Tuesday. Washington Post editorial cartoonist (and p3 favorite) Ann Telnaes had responded to a surprisingly-sleazy-even-by-the-contemporary-standards-of-the-genre TV ad that Ted Cruz was running in Iowa. You can see her cartoon here at the Post's site.

Well, actually no – you can't see it there at all, because Hiatt decided to dodge any heat coming down the pipe by pulling the cartoon, admitting in the process that he hadn't bothered to look at it, you know, before it went out. It must leave him more time to carry out his editorial duties if he spends less time actually carrying them out. Think about it.

If you want to see the Telnaes cartoon, and the original Cruz ad that it responds to, you can go to Comic Strip of the Day, who correctly points out that Telnaes' piece was a fair hit because it was not directly about the children; it's about the utter cynicism on the part of Cruz himself when he put them front and center, using them – as Telnaes points out – as little more than performing monkeys to attack his rivals.

Meanwhile, the board of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement supporting Telnaes and concluding with this astonishing bit of understatement:

While the editors at The Washington Post are free to edit how they see fit, in our view it would have been best to defend the cartoon once it had been published. Retracting it risks the appearance of caving to political pressure.

"The appearance of caving"? Gee, you think? Good lord. What would the reality of caving have looked like?

The Right Wing Cult of Victimhood is indeed a wonderful thing to watch in operation. Step 1: Cross the line with something offensive -- ideally it should be red meat for the base, but simply tactless and crude, or even just obviously untrue will do fine. Step 2: Shed a bitter tear when you're called out about it publicly. Step 3: Point to the calling-out as proof that the Liberal Media, as usual, has treated you unfairly. Mention "political correctness" at every opportunity. Repeat this claim in every venue in your considerable media armory, again and again and again. Step 4: Continue repeating it and trumpeting your victimhood forever, even after the object of your displeasure buckles, takes it back, accepts blame, begs forgiveness, and where possible hangs some convenient target of your wrath out to dry for it.

Telnaes' fellow cartoonists Darrin Bell, Clay Bennett, Steve Benson, and Clay Jones – all of whom are presumably able to do their work without fear of being Tuesday morning quarterbacked by Fred "Tower of Jell-O" Hiatt – proudly Stand With Ann. We at p3 do too. So should you.

Part Two:

And we've got year-end reviews! Bob Gorrell cuts directly to the chase with a primal-scream economy of word and image. Clay Bennett, Matt Weurker and Adam Zyglis each serves up a collection of his 2015 high points. Dave Barry, with an assist from ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman, presents a 2015 review which -- he swears! -- he is not making up.  Kevin Kallaugher finds a disturbing sense of going around and coming around in a large and lush piece. And Tom Tomorrow makes it to mid-2015 in his annual multi-part Year in Review.

Update: Ann Telnaes has posted her year in review. Only thing missing is my favorite image of hers: The Evil Old Bastard. Maybe her 2016 review will feature the EOB getting dragged into The Hague. One can always hope.

Enjoy.

It gets pretty strange after that

It was almost as if they were . . . organized.

In a suite somewhere in mid-town Manhattan:

Bob Woodward and Dan Rather share a quiet brandy.

When they leave, they will never speak to one another, or speak of that meeting, again.

(Harry Longabaugh didn't live long enough to attend, alas.)

Not the Dalai Lama, or someone like him*

(Updated below.)

A graphic has been making the rounds again on Facebook, one that appears to go back at least four years in one version or another. It pictures His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, with his trademark expression of infinite patience mixed with secret amusement, and the text begins as follows:

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered

It continues:

"Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

A nice sentiment, I suppose, boosted along by the oppositional phrasing and the ascending structure moving from work and the present, to the future, and finally to death. But I always felt that final clause about dying "having never really lived" seemed to have a false ring about it. Not something that the fellow who mostly talks about compassion and kindness would say.

And there's a reason for that. He didn't say it.

Plug the first sentence or so into the Google device and you'll quickly find it's a slight tweaking of something by James J. Lachard, the penname of a writer born in Essex, England in 1923, who eventually became CEO of World Vision International, an evangelical Christian humanitarian and advocacy organization.

Facebook and the like are, of course, an endless source of wrongly attributed quotes. Just ask Abraham Lincoln. And the name (or penname) of WVI's former CEO probably wouldn't be as recognizable to most social media users as the name of the world's most famous religious/political refugee. So perhaps whoever first mis-matched the quote to the leader of Tibetan Buddhism thought the expression just needed a little extra push. A little rebranding.

But if you help recirculate it online, incorrect attribution and all, it's on you now.

