In this Wall Street Journal boring article about how Europeans sure love cigarettes yadda yadda, we were intrigued by this paragraph calling Nazi Pope Joe “the Plumber” Ratzinger a known smoker! Is this some hilarious WSJ New Year’s joke? Because there is no evidence we can locate, outside of some obviously photoshopped images of Ratzi in a cloud of cancer, to suggest our crappiest pope indulges in this particular variety of sucking on cylindrical objects. MORE »

Just when you thought the Twitter fad was some dumb fucking thing nobody would possibly actually use — our Intern Juli was recently shocked to find it’s nothing but “an anthology of away messages? on a website?” — there is proof that it could change democracy forever. Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of the Nashville suburbs is now at the center of a powerful Twitter storm, as somebody somewhere remarked that her teeth are terrible, and therefore she must be a chain smoker, like every other 52-year-old blonde in Tennessee. MORE »

Last week, John McCain released a medical dossier longer than Moby Dick that lingered in gruesome detail over his many benign polyps and lesions. This week, Barack Obama’s doctor revealed that in spite of a youth spent snorting powdery mounds of blow, the candidate is hale, hearty, and possessed of an enviably low triglyceride count. Find out more about Your Barry’s hot bod after the jump. MORE »

“Yeah, I’m working on my next book, ‘Whatever the Front Page of the Times Says Today, I Believe Precisely the Opposite.’” (photo by Liz Gorman) MORE »