Comment pages are delightfully light.
The front page is ~200K, which is good... unless there's an embedded YouTube video, at which point there's an additional 1.5MB of (mostly) JavaScript.
I suppose my employer takes the blame for that.
Shit, unfogged doesn't support the blink tag?
For one brief shining moment, back in the day, it did. Then Ogged reasserted control.
Was that when the comment thread turned into typographical Romper Room? That was so great.
I'm sure we can come up with a 5MB script to get around this Persian tyranny.
Persian tyranny
We! Are! SPARTA THE MINESHAFT!!!!!
I've been playing around with a bunch of different ways to defeat ogged's comment sanitization, but haven't found anything that works yet. Some day, that holy grail, the style attribute, will be ours.
I've said this before, but when I first started using the internet (college, mid-90s), I would generally turn off auto-load of images. They seemed unnecessary and I liked having the control to selective load the images that I chose.
Then, eventually, I lost that habit because a significant number of pages were impossible to navigate without images (which is just laziness because proper ALT attributes would solve that problem). I resented it for a while but eventually just accepted that the web required images.
Then, for a while, I would turn javascript off until the same thing happened -- it became impossible to do basic navigation on some pages without javascript.
These days I use the NoScript plugin which allows me to selectively enable javascript by domain and it really is absurd both how much functionality one loses without javascript and the fact that it's common for a page to have javascript from 15 different domains.
All of this "evolution" has added functionality to the web, but I don't believe that it was driven by the user experience, I think the primary motivation, in both cases, has been serving up ads.
I stopped using NoScript because it was such a pain to selectively enable things on so many pages. I do use Ghostery still.
I stopped using NoScript because it was such a pain to selectively enable things
I'm getting close to doing that and, for now, my back-up is to have a separate browser (Chrome) which doesn't have any script blocking, but which I also don't use much and doesn't have any stored personal data.
I have a blog with what I think of as a decent amount of traffic (a few hundred thousand hits in a month when I'm active, less when I'm not), and stripping out all of that crap has generated more negative responses than anything else I've ever done.
I now get a regular street of emails, tweets, etc., telling me that my page is totally unreadable. But if you look at the actual analytics data and match like to like (e.g., traffic to the same page coming from the same source), people seem to be more engaged. More people read the whole thing, people are more likely to click links, etc.
Despite that, I have an endless stream of designers telling me how terrible my design is (basically no CSS, no webfonts, and certainly no graphics except for relevant graphs in some posts), including a number of people who have told me that my site is offensive. Offensive! I'm starting to get the impression that most designers have no idea what they're talking about, and that design guidelines are just totally made up nonsense.
I don't mean that design is worthless. I'm sure a good designer could design a better site than my CSS-less site. But 99% of designers seem to be full of it.
I'm happy to use AdBlocker. There's one Web site where I feel vaguely guilty because it provides a valuable service and probably costs more to maintain than most, but, hell with it, one ad with sound effects is one too many. I've searched now and then for a plugin or app that blocks suggested posts on Facebook, but (a) it apparently doesn't exist, and (b) I just noticed that "suggested" posts are almost indistinguishable from stuff that my friends have "liked" and went looking for the option to not see that stuff in my news feed and got sidetracked by reading a Cracked article, so maybe PEBCAK.
This works pretty well for a bunch of the obnoxious facebook stuff, though it can only do so much.
Was worried this thread would be about a certain self-published novelist
Is unfogged using both statcounter and google analytics?
Yeah, but no one ever looks at the stats anymore for either AFAIK.
Despite that, I have an endless stream of designers telling me how terrible my design is (basically no CSS, no webfonts, and certainly no graphics except for relevant graphs in some posts), including a number of people who have told me that my site is offensive.
Hmm. That does seem to confirm this speculation in the linked article.
But we face pressure to make these sites bloated.
I bet if you went to a client and presented a 200 kilobyte site template, you'd be fired. Even if it looked great and somehow included all the tracking and ads and social media crap they insisted on putting in. It's just so far out of the realm of the imaginable at this point.
Unfogged was into decluttering before it was fashionable.
My website is crap, but I really don't need 5 emails a week telling me that they can fix it for a small sum . . .
(If it was just up to me, I wouldn't have one at all. I certainly don't expect to get business from people randomly finding my site on the internet. Kids these days, though, need something more than a Martindale entry to believe I actually exist.)
