ARRGH! What is it with authors of contemporary fiction who can’t be bothered to use quotation marks for dialog? You’re not William Faulkner! Just use the right punctuation and help your readers out!

Nancy LeTourneau, speculating at Washington Monthly about why Nick Ayers turned down Trump’s job offer:

It is impossible to know exactly what Ayers is up to. In November, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed suit against Ayers and one of his companies, Freedom Frontier, for illegally laundering dark money to political campaigns, noting it’s nefarious ties to the Vice President’s chief of staff. So perhaps he needed to get out of town before the proverbial shit hit the fan.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that he’s exiting a White House that is about to implode as a way to try to save his own reputation. Or maybe his plans to preserve Pence’s options as the next POTUS are better served from outside the administration.

My guess? All of the above.

Kevin Drum, writing about the response to a few of his posts critical of the Bitcoin fad:

It used to be libertarians. I’d mention something unflattering about Ron Paul and the result would be hundreds of angry, illiterate insults from true believers who were convinced that Ron Paul was just short of the second coming of Christ.

Now it’s crypto crackpots—unsurprisingly, I guess, since there’s a huge overlap in the crypto fan base and the Ron Paul fan base. After writing a couple of posts about Bitcoin over the weekend, my Twitter feed is bursting with—you guessed it: angry, illiterate insults from true believers are convinced that Bitcoin is the only thing that stands between us and monetary Armageddon. It would be amusing if it weren’t for the fact that so many of these people are obviously not well off and are being taken for a ride by con men who care only about their bank accounts—and by that, I mean their real bank accounts, not their crypto wallets.

Sounds about right.