This morning, NOJO, our resident blogaholic (the glue who holds Stinque together, in much the same way Santorum binds the evangelical community) took a look at Mitt Romney’s claim to have created 100,000 jobs and concluded that he was a vulture who fired people with good, well paying jobs, replaced those jobs with thankless, low paid retail positions and in the process enriched himself beyond the dreams of avarice.

NOJO was being far too kind.
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“Coming out of Iowa, Santorum lost a little juice.”

-Former GOP chairman, Michael Steele, as heard on Morning Joe today around 7:00

Let’s face it: Michael Steele + Rick Santorum = Formula for Awesome.

“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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