The long road to economic ruin begins with a single ludicrous step… Martina Phelps says the Seattle City Council’s historic vote Monday to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour could change her life. Phelps, 22, earns $9.47 per hour working for a McDonald’s restaurant near downtown. She wants to move out of her mother’s South Seattle home, and she wants to go back to school. She says those

Quick point of correction in re: the title and much of the reporting on this story, and one that is crucial. Bergdahl was being held not by the Taliban, but by the Haqqani Network, placed on the terror watch list by Hillary Clinton. This was not a POW swap, therefore, no matter how they try to pretend otherwise. This was a deal made with identified terrorists for a deserter. Time:

Dear John Boehner, et al., President Obama’s use of the EPA — and frankly, his misuse of the entire administrative state (itself constitutionally dubious if not downright anathema to representative republicanism) — is not an attempt to clean the air or clean the water.  As a developed, industrialized nation, the US already has the luxury of clean air and clean water, made possible, ironically, by the very riches its history

Never again?  WFB: Temple University is seeking to reassure donors and top officials after a member of its staff engaged in anti-Semitic rhetoric on a secret listserv and questioned the deaths of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Temple president Neil Theobald blasted out a message to university trustees over the weekend after the school came under fire for initially defending the controversial professor in comments made to the Washington Free Beacon. Temple

Well, perhaps “explains” is too charitable. Let’s go with “eventually tries to turn the actions of the Obama Administration into an indictment of the Bush administration, to hilarious, bumbling results”: Christ. People voluntarily vote this dessicated, bug-eyed saddle bag into office repeatedly — and give here tremendous power as leader of the House minority. If that isn’t an indictment on the surreal state of American politics, I don’t know what

Basing my emotional reaction off of a WaPo story, and off of my own attempts to put myself in the (unimaginable) position of Bowe Bergdahl’s father, I was willing to apportion him some measure of sympathy.  After all, the love I have for my sons would probably lead me to do things that under other circumstances would be unconscionable, if it meant saving them.  However, if as early as 2012,

Look:  I’m inclined to be more forgiving to the parents of a young man who’d been taken prisoner for being a naive, snot-nosed, entitled, ruthlessly indoctrinated piece of self-loathing shit.  We’d all — well, most of us (Amanda Marcotte and others like her tend to view offspring as monsters out to steal the joy of having no real responsibilities and a drawer full of unimaginably stained sex toys that needn’t