“Context” is not a safe word that makes all your other horse-shit statements disappear. And horse-shit is the context in which Richard Cohen has, for all these years, wallowed. It is horse-shit to claim that store owners are right to discriminate against black males. It is horse-shit to claim Trayvon Martin was wearing the uniform of criminals. It is horse-shit to subject your young female co-workers to “a hostile work environment.” It is horse-shit to expend precious newsprint lamenting the days when slovenly old dudes had their pick of 20-year-old women. It is horse-shit to defend a rapist on the run because you like The Pianist. And it is horse-shit for Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher, to praise a column with the kind of factual error that would embarrass a j-school student.

Richard Cohen’s unfortunate career is the proper context to understand his column today and the wide outrage that’s greeted it. We are being told that Cohen finds it “hurtful” to be called racist. I am sorry that people on the Internet have hurt Richard Cohen’s feelings. I find it “hurtful” that Cohen endorses the police profiling my son. I find it eternally “hurtful” that the police, following that same logic, killed one of my friends. I find it hurtful to tell my students that, even in this modern age, vending horse-shit is still an esteemed and lucrative profession.

Ta-Nehisi Coates puts Richard Cohen and a lot of other bullshit into crystalline context in 245 words. That, ladies and gentlemen, is writing.

[…] 4. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that in FY 2014 (which runs from October 2013 through September 2014), total federal income will be $3,042 billion and total spending will be $3,602 billion, a difference of $560 billion.

5. This is the amount of debt we need to issue to pay for everything in the budget, which means that if the debt limit isn’t raised, we need to immediately cut spending by $560 billion, or $46 billion per month.

6. That’s roughly the equivalent of wiping out the entire Defense Department; or wiping out two-thirds of Social Security; or wiping out all of Medicaid + all unemployment insurance + all food assistance + all veterans’ benefits.

Kevin Drum, excerpted from a longer “10 sentences about” piece on the debt ceiling breach.

He’s right, of course, but I think he also touches on exactly the sort of messaging that’s required here by the Democrats. Out there, every day, saying “why does the GOP want to eliminate the Defense Department?” until people just can’t stand to hear it anymore. Then you say it 10,000,000 more times. Then, when the lunatic wing of the GOP relents or is bypassed by some less pure version of democracy in the House than “the majority of the majority party rule,” you continue to say “why did they want to eliminate the Defense Department? Can we trust a party that would take away all veterans benefits over some sort of party ideological purity test?” You continue saying something like that for at least 20 years, after which it might start to sink in.

This doesn’t seem so hard to understand, but The Democrat still doesn’t seem to get it.

You should thank God [for bank bailouts]. Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies. There’s danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be,’ […] At a certain place you’ve got to say to [those] people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.’

Charles Munger, billionaire vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., in a discussion at the University of Michigan on Sept. 14.

Would be breathtaking if the view weren’t so pervasive. The rest are just smart enough not to say it. We can all rest easy in the knowledge that Charlie will never, ever have to suck it up and cope about anything. Such a thing just wouldn’t be moral.

Source: bloomberg.com

We went for a drive in the desert and a little woo-poo. We really tied one on. We started shooting up a little town – Indio, I think it was; I don’t know where the hell we were – with a couple of .38s Frank [Sinatra] kept in the vanity compartment. We were both cock-eyed. We shot out streetlights, store windows. God knows how we got away with it. I guess Frank knew somebody! Somebody with a badge. He usually did.

Ava Gardner, describing a few of her days with Frank Sinatra circa 1949.

The NFL and Uber

The N.F.L. players association hopes to address [the recent rash in player drunk driving] in a new partnership it has formed with the technology firm Uber, which makes a smartphone app that acts as a digital dispatcher for people looking for a taxi or a car service.

[…]

Because Uber relies on G.P.S., players will not need to know the precise address of their location to get a ride home.

Further proof that there’s drunk, and then there’s drunk.

Players will be offered $200 in credits as an inducement to use the service, which begins next week.

Let’s all take a moment to recall that most active players in the NFL are a millionaire or should be in short order; I believe the lowest possible salary for a non-practice squad rookie player is currently ~$405,000 a year. This rises to over $800k/yr once you have put in any kind of service in the league beyond one season. Let’s face it: most, if not all of them could easily afford to employ a full-time driver. When you’ve already got a ready-made entourage of hangers-on, as seemingly all NFL players do, why not just pay one of them not to drink and do all the driving? Hell, pay two and they can take turns with the not-drinking. Who could refuse $60k/yr with benefits to haul Tim Tebow around between bars and shady “motels”? ‘Merica needs jobs, after all.

The NFL and Uber

History’s Greatest Monster

Reince Priebus (Chairman of the RNC): [Obama is] the king of golf and vacations!
Sad Reality: Obama would have to take off the next 2.5 years in order to catch up with President George W. Bush’s vacation record. By this time, Bush had taken 349 days off, Obama has taken 96. Even Saint Reagan took 180 days off, about twice Obama’s current tally. The GOP controlled House is out for 5 weeks. Obama is taking 8 days. Move over Jimmy Carter, we’ve truly found History’s Greatest Monster.

At the end of the day, I’m certain our bid was higher and could have been a lot more higher if they had just asked. I’m just stunned. [….] From the beginning, I don’t think they wanted to sell to us.

John Lynch, the chief executive of U-T San Diego, circling back to let us all see the obvious synergies his corporate DNA had with a potential Globe purchase. More Higher! is just the sort of cutting edge construction today’s newspaper business needs in 70 point Comic Sans. That and plenty of boobs on page 2. What else could keep the lights on?

[Nate Silver’s] entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”

Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of the New York Times and quoted on Political Animal by Ed Kilgore, helpfully points out just how fetid a swamp modern “journalism” has become. If you’re not a stenographer, specializing in “horse race […] or ‘punditry’” you need not apply and your brand of, uh, being right and pointing out just how wrong our gang of Wise Serious People are is entirely inconvenient and works against our business model, such as it is. Sad.