This week, we lost Ron Palillo, who played Arnold Hor­shack on Wel­come Back, Kot­ter, to a heart attack. Mitt Rom­ney insisted that he hasn’t paid less than 13 per­cent on his taxes, though inter­est­ingly he never said fed­eral income taxes. Per­haps he’s using the sort of phras­ing for which Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton was famous. We won’t know, because he says he won’t let us see for our­selves. Yet another shoot­ing, this time at a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. This one appears to have been dri­ven by polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. But appar­ently it’s still not the time to talk about gun vio­lence in the United States. The XXX Olympics ended on Sun­day, and we finally learned what made this Olympiad pornographic.

And here we are, at the end of the work week, for those Amer­i­cans for­tu­nate enough to have a job. Being Fri­day, it’s your day. What do you want to talk about?

Don’t see an arti­cle on a par­tic­u­lar topic, but want to talk about it some­where? This is Open Mic. Talk about what­ever you want, but stay respectful.

We cre­ate a new Open Mic every week to give a clean slate, but feel free to add to this topic at any time.