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Hocus Pocus

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State of the Union: Partly Cloudy, High Likelihood of Tedium
January 27, 2014
Tomorrow, an American president, invited by Congress, will deliver his annual address to lawmakers on the state of the union, and literally not one person in the world really gives a shit. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be covered! Oh, it will be covered. Every news ...

The Debtpocalypse Is Always Upon Us
January 24, 2014
Peter G. Peterson has been called “the most influential billionaire in America” based on the impact his namesake foundation has had in more-or-less creating deficit reduction hysteria. While the deficit has been rapidly shrinking, the hysteria of Very Serious People ...

Stuck in Detention with a Handful of Nukes
January 23, 2014
I’ve got this great idea for a movie. It’s about the people responsible for launching nuclear missiles in America, and how their daily lives are some Beckett-esque hellscape of waiting for something that will never arrive, forced to be on alert for no reason, and trapped ...

The Wolf of Wall Street, Print Version
January 23, 2014
Let us assume, for the sake of kindness rather than on any available evidence, that an editor at the New York Times had a bad morning. Maybe there was a hangover, or a new baby who cried all night, and the editor to whom we’ve decided to grant our narrative charity went to ...

That Wasn’t Just Any Snow. That Was Socialist Snow.
January 22, 2014
For his latest strategic maneuver in the all-out, full-communist war he has declared on the rich, New York City mayor Bill “Bane” de Blasio has summoned the magical powers of underclass resentment to control the weather. Here’s how it works: he summons ...

It’s Hard Out There for a Dem in the House
January 17, 2014
The big news from House Democrats in the last month is that literally all of them are retiring. And by “literally all” we mean that six have very recently announced their retirements at the end of this Congress: Bill Owens (2 terms), Jim Matheson (7 terms), Mike ...

Prepare Yourself. The Gun Debate Is SOLVED
January 17, 2014
Great news, liberal god-and-guns-hating girly America: famous loudmouth movie producer Harvey Weinstein is going to get rid of the NRA and, uh, guns. All of them. How nice of him? What is his plan? Oh? Oh. He’s just going to make some dumb movie with Meryl Streep. From ...

Reporting from a Safe Distance
January 16, 2014
A little more than ten years ago, Gregory Lynch, Sr. choked back tears at his home in small-town West Virginia, “as he stood on his porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures.” Lots of people were doing those kinds of things in the pages of the New ...

Breaking News: Rich Person Gets Away with Rich Person Crime
January 15, 2014
It is a well-known fact that if you are very rich, you will never have to go to jail for your fancy international rich-people crimes. But rarely does a judge make someone’s wealth the explicit reason for not sending a very rich person to jail over that person’s ...

Robert Gates, the CliffsNotes version
January 14, 2014
This week, former secretary of defense Robert Gates released a long and weirdly candid book on his years in that unpleasant job. His narrative is, how does one put this gently, uneven: long stretches of incisive analysis mixed evenly with tantrums about his enemies, who were all ...