Author: Andrew Sullivan

Is Christie Too Liberal To Win?

The New Jersey governor may jump into the 2016 race sooner rather than later:

Bush’s aggressive entrance in the race has sped up the timing of [Christie], who is preparing to make a public move toward running at the end of this month rather than waiting until February or March, according to a person familiar with discussions.

But Nate Silver doubts that Christie has a shot at the nomination, largely because “Christie takes moderate positions on the very issues where Bush notoriously deviates from the party base – such as immigration and education – along with others where Bush lands in the GOP mainstream, like on gun control”:

In late 2012, his favorability rating was 45 percent nationally against just a 20 percent unfavorable rating, according to Huffington Post Pollster. But Christie’s popularity has waned considerably in the wake of“Bridgegate” and other controversies. Now his ratings have turned negative; he has a 33 percent favorable rating and a 43 percent unfavorable rating, according to HuffPost Pollster. His head-to-head numbers against Hillary Clinton are no longer any better than those of fellow Republicans Bush and Mike Huckabee.

This isn’t catastrophic unto itself. There are lots of unpopular politicians in both parties. The head-to-head numbers don’t mean much yet, and many Republican voters would come around to Christie were he to win the nomination. But Christie’s case to Republicans is especially dependent on his perceived ability to win the general election. That’s the reward the GOP would get for putting up with the baggage Christie carries. Without it, it’s hard to see the Republicans’ rationale for choosing him.

The Whole Damn Country Is Sick

Flu

Basically:

The annual influenza outbreak has reached widespread levels in 43 states – up from 36 states a week ago.

Flu season arrived early this year – reaching epidemic levels last week:

That the flu has reached epidemic status is not unexpected — this is a regular part of flu season — but it has reached epidemic levels somewhat earlier than it usually does. The last two flu seasons were declared to be epidemics in mid-January.

And this year’s flu vaccine isn’t well suited to the bug going around:

This season is looking particularly bad because the predominant strain, H3N2, is not completely covered by the current flu vaccine and tends to have more severe symptoms. H3N2 accounted for the majority of the strains tested by the CDC so far this season, according to a health advisory issued in early December.

Sarah Zhang explains why flu vaccines don’t always work:

A network of labs working around the world is always on the lookout for new and emerging viruses year-round. These viruses are then tested against human blood serum; the ones that provoke the least immune response are the ones that are most novel and dangerous to the population.

But flu viruses naturally mutate, which is, after all, why we have to formulate a new flu vaccine each year. This year, the H3N2 virus mutated faster than usual, so the vaccine we now have is less effective against the H3N2 virus that is circulating most widely. The new H3N2 was first detected in March of 2014, and it became common by September. And now it’s too late to add it to this year’s flu vaccines altogether, thanks to the decades-old process we use to create vaccines in the first place.

Kent Sepkowitz defends the flu vaccine, even if it’s somewhat less effective than normal:

25,000 to 40,000 people a year die of influenza—the vast majority of them unvaccinated. A simple halving of the number with today’s mediocre vaccine would represent a major public-health triumph. By way of comparison, about 14,000 people in the U.S. died of AIDS in 2011—a vaccine to cut that number in half likely would result in a Nobel Prize.

That’s why the CDC still wants you to get the shot:

[T]he vaccine is still effective in about one-third of cases. “While some of the viruses spreading this season are different from what is in the vaccine, vaccination can still provide protection and might reduce severe outcomes such as hospitalization and death,” said [Darlene Foote, a representative of the CDC].

(Chart from the CDC)

France’s South Park

A reader writes:

enhanced-27032-1420647847-2Here’s something I’d like to contribute re: the massacre. First, I went to high school with the daughter of one of the victims, a long time ago but still. I met him and knew him – a very nice and funny guy. So it’s shocking on a personal level.

Second, these things do not usually happen in France. Especially the part where a commando uses automatic weapons (AK-47). It’s very hard to procure AK-47s in France. It’s not on sale at Walmart, like here. So this means these are organized criminals (obviously).

Charlie Hebdo is an institution. Its humor was always very corrosive and harsh. The writers and illustrators have been active in one form or another since the late ’60s, making fun of everybody and angering everybody since then.

Its first incarnation, aptly called “Hara-Kiri” was the most scandalous weekly magazine you could find.

