Anybody who says the Associated Press is not the most important wire service with “AP” as its initials just plain hates good journalism. Following up on yesterday’s scorcher about how there were five (5) other governors who did something vaguely weird once, over the course of American state history, today AP headquarters in New York offers up what just might be the most cogent yet blistering assessment of the Mark Sanford “Argentine Firecracker” scandal thus far: Sanford is a Republican governor doing lame, creepy things … just like all those other Republican governors trying to make a name for themselves in the GOP’s final days. MORE »

Weren’t we just talking about Larry King? Yes we were! Well, the “king of all media” has some very special guests tonight, straight from the meth/moose/Taco Bell capital of the world, Wasilla. The singular Levi and Mercede Johnston will sit down this evening with Hollywood’s favorite death muppet, and dope-dealin’ mom Sherry Johnston is coming along for the ride. (The ride will be in an actual pickup truck, driven from Alaska. Sherry will be shotgun. Mercede likes to be closest to Levi, in the night.) MORE »

Wonkette operative “Laura” sends this cell-phone shot from the High Desert stucco ghetto of Victorville, California. This is one of the lamest fucking places in America, the fat diabetic heart of the housing collapse, basically everyone is on the dole — military pension, social security, disability, etc. — so of course it’s hard-core wingnut land. This is the kind of place where you see new Ron Paul 2008 posters stapled up on the phone poles to replace the ones that blew away. The signs these teabaggers are waving say “HONK IF YOU LOVE COCK.”

Bobby Jindal was supposed to be elected President in 2012 after America realized what a goofball Barack Obama was, spending money on volcano research and other pointless endeavors while a budget hawk like Jindal waited in the wings ready to swoop in with hot money-saving tips. But now Jindal’s, and indeed America’s, dreams may be put on hold while Jindal runs for Senate instead. MORE »

How deeply must you despise your former running mate — the person you wanted America to accept as a perfectly good and safe president-in-waiting, just a few months ago — to be unable to fake a quick “Sure I support her” on a Sunday news-chat show? Here’s Old Walnuts McCain utterly unable to answer a simple question about Palin from David Gregory, because good lord, Palin is absolute human garbage. You’ve got to be some real dumb trash when even Republicans won’t support you. [YouTube/USA Today]

All it took was for the National Outrage to direct itself at derivatives traders at the World’s Worst Company receiving bonuses, and now Rick Santelli is finally saying: Whoa… hey… let’s cool it down, right? Besides, this outrage over $165 million doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People want government policy towards AIG (”give them the night key to the U.S. Mint”) completely changed now that the very worst individuals in the company are being directly rewarded. The fact that those contracts have to be honored under the present arrangement says quite a bit. [YouTube]

At a time when America was dangerously low on political comedy, swollen swamp boil Rush Limbaugh has come through like a champ — providing not only schadenfreude-sweet laughs, but a new gimmick for Democratic fundraising campaigns. All hoped out from donating to Obama last year? Which, you know, worked out pretty well? Maybe you’d like to throw some money at the completely juvenile effort to put a mean billboard in Limbaugh’s tacky town. MORE »

Forgotten hairball Rod Blagojevich thought he could finally cash in big with Barack Obama’s Senate seat, but that didn’t work out too well. Then Rod went on every talk show and cable-news program to jabber hysterical bullshit, and that really didn’t lead to riches, either. Now, at the end of both his political career and his brief stint as America’s Diversionary Joke, Blago has signed a very modest “six figure” deal to write an idiotic book. (”Six figure,” in this case, almost certainly means exactly $100,000 — a lot of money, to most people, but a lot less than the $155,600 he used to make as governor of Illinois.) [AP/WBBM]

Just a couple of years ago, Sarah Palin was a fresh young political personality. For battered and depressed Republicans who had just lost the House and Senate in an incredible pileup of corruption and perversion, it seemed like an impossible dream to have a happy, heterosexual family girl win a governorship — even if it was in some shoddy backwater like Juneau. Why, this Sarah Palin might just go all the way to the White House! Except she didn’t, and now she’s washed up. MORE »

MICHAEL STEELE FIRES ALL WHITE PEOPLE FROM RNC! “One week after Michael Steele won a hotly contested race to be the chairman of the Republican National Committee, he has cleaned house and laid off almost the entire RNC staff.” [Chris Cillizza]

They are ignorant religious fanatics who live in the past and love to bugger little boys, so it’s really no big deal that Republicans have finally embraced their only peers on this planet, the Taliban. Remember those dudes?! They were all, “Blah blah allah 9/11,” and then George W. Bush was all, “Gonna blow smoke up your caves, knocked them buildings down,” and hooray, we won the war, against the Taliban, and then, whoops!, not so much, and now the new president is all, “Now we have to go have the whole goddamned war in Afghanistan again, because the Bush idiots managed to screw it all the hell up for seven years.” In other words, Republican Congressman Pete Sessions says the GOP needs to join the Taliban! MORE »