Excellent News: John McCain Talks To 'Smart' People, Knows Stuff

•  This interview with Sen. John Grumpypants McCain is a real hoot if you think rolling your eyes repeatedly until you get dizzy, fall down, and vomit is fun. Oh, plus McCain totally stomping on Ted Cruz's dreams. Wait, thatispretty fun.Here are some fun facts you can learn about one of the world's sorest losers: He "wrote" a "book" with his "creative partner Mark Salter." It's all about blah blah who cares boring zzzzzzzz yawn. Like we really think John McCain wrote a single word of it his own self? Nope, we do not. On immigration reform, he is really feeling the fierce urgency of whenever:

  Why couldn’t the president wait two, three, four months and then act with [an] executive order? At least give this new Congress some opportunity to act, and then, if he still feels that frustrated, then I still don’t agree with it, but I understand why he would do it. You see my point?

  Raise your hand if you see his point that the do-nothing Republicans might actually do something if given the chance. Really? No one? Huh, WEIRD.

  Does John "I'd better suspend my presidential campaign until I can wrap my head around this crashing economy thing since I can't do two things at once" McCain have some "thoughts" on the rapidly falling deficit? Of course he does:

  It is going down now, which is good, but everyone that I have talked to that’s smart on it says within three, four, five years — as we see the dramatic increase in enrollment in the entitlement programs — it’s going to start going back up.

  Since we arestill, decades later, waiting for Reagan's trickle-down economics to suddenly start working, guess it's not too much to ask that we give it a few more years before acknowledging the deficit really is going down under President Obama. Because, gosh, if McCain turned out to be wrong about everything he has said -- that all bad things are Obama's fault, and all good things are in spite of Obama and thanks to George W. Bush -- well, that would be excellent news, wouldn't it? Just not for McCain.

• Want the latest on Bill Cosby's internet nightmare? Our kid sister Happy Nice Time People has the dirt:

  Lasting longer than you’d think but now dead and buried, Bill Cosby’s PR team invited the Twitterverse to create memes around the legendary accused serial rapist. They even provided photos and a generator to add text. [...]

  It’s a perfect case study for communications majors in how to fail at internet marketing. The Cosby crew apparently thought that by requiring approval of all memes before they could get posted to Twitter that they could weed out all the trolls. And, sure, no one could put unapproved memes among the official entries… but unapproved memes quickly flooded the rest of the internet.

  Go take a look to see the EPIC FAIL for yourselves.

• What do your shopping preferences say about your politics? A lot, apparently:  

  If you live near a Ben & Jerry’s or a few Dunkin’ Donuts outposts, odds are good that your Congressional district elected a Democrat on Tuesday. More familiar with the inside of a Pizza Hut or a Long John Silver’s? Chances are you’ll be represented next year by a Republican.

• Looking for some perspective on voter ID laws? 

  

  
   You can read the whole column, but here's a good nugget for you:

  In the meantime, some ­back-of-the-envelope calculations from Wendy Weiser — director of the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice — should at least give us pause: Right now, it looks like the margin of victory in some of the most competitive races around the country was as big as the likely “margin of disenfranchisement,” as Weiser puts it. That is, more people were newly denied the right to vote than actually cast deciding ballots.

• Invisible mice. Sorry, make that INVISIBLE MICE?!?! 

  Scientists are getting a look at the inner workings of mice like never before thanks to a new technique that renders the rodents so transparent they're nearly invisible. [...]

  The mice aren't just cool to look at. Researchers say they can be used to gain a better understanding of organs.

  "It allowed us to see cellular networks inside tissues, which is one of the fundamental challenges in biology and medicine," Kazuki Tainaka, first author of the paper, said in a news release.

  With these mice, researchers may be able to study diseases that affect humans.

• Please enjoy this gem from Mallory Ortberg:

  This was supposed to be so simple. Get in, develop complicated feelings for the girl, establish a relationship after a dizzying number of back-and-forths designed to produce the maximum amount of sexual and dynamic tension, then never get out. I was only supposed to fall in love. Wanting to protect her — that was never part of the deal.