Come home, Cracker Barrel, all's forgiven. And as Cracker Barrel's Twitter team seems to be telegraphing with its images, 'This move does not imply that Cracker Barrel is homophobic (note gay married couple playing checkers with their son) or racist (note young black child learning to fire bubble gun in preparation for the inevitable real thing someday). Whoops, obviously we didn't mean that in a racist way.'
If you have not had the misfortune to dine on the meaty, greasy, and yet somehow completely flavorless fare at a Cracker Barrel, you will not know that in order to get to the chow, you must first bob and weave through the world’s most annoying gift shop. It’s filled with overpriced America-esque junk, from made in China pewter cross pendants to made in China sock monkeys.
If you’ve never been there, you will also not have been shocked when Cracker Barrel announced, after GQ published an interview with one Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame, quoting him thusly, that it was pulling DD merchandise from its stores.
Floridians led the nation in signing up for health insurance on the federal exchange since its inception on Oct. 1. Almost 18,000 state residents from all backgrounds have enrolled, despite the refusal of far-right Republican leaders to facilitate access to health care for the uninsured, noted in a recent Tampa Bay Times editorial.
Florida is stuck with a tea party governor who won’t talk and a tea party House speaker who won’t listen. Gov. Rick Scott refuses to repeat his earlier support for Medicaid expansion, and House Speaker Will Weatherford refuses to hear the economic and moral arguments for accepting billions of federal dollars to cover the poor.
But thanks to healthcare.gov, residents don’t need the permission of state officials to do what’s best for themselves and their families. And they are doing just that.
Tampa Bay Times: ‘Florida is stuck with a tea party governor who won’t talk and a tea party House speaker who won’t listen’
Since the site launched at the beginning of October, 281,517 Floridians have taken the first step in applying for coverage and 75,480 are eligible for a subsidy to help pay for it, according to federal health officials… [Navigator Jodi] Ray said Florida applicants don’t fit a particular profile, so far.
“They’re not necessarily the sickly. They’re not necessarily the poor. They’re not necessarily the white or Hispanic. They are a whole range of demographics,” she said.
The numbers show the need among working age people and children. While Florida is first in federal health exchange enrollment, it is fourth in population, with many of its residents seniors who are presumably already covered by Medicare.
One of the many hilarious tweets about the Hobby Lobby case. Too bad it also misses the point.
The wonderful website Wonkette dissected former Sen. Rick Santorum’s (R-Penn.) defense of a case the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to hear, but they only rebutted the most obvious aspect.
The decor and craft merchandiser Hobby Lobby, which employs and targets mostly women, doesn’t think it should have to provide contraceptive healthcare coverage because it is a Christian-owned company. As Wonkette explained:
We are sure that Mr. Santorum would also support an exception where for-profit companies owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t have to buy insurance that covers blood transfusions, and for-profit companies owned by Christian Scientists won’t have to cover anything but a trip to a Reading Room.
You know all those, “Ain’t it awful?” stories you’ve been hearing ad nauseam since the launch of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) website on Oct. 1? Expect to hear not one more word.
Now that things are working great, we’re betting that not only will you never hear again how bad they are, you will also never hear that they’re really super.
Police in Seminole County, Fla. must be getting tired of seeing George Zimmerman’s face. The man who shot and killed the unarmed teen Trayvon Martin and was then acquitted of murder under one of the country’s most lax definitions of self-defense* was arrested again, this time for domestic violence against his current girlfriend. WESH-Orlando:
He was arrested at about 1 p.m. Monday at his girlfriend’s home on Topfield Court in Apopka following a 911 call. Neighbors told WESH 2 News that they didn’t know the woman was dating Zimmerman, and they thought the man might have been an undercover cop because he walked around like an officer.
Neighbors said they thought [Zimmerman] might have been an undercover cop because he walked around like an officer
Neighbors said his truck had been parked in the neighborhood for about a month.
Let’s review.
Zimmerman was let off scotfree for killing Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman was let go without being issued a ticket 15 days after the end of his murder trial, when he was pulled over for speeding in Texas and told the officer he was carrying a gun.
Number of minutes FOX News used to point out that the recent CBS 60 Minutes piece, which was later found to have falsely portrayed events in Benghazi, backed up the Republican portrayal of the incident. That was three times the length of the original 60 Minutes report. Amount of time FOX spent on the subsequent correction: 26 seconds.
When I hear Bush apologize about being wrong about WMDs, I’ll give a shit whether or not Obama said he’s sorry.
