Why American Politics Has Finally Jumped the Shark

It all started with the USA PATRIOT act.

Do you remember where you were on 9/11? Most of us do. Wrapped up in the fear and panic of that most terrible of days was a sense of unity, of national pride in the way we all banded together in the face of tragedy—whether in the streets of Manhattan and Washington, D.C., or comforting friends and neighbors in some neighborhood tappy. It really made you proud to be an American, even if you're not generally the flag-waving type.

Without Pink Ball Caps, There’d Be No Lady Sports Fans

Osi Umenyiora probably believes that.

“Happy Mother’s Day” tweeted Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora to Eagles halfback LeSean McCoy. The dis, of course, being that McCoy, who once called Umenyiora “overrated n soft,” is, gasp, a woman. Burn?

Keep Your Veto Power Off My Bike Lanes

City Council’s got bigger problems to solve.

Last week, Coucilman William Greenlee reintroduced legislation that would give City Council veto power over any new bike lanes in the city. Here’s hoping that, like last year, at the very least, the bill is met with vehement opposition and held up again—and at best, it’s permanently kicked to the proverbial curb.

No Red October: Imagine a Postseason Without the Phillies

Why it’s later than you think for the hometown nine, and four ways to save the 2012 season.

“It’s early.” “The season is a marathon, not a sprint.” “There’s a lot of baseball left to play.” If you’re a Phillies fan, particularly one of a fairly recent vintage, you’ve likely found yourself using some iteration of the above in the last month while shooting the shit around the water cooler, frantically hitting refresh on your “Chase Utley Injury Update” Google News Alert RSS, or praying at your Cliff Lee Is My One True God mini-shrine and hoping that he will pitch again.

Someone Remind Walmart That Corporations Are People

Also, capital punishment is legal in Arkansas.

It’s fitting, isn’t it, that now, some two years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout sullied the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, new evidence has surfaced that suggests BP not only knew the techniques that failed in the Gulf of Mexico were faulty—because they failed some two years prior in a blowout in the Caspian Sea—but, as EcoWatch’s Greg Palast reports, that oil industry executives, as well as members of the Bush administration, may have been complicit in concealing this information.

Five Carousing Tips for Naughty Secret Service Agents

Plus: Why having a job that requires you to take a bullet lets you get away with stuff.

Here we are in day five of Secret Service Colombian Hooker-gate. You know the story by now: In advance of President Obama’s visit to the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, members of the U.S. government’s elite security detail and members of the U.S. military were allegedly caught—while off duty, mind you—fraternizing with prostitutes. They were found out when one agent reportedly disagreed over the bill the morning after, leading the prostitute in question to stick around past 7 a.m. against hotel policy trying to collect what was owed her.

What’s the big deal, right? After all, the Prez did just sign a U.S.-Colombia free-trade deal, right?

Special Report: Republicans Are Waging a War on Caterpillars

They’ve just been covering it up with a fake war on women.

Last week, you, like lots of reasonable Americans, were probably up in arms at Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus’s tortured analogy that the “war on women” allegedly being waged by the GOP would just as easily be a “war on caterpillars” if the Dems said it were so and the media propagated it. Now look. It’s difficult to deny that the Republican party seems hell-bent on blasting women’s rights back to the '70s (yes, to the 1870s). So the conventional wisdom is that Priebus was attempting to pivot the debate by using the old magicians’ trick of misdirection: “We don’t have a war on women. Furthermore, it’s the media’s fault for bringing your attention to it.” Why debate the facts, when you can pin it on your political adversaries and that trusted GOP hobby horse, the media!

Is Don Draper Mad Men’s Resident Vampire?

And five more burning questions for season five.

Like the rest of the Mad Men-watching universe, I’ve spent the last 10 days with Megan Draper/Jessica Paré’s rendition of Gillian Hill’s nugget “Zou Bisou Bisou” stuck in my head like an earwig—or shrapnel. As my friends would say, I got song-fucked. (Only Weather Report’s “Birdland” and Deee Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” have provided even the briefest reprieves.) As notable as “Zou Bisou Bisou”'s complete undeniability was the lack of almost anything even vaguely memorable in season five’s two-hour premiere. While it remains to be seen what later machinations the writers were setting up, what’s clear is that they meant us to pay attention to Paré’s tramped-up version of Hill’s ingenue ditty. It’s as if to say this season will be about Don Draper, dirty aging man, ruining ever-younger girls.

Bad Knees Will Keep Chase Utley Out of the Hall of Fame

He coulda been a contender, but now the math won’t add up.

Lost amid 1) all the unfortunate hand-wringing over Chase Utley’s balky knees; 2) the ultimately pointless finger-pointing about who was wrong about when Utley would return to the field; and 3) the chin-stroking about why the the team didn’t retain as Utley insurance a guy with a career 621 OPS , who’s interchangable with Michael Martinez and whose ultimate value is as a trivia answer, is this:

What we may be witnessing with Chut-knee-gate 2.0 is more than just another protracted spring drama for the greatest second baseman to ever don the Phillies pinstripes. We are most likely watching Utley’s chance at baseball immortality—enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, an honor that, just one calendar year ago, he seemed on track for—definitively circling the drain.