“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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My tax dollars at work:

It is perhaps the most minor crime New Yorkers are routinely arrested for: sitting improperly on a subway seat. Seven years ago, rule 1050(7)(J) of the city’s transit code criminalized what was once simply bad etiquette: passengers putting their feet on a subway seat. They also cannot take up more than one seat if it interferes with other passengers’ comfort, nor can they block movement on a subway by doing something like standing too close to the doors.

Tonight a cop pulled me and another guy over because he thought we’d used the door at the end of the car to move to the next one. I hadn’t, and the other guy told the cop I hadn’t. He had. Wonder if he got arrested?

Relax, if You Want, But Don’t Put Your Feet Up [NYT]

[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]

In ordinary times, it would strike us as the one of most absurd thing we’ve ever read. But these are not ordinary times, what with a one time GOP Frontrunner asserting that the HPV vaccine casues mental retardation, based solely on the testioney of some random woman she met on the campaign trail, what with a different onetime frontrunner summing up the reasons for his departure from the field by quoting from the Pokemon movie, what with a third onetime GOP frontrunner forgetting, on stage, in the middle of a debate, the name of one of the three Federal agancies he wants to dismantle. Stil, even by these lofty standards, New Ginrich’s latest salvo in the war for the GOP Presidential nomination is laughable in its chutzpah. The New York Times Reports:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Thanks to a $5 million donation from a wealthy casino owner, a group supporting Newt Gingrich plans to place advertisements in South Carolina this week attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities

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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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Parents of third graders at a Norcross, Georgia elementary school are demanding an apology after their children were given word problems in math class that used images of slavery and beating slaves.

Among the questions:

“Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

“If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”

“Frederick had six baskets filled with cotton.  If each basket held five pounds, how many pounds did he have altogether?”

The response from the school shows a need for increased training in Media Crisis Relations 101.  The spokesperson for Gwinnett County school district described the questions as “cross-curricular activity” attempting to incorporate social studies into math.  Stinquer RptrCub, we worry about you living in this state.

[ABC News]