(I'm currently representing a small non-profit in a small billing dispute with their web designer. The designer read my site, and hasn't been insulting about it, but clearly believes I don't know nothing about web design. Hey, guess what, that's not what's important . . .)
The thing that really gets my goat is that the text in websites now loads last instead of first. So you can't even read a page while you wait for all the bloated bullshit to load.
Speaking of the web being broken, why does the back button behave so poorly on Vox's website?
I've had the vague sense now and then that after over a century of advertising as we know it, online analytics are going to reveal that the emperor has no clothes. Nobody ever actually intentionally clicks banner ads. We can measure better than ever how many people see ads and how many people buy things as a result and the ratio is very, very low. And it's only getting worse for advertisers.
I know that advertising isn't going to die in any meaningful sense and it continues to pays off in lots of ways. Maybe hoping that online analytics kills it off is just wishful thinking and schadenfreude at the decline that's already happened.
20: So you prove you exist by a website, just like that guy who faked sources at the New Republic did when proving his fake sources existed.
It's working so far. Even the web designer seems to believe I exist.
22
I blame you for mentioning Vox and making me read this singularly stupid article. It's like they realized they were losing the inane battle to 538 and decided to double down.
My bread is buttered by disagreeing with this, but he says ...
It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year.
and then complains about sites that aren't mostly text. internet.org, which he uses as an example, isn't mostly a text site. It's mostly images, video and a lot of behavior around those assets to produce "experiences". For brochure-style content like internet.org developed for a company like Facebook, the answer to
Why not just serve regular HTML without stuffing it full of useless crap?
is user testing. The target audience of that site is not poor people with bad internet connections in the developing world who are, nominally, the target of the service (internet.org is a horrendous scam, but that's a separate discussion: https://www.techinasia.com/talk/facebooks-internetorg-evil).
With my shitty, old computer, I can barely read many sites. It's not a problem only in the developing world.
Even on my not shitty computer, it was stupid slow over Christmas break when everybody was home all day in my neighborhood.
Even on a fast computer I occasionally have moments when loading a page will cause the entire browser to lock-up for 30-40 seconds, which I assume is caused by some javascript being unable to connect to a target and making everything wait while it times out.
(That's just speculation. For all I know, it could be some javascript going into an infinite loop until the browser kills the process, but it happen often enough to be a familiar experience.)
In my new computer, that happens sometimes. On my old computer, it happens nearly every page.
I'm doing a Wordpress site right now thats using all sorts of big-ass graphics that would have made me feel really guilty at one point. the front page, which is most of the content, is at 1.6 MB. Mostly because of a "hero" image slideshow and also a big-ass background that I need to get the parallax effect working.
In the old days that would have made me shudder, but people aren't on dial-up any more and also, this is a brochure site, so it better look like a nice fucking brochure.
I'm going to tweak it a bit to be smaller for mobile, though.
I sometimes feel the need for something like alt.fan.warlord for websites and/or the moral equivalent of the McQuary limit for them.
The target audience of that site is not poor people with bad internet connections
I agree with you at a high level -- some pages have a lot of page weight because that's somehow necessary, but at around the same time the website obesity talk was given, a page titled "Ludicrously Fast Page Loads - A Guide for Full-Stack Devs" was pinned to the top of HN because people loved it. IIRC, that page weighs in at 5MB, with images hosted on a third-party host that's notoriously slow. When I checked it out on webpagetest, it was something like an order of magnitude slower to display than my site. And that's a guide that's taken seriously about how to make pages load fast!
Page load time not only impacts the obvious stuff, like whether or not people click on ads (or go to checkout and buy things, if it's that kind of site), it also affects the odds that people will come back and interact more in the future. Furthermore, in studies where people are asked their subjective opinions on various factors, including how credible or trustworthy the site is, people find that fast-loading sites are better.
I think that a lot of bloated sites aren't because people did user testing, but because they didn't.
The link in 27 took at least a minute to load (I'm still waiting)
There is a ). at the end of that link, which seems to have broken it.
Internet.org is indeed teh evil. Why don't the people of India understand that Mark Zuckerberg only wants whats best for them?
Its interesting that Unfogged doesn't use gzip compression. Maybe it did, long-ass threads would be quicker to load.