The week after the General de Gaulle died, they came out with the title: “Tragic ball at Colombey: one dead.” (Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises was the village where the General’s private residence was located). After the scandal, they were forbidden to print and had to start another weekly under a new name.

enhanced-22753-1420647659-17Charlie was always committed to intellectual anarchism, virulently anti-clerical and anti-religion and resolutely left wing. But always in a hilarious manner. There is no 40-year-old French person of all political persuasion who has not read and laughed along with Charlie’s weekly delivery of caricatures.

More recently, Charlie been printing lots of cartoons making fun of Islamists and their Prophet. They were already the target of a bombing a couple of years ago. So everybody is thinking what I am thinking. If it turns out to be the doing of an Islamist cell, this is almost like France’s 9/11. On a much smaller scale, but France is a much smaller country. To assassinate the comedians and the satirists is as big, if not bigger thing. It is a direct impact on France’s most cherished cultural trait: the active, public, vocal disrespect and skepticism towards any form of authority, political or religious.

I am crestfallen and scared. This is a very dark moment.

Amy Davidson adds:

Recently, the magazine had mocked the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Its last tweet before the attack was of a cartoon making fun of the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. That is not recklessness; it’s how one knows that ISIS has not won, and never will. There Charlie-Hebdo-Secondary2-320ought to be more such tweets. (Whether ISIS in particular had a role in this attack is a question that can’t be answered at this stage; its members are, sadly, not the only ones in the terrorism business.)

The current issue of Charlie Hebdo, published the day of the shooting, featured a caricature of the novelist Michel Houellebecq on the cover. Houellebecq’s new novel, “Submission,” also out Wednesday, according to the Times, “predicts a future France run by Muslims, in which women forsake Western dress and polygamy is introduced.” The drawing of Houellebecq, accompanied by a joke about Ramadan, is not flattering. The French police have added the protection of Houellebecq to their list of priorities on what is, by all accounts, a traumatic and disorienting day for the entire country.

Update from a reader:

I have to ask, does your reader who states:

Especially the part where a commando uses automatic weapons (AK-47). It’s very hard to procure AK-47s in France. It’s not on sale at Walmart, like here.

… understand that automatic weapons are not on sale at Wal-Mart? Granted, something of the point may stand – it’s not as if illegal firearms play no role in crime in the US – but it makes me question someone’s ability to expound on a topic of they’re willing to throw out factual inaccurate remarks in the process.

(Top cover translates to “Love: Stronger than hate.” Middle cover depicts Catholic bishops discussing how to get away with pedophilia. Bottom cover is the aforementioned one featuring a caricature of the Houellebecq.)

Slaughtered For Satire

The Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which has in the past been condemned and firebombed for its satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad, were ambushed this morning by two gunmen, who killed 12 people before fleeing the scene. A massive manhunt is now underway throughout the French capital:

Visiting the scene of the country’s worst atrocity in decades, the French president, François Hollande, described it as “a terrorist attack, without a doubt”. Hollande said the assault, which happened at about 11.30am on Wednesday after the magazine’s staff had gathered for their weekly editorial meeting, was “an act of exceptional barbarism”. Warning that several other attacks had been foiled in recent weeks, the president called for national unity and convened an emergency cabinet meeting. The French government raised the terror alert level in the greater Paris region to the highest level possible. …

A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, confirmed that 12 people had been killed in the attack. Police said three attackers were involved, two who entered the building and a third who drove a car to the scene, in rue Nicolas Appert in the 11th arrondissement in eastern Paris. The gunmen escaped in the car before abandoning it in the 19th arrondissement, where they hijacked another car, ordering the motorist out.

The Guardian is live-blogging. As of this writing, the gunmen have not been identified or apprehended, and no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though ISIS had previously threatened to target France. Katie Zavadski speaks with a terrorism expert on what made this attack unusual:

That the attackers sped away instead of fighting to the death, however, means that Wednesday’s attack is different in style from the suicide attacks often deployed by terror organizations. Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, tells Daily Intelligencer that the highly-trained gunmen may have been too valuable to waste on such a mission — especially given that a suicide attack would have only required one bomber. “This is a far more dangerous kind of attacker because the terrorist group invests heavily in their training and preparation, and will be able to have a second or even a third strike if they want to really spread terror and panic beyond the magazine and the 11th arrondissement,” she said, referring to the area of Paris where the attack occurred.

