123 Comments

Wyoming! Still in recovery from the rodeo back in Cody in 2021. Wotta trip.

Wyoming! My joke to the natives in Missoula re the good people of Wyoming may be why they spilled the tea as it were and told us that Biga pizzeria was owned by by Jeff Ament's buddy. (Maybe should say much saner buddy but that, nah, self-cancelling that one.)

Anyway, Bezos:

Fun fact: The Times' editorial side went on record with the same position re markets nearly a decade ago.

Fun fact: look at establishment media economics reporting over the years and there's been ~no coverage of the harms of capitalism or neoliberalism.

Fun fact: BezPo's overwhelmingly a POS outlet anyway (yeah, yeah, doesn't make it special in these times).

Not a defense of Bezos in the least because the entire establishment media have been doing the same forever.

And the chaser is that the dick opinion editor who push Ann Telnaes and others out finally found his limit and quit.

Quik-ee update: I remembered to check the T shirt and I like it.

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Well papers used to have a labor section but that died I think mostly before I was born and then was replaced by the business section

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I’m not sure there was all that much labor coverage qua labor coverage. Superficial, maybe dismissive, context-free reporting of strikes.

But reporting on the negatives of capitalism was covered approximately never and definitely since Reagan. That that’s a pretty significant omission says, like, everything.

But here we are and I have no idea whether there’ll be any swinging back of the pendulum to anything better than this anti-democratic Gilded Age 2.0: Where the Wealthy Learned to thoroughly Corrupt the Nation.

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I don't know. I did not read papers in the 1940s and 1950s

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Same here, I was a precocious child, but this did not extend to reading before I was born.

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LAME!

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Lil' Elon was probably reading "Calculus for Zygotes"

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I suppose there was a time when businessmen would read the labor section like farmers read the weather section. To see if there's a storm a-brewin'.

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So what's the point of Bezos' statement? They weren't some bastion of lefty opinion before, now they REALLY won't be? It's dick-waving, "Look at me, I'm in charge!" A shitty editorial page gets somewhat shittier, the Post hemorrhages another couple of hundred thousand subscribers while gaining exactly ZERO Republican subscribers, but what does he care, he's the richest man in the world not named Elon.

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Sorry, not a Bezos whisperer or whatever. I assume it’s a statement to Trump that media shitheads think is of some importance.

When one’s bias skews towards believing all establishment news media are net harmful, anything and everything re BezPo is unimportant BS. I mean, I really don’t care.

Besides, I have enough trouble juggling mixed emotions shopping Amazon.

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That's OK, I'll care enough for the both of us. I'll care about the reporters doing actual reporting who will be laid off after the inevitable subscriber losses and the complete failure of moderate Republican subscribers to materialize to take their place.

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I’ll bite: what do you call real reporting? And an imploding profession has been a problem for decades on the print side and is now becoming one on TV as audiences shrink there. As for Bex.zPo, it’s been losing — repelling — its readership for months.

As for reporting, this what they have or haven’t reported: no honest reporting on capitalism and neoliberalism ever: with the exception of Vietnam, no honest reporting on any thing national security related; pro-Republican biases and giving the GOP undeserved passes, like on state gerrymandering for one thing; no reporting in 2015-16 that Trump was historically unfit for office and yet more so post J6.

Personally, I wish unemployment on no one with too few exceptions to matter. But these guys went to J school then decided they had no problem misinforming people on important issues as SOP.ugh. Talk about mixed emotions…

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Well, I no longer have a subscription, but I guess if I took a copy of today's WaPo I could find one or two stories that are basic factual reporting on something that actually happened. Perhaps soon, the person who did that will be unemployed. The people peddling bullshit, however, will always land on their feet in some right-wing sinecure.

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Sure, everyone runs exceptions to the rule. The problem is on net they do more harm than good.

And all the BS chases the audience away. BezPo’s big drop is when Telnet’s got sacked and others on the editorial side quit.

Y’all think I rant about our leadership class being (net) sociopaths I’m joking or whatever. I’m totally not.

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People doing legit good reporting are either the rare exception to the rule or are niche outlets like TPM, Bolts or ProPublica.

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You think so? The City Council meets to talk about street repairs, some poor schmuck has to go to the meeting and report how they voted. That's probably most reporting, just by sheer bulk.

The House voted on a Republican budget plan. What was the vote count, what was in the bill? The stories I read had the basics, one had a quote from Steve Scalise which was a lie because Steve Scalise is a fucking liar, and it's true the reporter didn't include "Steve Scalise is a fucking liar" in their article, but they did include enough information so that anyone could easily draw that conclusion if they didn't have some powerful reason not to draw that conclusion.