Still, this bit of literary vandalism did create one memorable moment a few years ago at, of all places, Forbes.com. A contributor who describes his beat as "the intersection of entertainment and technology" (he's a video game reviewer) saw that meme somewhere and attacked it with the intellectual brio of a college sophomore who just aced his first philosophy elective. It's titled – seriously, now – "The Dalai Lama is Wrong" and it begins like this:

This quotation from the Dalai Lama has been making the rounds.

It’s one of those irksome sentiments that sounds really wise and profound and makes all of us sort of cringe in self-examination. Or worse, causes us to look outward at “humanity” and think to ourselves, “Yes, all these people are living for tomorrow. They should slow down and live for the here and now. They should spend less time being greedy workaholics and hang out with their families more.”

And then it continues in much the same vein for another eleven paragraphs (twelve paragraphs, if you count the extended block quote from the pilot episode of "The Wonder Years"), heaping withering scorn on the Dalai Lama for disrespecting the workaday life the rest of us lead while he led "a life of celebrity."

Readers eventually pointed out the attribution error in the comments section, although the post itself appears to stand as originally published in 2011, despite the large, Lama-shaped hole blown clean through the middle of it.

Oddly, though, the author cast references to the object of his derision in the past tense, suggesting that he might have been unaware that the man who didn't actually say the things he found so offensive hadn't actually died, either – in fact, he turned 80 on the 6th of July this year.

Update: And while we're at it, here are a list of things I meant to include that George Carlin never said, either.

*Acknowledgment is made of the works of The Firesign Theatre.

Sunday morning toons: Making the necessary exceptions

If you chortled over the Oregon bakers who had to pay a six-figure damage settlement to the couple who wanted a cake for their same-sex wedding because they refused service (a violation of state and federal law) and then – this was the part that burned them – published the couple's name and address, and went on a regular media/social media tour that gave the couple the gift of unwanted notoriety, but you climbed on the bandwagon to out and shame the vanity-safari dentist who most recently killed a beloved lion in Zimbabwe, you very likely didn't make the cut today. (CSotD spelled out the argument in fine detail here, so I don't have to.) The dentist is a jerk, no question, and the lion should still be alive and doing liony things, but when the social media starts wilding, I get nervous, and so should you. It's not a good idea to rely on this defense.

If you're still humping the original, discredited, and twice-corrected NYTimes story about a supposed criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton regarding her use of email while Secretary of State (especially now that there's some evidence that the bogus story was fed to the Times by Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee) suggesting that, all these years later, the Times still maintains a different definition of "fit to print" when it's a Clinton – you didn't make the cut. Again.

And if you are still trying to get mileage out of the nothing-burger that is the edited Planned Parenthood "documentaries," now being bandied about as reason for congressional Republicans to shut down the federal government yet again (because it worked so well last time), you not only didn't make the cut (again), you probably weren't even allowed into the parking lot outside where the cut was happening.

The rest of the 2016 GOP presidential candidate pool has studied Trump Ascendant and seemed to have learned the lesson that the only way – and I'm not saying they're wrong, mind you – they only way they can guarantee they'll be on the debate stage with him this Thursday is to try and match him outrageous and offensive public statement for outrageous and offensive public statement. (Mike Huckabee, pick up the white courtesy phone. Mike Huckabee, the white courtesy phone please.)

Which reminds me, there was also something about a smashed cell phone. What was that all about? Heh.

Today's toons were selected by some as-yet undisclosed system from the week's offerings at McClatchy DC, Cartoon Movement, Go Comics, Politico's Cartoon Gallery, Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons, About.com, and other fine sources of toony goodness.

p3 Picks of the week: Jeff Stahler, Gary Varvel, Signe Wilkinson, Robert Ariail, Darrin Bell, Chip Bok, Steve Breen, Jeff Danziger, Tim Eagan, Clay Jones, Rebecca Hendin, and Matt Wuerker.

p3 Best of Show: Darrin Bell.

p3 Legion of Merit: Clay Bennett.

p3 Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium: Chris Britt.

p3 World Toon Review: Corax (Serbia) and Jalal Hajir (Morocco).

Ann Telnaes looks at what you may have to do to get on stage with the short-fingered vulgarian.

Mark Fiore sez: Perspective – use it or lose it.

Tom Tomorrow should be more grateful, apparently.

Keith Knight finds eight when there were once seven. (And we aren't talking about Santa's reindeer.)

Reuben Bolling has his Shirley Jackson moment. ("It isn't fair!" sobbed Penelope.) And I remind readers once again that Chagrin Falls is a real town in Ohio, and I had a friend in college who was from there.)