Max Fisher stands up for Charlie Hebdo’s dedication to pushing Islamists’ buttons:

The magazine was not just criticized by Islamist extremists. At different points, even France’s devoutly secular politicians have questioned whether the magazine went too far; French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius once asked of its cartoons, “Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire?”

It is, actually. Part of Charlie Hebdo’s point was that respecting the taboos strengthens their censorial power. Worse, allowing extremists to set the limits of conversation validates and entrenches the extremists’ premises: that free speech and religion are inherently at odds (they are not), and that there is some civilizational conflict between Islam and the West (there isn’t). These are also arguments, by the way, made by Islamophobes and racists, particularly in France, where hatred of Muslim immigrants from north and west Africa is a serious problem.

Michael Rubin comes to a similar conclusion:

Satire and ridicule are like carnival caricatures. They may exaggerate, but they strike a chord because their basis in fact resonates with a wide audience. Such is the case also with satire. Islamists cannot handle free thinking at the best of times, but ridicule is their kryptonite, for it shows that the would-be caliphs have no clothes.

Free speech can be a powerful tool, and so Western liberals should rally around Charlie Hebdo. To suggest that the satirical outlet brought violence upon itself is to suggest women wearing bikinis invite rape. Do not blame the victims, but rather the perpetrators. Recognize that free speech is under assault, and that it is a value worth protecting. Let us hope that no government or publisher responds to today’s violence with self-censorship, as some commentators and journalists have counseled under similar circumstances. If they do, the Islamists have won and all man’s progress since the Enlightenment is at peril.

But Massie despairs of the aftermath of this attack:

Doubtless some will still, even now, find a way to blame the victims. Doubtless some will do anything they can to avoid looking reality squarely in the face. Doubtless some will pretend that reality can be wished away or that responsibility can be transferred to someone, anyone, other than the perpetrators. Shame on those people. Shame. 

Doubtless, too, there will be the usual calls on all Muslims everywhere to condemn these attacks as though they bear some inchoate communal responsibility for the barbarous actions of their co-religionists. This too will be drearily predictable and familiar and, most of all, desperately unfair. Their Islam has nothing to do with this even if it is also true that other subscribers to the faith do not share their views. The platitudinous suggestion Islam is a religion of peace is evidently, abundantly, true for the vast majority of Muslims while being utterly untrue for some. And so what? Where does that leave us? Only in a state of dread that’s matched only by its inadequacy.

The Wrong Way To Chip Away At Obamacare

Suzy Khimm examines the GOP’s plans:

One of the first items on their agenda in January is President Obama’s signature health care legislation. But Republican’s won’t be pushing for a full repeal of Obamacare. They’re not even pushing for partial repeal. Instead, they’re angling for a seemingly incremental change: to be counted as full-time, workers should need to rack up 40 hours a week, not 30 hours. …

But the GOP’s proposed change is hardly a minor tweak to Obamacare—and not all conservatives agree it’s the best way forward. It would effectively gut the employer mandate, reducing employer-sponsored coverage by 1 million people and costing $74 billion in lost penalties, according to the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. But it would also make it even more likely that the Affordable Care Act will have negative consequences for ordinary Americans, according to Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Paul Van de Water likewise warns that “raising the threshold from 30 hours a week to 40 hours would make a shift toward part-time employment much more likely — not less so”:

That’s because only a small share of workers today — 7 percent — work 30 to 34 hours a week and thus are most at risk of having their hours cut below health reform’s threshold.  In comparison, 44 percent of employees work 40 hours a week, and another several percent work 41 to 44 hours a week.  Thus, raising the threshold to 40 hours would place many more workers at risk of having their hours reduced.

In short, it’s the House Republican bill, not health reform, that threatens the traditional 40-hour work week the bill’s sponsors say they want to protect.

Jason Millman argues along the same lines:

[S]etting the ACA workweek at 40 hours puts far more employees at risk of having their hours reduced, according to a Commonwealth Fund analysis. Compared to the 30-hour definition, “there are more than twice as many workers at high risk of hours reductions because they are within five hours of the full-time definition at firms that do not offer health insurance coverage,” the analysis found. Commonwealth also concludes raising the full-time threshold will increase reliance on public coverage through the ACA.

