Tell-All Book Reveals Mother of Five May Have Used Own Vagina

Nothing about sudden Sarah Palin-related schadenfreude erupting on Facebook or Twitter surprises me. I know where it comes from, and I know the feelings it satisfies. What surprised me this time, though, was how little I sympathized with it. It felt tiring, if not unnecessary.

You probably know the tasty details by now: Joe McGinniss, author of the seminal The Selling of the President, has been lurking under the watchful gaze of Vladimir Putin in Wasilla, Alaska, engaging in what Palin calls "peeping tom" behavior by writing a book about her. Parts of the book leaked yesterday, including this revelation from her "LOTS OF DOGS" days as a sports anchor:

Sarah hooked up with [former NBA player Glen] Rice, a 6-foot-8 junior at the University of Michigan, while he was in town for the 1987 Thanksgiving weekend "Great Alaska Shootout" basketball tournament, according to the book.

McGinniss quotes a friend as saying Sarah had "hauled his [Rice's] ass down." While the pal coyly states: "I can't say I know they had sex," the friend is also quoted as saying: "I remember Sarah feeling pretty good that she'd been with a black basketball star," according to the source.

Rice confirms the hookup... "but he's quoted as saying he didn't think Sarah harbored any bad feelings over being with him because he was black. And he remembers only nice things about Sarah, recalling her as 'gorgeous' and saying she was a big crush of his at the time."

According to the book, Rice and Sarah continued to chat on the phone right up until she married Todd just nine months later.

It's interesting. It's titillating, and I admit that I'm not immune to feeling non-angry non-grudgefuck lustful interest in Palin's whole white-trash death-librarian vibe. (If anything, she seems experienced and doesn't come off like the type who insists on using condoms.)

INFOGRAPHIC: 'IS THE SHARIA THREAT REAL?'

(This INFOGRAPHIC is an addendum to "Understanding 'The Shariah Threat.'")

Those looking for a fuller explanation of Sharia can turn to the normally terrible Wikipedia — home of facts like this one — for a surprisingly decent rundown of what it means. Cynics will note that, politically, Sharia is Michelle Bachmann's favorite new argument, one that ignores history and the terms of the Bill of Rights to paint a unique existential threat that is to be categorically feared. That she is willing to demonize Sharia as fundamentalist Islam's lurking, hateful agenda, crafted by a bunch of men to tell women what they can't do and seeking to criminalize private behavior on the basis of abstract morality — and, further, that no manner of violence is prohibited to defend this morality — should at no point remind you of her fundamentalist Christianity, which is something totally different.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: SNAP INTO A COAL PIT

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


Passengers Traveling with Small Children Are Encouraged to Stop Somewhere Other Than the United States
by IDI AMIN DADA

• President Obama's annual promise to end the Bush tax cuts (this year he'll finally keep his word, liberals are sure of it!) is taking a toll on conservatives who are sick and tired of class warfare. They can't even hide their disgust with his statement that taxes are lower now than they were under President Reagan, something which is factually true. As is par for the course, they respond to correct statements by mocking the person making them and joking as if laughter chases away reality. They could have even cited this shitty Politifact calculation which ignores the context of the tax rate discussions and was tailor-made for conservatives who want to misrepresent history, but that would offer too much dignity to the truth, which deserves nothing more than mockery.

• Unrelenting in their anti-reality stance, Republicans blocked President Obama's nominee to the 9th Circuit Court by portraying his views as the exact opposite of what they actually are. Now Obama has no choice but to try to swear him in on Opposite Day.

• President Obama's nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, Peter Diamond, has withdrawn his nomination for the position after being blocked and renominated several times since April 2010. Not even some award he got in October 2010 helped his cause, which is evidenced by the scathing and wickedly awesome letter titled, "When a Nobel Prize Isn't Enough." The letter was written by Peter Diamond.

It's really worth reading in full, as it castigates the relevant GOP senators with exactly the level of scorn they deserve. Also noteworthy is this quote from Norm Ornstein of the fucking American Enterprise Institute, of all sources:

We've had huge numbers of nominees blocked, and very few of them for reasons to do with the qualifications or character....

You wonder if there's anything that could bring some level of shame to those who block nominees for partisan purposes and just take people hostage and leave them twisting in the wind for months.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Liberal Extremism

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


You Can Keep the 'Climate Change'; I'll Cling to My Fracking and Logs
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Due to budget cuts, the government will shut down or significantly scale back several web projects which increase government transparency. One of those projects involves showing which private companies were awarded stimulus contracts. Surely this move won't benefit companies owing millions in back taxes, for a total of almost $25 billion given to companies that hate the government so much that they want to ensure it won't be able to afford to give them contracts in the future.