My aging internet devices and bloat have conspired to save me from reading many a Slate article, so there's that.
Embedded tweets are ridiculous. On average, they have to have the lowest signal density in the history of written communication.
40.2: Word. Even without twitter mobs, g/amerg/ate & etc., I would still despise twitter for embedded tweets alone.
The article in the OP was a rollercoaster of mixed feelings.
Before I even read it I thought that the "major works of Russian literature" was a pretentious thing to use as a unit of size. It took my computer a little while to load the image links. I quickly got annoyed at long-windedness; nine examples before he even gets to "Everyone admits there's a problem" is a lot. I wondered if the loading time and long-windedness was intentional. (In hindsight, the loading time was probably not as bad as it seemed, I'll bet it's just that he avoided gaming the SpeedIndex system.) I did enjoy the Taft Test, both as a pure joke and as a halfway-serious suggestion. I began skimming the article for a discussion of the size of this Web page itself, sure that whatever it is, the writer must be making some kind of point with it. I got sidetracked by the proposal for regulation of page layouts, which seems impossible in Saudi Arabia, let alone internationally. There was alarmism about some kind of looming crisis of an ad bubble bursting. It meandered through a bunch of only vaguely related topics, like big but low-resolution images or Web sites designed for both phones and computers. "Chickenshit minimalism" is either badly named or badly described, and I'm leaning towards the former; fake minimalism may be bad but it doesn't have much to do with cowardice.
And I finally got to the end and there was no discussion of the size of the article. No discussion of this page itself at all. I right-clicked on the page and selected Properties. Apparently its size is 69 KB. Good for him, that is indeed small. (But all those images on the side of it are links to much bigger images, which kind of feel like cheating.) I was also curious about the word count, so I tried to copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. Word froze up, probably because it was trying to grab all the images. I found a workaround - copy and paste it into a Web site's text field, namely this comment window, and from there into Word. The word count is 7,600.
As long as we're comparing stuff to great works of literature, that's about a quarter of L'Etranger. A fifth of a short novel isn't as bloated as longer than a long one, but that's still pretty damn bloated. Like the guy redid a Google's AMP page, I'm seriously tempted to redo the text of this article.
*A quarter, not a fifth. I swear I'd put more time into editing his page than I would into editing my comments here.
And I finally got to the end and there was no discussion of the size of the article.
It's a transcript of a talk. The page hosting the text and images didn't exist when he gave it.
The article at the link is a talk with slides. I bet it would load faster if he weren't trying to reproduce the talk, which is to say I wouldn't judge it as something meant to be unillustrated parsimonious text. I certainly think it's easier to read a talk posted like that than on slideshare.
The Gutenberg etext of War and Peace is longer than the Gutenberg etext of Anna Karenina. Way to control bloat, Tolstoy.
(but the javascript is the same)
44/45: Fair enough, admittedly I don't realize that, and that probably is exculpatory because sometimes you need to fill time. If he had been assigned some time slot, padding the speech just makes sense.
All that being said, I don't see how that's better. Drawing out a speech to fill time may be a useful skill but it's not actually good. I had mixed feelings reading a rant like that, but I'd just hate sitting through it.
26: This summary of the supposedly lead/crime-debunking study is possibly more craptastic. The writer doesn't seem the understand the actual theory that's being debunked, and takes the people who did the study at their word. But the new study is far from definitive even on the sliver of evidence that it's allegedly undermining.
It's hard to express just how disappointing Vox has been. It's hard too identify a single axis along which it's been successful.
I don't disagree with 34 and will hopefully have time to say more later. To the extent that pageload vs. fanciness are competing values, most clients will not user test to see which gets better results, because that's expensive. Using pre-fab ui/ux components that mimic the behavior of actually test-driven designed sites, by contrast, is cheap.
Wow, 538 sees 26 and 49 and raises it this:
As more people lose interest in the deficit, Republican policy experts face a conundrum: how to raise alarm about what they still consider to be the government's profligate fiscal policy and how to promote conservative solutions when enthusiasm is waning.How anyone can write this way about Republican deficit hawkery in these terms in 2016 is beyond me. The last 16 years have embodied the truth that Republicans only care about the deficit as a cudgel against Democrats, but there will always be jagoffs like Andrew Flowers to pretend that there's some principled opposition, and not just opportunism. Feh.Timothy Kane, an economist at the conservative Hoover Institution, worries that politicians (of both parties) will kick the can down the road until built-up debt triggers a financial crisis. "Politicians don't care about debt until it's too late," Kane said.