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Glad to hear Buff found a spot at the Pentagon. But it was “voluminous folds” that really kicked my morning into gear.

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Reminded me of the nuns who always managed to bring forth the kleenex or safety pin or whatever from their hidden recesses.

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Holy shit - I'm rich ! I got an old dresser out in the garage full of shirts like that! I usually use them for stripping furniture or cleaning up after the dogs when they have diarrhea. Not anymore! All that distressed

cotton is going to have me farting through silk!

Good column, funny! Or funny as you can get about the unimaginably wealthy ruining the entire world due to avarice and a lack of imagination.

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Yeah I saw that bit about personal liberties and free markets. My first thought was, oh, so McMegan’s going to be the new opinions section editor.

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I read about the allegedly unpleasant staff meeting concerning this and imagined McArdle there suppressing her urge to cheer.

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I saw something from a WaPo reporter saying that if Bezos did anything to limit the reporting on the news side, she'd quit. I know it's become a cliché, but I thought, first they come for the opinion page, but I don't work for the opinion page...

But I get that's it's not easy to quit your publishing job when there are so few publishing jobs and making the rent in metro D.C. is not an easy thing either. Although it's likely a lot of those reporters are trust fund kids or they wouldn't be able to afford it anyway. I'm sure it's not easy for them to give up the social perks. So most people will comply and stew in their toxic work environment until the guys in the yellow hazmat suits come for them.

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I'm sure Bezos would just replace her with some AI slop, because THE FUTURE.

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A Grenfell in every town and a salmonella chicken in every pot!

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Just think of how Tubby will interpret "personal liberties." No Bonwits changing room will be safe.

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3hEdited

Some Trump administration jackass was criticizing Biden's response to bird flu, saying "They just randomly killed every chicken within a certain radius if you found one sick chicken." And I thought, RANDOMLY? Like did they kill every third chicken? Did they make the chickens draw straws? Was it like the chicken version of Paths of Glory?

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All I ever wanted,

all I ever wanted

all I ever wanted was to be your spine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZkEob55qso

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Fucking hilarious, and I’m looking forward to the viral videos Buff will make when he gets back from the Funny Farm—a breakdown that could have been avoided if liebrals had just done Trump’s bidding.

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Bezos never found out that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Even before that the Chi-coms swapped their Mao jackets for Brooks Brothers and hung the Open For Business sign. Vietnam became a go-to spot for cheap, docile labor in multinational assembly plants. Cuba, and Venezuela try to keep the old red flag aloft, but remain impoverished anachronisms. North Korea is a wild card...and that's about it for the Marxist threat of world domination. Jeff could have read about it in that newspaper he bought. Hell, he owns it, so he could have asked some of the old sweats in the newsroom.

Kids these days.

They just don't want to learn.

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As a card-carrying lie-bral, I won't stop until all of us are turning our Webers into blast furnaces and making backyard steel. Talk about making America great again!

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Excuse me, small-batch artisanal steel

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You can't make much of it but you can charge whatever you like! Let the free market rule!

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We used to get USian steel tubing in small batches that was more expensive than French or British. But it was higher quality than the foreign stuff.

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Was it that fancy-schmancy double-butted stuff? Can't beat the double-butted!

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I do sometimes walk around with a laptop slung around my neck, my mark of shame, so the other villagers may spit on me for being an intellectual. It's in a rather nice leather case I bought on Amazon.

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You don't need a blast furnace to make backyard steel. You just need a fairly small bloomery. One of my students made a Catalan bloomery furnace that was only about 5 feet high and maybe 2 feet x 2 feet on the base

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"Catalan Bloomery" sounds like the title of an Almodovar movie set in the last decade of the nineteenth century (with Penelope Cruz, of course).

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Love was a -bloomin' at the Catalan Bloomery

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How was the steel?

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Bittersweet

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My latest fascination, a German YouTube series, Handwerkskunst, about people who make stuff by hand. This guy makes his own iron, then makes it into knives. If you want to try this yourself, be prepared to do a LOT of hammering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Y1UjJvmBs

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My brother-in-law is gonna love this.

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Oh, it's gonna suck up HOURS of his life. I hope he didn't have anything important he needed to do.

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Yeah, well, the glorious people’s cause is just biding it’s time! We’re posing as obedient wage slaves, but the vanguard will emerge when the bourgeois least expect it! BTW, I’m going to Trier, the illustrious birthplace of Karl Marx, and I fully expect to come back with a tshirt with his face on it, because that is probably what one does.