Red Meat's Ted Johnson may have some post-legalization issues concerning his stash.

The Comic Strip Curmudgeon presents Dagwood in a little something we like to call Groundhog Day Stew.

Comic Strip of the Day passes a milestone. So to speak.

Aw, now yuh went and hurt muh feelings! When Beaky the Buzzard went up against Bugs Bunny (in "Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid," directed by Bob Clampett in 1942), things didn't go so well for him. He has better luck eight years later – at least for a while – against Leo the Lion in "The Lion's Busy," directed in 1950 by Friz Freleng. He keeps his original musical theme, though: "Arkansas Traveler," but without the lyric he sang in his 1942 debut: "Ah'm gonna catch a bay-bee bumble bee – won't mah momma be so proud of me?") The whole lion thing appearing in this week's p3 toon review is, of course, a complete coincidence.

Value-Sized Oregon Toon Block:

Ex-Oregonian Jack Ohman offers a demonstration.

Very Possibly Ex-Oregonian Jen Sorensen raises an important question.

Matt Bors has one today you really need to stick to the last panel for.

Jesse Springer serves up fried salmon: It's what's for dinner in Oregon.

Test your toon captioning spellcraft at The New Yorker's weekly caption-the-cartoon contest. (Rules here.) And you can browse The New Yorker's cartoon gallery here.

The p3 Sunday Comics Read-Along: Pearls Before Swine, Doonesbury, Rhymes with Orange, Zits, Adam @ Home, Mutts, Over the Hedge, Get Fuzzy, Prince Valiant, Blondie, Bizarro, Mother Goose & Grimm, Rose is Rose, Luann, Hagar the Horrible, Pickles, Rubes, Grand Avenue, Freshly Squeezed, The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee, and Jumble.

Quote of the day: Delusional

What I would argue is key to this situation — and, in particular, key to understanding how the conventional wisdom on Trump/McCain went so wrong — is the reality that a lot of people are, in effect, members of a delusional cult that is impervious to logic and evidence, and has lost touch with reality.

I am, of course, talking about pundits who prize themselves for their centrism.

- Paul Krugman, reflecting on Donald Trump's rise in the polls after taking his shot at former POW Senator John McCain, when the best and brightest all predicted it was the beginning of the end for Trump.

It's a shrewd argument, and the article is going on the p3 Readings list.

(Via Driftglass.)

A quantum of umbrage: Let me see if I've got this

Someone – certainly not oppo researchers working for another GOP 2016 presidential wannabe from the Sunshine State! – spoon-fed NYTimes reporters the story that Marco Rubio and his spouse have between them 17 traffic tickets in 18 years.

Putting aside the question of who might have had easy access to state records like that – certainly not a former governor from Rubio's home state who'd like to bump him out of the competition for sugar-daddy cash and favorite son status! – it seems to me that the important question is this:

Does anyone really think we're still living in a world where the idea that United States Senators – to say nothing of presidential contenders – and to say less than nothing of GOP presidential contenders – believe that the quotidian rules that apply to losers like us don't apply to them is somehow news​​? Is somehow shocking?

Oh, Gray Lady, please. As St. George famously explained, "It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

The headline that captures why I'm pretty much fed up with the big-studio/social-media nexus

To spell out what's wrong here:

1. I'm bored to death with the cult of the spoiler. I'm so old I remember when spoilers were a thing to be avoided, not a something that the studios feed beginning six months in advance – drip, drip, drip, like water torture – to eager sites who live for that "Look! There's Harrison Ford's elbow in this shot from the set of The Force Awakens!" moment. Or: "Wow! Your head will explode when we speculate about the possible meaning of every shot in this just-dropped 30-second trailer for Season Two of __________ !" Bored, bored, bored.

2. Legos used to be about creativity and imagination. The fact that what you built with them didn't always look exactly the thing you were picturing in your head was part of the point.

3. And I'll accept that Marvel and DC are prepared to dig deep for their movie concepts these days, even if that means an Ant-Man movie starring Paul Rudd. But, a Lego set for an Ant-Man movie? Honkie, please. And the notion – no less offensive if it's true or false – that a Lego set for a minor movie which won't be released for another two months might somehow contain a "spoiler?" That's the very opposite of a spoiler.

Quote of the day: Selfies among the ruins

He's being a tourist of the lost world of morality, posting selfies of himself amid the ruins.

Yastreblyansky, in comments, musing on the sad spectacle of NYTimes colunmnist David Brooks attempting to lecture the rest of us on morality while maintaining his sweet gig as a highly-paid narcissistic blowhard.

Of all the David Brookses in the world, he's the David Brooksiest.