Republican Representative Larry Pittman of Cabarrus County, NC thinks, sort of like Newt Gingrich did back in the ’90s, that capital punishment is the only way to scare people like “abortionists, rapists and kidnappers” (what, no murderers?) into being better citizens (and more conservative). But Pittman goes a step further than Newt: he thinks we should bring back public hanging. It’s the only way, etc. Well, about every 36 seconds a Republican calls for the return of some barbaric practice or another, so big deal. But Pittman had a funny way of expressing his views: not boldly or proudly, in front of his fellow lawmakers or at the very least, atop a milk crate in some park, but in an e-mail that he accidentally sent to every member of the General Assembly of North Carolina. Ah, well. READ MORE »
NEW YORK—Hey look! It’s that time of year again, and the semi-annual release of some or another study claiming that conservatives are stupid has finally landed on liberal doorsteps across America. Perfect timing, really! Since, you know, the one thing the country needs right now more than just about anything else is yet another excuse to avoid the hard work of looking at those we disagree with as equal partners in a national conversation, people who we must engage with and convince—and, oh, maybe as a result challenge ourselves to check our work and, you know, make better arguments! But hey, now we can all let ourselves off the hook and just deride them as all a bunch of idiots who aren’t even worth talking to in the first place. Thank you, science! Yes, this is quite obviously how we will move forward together as a nation. (It was the dramatic improvement in the quality of the national discourse evidenced after the last two dozen times a study like this was published that gives us so much faith.) READ MORE »
Welcome to the last GOP presidential debate of …eh, “tonight” is about all we can say for certain these days. UGH. Here’s a preview: Newt Gingrich will sneer at some minority and the audience will gnaw its fingers off with excitement, Mitt Romney will be asked to compare and contrast the feeling of wiping his ass with a fifty versus a hundred dollar bill, Rick Santorum will suckle his microphone, and oh yeah, probably Ron Paul will also be there as well to say, WARS ARE BAD, bless him. Here’s the video stream for those of you who are still sober enough to operate the keys on your computer, aren’t you the responsible ones. HERE WE GO! READ MORE »
Here’s a wacky fun-time ritual thing the Mormons do that you may or may not have heard about: they love to baptize dead people and thus declare them members of their magic moon faith, mostly so that the Mormons can claim a 7 billion person membership similar to the way that those McDonald’s signs claim “50 billion anusburgers served since 1940″ to reassure you that it’s, like, really popular. This has, throughout history, not always pleased the relatives of the dead people who were baptized — say for instance, the relatives of Jewish Holocaust victims who found their family members’ names among those who had been posthumously converted to Mormonism. And so hey, know where there are lots of Jewish people these days? Florida. What’s happening in Florida next week? A Republican presidential primary. Who’s leading the polls in that primary right now? A Mormon. Has Mormon Mitt Romney been secretly baptizing Holocaust victims in his spare time? READ MORE »
Mark Oxner, a Republican running for Congress in Florida’s brand new 27th district, which will include parts of Orlando, just released this ad, which he promises to be the first of many. It depicts President Obama as a pirate who enslaves children to row his ship to its demise over a waterfall. Former Florida Representative and generally not-to-be-out-sassed Democrat Alan Grayson, who’s running again this year after losing his seat in 2010, plays the role of Obama’s parrot. “I just love this ship,” says some delusional Obama supporter as the boat makes its way to the edge of life and Oxner’s brilliant videographer Vernon Furniss fades out the sinister circus music and fades in some hotel lounge piano jazz, just because. THERE IS EVEN A WE-SLEEP-IN-SEPARATE-BATHTUBS CIALIS AD REFERENCE. READ MORE »
Randy “Duke” Cunningham was a fantastic Republican congressman. After a career bombing peasants in Vietnam, he came back to teach pilots at an ugly suburban theme park based on the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun, and then “Duke” became a congressman from San Diego, until his inevitable conviction for fraud and bribery and douchery and Viagra sex crimes with hookers ended his time in the House of Representatives. Since then, he has toured various prisons and is now locked up in the federal penitentiary outside Tucson, where he offered Newt Gingrich a very special endorsement. READ MORE »
Anthony Albanese, the transport minister of Australia’s leading Labor Party, recently went on the offensive in a speech targeted at the country’s opposition party leader Tony Abbott, and for inspiration, looked to the B movie The American President written by our beloved cinematic fabulist Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Douglas. By which we mean, he essentially lifted lines from President Douglas more or less verbatim! READ MORE »