The National Review’s Yuval Levin also took note of the Commonwealth findings, writing in November that adjusting the 40-hour workweek “seems likely to be worse than doing nothing.” Instead, the conservative pundit wrote, the GOP should focus on repealing the employer mandate entirely.

Our Hottest Year Yet

Trend Line

2014 set a new record:

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has announced that 2014 was the hottest year in more than 120 years of record-keeping — by far. NOAA is expected to make a similar call in a couple of weeks and so is NASA.

As the JMA graph shows, there has been no “hiatus” or “pause” in warming. In fact, there has not even been a slowdown. Yes, in JMA’s ranking of hottest years, 1998 is in (a distant) second place — but 1998 was an outlier as the graph shows. In fact, 1998 was boosted above the trendline by an unusual super-El Niño. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records.

Mooney adds important context:

[I]n a technical sense 2014 is just another year and just another data point. Despite the January ritual of tallying up each year’s temperatures and ranking it against prior years, what actually matters (as always) is the trend, not the individual year. But as we’ve seen, the global warming trend is intact — 2014 may just be an exclamation point on top of it.

Indeed, this year — 2015 – the temperatures of 2014 could take on major significance. After all, the world is now racing to complete a global climate agreement this December in Paris. A new temperature record for 2014 would surely light a fire under negotiators.

Meanwhile, there remains a 65 percent chance that we’ll see an El Niño — which could also help drive a new temperature record — in 2015.

The Weird Liberal Love Affair With The Draft, Ctd

Several readers sound off:

A military draft would help with our current segregation problem.  No, not race, but segregation by income and ideologies.  It is easy to hate “the other” when one has never met the “the other”.  It is harder to hate them when they are an okay guy or girl you spent two years with bonding over how horrible the food is and that time it rained all day on a twenty-mile hike.

From a veteran:

The book, now out of print, is Chance and Circumstance.  The authors (a Republican and a Democrat) worked on the draft issue on Capitol Hill.  The conclusion: The one overriding factor in deciding who got drafted was family income.  High school graduates from locally wealthy families were less likely to be drafted than college graduates from low-income families.

I saw this firsthand in Vietnam.

I was Commandant of Faculty at a language school for Vietnamese signalmen where all the teachers were American soldiers with G.T. scores (comparable to I.Q. scores) of at least 120. The average education for my teachers was five years of college, including a couple of Ph.Ds. Every one of my teachers had the same story.  He was from a blue-collar family, went to a public college (frequently the first in his family to do so), ran out of money, dropped out of college or grad school and was promptly drafted.

From the book and my own experience, I am convinced that reinstating the draft will simply replace the financial incentives of an all-volunteer military with compulsion.  The same people will enlist, but from lack of economic clout and not voluntarily for economic incentives.

Another boomer:

Although I often agree with Daniel Larison, he is dead wrong about the impact of the draft on the Vietnam War. As a veteran (of the peace movement), it was quite clear to me that it was the draft (more than Walter Cronkite) that turned Americans against the war.  Yes, the Vietnam War went on for years whilst the draft took place, but Larison neglects to mention that the overwhelming number of draft age middle class white men had 2S college deferments.  It was a draft mostly off the poor and blacks – the voiceless.

In late 1969, student deferments ended, replaced by a random lottery of 365 dates where the first third were drafted.  This touched off a firestorm in reaction against the war.  I drew a number in the high 200’s, and I will never forget listening to the lottery numbers announced live on radio – a macabre spectacle if ever there was one.  I was lucky.

The parents of those drafted in the first third, many of whom never gave a whit about the war, joined the peace movement in droves with money and political muscle bringing even the likes of Henry Kissinger to the Paris peace table.

The Iraq/ Afghanistan/ Libya fiascos barely stirred an anti-war movement. Does Larison actually think those wars would have continued as long as they did if those body bags were filled with middle-class draftees, including the sons of congressmen?  I think not. And at the least there would have been a national debate, something that never happened.

