Elizabeth Warren Is Being A Badass Again, Because It Is A Day

By Twp [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http: //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

• We sure do love us some Sen. Elizabeth Warren because ALL the reasons. She is always yelling at the too-big-to-fail banks and the sleazy credit card industry and the sleazier Republican Industrial Complex and the greedy bastards who think They Built That. And here she is again, telling it like it is again, which is why we love her all over again some more forever:

  Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) brought her populist message Saturday to this small college town to rev up the final weeks of Sen. Al Franken's reelection campaign, but also to claim the mantle of the modern liberal movement's political godfather. [...]

  "The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it," Warren said to loud cheers.

  She then moved on to Iowa, where she did some rallying for Rep. Bruce Braley, running for Senate against some crazy pig castrator who thinks Agenda 21 is out to get ya.

  Democrats believed that college students were entitled to try to get an education without being crushed by student loan debt, she said. They believed that investing in interstate highways and bridges and dams and airports would spur business, she said. And research investments created "a giant pipeline of ideas" that turned into opportunities for the children of the future, she said.

  "We believed in it!" Warren said. "Here's the amazing thing. It worked! It absolutely positively worked."

  But in the 1980s, the GOP had a different idea, she said.

  The first thing they did was "fire the cops on Wall Street," she said.

  "They called it deregulation. But what it really meant was have at 'em boys. They were saying in effect to the biggest financial institutions: Any way you can trick or trap or fool anybody into signing anything, man, you can just rake in the profits." [...]

  Warren said the GOP vision is that government should work for those at the top - those with money, power and armies of lobbyists. "Republicans, man, they ought to be wearing a T-shirt. ... The T-shirt should say, 'I got mine. The rest of you are on your own.'"

  Let's watch her explain how the world really works again, because it never gets old.

• One less reason to hate Walmart, maybe?

  The latest sign that the tide is turning in favor of better pay for low-wage workers: Walmart's CEO on Wednesday announced the company's intention eventually to abandon the minimum wage.

  Walmart chief executive Douglas McMillon told reporters after an investor conference that the company plans to pay all of its workers at a rate higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. He did not say how much more.

• "Author" of "books" John Grisham says leave dudes who look at underage porn aloooooooonnnnnnne!

  Displaying a remarkable lack of understanding of the American penal system – especially for a guy who writes a whole lot about it – Grisham says that “We’ve got prisons now filled with guys my age, 60-year-old white men, in prison, who have never harmed anyone. Who would never touch a child, but they got online one night, started surfing around, probably had too much to drink, whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, and went to far and went into child porn or whatever.” Ah yes, because as we all know, the prisons of America are just teeming with 60 year-old white guys. Oh wait, no. [...]

  “It happened to a lawyer friend of mine, a good buddy from law school,” he says. “They haven’t hurt anybody. They deserve some type of punishment, whatever, but ten years in prison?” He goes on to say, “His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labeled ‘sixteen year old wannabe hookers’ or something like that. And it said ’16-year-old girls.’ So he went there. Downloaded some stuff — it was 16 year old girls who looked 30. He shouldn’t have done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys. He didn’t touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: ‘FBI!’ It was sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people — sex offenders — and he went to prison for three years. There’s so many of them now. There’s so many ‘sex offenders’ — that’s what they’re called — that they put them in the same prison. Like they’re a bunch of perverts, or something; thousands of them.”

• Thank you from the bottom of our hearts and our other special parts to ancient Scottish fish:  

  An international team of researchers says a fish called Microbrachius dicki is the first-known animal to stop reproducing by spawning and instead mate by having sex. [...]

  Lead author Prof John Long, from Flinders University in Australia, said: "We have defined the very point in evolution where the origin of internal fertilisation in all animals began.

  "That is a really big step." [...]

  "The little arms are very useful to link the male and female together, so the male can get this large L-shaped sexual organ into position to dock with the female's genital plates, which are very rough like cheese graters.

  "They act like Velcro, locking the male organ into position to transfer sperm."

• A major problem solved:  

  The douchebag is someone — overwhelmingly white, rich, heterosexual males — who insist upon, nay, demand their white male privilege in every possible set and setting.

  The douchebag is equally douchy (that’s the adjectival version of the term) in public as in private. He is a douchebag waiting in line for coffee as well as in the bedroom. This definition marks him, like the atavistic, dusty rubber douchebags of our grandmothers’ generation, as a useless, sexist tool. Armed with this refined definition, I believe the term “douchebag” is the white racial slur we have all been waiting for. We have only to realize this. White privilege itself has blinded us to the true nature of the douchebag’s identity. But it’s been there all along.

  The precise race, class and gender position of the douchebag marks this identity as a specific subset of the asshole, another identity on the rise in the twenty-first century.

• In case you missed it, Yr Editrix figured out how babby is formed . The entire interwebs is very happy about this exciting news, including o ur favorite nerdgirl Rachel Maddow, who loves us back, obviously: