Koch Industries’ one-man teabag revolution in Santa Monica As soon as Ames and I sent off our Santelli-FreedomWorks connection article to the editors at Playboy, I rushed out the door. I was already 10 minutes late to a tea party…

This article first appeared on Playboy.com Chris Matthews: “You’re up there with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity… It’s quite a team.” Rick Santelli (smiling and nodding): “It is quite a team!” Hardball, MSNBC, Feb 20, 2009 Last week, CNBC correspondent…

A 58-year-old Wal-Mart employee who said he “couldn’t take it anymore” lit himself on fire outside the Bloomingdale store where he worked late Thursday night and was later pronounced dead at a hospital, authorities said this morning.

I saw that the US government posted an “extreme warning” travel advisory about Mexico last week and wanted to weigh in on the bullshit. If you’re traveling to Culiacan or Acapulco, or any major Mexican city for that matter, you…

A “Westerner’s” severed head was found in a plastic bag hanging from a rope from a bridge in Thailand on Monday. Turns out he wasn’t murdered, he was just depressed. And he wasn’t just any ol’ Westerner: he was a 53-year-old…

In the great debate about the stimulus package — which, underneath all the cant is really nothing more than a debate about how America’s scarce wealth should be divided –  one of the right wing’s favorite mantras was their claim…

There aren’t a huge number of constants in the world of finance. First of all, that word, finance, includes a guy sitting in a cube cold-calling retirees while he’s working at Fidelity. It also includes Larry Fink, the CEO of…

This is a video of shootout that happened a few days ago (the same day the international bridge into America was blocked in Reynosa), that Yasha Levine sent along, asking me to decipher what the hell is going on. Well,…

The reigning czarina of Russian sluts, the ever-ambitious Karina Barbie, released a poorly-edited video of herself practicing her poledancing moves when she was 17. Note that she’s poledancing in her parents’ home, with her babushka walking back and forth sans…

If you haven’t seen a slasher film lately, Marcus Nisbett’s reboot of Friday the 13th feels paradoxically fresh. That’s probably because the genre is delivering a very specific product, so well-tested in eleven sequels that the only real challenge is…

Although it’s more fun to trash the villains and suckers who dominate our dying empire, if the rare hero appears and says something courageous and decent, then it becomes our professional duty to salute her. That hero is Ohio congresswoman…

Today, Drudge and the rightwingers are going crazy red-alerting CNBC’s Rick Santelli as some kind of righteous anti-Obama freemarket revolutionary. There’s a clip of him standing in the middle of the Chicago Exchange, yelling: “The government is promoting bad behavior!…

First there was Hitchens’ comically idiotic attempt at gonzo waterboarding, in which the macho British warmonger lasted all of 11 seconds, even after he massively cheated in order to make the waterboarding as unfrightening as possible. Now he’s spinning a…

MONTERREY, MEXICO — I was in the middle of writing about a badass Colombian drug trafficker who’s taking over huge swaths of Mexico when convoy of green Army trucks fully packed with G3-carrying soldiers rolled through my hometown of Monterrey…

Masha Gaidar, the hot elitny daughter of Russia’s first and worst prime minister, Yegor Gaidar (who introduced “shock therapy” back in 1992, wiping out everyone’s savings), announced today that she agreed to take a government post as an advisor to…

I was stuck in traffic with a broken tape deck, barely paying attention to the stupefyingly flat drone of NPR when I heard a story that made me want to carpet bomb the entire US. Just get it done with….

Joe the Copywriter (whose identity we’re not revealing yet) was fired less than 24 hours after we posted an  article with him railing on his incompetent bosses at the Yellow Pages company. He gloated that these Just-For-Men-highlight-wearing-morons were too clueless…

There’s a shootout at the Guggenheim Museum in the middle of The International that’s about as cheery a spectacle as an action film can offer. One minute a cathedral hush prevails in Frank Lloyd Wright’s creamy architectural spiral, and visitors…

My fellow Americans (as you like to be called), you now have the opportunity to prove that you are not passive slaves, the “sheeple” that they say you are. Over the past few months you’ve been forced to face the awful…

The gaming groundhog sticks his head from his hole, goes to Blockbuster and sees: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (360). Most people associate F.E.A.R. with Alma, the creepy little girl who gets bloody footprints everywhere and sets shit on fire. But…

The past few weeks, national headlines swirled with distressing news for an American workforce already cowering in fear. As the world suffers the worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression, two-thirds of American CEOs plan to fire employees in the…

This will necessarily be a short article. The Academy Awards are so great because they keep us in touch with the ratty old values of our forefathers and foremothers. We no longer know how to churn butter, or why it’s…

I come back from sick leave and there’s a whole pile of wars in my “in” box, like one of those old office cartoons. Still got to write up the dustup in Gaza, and then there’s the so-called final victory…

The new games on shelves this week are: Burnout Paradise for the (PC) – reheated leftovers. Ultimate Shooting Collection (Wii) – Extremely Unimpressive Unleashed! And… My World My Way (DS) – In this Japanese Pouting Sim, you play a little…