Maine Governor Paul LePage, whom you may remember from such verbal diarrhea as "Hey, kid, I'd like to shoot your dad because of his political cartoons," “I want to find the [Portland] Press Herald building and blow it up," (that's verbatim, though he was talking about a flight simulator, I think), and "President Obama hates … Continue reading Who are you gonna believe, Paul LePage or your lying ears?

Virtually since the Iran nuclear talks began, it's been an article of faith among right-wing deal opponents that the United States is about to shift its Middle Eastern loyalties away from the Saudis and toward the Iranians. This would be Bad, we're told, because it would strengthen a malign regional actor whose muscular foreign interventionism … Continue reading Phantom shift

Continuing in the "hey, go read this while I'm working on something else" vein, check out Elias Isquith's interview at Salon with Mike Lofgren. Lofgren is a former Republican staffer on Capitol Hill who's just written a book called The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government. We … Continue reading The Deep State: it’s not just for Egypt and Turkey anymore

I'm working on a little something, so meanwhile I'm sending you over to give The Week's Ryan Cooper some clicks. He's written a great summary of Michigan Governor Rick Snyder's decision to poison Flint, Michigan's water supply in the name of Almighty Austerity: You know what's bad? Brain damage. Flint, Michigan, is finding this out … Continue reading Poisoning children for fun and profit

Online journalism is running headlong into its own funeral pyre. Outlets are increasingly turning over content to places like Facebook, where more people might see it, but where it becomes increasingly difficult to find a financial model that can actually sustain the business of paying people to write and report about stuff. Enter Twitter, which … Continue reading Say, could these two things be related?

Has Saudi Arabia put Jimmy Malone in charge of selecting targets in Yemen? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPZ6eaL3S2E Well, maybe: Iran has accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out airstrikes against the Iranian embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, which it claimed left a number of guards wounded and damaged its diplomatic building, although witnesses said the compound was intact. Tensions … Continue reading Well, if it’s bad for the goose…

Thanks to The Federalist's M.G. Oprea for explaining to us all that people who try to properly pronounce foreign words of an Islamical derivation are clearly ISIS sleeper agents: You may have noticed something different in the way some people, including various presidential candidates, talk about Islam depending on whether they are Republicans or Democrats. … Continue reading Your PATRIOTIC AMERICAN GUIDE to pronouncing terrorist words like a REAL AMERICAN

I'm tired of doing that "welcome to 2016" thing, but here's another story that doesn't bode all that well for the new year, this time out of Ukraine: Highly destructive malware that infected at least three regional power authorities in Ukraine led to a power failure that left hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity … Continue reading Maybe doomsday preppers are on to something

Yeah, so a funny thing happened right around the time I was trying to put the blog away last night. First, a 5.1 seismic event was detected near North Korea's usual nuclear testing site, which Pyongyang quickly confirmed was a nuclear test. In fact, they announced that North Korea had just tested its first hydrogen … Continue reading Welcome to the glorious H-Bomb of Justice

(OK, last one of these--I hope) So, uh, in case you'd forgotten about North Korea in all the craziness... A 5.1 magnitude earthquake has been detected in North Korea, close to a site previously used for nuclear tests. Chinese and South Korea officials said there were indications the tremor was man-made, meaning the North may … Continue reading Welcome to 2016: how’s your bomb shelter looking?