Weekend link dump for April 5

Martin O’Malley is running the campaign for president that some folks have been begging Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run.

A writer/producer for Lost explains in depth what was planned and what was made up as they went along.

“LBJ did have some unique abilities that mattered at the margin. But the biggest factor in his legislative success was the simple fact that he was briefly working in a legislative environment that was unusually hospitable to liberalism.”

“Citizenship, rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. More than most historical subjects, how we think about this era truly matters, for it forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be.”

“If you’re an American and haven’t yet created an account at irs.gov, you may want to take care of that before tax fraudsters create an account in your name and steal your personal and tax data in the process.”

“Setting aside the problem that some religious business owners will now think they have a green light to discriminate, the real problem with Indiana’s RIFRA has been less about its substance than its politics – specifically, the motivations of some of its most ardent proponents.”

Three words: Taxidermy clearance sale. With bonus mammoth cloning update. You’re welcome.

From the “Everything old is new again, baseball rule changes” department.

Ease on down, ease on down the road…

“Every single year for the last half-century, Notre Dame has found at least one student who is short, has red hair, can grow a beard, is smart enough to get into Notre Dame, and who is willing to appear on national television dressed up like a cartoon character from a cereal box. That’s amazing.”

“But at bottom, their scriptural objections to homosexuality are no stronger than the scriptural objections to racial integration cited so often in defense of Jim Crow. And like them, the current efforts to identify Christianity with homophobia will look ludicrous and shameful in a generation or less.”

“Their argument is: 1) We must allow religious people to discriminate; and 2) This has nothing to do with discrimination. But both those things can’t simultaneously be true.”

“Oswalt’s hypothetical belief is demonstrably untrue. His proktolatrous metaphysics can be disproved. At some point, he’s bound to fail to be as nice and courteous as the GIA requires, yet when that happens it will not suddenly appear and suck him up to be devoured by the aforementioned pirhanas. When that happens, he will be forced to readjust the eschatology of the GIA, relegating its threatened punishments to some kind of afterlife. He can thus maintain the general idea of rewards and punishments while rendering the system unfalsifiable in this life.” And I miss The Editors, too.

Mashing up classic video games.

RIP, Tom Koch, longtime MAD Magazine writer.

Retired Disney animator Floyd Norman argues for bringing Song of the South out of the vault.

Tom Cotton is a deeply stupid person.

Eireann Dolan is a mensch. So is her boyfriend, Oakland A’s pitcher Sean Dolittle.

RIP, Gary Dahl, inventor of the pet rock. Yeah, we had one back in the day. It was the 70s, man. You had to be there.

“The buying power of the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour today, peaked in 1968, when it was nominally $1.60 an hour. That would be the equivalent of $10.88 today. If the minimum wage had kept pace merely with worker productivity since then, it would be more than $16.54 today. Try proposing a $16.54 minimum wage to the average fast-food franchisee today, and you’ll hear squealing from here to the Chicago stockyards.”

The Yankees are America’s favorite baseball team. So there.

Sign-based smartassery is some of the best smartassery out there.

“Something that can demonstrably change the city, however, will take place this coming Tuesday, April 7: Ferguson will vote in its first local election since [Michael] Brown was killed.”

Science museums should work to de-Kochify themselves.

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One Response to Weekend link dump for April 5

  1. Steven Houston says:

    To put the minimum wage article in perspective, HFD pays trainees and probationary staff less than the $16.54/hr mentioned.

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