Ever gotten one of those wacky “trivia for reading on the toilet” sorts of books for your birthday, the kind that says, “an antiquated law in Missouri dictates that anyone who puts a mule in a bathtub must be publicly flogged”? Here is another bit of trivia you might find in such a book: apparently South Carolina decreed in 1880 or so that adulterers must pay up to $500 in fines and serve a year in jail. MORE »

Well thanks for clearing that up, “administration officials”! On Sunday Rahm Emanuel suggested that “those who devised policy” around torture wouldn’t be prosecuted, but by yesterday other Obama people were rushing to walk that one back. What he meant, apparently, was that officials who ordered the torture shouldn’t be prosecuted, but the lawyers who devised the legal rationale maybe could. MORE »

Here is a Hot Scoop via our nation’s secret spy network, CSPAN: one of the main guys from John McCain’s VP vetting committee spilled salacious details on how and why Joe Lieberman did not get to be John McCain’s Sarah Palin. MORE »

Just a day after fellow bathroom goblin Bob “Twenty Dollar” Allen failed yet again in his own absurd quest to expunge all hints of gayness from his police record, the original Idaho toilet troll Larry Craig lost his most recent appeal. Craig was arrested for trying to pick up a cop in a Minneapolis airport men’s room, blah blah blah, and ever since he has been trying to convince legal authorities that he just has a “wide stance” when he urinates in a very heterosexual manner in public restrooms. MORE »

Why is it that Republican men who conduct their gay sex antics in public bathrooms cannot resist loudly and repeatedly proclaiming their innocence and heterosexuality in an escalating series of legal forums, all of which end up with judges and such saying “Nah dude, still gay”? It is one of life’s great mysteries, along with the human spleen and the “dewclaw.” MORE »

FIFTEEN GAZILLION angry citizens swamped the steps of the Supreme Court this morning to protest the takeover of the government by the radical Islamic Indonesian bastard orphan and known Kenyan Hussein “Barack” Obama. Some nut recently filed a suit alleging that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii or somesuch, and so the Supreme Court agreed to review it, along with thousands of other cases they will also decide not to hear this session. A veritable handful of like-minded nuts decided to go to the Supreme Court in a dazzling show of support for this completely insane lawsuit. MORE »

Every four years, a mysterious combination of negligence, incompetence, fraud, and criminality conspire to make a single state responsible for getting some doofus into the White House. In 2000, Florida took the honor; in 2004, it was Ohio. And every four years, Hendrik Hertzberg writes angry editorials about how the whole electoral college should be bombed from space as a Republican takes office yet again. So which state will we be able to blame when Sarah Palin is hastily sworn in as America’s 45th president after John McCain expires from gout and agues in the spring of 2009? MORE »

So, remember back in May how the U.S. government launched an international manhunt to find a lawyer with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis that had gone to Greece to get married? And, um, fucked it up utterly? Did you ever hear about how no one caught TB from him? Good times. Well, it also turned out that there was another guy with MDR TB at the same time and, um, the government was just a little bit quieter about him.

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