• Blue Dog fuckhead Steny Hoyer insists on ruining the well-being of Federal employees, by asking as a part of budget negotiations to bring down their employee benefits to the nonexistent level of the private sector. Give Hoyer credit for mastering the art of Democratic negotiation: abandoning all major demands as a prerequisite for getting to the bargaining table and converting all those golden concessions into the lead of GOP demands rubber-stamped by "liberal" policymakers.

• State Park Obituaries:

California — Democratic (questionable) Governor Jerry Brown has proposed closing a quarter of the state's parks, with 70 scheduled to shutter as a result of budget cuts. Thankfully, closing 16 of those parks may violate federal law, meaning a mere 56 would be closed. Besides, the ones remaining open are already in such bad shape, it's like, who cares?

Ohio - A bill to allow Oil and natural gas drilling in state parks has passed the state house, and famous asshole governor John Kasich supports the measure. Nevermind that fracking for natural gas is like sticking nitroglycerine in your air-popper before the start of movie night, and that it's worse for the environment than just straight-up using coal. The big problem is that otherwise there's just not enough of a chance that Ohio will experience earthquakes, and this is something fracking can finally correct.

Talking Points Memo Throws Down

It's been a busy week. It was bound to happen, the sweet flow of new content stanched at some point. This news week didn't need anyone here to weigh in anyway. The hysteria of American conservatism and the self-conscious nail-picking prose of liberals unsure whether to gloat about a victory or lament a lack of progressivism to the healthcare bill was enough on its own.

Some good stuff came out of the events of this week, stuff that nobody here need comment on. Posting new content only to direct people someplace else represents a losing gambit. If people should read something else, why do they need you? You become little more than a Burger King just off the highway: people are going to keep going to a destination, but maybe you can draw a few off the road and to your profit before sending them right back on their way.

'Raise your hand if you love freedom. Notice your dead mom didn't move a muscle, kid.'

Here's the story so far: Marcelas Owens is 11 years old and doesn't have a mom. She developed pulmonary hypertension, a potentially fatal but very treatable disease. Because she got sick, she lost her job. Because she lost her job, she lost her healthcare. Because she lost her healthcare, she lost her (potential) access to treatment. Because she lost her access to treatment, she lost her life.

A month ago, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) told Marcelas and his mother Tifanny's story to President Obama as an illustrative tale of how fragile people's lives and economies are without healthcare. This week, conservatives responded by telling an 11-year-old that his mom should have pulled herself up by her healthstraps and got undead, like, doublequick. She's just lazy. She lies around on her back all day.

Their response combines the best of ignorance, self-serving fabricated victimization and imperial unconcern with the little things, like whether someone lives or dies. Let's go to the McClatchy article on the subject, which describes their behavior as "ridicule":

Michelle Bachmann: Proving That Republican Racial Understanding Basically Equals That of Professional Wrestling

Poor Michelle Bachmann. She's not like us. In our post-modern hugger mugger of sending tweets to bisexual lovers we met on Facebook, we lack the perspective to understand a decent Minnesotan hockey mom who just wants to bring back McCarthyite witch-hunts to cull the un-Americans from our national herd and to send strangers Christmas form letters where she talks about her pre-teen daughter's 14" hips and her desire for another daughter to never leave the home and spend her life in her parents' servitude.

I know what you're going to say: "Couldn't you have just tweeted this at me?" And you know what my response will be: stop being such a bitch about this, Julian. In any event, Michelle Bachmann is relevant because initially she wasn't even going to be the most insane thing about this weekend's CPAC (or Conservative Political Action Conference), the annual assplug- and dildo-filled logistics meeting for how the republican party is going to continue gangbanging America for another year without it getting all wet and sticky and gross again—like that Katrina thing.

The Rats Are Clambering Onto the Only Remaining Ship

Remember the odious proto-McCarthy Michelle Bachmann? In case you only recognize names and not faces, she's the pink-clad skullhead below right. If you recognize both names and faces, you probably can read that the author of the book she's holding is Mark Steyn.

I don't have time to get into the type of person he is, but suffice to say that he refers to muslims as "sheep-shaggers," believes their goal is to overrun Europe and create "Eurabia" via forced conversion and murder, spent a couple years insisting "bin Laden" was dead to do his level best for the right-wing propaganda imaginarium, and advocated Western Europe taking the Serbian solution to an increasing muslim population, saying, "If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em."

I point this out, because this is the sort of racist, delusional, genocidal shit Michelle Bachmann reads. All of which makes this exchange she had on an October 17 appearance on Hardball that much more predictable: