Let’s be honest: We burned our “You Can’t Get There From Here” gag yesterday, we’ve spent hours trying to riff on the state nickname, and all we can come up with is a Rocky Horror reference. But in welcoming you to our New Hampshire Primary Open Thread/Time Warp, we take solace in the fact that Mitt’s a lock anyway, so there’s no point going to much trouble.

“It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007.”

Fox News Radio’s Todd Starnes to Sean Hannity: “This is what America is all about. Like you said, no hanging chads, we didn’t see any Black Panthers with baseball bats. These were good, American folks going to do their patriotic duty, and I think it’s fantastic. Dixville Notch is just a great little place.” [TPM]

“Never get a job,” our local bowling-alley proprietor once told us, “where you have to work with the public.” His wisdom was offered a moment after dealing with an unruly customer, but we’ve remembered it over the years because not only does it apply to our own experience — in particular, answering the local paper’s complaint line during college — but also observation: Retail jobs pay shit.

Nobody wants to work retail. You only work retail when, for one reason or another, you have no other choice. One reason for going to college is to escape retail — to leave the Floor for the comfy confines of the Cubicle.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney.

His claim to have created “a hundred thousand jobs” — third-hand, through vulture-capital investments — is being (properly) criticized for only counting the Plus Column, and ignoring the Minuses. But nobody seems to be talking about the kinds of jobs Romney claims to have created.

Shit jobs.

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[Nashua, N.H., Telegraph, via @daveweigel]

We think this means “I just got laid off, and now I’m going to kill myself for my family.”

[Twitter]

The other night, the impossible happened: We learned something new about Mitt Romney.

It was near the end of Iowa Night, and Lawrence O’Donnell, discussing Rick Santorum’s Italian-grandfather anecdote, observed that in politics, you don’t say things like that by chance. In Santorum’s case, you say that to draw implicit contrast with somebody else’s grandfather. Or, in this case, great-grandfather.

The story, briefly, goes like this: Mitt’s great-grandfather Miles Romney was an old-school Mormon. A Big Love Mormon. A Mormon who bequeaths you not just a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, but a lot of step-great-grandmothers, whatever you call them.

(And what do you call them? Love Grannies?)

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