And that's aside from the fact that, rhetoric aside, the last 7-8 years have made really fucking clear that, in raw economic terms, built-up debt never, ever triggers financial crises in countries that borrow in their own currency.
Gah.
I prefer Vox over Salon. Maybe 90% of Salon articles are about how Republicans are stupid and evil. I do not disagree, but I do not learn anything.
I'm not going to even try to read Salon, Slate, or Vox on this old phone.
49: Christ, that article sucked. The last two paragraphs verged on gibberish. The national correlation is literally the least important piece of evidence for the theory.
49: Christ, that article sucked.
The thing that is particularly bad about the article is that it was written after (and references) Kevin Drum's thoughtful, measured response to the study and doesn't seem to have understood any of his points.
It's hard to express just how disappointing Vox has been. It's hard too identify a single axis along which it's been successful.
I somewhat disagree with this, however. My own impression is that vox has been getting better. Over the last couple of months I read 2-3 articles a day and, out of that, there's usually 1-2 a week that I'm actively glad to have read.
That isn't a great success ratio, but most of the others aren't terrible (like the articles mentioned in this thread) they're just typical not-all-that-interesting internet content.
Do the test-driven designs include long load times,third-part served ads, and delayed branded take over images during the tests?
OT: False alarm, everybody! The man across the aisle on the train out of New Haven is not David Brooks after all. Stand down.
Nonetheless I intend to inform this fellow that no one is interested in DB's Yale course on humility. I'm sure he will appreciate the news.
...in raw economic terms, built-up debt never, ever triggers financial crises in countries that borrow in their own currency.
One of the areas I find Krugman disingenuous and not particularly useful. He was rendered almost mute by Crete and Greece. "Well, I suppose the politics is kinda hard."
A financial crisis is always a political event, and avoiding one or escaping one always involves political decisions, with inevitable questions of revaluations and redistributions.
To say the accumulation of debt never has to hurt anyone is wrong, because the accumulation of debt will always be used to hurt someone. We on the left hope rentiers are the ones hurt. Like capital, accumulation itself is power.
Remember back when politics on the Internet used to be awesome? The worst thing you'd read would be some bizarre analysis of the causes of World War One by Stephen den Beste. Now it's all either banal pablum, or delusional insanity from Fox News watchers. The guy who used to write the Poor Man was single-handedly better than the entire output of Vox or 538.
they're just typical not-all-that-interesting internet content
Mouseover text.
Remember back when politics on the Internet used to be awesome?
I think I've mentioned before that I've enjoyed This (as I like to call it, the anti-social social network). In fact this link for this post came from there.
I think they have a reasonable explanation for why things went wrong.
The explanation in 62 is great. The phenomenon itself is terrible, but it's a nice explanation.
However, I don't understand why a publication couldn't get known for producing good content and make money that way. I basically don't read anything from the publications mentioned in the post because they churn out so much crap. I do read a fair amount from a handful of bloggers who regularly produce great content, though. Individually, none of them gets enough traffic to effectively monetize, but they're all almost blogs that are written in someone's spare time. If you collect a group of people who write blogs like and have them write for you, shouldn't you be able to produce enough good work to support a site?
But group blogs that have attempted to do that are usually less successful than individual bloggers, and publications that have tried to do that haven't actually produced good work. What's going on there?
I also like This (from recommendation here I think).
I have images blocked by default on all my browsers, ghostery and yescript on firefox to block the more outrageous javascript; performance without those things is really dramatically worse. It's got so I just won't visit a site if it isn't usable without images. Most of my browsing though is on Opera mini on my phone. Interactive web apps don't really work on it and sometimes the page compression really fucks up presentation, but overall it's great. Firefox for Android was unusably slow and unstable.
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Reptilia S. Serpentes would be a great name for a goth-diaper baby.
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But group blogs that have attempted to do that are usually less successful than individual bloggers, and publications that have tried to do that haven't actually produced good work. What's going on there?