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No doubt Main Street Trier is lined with Karl Marx souvenir shops. Don't sleep on the wall clock with the swinging beard that emits a quote every hour on the hour. "It's one o'clock. You have nothing to lose but your chains."

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"It's midnight and you should be in bed, have some opiate of the masses."

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It looks like Trier has a bunch of Roman stuff, along with Karl Marx house and the Fell Exhibition Slate Mine is not too far away. There also is a sculpture memorializing the deportation of the Sinti and Romany. I did not see a t-shirt, but Marx commemorative Euros and Deutsche Marks look good

https://triershop.de/shop/en/karl-marx-souvenirs/

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Seriously considering buying the cookie cutter.

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!!! Wow, that's kinda awesome. If we ever made cookies that required a cutter, that's the one I'd use.

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As long as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau still stands, the war against Communism is not won.

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I will sleep well at night only when I know my credit card company is screwing me royally.

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So you have been sleeping like a baby since you first got a credit card

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Somewhere, VISA is beatin' up a guy...

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Put another way, if the caviar on Jamie Dimons Gulfstream V isn't served at the optimal temperature, the dirty Bolsheviks have won.

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Jamie recently says he approves of the Trump-Musk-DOGEbags as government is inefficient. I presume he means that the 20% profit he takes is the key to the economy

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6hEdited

Musk lying about an $8 million cut and saying it's $8 billion, why should I care? Hell, I wish EVERY cut was a lie, and the government could just continue to function normally. But if I was one of those heartless fucks who lives for budget cuts, I'd be damn angry about this, don't fuck with me about the numbers, I want REAL cuts reported with REAL numbers.

The fact that zero deficit hawks have complained about this just proves they were always full of shit. As long as liberals are mad and people are being hurt, they don't fucking care.

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The pattern on Bez-elious Windrip's shirt looks like that kind of wallpaper you see in a Victorian-era house's parlor, stuffed full of knickknacks, cuspidors, ferns and oversize Chinese pottery.

Since he's adopted the Washington Times editorial line why he doesn't just buy it off the Moonies and shut it down I have no idea.

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It's why JoAnn Fabrics went out of business.

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REBID's following the script: first the Senatorial equine, then the orgies.

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He's leading a military expedition to the beach at Mar a Lago, where he will STEAL ALL OF NEPTUNES SEA SHELLS.

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I'll start, as always, with the fashion. Chafe's shirt. Jesus wept. But that was far from the only visual atrocity. I should sue you for the images introduced into my brain. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who could make a claim for PTSD.

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It's still February; why is he wearing a summer weight *linen* suit?

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Obama made a mistake like that, and he PAID.

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The Day The Menswear Died

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Buy, buy, missed American tie!

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Much hair and fat?

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"NOW EVEN MORE THAN BEFORE, ENJOY ADDITIONAL HOLES, DISTRESS, TEARS AND IMPERFECTIONS THROUGHOUT THE BODY AND GRAPHIC."

Wow! Now every time I spill mustard on my shirt it makes it UNIQUE AND VALUABLE! One of a kind! I mean, sure, "personal liberty" won't go so far as your gender expression or alternative economic systems, but we'll always have commodity individualism!

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Maybe you've got the time to spill mustard on your own shirt, slacker, but thanks to the new focus on personal liberties and free markets, I'm going places.

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THE MARKET HAS SPOKEN AND WE MUST FOLLOW

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“An effective brute loved by millions!”

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12hEdited

The Guardian, which I mostly love, has a gang of opinion columnists who are always doing this, criticizing while pumping him up. A recent example: "Under Trump's Blizzard of Bullshit, Europe is on its knees." Now, sure, 2 marks for "Blizzard of Bullshit", you can always get me with the cheap alliteration, but how the fuck is Europe "on its knees"? The newly elected German Chancellor is saying, "Eh, guess we'll have to form our own military alliance now that we can no longer rely on America." Oh, great, a new military alliance led by the Germans, can't see that going wrong in any way.

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That was Andre the Giant playing Fezzik not Trump. DJT is ineffective

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Seems like "destructive" and "effective" shouldn't be synonyms.

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Unless Schumpeter is saying that

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Roy always describes the news anchors' clothing, adding links. Great fun ...

