Ass or dumbass? Papal edition

Not sure if these people are assholes or just don't understand supply 'n' demand:

[Mark] Zajak and his wife, Kim, started out asking $16,000 for the whole week. They recently dropped the price to $14,000. They're willing to negotiate.

"I actually am disappointed," she said. "We haven't had anyone reply yet, so hopefully soon."

She wants to use the money to go on vacation in the Bahamas, but her dreams of the Atlantis Paradise Island Resort may not come true.

Or, as the kids say today, why not both?

GOP candidates treating Donald Trump as if he's a real candidate

Well, someone has to.

The best thing about the Donald Trump presidential candidacy is that all the other GOP candidates -- for lack of a better word, let's call them "serious" or "realistic" -- I say, all the other GOP candidates are actually responding to him, in public. Seen on CNN, just this morning:

Reince Priebus has phoned him personally.

George Pataki has invited him to a one-on-one debate on immigration.

Lindsey Graham spent time in comments to an international affairs think tank criticizing Trump and Hillary Clinton, as if they're both of the same caliber of candidate or as if Trump actually had some grown-up understanding of foreign policy.

Following a bouncing link, I see that Ted Cruz actually called Trump "terrific" the other day. I'm not sure if he meant that in sort of a modern, everyday way, like "really neat" or "the bee's knees" or "awesome," or if he was going for a more originalist meaning, like "inducing terror." But whichever meaning he intended to get across doesn't matter so much as why on god's green earth is he bothering to answer any question about Trump?

Another bouncing link shows me that Marco Rubio says that Trump's anti-Mexican comments are "offensive" and that Trump himself is "divisive." Whoa, Marco! Them's fightin' words! Let's cool it with the harsh language and try to be a little more polite next time, eh?

Every action they're taking to delegitimatize Trump only increases how seriously the media is taking him. "Amateur hour" is one term for it. The GOP clown car could not be more literally full of clowns, though at least one outlet is being realistic about the situation.

If you get rid of it, it'll still be there

If flying the Confederate battle flag is outlawed, then only outlaws will blah, blah, blah:

Once you have this neo-Confederate mentality at some level of your consciousness, I don’t really have to tell you how to vote or give you a position on some issue — you’ll have this idea already, it naturally comes out of your consciousness. Neo-Confederacy forms American consciousness.

[...]

I’m interested to see whether this current reaction against Confederate symbols lasts more than three months because they’re going to organize a counter reaction. Even if you get rid of the license plates and flags through legislation, the movement’s still going to be there. And people might go home thinking a victory has been won.

Maybe they could go full Philly dogwhistle and fly Irish flags or stick little shamrock symbols on their vehicles.