@RudePundit, on Twitter, commenting on those being given air time to say Pres. Obama should apologize more because the Affordable Care Act website wasn’t fully functional when the health care exchanges became available on Oct. 1. The toll-free phone number, in-person “navigators,” and other venues in various states worked great on opening day, despite the 17-day tea party led government shutdown that began simultaneously.
Reuters photo shows Christie presumably among the 60% who voted for him and the 44% who said they'd choose him for president over Hillary Clinton in 2016
Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) all but rigged his recent landslide re-election victory, but you know what makes a better story? See if these themes sound familiar:
Sixty percent win lands Christie at top of 2016 presidential contenders
Huge victory shows Christie’s broad, non-partisan appeal to voters
Christie’s re-election signals end to divisiveness in politics
These are the lines we’ve heard since election night, when Christie did indeed take 60 percent of the vote over former NJ state Sen. Barbara Buono (D). But that’s hardly the whole story.
Much is being made of Bill de Blasio’s recent mayoral win in New York City, with the Washington Post even calling it “historic,” since he will be the first Democrat to serve in that office since David Dinkins won in 1989.
It’s not just worth nothing that de Blasio won, but how. De Blasio focused on income inequality in NYC, or what he called “two cities,” one rich and one poor, much the way the ultimately disappointing Sen. John Edwards talked about two Americas.
According to the Census Bureau, income inequality in the New York City region is higher than any other major metropolitan region in the country. So taking the whole city, Brooklyn to the Bronx, if you are in the bottom 20 percent in New York your income, on average, is about $9,000 a year. If you’re in the top 20 percent you make, on average, $223,000 a year. So otherwise, put [that] the top 20 percent of the population makes about 25 times what the bottom 20 percent makes.
Former Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist is running for governor in 2014 as a Democrat. The official announcement was made in Crist’s hometown of St. Petersburg, and puts an end, not to speculation that Crist would run, but to when the campaign would begin. It’s on.
Alex Sink (D), former state chief financial officer, who lost to Gov. Rick Scott (GOP/Tea) in 2010 by 1% in a campaign where Scott provided $75 million of his own money, announced she is running for Congress to fill the seat of U.S. Rep. Bill Young (R), who died in October. Sink claims a fundraising headstart, and if successful, will help chip away at the Republican majority in the House. Dist. 13, where Sink is running, is 37.7% Republican, 35.2% Democratic, 23.2% independent, and the rest “other.”
Republicans are already gunning for both Crist and Sink. This promoted tweet from the Florida GOP went up as Crist was delivering his announcement:
What if you planned a Kentucky MAGA event and only heard crickets? Previously, announcing Freedom Fest turned on the money spigots. Kid Rock was planned as headliner, But organizer Eric Deters was a whiner: The […]
“With the war it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high, it’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it’s going to be over very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”
“The cesspit of corruption that is Donald Trump’s presidency is finally getting the attention it deserves. It’s about time. And if a massive blue wave sweeps Washington on November 3rd as polls now suggest, Democrats should put corruption front and center of their agenda in Congress. … The level of corruption that Trump has engaged in and enabled in others is completely unprecedented – self-dealing that, as Trump would say, is like nothing anybody has ever seen before.”
“We’re not talking about socialists, these are communists, Marxists and anarchists. You got to be kidding. They want us to call them democratic socialists, there’s nothing democratic about these people.”
KFF Poll: “With the 2026 midterm campaigns in full swing and early voting about to begin, there is a wide enthusiasm gap between partisan voters, with Democratic voters 25 percentage points more likely than Republican voters to say they are ‘more motivated’ than usual to vote (63% vs. 38%).”
Wall Street Journal: “The U.S. added 29,000 jobs in September, far short of expectations, in a sign that the labor market remains steady but may not be able to deliver consistent and sizable employment gains like it did in the past.”
G. Elliot Morris: “Voters aren’t confused about the motive, either. 62% say Trump made the promise mainly to win votes in November, and only 13% think he genuinely intends to send the money. … Moreover, 71% of adults say it is inappropriate for a president to promise government payments that depend on his party winning an election, including 53% of Republicans.”
“Donald Trump made over a thousand stock sales and purchases worth between $79m and $270m in July,” The Guardian reports. “His two largest sales were of Amazon and Microsoft stock, selling between $5m and $25m each on 20 July. That same day, he also sold up to $5m worth of Oracle and Costco stock, $500,000 to $1m in Nvidia, and bought up to $5m worth of shares in Intuit and Salesforce, among dozens of other transactions.”
“The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study,” the Associated Press reports.
