Amazing story in Mother Jones about the human toll of the warehouse fulfillment industry. Those packages that show up on your doorstep a day or two after you one-click-order them? Turns out they’re not being processed by happy magical elves.

One suggestion for minimizing work-related pain and strain is to get a stepladder to retrieve any items on shelves above your head rather than getting up on your toes and overreaching. But grabbing one of the stepladders stashed few and far between among the rows of merchandise takes time. Another is to alternate the hand you use to hold and wield your cumbersome scanner. “You’ll feel carpal tunnel start to set in,” one of the supervisors told me, “so you’ll want to change hands.” But that, too, he admitted, costs time, since you have to hit the bar code at just the right angle for it to scan, and your dominant hand is way more likely to nail it the first time. Time is not a thing I have to spare. I’m still only at 57 percent of my goal. It’s been 10 years since I was a mover and packer for a moving company, and only slightly less since I worked ridiculously long hours as a waitress and housecleaner. My back and knees were younger then, but I’m only 31 and feel pretty confident that if I were doing those jobs again I’d still wake up with soreness like a person who’d worked out too much, not the soreness of a person whose body was staging a revolt. I can break into goal-meeting suicide pace for short bouts, sure, but I can’t keep it up for 10.5 hours.

Online shopping is clearly not going away, but this is an issue that needs a lot more attention. I’d much rather pay a little more, and/or wait an extra week or two for my crap, than have people working in conditions like this.

Over at DK comics: a new controversy erupts! (Hint: female orgasms are involved.)

Click to engorge

February 22, 2012
Sex Talk!

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Click to embiggen

February 15, 2012
More bad news for (parallel) Romney

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The follow-up article in CJR, in which our efforts at Daily Kos are discussed.

Two things via Digby:

–Whitney Houston’s death unleashes the racist id of Fox News comenters; and

–Racist founding father rap at CPAC.

Important to remember that this stuff exists, because a lot of effort goes into pretending it does not.

Click to embiggen.

February 8, 2012
The Rightwingoverse

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There are a limited number of signed copies of TOO MUCH CRAZY now available in the Topatoco store.

I love watching Krugman open a fresh can of whup-ass, particularly when David Brooks is the recipient. This morning he responds (without mentioning his op-ed colleague by name, of course) to Brook’s recent praise of Charles Murray’s latest.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

Speaking of Brooks, his own column this morning provides reason number elventy billion and fifteen why David Brooks is a Weasel:

I don’t actually know what sort of person Romney is. He’s a reticent man. He’s unwilling to talk about his roots, home and family history, so it is hard to understand what’s really going on in his head. But he is giving the impression of being a classic other-directed type.

So Romney doesn’t talk about his family history, because he’s reticent you see, kind of a Gary Cooper type. Man of few words.

Oh, also, this:

The candidate’s great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, was born in 1843 in Nauvoo, Ill., where Joseph Smith founded the Mormon church. Miles Park Romney had five wives and 30 children, and fled to Mexico after passage of the 1882 Edmunson Act that barred polygamy. Among the first Mormons to settle in to the rolling Mexican valley bordering Texas, Miles Park Romney married his fifth wife after the church banned the practice in 1890.

If I were running for President and had an interesting story like that in the family tree, I might be “reticent” too.

An article in CJR about the declining fortunes of political cartooning. Update: There’s apparently a second piece in the works in which our efforts at Daily Kos to counter the trend will be discussed.