A devout young man joined a religious order in a monastery where he took a vow of silence, under which he was allowed to say one word for each year of successful service—one word for the first year, two for the second, and so on.
At the end of his first year he came for his audience with the Father, who said, “My son, you have successfully completed one year of service. Do you have anything you would like to say?”
The young man opened his mouth, pointed to an upper left molar and said, “Hurts.”
He was sent to the clinic, his badly abscessed tooth was removed, and he returned to his duties.
At the end of the second year, the young man came for his audience and the Father said, “My son, you have successfully completed two years of service. Do you have anything you would like to say?”
The young man pointed to his shoes and said, “Too… tight.”
He was sent to the commissary and given a proper-fitting pair of shoes. His infected blisters healed and he resumed his duties.
At the end of his third year the young man came for his audience and the Father said, “My son, you have successfully complted three years of service. Do you have anything you would like to say?”
The young man said, “Want… to… quit.”
“I’m not surprised,” the Father replied. “You’ve done nothing but bitch since you came here.”
—Brian Kahn
Real Common Sense
The outsize Republican idolatry of Reagan is explained in part by the fact that there’s no one else in their history of whom they can really approve. The Bushes are a bad memory for most, Ford was a non-entity and Nixon was Nixon. Eisenhower looks pretty good on most historical rankings, but he’s anathema to movement conservatives: Eisenhower Republicans were what are now called RINOs. Going back a century, and skipping some failures/nonentities, Theodore Roosevelt is problematic for related but different reasons. Going right back to the beginning, and skipping more nonentities and disappointments, some Repubs still try to claim the mantle of the “Party of Lincoln” but that doesn’t pass the laugh test. As many others have observed, the “Party of Jefferson Davis” is closer to the mark. So, they have little choice but to present Reagan as the savior of the nation.
Henry V is a very favorite monarch with the English nation, and he appears to have been also a favorite with Shakespeare, who labors hard to apologize for the actions of the king, by showing us the character of the man, as “the king of good fellows.” He scarcely deserves this honor. He was fond of war and low company:—we know little else of him. He was careless, dissolute, and ambitious—idle, or doing mischief. In private, he seemed to have no idea of the common decencies of life, which he subjected to a kind of regal license; in public affairs, he seemed to have no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force, glossed over with a little religious hypocrisy and archiepiscopal advice. His principles did not change with his situation and professions. His adventure on Gadshill was a prelude to the affair of Agincourt, only a bloodless one; Falstaff was a puny prompter of violence and outrage, compared with the pious and politic Archbishop of Canterbury, who gave the king 
In approaching this subject, let us first address the historical situation of the Obama administration. The task of [presidential] museums, like that of history generally, is to document periods of great change. The task facing the makers of the Obama museum, however, will be pretty much exactly the opposite: how to document a time when America should have changed but didn’t. Its project will be to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over—when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers miming “seriousness” for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in—and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.
From obstructing a jobs bill to put Americans back to work in 2011, to derailing gun control measures any time they reached my desk, I feel blessed to have had such an incredible run of preventing productive policies, and even a few pieces of landmark legislation, from ever passing… Of course, I’m disappointed because I thought I had many more years of impeding accomplishments ahead of me, and I’ll be the first to admit that I never quite managed to stall environmental policies as much as I would have liked. But at the end of the day, I’m very proud of how I helped Congress accomplish so little during my time in office.
You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today’s money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He’s working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.
Query: Is there anyone telling us now that Christie is, or might be, innocent who wasn’t telling us in October 2012 that Mitt Romney was going to win or that the election was “too close to call”?
Marketplace radio 
The United States is in the midst of the most sweeping health insurance expansions and market reforms since the enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Our 2013 survey of the general population in eleven countries—Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—found that US adults were significantly more likely than their counterparts in other countries to forgo care because of cost, to have difficulty paying for care even when insured, and to encounter time-consuming insurance complexity. Signaling the lack of timely access to primary care, adults in the United States and Canada reported long waits to be seen in primary care and high use of hospital emergency departments, compared to other countries. Perhaps not surprisingly, US adults were the most likely to endorse major reforms: Three out of four called for fundamental change or rebuilding.