The National Guard is dropping off food and water in the Rockaways at least, if you know where to look. (Some folks there didn't even know that for days.) Come on, people. (via)

Here are the shocking revelations about where Mitt Romney slept in January while campaigning, according to the fine people at Think Progress, who themselves sleep in biodegradable hovels. Uh, the Empire Hotel doesn't even make the list of the best hotels (or most expensive hotels!) in New York. And there's basically nowhere else to stay in Palm Beach except the Breakers. Even I've stayed at the Omni Parker House in Boston! This is one of those topics on which the media is not equipped to advise us. All hotels look expensive to the LIBERAL MEDIA.

The campaign also spent $60 on a Best Western in Arizona, by [...]

"Taking the Bite out of the Holidays is a charitable effort sponsored by BedBug Central that is offering free bed bug services to those in need who are suffering from bed bug infestations and do not have the means to better their situation this holiday season." Apply here. Sure, I'm also giggling about this a little but BEDBUGS and POVERTY AREN'T FUNNY, SO.

American piety, like our other established social habits, is supposed to follow a simple call-and-response pattern, depending on the overall condition of our market order. When plenitude abounds, we don't give much thought to last things, and overall religious observance declines; conversely, when times are tough, we're supposed to throng into the pews, imploring the Creator to straighten out our suboptimal economic prospects, and to revive our faith in the American gospel of success.

Such, at any rate, is the breathless assessment in Newsweek, which has long had a bland-yet-insatiable fascination with all things Jesus-y.

About two years ago, on a sluggish L into Manhattan, the train stopped suddenly somewhere under the East River, flinging forward anyone who hadn't been gripping seat or strap. I watched as a white gentleman-neo-nerdy and a bit old for his skinny jeans-reached much too late for the pole to his left. He stumbled hard into a black guy about 15 years his junior and one foot taller, causing the black guy to drop his soda. Immediately, everyone fell silent and stared, as if the spilled Dr. Pepper were a Baselitz he'd been delivering as a gift.

Throughout the recent history of humanity at least, if not all of it, one thing has always been true. Rich people have their primary homes on hills, and their secondary and tertiary homes at sea level. That way when they lose their beach houses, they can fly their helicopters back to the main house.

Two articles are getting a good bit of attention in the wake of Hurricane Sandy: There's this, about the "hideous inequality" of New York: "Divides between the rich and the poor are nothing new in New York, but the storm brought them vividly to the surface. There were residents like me who could invest all [...]

The data suggests the people who have average or low incomes are way less likely to own iPhones! That is so inexplicable. (via)

There is no spectacle quite so stirring as the pundit swaggering to the bar of public opinion to deliver a good and shrill scolding. So let us tend to the chastisements of Washington Post columnist David Broder—recently heard hailing an invasion of Iran as an economic stimulus measure—as he now urges the stiff medicine of the Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction plan on a feckless American public. Broder is, after all, the dean of American political journalists (though I’ve always found this locution puzzling, since so few political journalists actually seem to graduate—and perhaps more to the point, when was the last time anyone reported an actual dean saying anything [...]

It's always a difficult moment for those of us who despise the poor tax that is the lottery when someone really poor wins a giant ass truck full of money! Christopher Shaw had $28.96 in his bank, he said, when he spent five dollars on a lottery ticket. So you know: dude, when you have THREE/FIVE KIDS (three of his own, but then two of his girlfriend's), you do not spend 1/6th of your LIFE SAVINGS on LOTTERY TICKETS. Except, I guess, when you do, and are rewarded with $258 million. Please don't all go out and buy a lottery ticket all at once right now.

Armed with a thermal map produced by a flyover in March, Christine Lyons, chief planning enforcer of the London borough of Newham, is searching for unlawful “sheds with beds,” as the borough council calls them. There are as many as 10,000 outbuildings where people may live illegally in the 14-square- mile East End district, she says. Raids have found as many as four people sleeping in a single backyard shed and sharing a filthy shower and toilet that aren’t always properly connected to the sewage system.

—Nothing like a ten-billion-dollar sporting event next door to make you feel bad about your poors.

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Johns Hopkins announced a study this morning that found that "minority pedestrians are far more likely than white pedestrians to be struck by motor vehicles" and "uninsured minority pedestrians hit by cars are at a significantly higher risk of death than their insured white counterparts, even if the injuries sustained are similar." Oh yes: "uninsured patients had a 77 percent greater risk of death" than the insured. Here's one nice way of putting something complicated: "Previous studies have shown that insurance status and race may increase mortality risk because of treatment delay or differences in services provided." Jaywalking! A one-way ticket to death in racist America! No but, [...]

After the Times blew up with a story in part on how the youngs, who have no jobs, use the foodstamps at the Whole Foods, Salon has followed suit about the youngsters buying the organic chickens and boy are the comments insane.