Ryan will serve the remainder of his term, and he told reporters he would remain as speaker through that period. “We all know that I did not seek this job. I took it reluctantly,” said Ryan, but, “I have no regret whatsoever for accepting this responsibility. This has been one of the two greatest honors of my life.”
Facebook says its mission is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” Yet the longer I use Facebook, the more I realize I really don’t want to draw “closer together” with some of my Facebook friends—the vast majority of whom aren’t actual friends in the ordinary use of the term, but rather a collection of former coworkers, casual acquaintances, and high-school classmates from more than two decades ago.
Ryan’s district might not be competitive if the national environment was neutral. Wisconsin’s 1st District moved right in the 2016 election. Trump won the district by 10 points after Romney took it only by four points in 2012 (though 2012 may be an odd case because Ryan was the GOP’s vice presidential nominee). And in 2008, Barack Obama won the area by about three points while winning the national popular vote by seven, suggesting that it took a real step to the right over the course of the last four to eight years. If you add that to Ryan’s incumbency advantage, you get a district that would’t typically be near the boottom of the GOP’s list of worries.
Like the bigots of the 1940s who attacked Orwell, today’s white supremacists responded to Peterson’s article with anti-Semitic bile. They resented the psychologist calling them “ever-so-pathological.” Nor did they much like him describing their ideas as “the lowest form of intellectual enterprise.” Especially hateful to them was Peterson’s flattering portrayal of Jews as intelligent, studious, and open to new experiences.
Let’s start with the obvious: Andre the Giant, subject of a new documentary from HBO, was huge. The wrestler seemed almost to have stepped out of legend or myth. Billed at a whopping 7-foot-4 and 477 pounds, he was a veritable Grendel, with deep-set eyes, frizzy hair, and a protruding jaw. Dubbed by promoters the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” he wore size-24 shoes and a size-24 ring, and his wrists were nearly 12 inches in circumference. In addition to the incredible diet necessary to sustain such mass, he could consume, according to some estimates, up to 7,000 calories of alcohol a day. In a career spanning 27 years, six continents, and over 5,000 matches, he became a cherished icon of professional wrestling—and was arguably among the most influential athletes of the 20th century.
In Russia, sandwich cook you! I don’t even know what to make of this image: a Russian man hotwiring a …sandwich.
“Every day for six years, I brushed my teeth, I got in my car, and I looked for pickles,” Speaking of weird stories involving food, here’s one out of my former hometown of Saint Louis, Missouri. A random pickle jar on the side of the highway that’s been in thesame location for years.
This Safeway needs a name. If you’re not a denizen of The Swamp™, you probably don’t know that Washington’s Safeway grocery stores often have nicknames. Erick Erickson met with a member of Congress at one nameless Safeway to do some shopping,and record the representative’s thoughts on President Trump.
He is not happy with President Trump. He was never a die hard Trump supporter. He supported him in the general and never expected him to win. But he did. So the congressman, whose district Trump won, has been a regular supporter on Fox News and elsewhere defending the President. He is happy to be quoted, so long as I don't name him. He says he just needs to vent. I suggest what we're doing is one of the reasons Trump won -- a congressman says nice things in public and bad things in private.
If youread the whole thing, you’ll see that it’s...spicy. So, what do we call this Safeway? A friend suggested the “Sh*t Talk Safeway” while anothersuggested “Sockpuppet Safeway.” Will Erick Erickson reveal which Safeway it was?
span style="color: #000000;">Sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg? That’s what the ever-talented Matthew Walther isexpressing over at The Week as the tech billionaire is grilled by members of Congress:
The only really important question of the day came from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who asked, "Do you think the average consumer understands what they are signing up for?"
Of course she doesn't. Very few of the more than one billion Facebook users have even the remotest sense of what is actually involved in the creation and maintenance of even a very simple website, much less an acute appreciation of what happens to the information that we share with a thousand different entities every time we so much as search for a book on Amazon or Google "King Crimson discography ranked." Many of us are becoming slightly more aware of just how powerful the tools employed to harvest our whims and queries have become in recent years; everyone has his favorite story of searching for or even having a conversation about a product only to find his inbox inundated with related 15 percent off solicitations.
I feel for the guy, too. Imagine having elected officialsask you about Diamond & Silk. And not as some sort of joke.
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