Vox is the poster-child for this. Their problem is that, while they have good pieces, it gets drowned out by the clickbait. The problem is that clickbait is still the most effective means to get clicks, and clicks is what pays the bills.
They've as much as said so - that summarizing John Oliver is what gets clicks.
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If people are watching the debate there was just a really good example of how good Cruz can be on his feet, and why he's dangerous.
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Surely you don't mean the NYT answer. That was the most canned answer of the night so far.
One of the areas I find Krugman disingenuous and not particularly useful. He was rendered almost mute by Crete and Greece. "Well, I suppose the politics is kinda hard."
What? The thing I said that you quote specifically says "borrows in its own currency." If Iceland had borrowed in the Euro, it would have been fucked. But it borrowed in [crowns? chunks of ice? whatever], and it came through like a fucking champ. Greece seems to be sui generis for astonishing levels of bad government ["what? we have to pay taxes? that's crazy talk"], but the fundamental fact is that, unlike the US, they're beholden to someone else's central bank. They couldn't possibly be less relevant. It's like saying that, since Duquesne went bankrupt when steel collapsed, the US is in mortal danger if a single industry goes to hell. The rules are, quite literally, different, and not just because we have a big army.
That said, I don't totally disagree with 59.last. If the GOP wanted to, a big debt could absolutely lead to crisis. But that's a choice. Greece didn't have a choice, because Germany was in control.
60 to 56. Vox should be held to a higher standard.
62.last is indeed very appealing. There are troubles, though, including that publishers who are overproducing are now less good, even in their best pieces, plus IME publishers/bloggers don't always know what their best pieces are.
Indeed, this might be why Vox has published at least one Dems in Disarray piece a week for the last 6 months. They think this is a really important point, so they keep returning to it. I would bet that, in a given week, they're more likely to push one of those pieces than basically anything else. Just like Yggles would push a Luxury Skyscrapers Will Solve Affordable Housing piece every week.
The trouble with all the debt talk was that it was happening at the worst possible time in the business cycle, when a shitty economy was far more of a problem than debt. That was a terrible time to cut the deficit, and it did a lot of damage.
Now that things are finally a bit better we should be looking at ways by which we could start running a modest surplus to work off some of the debt. But its not even on the table right now.
64: If you (or anyone) want to follow me, I'm NickS there as well.
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I did not see Trump's response to Cruz coming, but I think it was kind of brilliant. I'm not sure it'll beat out the dogwhistle involved but it's definitely going to soften it a bunch and Cruz didn't come off looking great either.
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I've probably said this before, but with my habits I don't think This would be anything other than yet another source of links I can't keep up with if I used it.
I have a pretty ravenous appetite for links. I just want them to be better links.
I have a pretty ravenous appetite for hot links.
Iceland... came through like a fucking champ
Agree with you overall, but this isn't really true. They had a severe recession, but much less severe than Greece.
My GOP debate drinking game for tonight: just drink.
#becksstyle
Why are all the people stage left wearing blue ties, and all the people stage right (and Trump) wearing red ones? Was there some kind of agreement ahead of time?
They almost fooled me, but none of the GOP candidates have passed the Turing test. Spambots. Every single goddam one of them.
I'm watching this. I don't think I'll last more than two minutes. The actual booing is nice. Like pro wrestling. Ted Cruz's voice isn't as shitty as I was picturing in my mind.
Jeb sounds like a smart version of his brother.
Don't give up! There are rewards if you hold on for long enough of it!
Mostly those rewards are drinking, I guess, but lots of it!
Also everyone wants to take down Cruz except Cruz and Bush who want to take down Trump.
I can't drink that much because I got up at 4:00 a.m. today and have meetings from 8 to 8 tomorrow. I'm watching the first half hour of Fury Road instead.
Is the guy chained to the front of the paint sniffers's car the male lead?
Republican debate, Fury Road, Dumb and Dumberer. I'm slowly climbing up levels of declining nihilism.
Ted Cruz's voice isn't as shitty as I was picturing in my mind.
I had the same reaction when I heard a snippet on the radio this morning.
I lasted only 15 minutes. I should have just turned it off after Ted Cruz's opening preening and flexing about Iran. God, I hate that guy.
Over/under on what percent of debate watchers, or R primary voters overall, think Iran is still holding the Americans?
