Parties We Missed

We’ve hated our generation since Disco.

You need to understand this about us, the resentment we’ve harbored for kids our age from the moment kids our age were swept away by Saturday Night Fever. You need to understand this about that moment, that pre-Internet moment, that pre-cable moment, when there was no escape from what everyone was watching and listening to.

The previous generation got the Beatles. We got stuck with the Bee Gees.

Don’t call us a Boomer.

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Left Behind.“The author imagines a Centrist Party which attempts to win a few as four or five seats in the U.S. Senate, enough to deny either traditional party a majority. At that point, he says the Centrists would be the powerbrokers in DC. giving voice to those who fall in the ideological middle.” [Political Wire]

Some day, far in the future, Minnesota high school civics students are going to stumble across a transcript from their state legislature, and learn an important Life Lesson.

[via TPM]

Party like it's the last five years.

[Politico]

“Arpaio wants his army of 3,000 volunteer posse members to look like sworn deputies and sometimes perform the same duties. But an in-depth project by CBS 5 Investigates uncovered a number of posse members with arrests for assault, drug possession, domestic violence, sex crimes against children, disorderly conduct, impersonating an officer — and the list goes on.” [CBS Phoenix, via jwmcsame]

So there’s this facility known as the “Y-12 National Security Complex” in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which “maintains the safety, security and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile”. We know this because they say so, on the same page where they show a handsome soldier vigilantly guarding our nukes.

Not shown: The hole in the fence.

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Four years ago, the drama and tension at the Democratic convention was palpable: Not just whether Hillary and Barry would kiss and make up, not even whether Teddy would survive the flight to Denver — but whether Barack Obama would pull off The Big Speech.

And, for that matter, whether the weather would let him.

Everything was at stake that Thursday night: The stage columns may have been a tad much, but Obama had to fill an imaginative void in the American mind, the void where President Black Man would go, and not just one from the movies or Allstate commercials. You couldn’t know that within three years, he would be strolling up an ornate hallway to tell us that Bin Laden was sleeping with the fishes.

And this time? Hey, he can phone it in.

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