After spending five years watching a diffident political compromiser campaign for and occupy the White House, Democrats were still shocked that Wednesday's debate didn't reveal Barack Obama: Political Nut-Cutter.
K-pop superstar Park Jae-Sang — known to everyone but his mom as Psy — returned to Seoul, South Korea, yesterday to put on a thank you show for fans, free of charge.
Is Nicki Minaj for real?
Chicago police discovered roughly $10 million worth of pot growing in a field on Chicago's South Side. The plants, some of which were ten feet tall, took up a plot of land the size of two football fields. Even with so much weed, authorities only found the field during a routine helicopter patrol, and even that was mostly due to luck, according to Cook County Sherriff's officer Ed Graney.
Last night, a 2008 speech surfaced of Todd Akin saying, among other ludicrous statements, that doctors perform abortions on women "who are not actually pregnant." Today, Buzzfeed's Rebecca Berg contacted Rep. Akin's campaign for comment and, guess what, they're standing by the comments, if not Akin's exact phrasing.
The first debate of the 2012 general election season—the one that will fundamentally alter the direction of this race even though both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are terrible debaters who will lose to each other—is upon us. So settle in to your couch, open a beer, review your debate drinking game rules, and let Max Read and I "liveblog"—that's a dead technology from the days before Twitter—the action for you. Let the zingers fly! (No seriously you can watch the ball game and just check in here; we'll keep you updated.)
If Mitt Romney, who never makes any mistakes, gives a subpar performance at tonight's debate, we'll all know why: he, like Rick Perry before him, was just too tired. According to a report from Buzzfeed, Mitt got almost no sleep Monday night. The cause? A loud train near the candidate's Denver hotel:
Remember the George W. Bush years? They almost seem like a bad dream, don't they? Years of terror, and militarism, and war, and unaccountability, and even, perhaps most repugnant, years of torture of foreign prisoners by we, the Americans, the beacons of freedom. Well, the Bush years have thankfully passed. And now, Americans like torture even more.
When I was a young boy my father's best friend, Art, lived in Alabama, and every now and again my family and I would travel from Arizona to spend a week visiting him at his lake house. On one of those trips, on the way back from an errand to buy ice, my dad and I pulled over for a quick bite at a roadside shack advertising catfish fritters. At that point, most of my life had been spent in Saudi Arabia and Arizona, where I could count the number of black children in my elementary school on one hand, and without using my thumb. Alabama was different. Black people were everywhere, though not in Art's neighborhood, and on that day, on the back patio of that fish shack, I recognized code-switching for the very first time.
To briefly recap: America is currently in a student loan bubble, holding an unimaginably huge amount of student debt, as delinquency of loan payments swells, and even the well-off question whether they can afford college. It would seem, then, rather obvious that student loan debt is too big. Surprise: the people who control the higher education spigot—college admissions directors—disagree!
A driver traveling from Taunton in Massachusetts to East Providence, Rhode Island, accidentally ran over a dog at 50 miles per hour.
Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the middle of his "I Got the Maid Pregnant and Wrote a Book About It" press tour, during which he's been candid with interviewers about his inner turmoil. (Yes, when your wife starts asking about your illegitimate son, things get rocky.)
Following the release of secretly recorded footage from a $50,000-a-plate Mitt Romney fundraiser, in which the GOP's presidential nominee can be heard blasting 47 percent of all voters for believing "they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," subsequent media coverage may have given a casual observer the impression that Romney had all but forfeited the race.
It's no secret that the Washington Post Company, home to one of America's most important and revered newspapers, is floundering. The company's once booming education business, Kaplan, has cooled significantly in recent quarters, and ad revenues in both print and online are also down. Fighting to keep its head above water, the Post Co. has now done what many dying people do: turned to hospice care.