Re: "distressed" clothing: my peeve is "relic" guitars. For a long while now, builders have been selling electrics that are supposed to look like a pro spent years on the road with them. They are hard to avoid, as I found out buying my $4,000 vintage-reissue Jaguar; I chose the lightest level of fake, since they are not made pristine.

As the proud owner of a 1990 Stratocaster that I weathered and customized myself, I have some thoughts.

(1) You can't fake the competence that comes with weathering one yourself.

(2) Buying a guitar that somebody else weathered is cool, I fully approve.

(3) Off-the-shelf "relic" guitars should be available, but less common.

(4) Buying a instrument made to look like Flea's or Stevie Ray's is lame. The same would be true of clothing. Do it if you want Sid Vicious, say, rolling in his grave.

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Yeah, that "relic" thing irks me too. It does remind me of a time when we went to a bunch of different vintage clothing places and learned that there are some who take only "vintage" but not "retro", and vice versa.

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Jesus, Roy. The 60 cycle hum underlying the intro "music" was *chef's kiss*, and really set the tone for the rest of the article.

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It's got a nice beat and you can dance to it!

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I'd give it an 84

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What th - is that like celsius and fahrenheit?

60 is to 84 as Nixon is to Reagan?

LX=quatre vingt quatre?

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Hi, folks. I'm the guy who raised the Social Security alarm yesterday. Went to our local office, turns out it was a pure clerical error. The notice we were sent was phrased in completely misleading fashion. Many apologies for raising a false alarm, and many thanks for everyone's kind words. It's a symptom of where we are that I assumed it to be the work of our otherwise faultless administration. Thanks again.

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Well, if it means anything, mine came in as usual this month.

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Dry run?

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I honestly don't think so. The way the woman at the office explained it, the benefit hadn't been cut, the notice was just phrased in a manner than made us believe it had been. But, of course, there are times when paranoia is the only rational response.

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Well, hasn't been cut, yet

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You any kin ta that there Debbie Downer lady?

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Whew!

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You'd be surprised how much they can reduce the number of Social Security recipients just from the resulting heart attacks. They've got statistics on it.

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Statistics you paid for but cannot see.

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Phew! Not gonna toss my paranoia into the trash just yet, I think I'll keep it somewhere handy...

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To paraphrase Lily Tomlin, no matter how paranoid you get you can't keep up.

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How did Lily know about ED

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What was it supposed to mean?

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The rule says that if a spouse's benefits are less than one-half the amount of the spouse with the greater benefit, s/he gets the one-half instead. That's the case with my wife.

The notice said that because of an (unnamed) error, her benefit had been changed to x, which was $600 less than what she was getting from that one-half amount. Turns out it was only referring to that part of the benefit that was over and above the benefit from her job--but it didn't say that. So, basically, we panicked. The punch line was that the change in her benefit was an INcrease of (ready?) thirty cents per month.

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Spam email from our new Social Security: "You may have already lost!"

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Tubby has accomplished the feat of making all of us, no matter the political stripe, suspicious that every federal worker is dumb, lazy, or evil. And as king of the federal workers, he himself embodies all three, in bucketfuls.

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Inside Scoop : 'Made Worn' is how Chafe refers to Peoni behind her back, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Rode hard and put up wet.

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I think there was a swapping of Buff and Bolt's names in the stage direction, and I decided I liked it, even if I imagined it. Its a nice invocation of the blurring of reality we're all going to get very used to soon enough. I'm starting to feel sorry for Buff, I hope they get his meds balanced soon. Excitable boy, they all said.

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I'm always grateful for corrections but I'm not seeing this. Can you specify?

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After Peoni suggests that Buff's career has been stressful, too. The stage direction says "UPRIGHT looks skyward," while you mean Toehold. I was a little disoriented when I read it, but I'm okay now, thanks.

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Fixed, thanks. I'll have a word with the staff. [CUT TO me staring in the mirror like Nicholson in The Shining.]

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When one of your daily installments comes out "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy", then we'll start to worry.

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I just like the image of faces blurring in and out like some Cronenberg movie where the people in the room start turning into each other.

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So my suspension of disbelief was destroyed by my knowledge of the Wyoming University system

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Explain please!

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Sure. Wyoming has one state University. The University of Wyoming. There are 8 Community Colleges spread throughout the state. There is one private Catholic College and a tribal college along with a for profit Technical College

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I thought "Barium State" was that libertarian fake college in Austin.

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Although there's some fun Kristi Noem punnery around "Barium".

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In Wyoming you do your punnery around Liz Cheney or Alan Simpson

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In Wyoming, cows poke YOU!

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No, that's Bari, ummm State

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