[ Posted Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016 – 17:46 UTC ]
Maybe I'm just loopy from staying up late to watch the Iowa returns trickle in, but this morning I had a pretty radical idea, after reading a statistic that several pundits pointed out in their post-caucus articles. Jeb Bush apparently spent $14 million in Iowa to receive a little over 5,200 votes. According to many pundits today, that works out to roughly $2,800 spent per actual vote (it's actually under $2,700 when you run the numbers, but whatever). Which caused my epiphany -- why not just hand that cash over to the voters themselves, and eliminate all the middlemen?
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[ Posted Thursday, December 31st, 2015 – 18:36 UTC ]
So it's the end of the year, meaning it is time once again to check into the news from Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, in order to see the venerable Lake Superior State University's annual "banished words list." For those new to the concept, this is a list of words and phrases which have become so downright annoying that they deserve banishment from casual conversation (whoops, I've now used two of them in this opening paragraph).
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[ Posted Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015 – 21:03 UTC ]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
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[ Posted Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015 – 20:00 UTC ]
[Program Note: Due to the foreshortening caused by the calendar, I wasn't able to write a new column today. Instead, I've been working all day to get tomorrow's column ready, which will be the "Part 2" of our year-end awards columns. That will be it for this week, I might add, so here's wishing everyone a happy holiday weekend. In any case, check back tomorrow for the final 2015 awards, and for now, here's a fun Christmas column I wrote in my second year of blogging.]
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[ Posted Friday, December 18th, 2015 – 19:24 UTC ]
Welcome to our year-end awards columns!
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[ Posted Thursday, December 17th, 2015 – 18:24 UTC ]
I'm busily putting together the first installment of our year-end "best/worst" lists, and so am unable to write an original column today. Tune in tomorrow to see the result. For now, please enjoy the following, where I uncover a worldwide conspiracy that each and every one of you has participated in at one point or another in your lives. Yes, you! You're a co-conspirator just like all the others....
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[ Posted Friday, October 30th, 2015 – 17:45 UTC ]
Welcome to our annual frightfest! Each year we crank up the special effects soundtrack [Cue: rattling chains, unholy moaning, shrieking harpies in the night, and maniacal organ music in a very minor key....] and present our very own scary stories for both sides of the political aisle. This year's presidential campaign is frightening enough, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, so we had to get rather outlandish for one of these stories. The other one is bone-chilling for a very different reason: because it's so uncomfortably close to actual fears some voters are now having, to some degree or another. Both should be equally spine-tingling, for their respective audiences, though.
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[ Posted Thursday, October 15th, 2015 – 16:53 UTC ]
I start this article with a premise, and then build to a conclusion. As with any conspiracy theory, it's entirely up to you to measure how believable or ridiculous you find any of it. I formulated the premise from reading thousands of comments to online articles (most of them in the Washington Post, because their comments section is always a lively one). The premise: everything that helps Hillary Clinton politically has, at its heart, a liberal conspiracy.
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[ Posted Friday, October 9th, 2015 – 17:19 UTC ]
Two weeks ago, we wrote one of these columns and snarkily subtitled it: "New Job Vacancy: Chief GOP Cat-Herder." This week, we really should have gone with: "Babysitting Experience STRONGLY PREFERRED," but Salon had already used it (we'll explain that joke in a bit, promise). Instead, we chose to feature the word which appeared in too many headlines to accurately count over the past two days, because describing what is going on in the Republican Party these days is pretty downright hard to do without using the word "chaos" in some fashion or another.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015 – 17:37 UTC ]
In the intervening two years, College of Saint Rose professor Bruce Roter has made significant progress towards seeing his dream become a reality. He has secured a charter for his museum from the state, and is now in the process of filing paperwork registering as a non-profit (to assure that donations to the Museum of Political Corruption will be tax-deductible). And just yesterday, the M.P.C. announced its first-ever essay contest for high-school students, to answer the question: "What is political corruption and why should we care?"
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