Another reader shifts focus:

Forget the draft.  The way to make both politicians and the electorate think more carefully about our use of military force would be a war tax.  Imagine if every foreign military intervention automatically triggered substantial increases in income tax rates, especially in the top tax brackets.  It could be arranged so that multiple simultaneous foreign interventions would cause multiple increases, with two or more interventions leading to essentially confiscatory taxes on incomes over $1M.

I don’t know whether a draft would really cause anyone to think more about their foreign policy choices, but if I know Republicans, confiscatory taxes would definitely do the trick.  It also seems more just: the draft idea deprives young people of their freedom and possibly their lives in an attempt to influence the donor class’ political choices, while the war tax would leave young people alone and directly target the kinds of people who hold influence over politicians.

After The Failed Revolt Against Boehner

Speaker Votes

Cillizza’s takeaway as the dust settles:

Caveats aside, what’s clear from that list of Boehner opponents is that even though he will operate with an increased majority in the 114th Congress, there’s little reason to think the travails of the 113th won’t be repeated again. If more than two dozen House Republicans are willing to stand up and voice their discontent with him in a vote that is almost certain to go his way, what will the prognosis be for Boehner when the legislative outcomes are less certain? (Worth noting: Several Boehner detractors who are likely to cause him agita in the coming weeks and months — most notably Idaho Rep. Raul labrador — voted FOR him as Speaker.)

If past is prologue — and today’s Speaker vote suggests it very likely is — Boehner’s next two years might well be as rocky as his last two as the leader of a GOP conference that, at least in parts, does not want to be led.

Cassidy has a soft spot for Boehner:

Compared to Gohmert and his ilk, Boehner seems like a conservative but ultimately rational member of the Rotary Club. To be sure, he mouths all the usual G.O.P. lines about President Obama usurping the constitution with his immigration reforms, and about the Affordable Care Act destroying the economy. But he has shown little enthusiasm for responding to points of contention with the drastic measures that some Republican ultras favor, such as impeachment or shutting down the government. “I don’t do anger,” he told Politico’s Glenn Thrush, whose new profile of Boehner is well worth reading.

Ezra calls him the speaker the GOP needs:

There have been many, in recent years, who wished for a stronger speaker, a speaker who sought compromise more aggressively and did more to marginalize House conservatives. Perhaps that speaker would have made the last few years more productive. Or perhaps he would’ve been broken by conservative dissatisfaction and replaced with a more authentic tea partier.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have often wished that they had been led by one of their own — someone willing to truly maximize his leverage, someone who wasn’t, in his heart, so afraid of defaulting on the debt and defunding the government and launching impeachment proceedings. That would have been a disaster for the country, but it would have been a particular disaster for conservatism, which would have been blamed for the consequences.

Boehner has managed to steer his conference between these extremes, and the result is, today, Obama is unpopular, his legislative agenda is dead, and Republicans have the largest House majority since the Truman presidency and a real chance to win in 2016.

John Patty wonders “how the insurgency will affect Mitch McConnell’s approach in the Senate”:

[E]ven setting aside worries about the possibility of passing legislation that the president will sign, to even get a piece of legislation to his desk will require at least a modicum of bipartisan support in the Senate, because the GOP does not control 60 seats in the Senate.

Thus, for the GOP to come across over the next two years as a party that can govern as opposed to simply obstruct, Boehner and McConnell must work together with at least a handful of (presumably conservative) Democrats in the Senate.  The question, then, is whether and how Boehner can manage this without angering the 20+ members of his own party that were happy to break with him on what is typically the most visible and partisan procedural vote of each Congress.

However, Harry Enten observes that “the trend toward more opposition to leadership is also going on in the Democratic Party, and there are few people who would argue that Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have control of her caucus”:

Pelosi’s share of the vote for minority leader in the past three minority leader elections is the lowest for a minority leader since 1991.  … The movement to voicing opposition in a public vote is probably much more of a performance art than anything else. It’s a way for members of Congress to show they haven’t gone “Washington.” With every part of a representative’s record being scrutinized in the media, members may find it worth their time to score points with supporters at home and potential donors on the web.

