Coochie Ken relents: “I cannot believe that joking with my staff about Virtue being a little more “virtuous’ in this antique version has become news. This is simply a media-made issue that has become distracting to the work of my office. I am going to end this distraction by discontinuing future use of the pin.” [ThinkProgress]

Glenn Beck would like you to know that Mother’s Day is a communist plot:

Our sponsor this half hour is the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. Vermont Teddy Bear is getting ready for Mother’s Day weekend.

Can you believe Mother’s Day week— By the way, Sarah and I were talking on Saturday and she didn’t believe me, or it was on Friday, and she didn’t believe me. And I said, Mother’s Day, it’s a scam. It’s a big business scam. And I said, I bet it was started by Woodrow Wilson. Look it up, Sarah. And she didn’t. I said, look it up. She’s like, no, I’m not going to look it up. I said, look it up, I’ll bet you, I’ll bet you. Mother’s Day? Started 1914. Woodrow Wilson. Hate that guy. Love my mom. Hate the holiday.

Now, you could go to Hallmark because Hallmark and Woodrow Wilson would like you to do that. But there’s something new from Vermont Teddy Bear: Three handmade teddy bears in pink, green, and white…

Read more »

Speaks for itself …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndRxGeGZLt0

That wet dog is a hot bitch, too:

Read more »

Hubris is one thing, but this is something altogether different… hubris, coupled with arrogance and an unbelievable contempt for the great unwashed masses that can’t possibly understand the things you do and so must be kept in the dark (lest they do themselves harm, you understand).

In 2004 a debate raged inside the Federal Reserve as to whether the U.S. was entering a dangerous housing bubble. Alan Greenspan’s response? Such discussions had to be suppressed. No word of these concerns should leave the ivory confines of the Federal Reserve. The natives, you see, just wouldn’t understand…

We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand.

Of course, in retrospect, the most absurd aspect thing about this quote is that Greenspan was worried he might “lose control” of something as irrationally driven and wildly out-of-control as an economic bubble. Was his “understanding” really any different from that of a witch doctor ordering virgins to be thrown into the mouth of a volcano, worried that if he should offend the gods by not doing so, the mountain will erupt?

Playing a hunch, Razib Khan futzes with the General Social Survey and discovers what we all knew about the relationship between alcohol and awesomely smart people like us:

I was expecting it. That is, that the more intelligent, who scored high on a vocabulary test, would drink more than the dumb, who scored low.

New Englanders can drink the rest of us under the table, by the way. And Catholics? Don’t get them started.

Read more »

“California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina voiced support Friday for Arizona’s new immigration law even as she deplored a ‘racist tone’ that’s developed in some corners of her party over the highly charged issue.” [Politico, via TPM]