The Decider stomps on the terra firma once again

In case you haven't noticed, George W. Bush - still swaggering around like a goddamned washed up peacock that was run out of the flock years ago - the previous unelected resident of the White House, has been peddling a boatload of unbearably stinking revisionist  vomitus...conjured up by his ghostwriter.


How does he walk through the world? 'The Editors' at Esquire Magazine want to know. Interesting that the 'Editors' declined to identify themselves editorially. Oh, never mind. Not particularly interesting. Move along. Nothing to see here.

His two wars drag on, as does his vandal's contempt for the rule of law. His economic intemperance and neglect live still as a consuming dry rot. New Orleans remains a shadowed, haunted place. One of the most poignant sights in the world is in the lower Ninth Ward, where, block after block, there's nothing left of the houses except the front steps. Little stairways to nowhere. That is the country he left behind.

How does he walk through the world?

T-Bone Walker: Live 1967

Saw this legendary guitarist perform at a prom dance once upon a time...

Math is easy

See?

Easy bar bets: God has a plan for these losers

Nate Silver - the statistician brainiac over there doing his 538 column at the NYT - brings some welcome hopey-changey:

The table below compiles a number of statistics related to prospective G.O.P. candidates in 2012. Moving from left to right, we have their current chance of winning the nomination according to the political futures market Intrade; the candidate’s current “power ranking” according to the National Journal’s Hotline, their average standing in five recent polls of prospective Republican primary voters (I don’t use the recent Zogby Interactive poll — we don’t consider Zogby’s online polls to be scientific), and favorability ratings among Republican adults according to the recent A.P.-G.f.K. survey.

<Nate Silver>

Love me some Johnny A.

The world according to some cynical densepack

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You are dreaming of Bali

Postcard from Bali from Stephan Kot.

The enabling of Rush Limbaugh: the Vulgar pigboy

President Obama lowered taxes. Why doesn't the country know that? Rick Perlstein on how Rush Limbaugh helped mislead a nation—and why the Democrats let him get away with it.

We live in a mendocracy. As in: rule by liars. Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday. 

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—"civil," just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows. And it was all too predictable.

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