The Showdown Over Keystone

Obama has promised to veto the Keystone bill making its way through Congress. Bill McKibben savors this victory:

It’s not as if we’re winning the climate fight – the planet’s temperature keeps rising. But we’re not losing it the way we used to. If the president sticks to his word, this will be the first major fossil-fuel project ever shut down because of its effect on the climate. The IOU that the president and the Chinese wrote in November about future carbon emissions is a nice piece of paper that hopefully will do great things in the decades ahead – but the Keystone denial is cash on the barrelhead. It’s actually keeping some carbon in the ground.

But Charles Pierce isn’t counting his chickens yet:

The White House veto threat is not a categorical threat to the pipeline’s construction. The president is saying that the bill in question is premature, that it is short-cutting established procedure that already is underway, and that it is an improper federal infringement upon the function of the state judiciary of Nebraska. The president has not eliminated any of his options.

Josh Green sees Keystone as relatively unimportant:

Keystone has attained tremendous symbolic importance for both Democrats and Republicans. But this is the opposite of how it should be — the political fight has become completely divorced from reality. The pipeline’s actual importance to oil markets, the economy and the environment has steadily diminished. Whoever wins, the “victory” will be pointless and hollow.

First Read also wonders why Keystone should be the first order of business:

Republicans now have complete control of Congress, and the first thing they want to get done is … the Keystone XL pipeline? That’s the statement they want to make after their midterm victories? “The president’s going to see the Keystone XL Pipeline on his desk, and it is going to be a bellwether decision by the president,” Sen. John Barrasso said on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday. We get the politics of Keystone; we’ve been covering the issue for years now. But it’s such small ball — and it’s even smaller now in the midst of the lowest gas prices in years and 200,000-plus jobs being created each month. We’ve got to ask: All that money spent on the midterms, all that jockeying for control of the Senate, and first real statement from the new GOP majority is Keystone? It’s small-ball politics, whether you’re on the right, left or in the middle. It’s certainly no Contract with America.

Taking A Stand On The Can, Ctd

another-grout

The popular thread on bathroom graffiti continues:

I was going to write to say that your other reader‘s college was not unique in featuring restroom grout puns.  I remember a similar collection in one of the men’s rooms at my large university. But it turns out this phenomenon goes far beyond our two schools. A quick Google search reveals a tumblr collecting photos of grout puns called “The Groutlands”, a reddit thread, and even an Urban Dictionary definition of groutfitti:

It involves writing in the tiny space of grout in between tiles in public toilets. The phrases always are made up of some pun using the word grout. Other examples include movie titles, like “The grout, the bad, and the ugly” or simple words, like “groutrageous.”

One of the photos from The Groutlands is seen above. Back to many more submissions from readers:

I can’t believe I’m actually writing about this to someone whom I consider to be the most intelligent person in the blogosphere.  But here goes. From the bathroom stall of my university, in 1994.  Imagine Julie Andrews singing this:

Blowjobs and handjobs and licking Clitoris,
Watching my grandmother douche with Lavoris,
Flossing my teeth with an old tampon string,
These are a few of my favorite things!

Another:

At Stevenson College, UCSC, in the men’s room across from the main classroom, circa 1993, someone had written on the condom dispenser: “THIS GUM SUCKS.”

Another goes geopolitical:

This was in the early ’00s in a Safeway bathroom. It’s the only piece of bathroom graffiti I remember, because I’m still trying to figure out quite what it means: “Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon should eat pork together.” Can’t tell whether it’s just a big Fuck You or a call to compromise and find common ground by doing something unpleasant and unthinkable together.

Another political stand:

Princeton University, early 1980s: “SAVE SOVIET JEWRY”. Underneath, in another hand: “WIN FABULOUS PRIZES!”

Another:

From a Jamaican restaurant in Madison, WI, circa 1993:  “If you jerk it, they will come.”

Another:

High school was a rich vein for this. One of my favourites: “Flush hard, it’s a long way to the cafeteria.”

And another:

Spray-painted on a concrete seawall: “Man’s downfall will be his own intelligents.”

Another notes:

Your other reader neglected the essential preamble to the “paid a dime but only farted …”

In days of old when men were bold
And toilets were not invented
Men left their load by the side of the road
And walked away contented.

But here I sit, broken-hearted …

There. Nothing like a nice high-brow contribution to start off the new year!

Another agrees:

You know what I love about The Dish? Where else can you read a lengthy post about bathroom graffiti followed by a post about the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta? And feel the same level of enthusiasm for both?