Cruz's voice is about as shitty as I imagined- whiny southern drawl with an undercurrent of northeast elitism. Although I didn't detect any notes of Canadian, eh?
I was honestly delighted this morning to see that Cruz and Trump are now birthering *each other*. Dive right in that fever swamp! Go for it!
96: his mother was born in Scotland, which Cruz suggested should disqualify Trump (if Cruz's Canadian birth disqualifies Cruz, which Cruz doesn't think it should). Plus, he's from NYC, which isn't authentically America. (I wish I were making some up this up, but I'm not.)
Wikipedia says he was born in Queens. But his mother was an immigrant because there are some jobs Americans won't do.
Here's a summary: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3400501/Donald-J-Trump-disqualified-extremist-birthers-Canada-born-Ted-Cruz-hits-tormenter-Trump-s-MOTHER-Scottish.html
Pretty sure my answer is the most credible objection.
I was actually surprised at how badly Trump bungled his answer as to why he's raising this issue about Cruz. He actually had a perfectly reasonable response ('reasonable' within the confines of the republican debate)--he doesn't personally care and isn't even sure it's an issue, but there's some uncertainty, and he thinks Democrats will try to sue to block Cruz--but he tripped over himself so badly in spitting out that answer that it really did come across as a nakedly opportunistic attack being launched only because Cruz is gaining on him.
93: I know it was fox business, but it was still pretty shocking that the moderators didn't bother to ask Cruz what he would have done differently / how exactly he thinks Obama should have responded to Iran. Because I'm honestly unclear what he thinks should have happened. Nuclear war?
I thought the lack of follow up might have been because his Iran response was completely off-topic from the question he was asked. I think the candidates may all be figuring that out--if you want to say give an absurd sound bite on which you don't want to have to deal with any follow up, give the sound bite in response to a totally unrelated question. Then the only follow up you might have to deal with is "so do you have any view on [thing I asked you about]?"
105.1: Anybody who knows anything knows that if a real man with genuine Ameritude were President, the Iranians would never have dared to get near our sailors in the first place.
Isn't that the obvious lesson from the Iranian Embassy hostage crisis? Isn't it obvious that the Iranians only did it because the weenie Carter was President? Note that as soon as Reagan was President they couldn't move fast enough to give up the hostages.
106.2: no, I don't think that's obvious.
107: Well, sure, but can't you imagine that someone might sincerely believe that?
108: I can imagine someone sincerely believing anything. That doesn't mean it's not nonsense. And more to the point, I think Cruz should have been required to spell out that that's what he meant, if that's what he meant. He wouldn't have had any different response than Obama, because there wouldn't have been any incident to respond to if he were president, because he's a tough guy. Like Reagan. I don't think candidates should be allowed to get away with vague gestures implying something along those lines--if that's what he meant, he should have been pushed to say it.
I can imagine someone sincerely believing anything
I guess that's right.
Cruz should have come out and said it -- it would have been a huge applause line ..."Let me tell you now.. when Ted Cruz is President no nation will dare to treat our military that way!"
I 'm not sure why I feel like such an expert on this topic. It's not like I watched the debate or anything.
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If bears are your thing you should immediately cease any masturbatory fantasizing about Grizzly Adams.
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109 Oh, come on. All he'd have done is looked into the camera and said "Resolve." And if that didn't get applause, then he would say "Leadership."
Republicans believe in that shit.
But then Trump could say "oh yeah, like that time you repealed Obamacare with Resolve and Leadership?"
I'm not watching this crap, but it seems to me that this may be a better attack on Cruz than his mother's citizenship. Cruz assumed leadership on the effort to repeal O'care. Failed. He's basically no better than Jimmy Carter.
Oh, come on. All he'd have done is looked into the camera and said "Resolve." And if that didn't get applause, then he would say "Leadership."
And if that didn't do the trick he could go to "Strength," and follow it up with "Hear the lamentations of their women."
This vox article on the Republican debate is amusing (I concede, it has a stupid headline, and it's republishing content from somewhere else, but I wouldn't have seen it otherwise, so I'm glad that they did).
The Relevant Organs is great. I was excited to see them tweeting about it last night, since they've been almost silent the past year (to the point I forgot I was following them).
Trump messed up by implying Cruz had become a threat. He should have said he was running out of moles to whack.
115: oh, god, that is hilarious.