Comedy chuckwagon Newt Gingrich got a ton of mileage out of his cranky and peevish take-down of CNN’s John King, and by extension the whole of the liberal media empire. (And for Gingrich’s gross vehicle weight rating, tons of mileage don’t come cheap!) You will recall that ABC was scheduled to air an interview with one of Newt’s former wives almost immediately following last Thursday’s debate in South Carolina and that King decided to open the debate with a question about ex-wife Marianne Gingrich’s allegations that Newt had pressed her for an open marriage. Graduate-level reprobate Newt naturally and easily lobbed this softball out of the park in part with an angry claim that his campaign provided family friends who could testify the story was false but that ABC had rebuked the offers. This claim, it seems, was just a fall-back to one of Newt’s most trusted rhetorical techniques: Flat-Out Lying.READ MORE »
So Barack Obama is in favor of greater access to college education (like most every other modern president before him), you say? There’s a sinister, political reason for that, according to dim dweeb Rick Santorum. Learning turns people liberal. “It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college,” he told an audience in Florida. “The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America.” Woah! But wait, wasn’t he just saying that it’s the vast cabal of single moms who conspiratorially refuse to go out and get a man that make up the base of leftist power in the country? READ MORE »
In a bold strike of the kind we hope to see in a lot of nations this year, a protesting group of indigenous people mobbed Australian prime minster Julia Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott from a fancy 1% restaurant in the capital of Canberra — Gillard and Abbott were about to be torn apart, but their security teams managed to drag the politicians to safety. Why all the excitement? Because right-winger Tony Abbott suggested tearing down the aboriginal “tent embassy” erected 40 years ago in protest of two centuries of brutal oppression by the colonizing Europeans. Things are very weird in Australia! It’s sort of like if America went straight from the Old West/Plantation Era directly to the Earth Day hippie Beatles world circa 1970, with nothing in the middle. READ MORE »
Where were you when you found out Mitt Romney made $42.5 million in two years? On the toilet, as you are now? Well the truth is that this Republican f—-runner would like to downplay this significant Event in our country’s history by telling you that, actually, he paid ‘closer to 40 or 50 percent’ in taxes in 2010 and 2011. Oh, that’s great, sorry, it’s just that tax returns are so hard to understand and we just thought the amount that you paid in taxes was the amount you paid in taxes, but apparently it’s actually any money that you spent that did not go towards making you or your houses prettier. READ MORE »
America’s relationship with the breakaway republic of Arizona remains a contentious one, with especially pungent ill-will bubbling between President Obama and Arizona’s current monarch Jan Brewer. First, Brewer blamed Obama for blowing up her beeper, two-way, AND cellie, and thereby delaying the completion of her book “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border.” Brewer eventually released the erotic thriller late last year to well-deserved indifference. Now Obama is getting into it with Brewer in front of God and everybody, because she used her stupid book to kiss and tell about a top-secret Oval Office meeting the two once had. JESUS! Will they or won’t they, already!! READ MORE »
NEW YORK—So here is a thing that happened: Newt Gingrich said four preposterous things yesterday in the span of a single sentence. Let’s parse it! “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” Ok, first: a moon base! Which, right, is just patently ridiculous. But moving on: it will be American! Because of course it would be, or, well, at least when you’re the sort of person who will not rest until the entirety of the Middle East is remade in the American image. Thirdly: Newt suggested he will actually get elected president. (LOL, etc.) And fourthly! Newt suggested he will actually get elected president TWICE. (LOL squared, etc.) READ MORE »
The United States placed a thrilling 47th on the newly-released index of worldwide press freedom compiled by Reporters Without Borders, go team! This is 27 places worse than the previous year, owing to all the great fun cops across the nation had arresting, brutalizing and obstructing the work of journalists during the Occupy Wall Street protests. We were trying to type a bit of humor about some scandalously idiotic screaming exchange between Barack Obama and Arizona’s dingbat teabagger governor Jan Brewer that’s taking a dump all over our news feed, but then we just kept thinking to ourselves: Ha ha, maybe we will avoid this kind of thing just once, because this story — a White House pool reporter excitedly detailing a brief, meaningless spat between enemy politicians only because it deviates slightly from the usual banal protocol and then twenty other news sites repeating the account almost verbatim like it matters — is pretty much the exact kind of story that we fear being the only kind of story on our political news feed when we think about how much Michael Bloomberg wishes he could have shipped every journalist covering the police brutality against #OWS protesters to Guantanamo for a couple months/forever. READ MORE »
In an article in the French version of Elle magazine called — yes, really — “Black Fashion Power,” writer Nathalie Dolivo discusses Michelle Obama’s style and the fact that she’s allowing black women to finally dress well, godddddd, what took so long? The article, which appears to have since been removed from the Elle France website (clicking on the link now reveals an “OUPS!” message — “OUPS,” indeed), says that our FLOTUS’s sense of style means that “chic has become a plausible option for a community so far pegged to its codes [of] streetwear.” Lord. READ MORE »
