ISIS taking over Iraq?

Honestly, they don't look that scary to me.




Sorry. No time. USA v. Ghana!

How to Win an Election

Let's say you're a senator running for re-election in, oh. let's say Mississippi.

  

That's fun to say!

And let's say you're facing a primary challenger who, let's say, isn't the smoothest campaigner, maybe does things like associate with neo-Confederates and white supremacists, you know the sort of thing that would be a liability in most places, but might garner some support in rural Mississippi.

What do you do?

Well, take the example of veteran campaigner  Thad Cochran.





 One can't miss strategy would be to go to those rural areas and tell the folks there that you're just like them. Just ordinary plain folks. Salt of the Earth types who do ordinary wholesome good ol' fashioned activities like oh, I don';t know, picking pecans. Or fucking farm animals, or . . . wait. WHAT?

The Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that Cochran was addressing a group of donors and supporters at Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg.
The senator explained his connection to the area, saying that his grandparents lived their whole lives in the area.
“I grew up coming down here for Christmas,” he said. “My father’s family was here. My mother’s family was from rural Hinds County in Utica.”
“It was fun, it was an adventure to be out there in the country and to see what goes on,” he said of his boyhood visits to Hattiesburg. “Picking up pecans, from that to all kinds of indecent things with animals.”

Wait. surely you mean to accuse your opponent of doing indecent things with animals, right? You can't possibly be admitting to doing those things yourself, right?

Right?

You're accusing someone else, right?

“Picking up pecans, from that to all kinds of indecent things with animals.”
The audience chuckled.
“And I know some of you know what that is,” Cochran said.

Oh my GOD! Not only are you standing in front of a group of potential voters and saying "Hey, I'm a regular guy, you know, a horse-fucker!" but you're also adding on to that "And I know some of you are horse-fuckers, too. Vote for me!"





This is your plan to appeal to voters?
Like, you might lose the "people who only have sex with other people" vote, but you're gonna clean up with the horse-fucker demographic!

 

Sweet, sweet horse-fucking, am I right?

Don't leave me hangin' brah!

Now, I've never been to Mississippi, but I'm pretty sure that, despite whatever idiosyncracies that state has, whatever features make it unique, it probably shares at least this in common with the other 49 states in the Union: people there almost surely find the idea of horse-fucking repellant, abhorrent, and morally reprehensible. Not to mention just gross.

But, hey, what do I know? This is the Bible Belt after all, so maybe they're okay with horse-fucking as long as it's a female horse? I mean, I know in general these folks frown on anything-but-marital-reproductive sex between humans, but maybe there's an exception for inter-species boinking? Probably not.

But at any rate, it's definitely a bold strategy.
And the ads just write themselves.



  Hi, I'm Senator Thad Cochran, and you're goddamm right I've fucked a horse! And you probably have too. If you're one of those fancy-pants Washington elites that thinks he's too good to fuck a horse, maybe you should vote for my opponent. He's only ever had sex with women!
But if you're like me, and you've fucked a horse, and you're not ashamed of having fucked a horse, then vote for me, Thad Cochran, for Senate. Together we'll fuck all the horses! Who knows, maybe we'll even 69 a goat!

I'm not Thad Cochran and I do NOT approve this message.

Meet the latest nut.

It's Virginia's David Brat!




 

After defeating ferret-faced bag of dicks Eric Cantor, the latest Ayn Rand Fanboi to pollute our national discourse took to the airwaves to be interviewed by creepy douchebearded flack Chuck Todd.

 

I'm on TV!

Todd asked him about the minimum wage:

 "I don't have a well-crafted response on that one," he said.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/david-brat-explains-stunning-victory-eric-cantor-article-1.1825251#ixzz34SekIcbi

Seriously? A well-crafted response? You're no supposed to have a well-crafted response, you're supposed to have an opinion! You're supposed to have a position! This was a n easy one. It's not like he asked you about some complex foreign policy issue. He asked you about the minimum wage. Walk down the street and just ask people about the minimum wage. Everyone has a position. Most people will tell you "It;s too low, let's raise it." And they won't have to take any time to craft that answer. And there are a few guys you might run into who will stop jerking off into a copy of The Fountainhead long enough to say "fuck that, there shouldn't be any minimum wage because free markets." And they'll be spectacularly stupid assholes, bu they'll have a ready, coherent answer to a simple fucking question.

It's the minimum wage. You have a PhD in fucking economics. You TEACH ECONOMICS! How do you not have an answer? I took exactly one economics class in college and barely passed it and I could give you a good answer off the top of my head if someone asked me if I support a federal minimum wage.  "Yes". See how easy that was?

Then there was this:

"Hey Chuck, I thought we were just going to chat today about the celebratory aspect," Brat said, adding that there would be time in the future to talk about his positions. "I just wanted to talk about the victory we had, and I just wanted to thank everybody."

Because, of course, that's how right-wingers see the role of the media. They think all the media should be like Fox. They think all media outlets should function as part of their PR apparatus. They think the job of the media is to help them get their message out there. Which explains why, whenever any media outlet is less than fully cooperative in helping them frame their story, they think they are victims of some imaginary liberal bias.

Well, at least he can't be any worse than Cantor, and he may actually be gaffe-prone enough to blow the general election, like a Todd Akin or Christine O'Donnell.  Should be fun.

Washington Post will teach you ladies how to live!

Didn't the Washington Post used to be a legitimate paper? 

Like one of our nation's most prestigious bastions of journalism?

Because this is what they've been reduced to:

One way to end violence against women? Married dads.

The data show that #yesallwomen would be safer with fewer boyfriends around their kids.

Now that may sound awful, but compare it to the original headline
 (source: Wonkette)




Jeezus Christ! Taking lovers? To whom is this article targeted, Lady Chatterly?

The dramatic social media response to the UC-Santa Barbara shooting, captured by the hashtag #YesAllWomen, underlined an important and unpleasant truth: across the United States, millions of girls and women have been abused, assaulted, or raped by men, and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack

This social media outpouring makes it clear that some men pose a real threat to the physical and psychic welfare of women and girls. But obscured in the public conversation about the violence against women is the fact that some other men are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers. 

 I don't know what's worse, the notion that women wouldn't be getting violenced if they would just quit catting around and marry that nice boy, or the stunning ignorance it takes to posit that women are never beaten up or killed by a man to whom they are married!

 

All the research they would have needed to do.

 

Also, I'm a little curious, would being married have protected any of the victims of the Santa Barbara shooting spree you referenced above? Maybe wedding rings work like wonder woman's bracelets?

    

Too bad, sucker. I'm married!

But marriage also seems to cause men to behave better. That’s because men tend to settle down after they marry, to be more attentive to the expectations of friends and kin, to be more faithful, and to be more committed to their partners—factors that minimize the risk of violence.

You haven't met a lot of married men, have you?

I mean, sure, some of them are me, but most married men are not me. (sorry, ladies) You think a wedding ceremony takes the jerk out of a jerk? I'm pretty sure that a lot of abusive men want to marry, because they feel that marriage gives them a claim of ownership on the woman they marry. 

At any rate, why are we always trying to teach women tricks for avoiding violent men instead of teaching men and boys not to be violent?

The best part about Cantor losing

is not that he's going to have to slink off into well-deserved obscurity, he won't. He'll become a six-figure K-Street lobbyist or fill some seat on the board of some awful think-tank. No, the best part of Eric Cantor's loss is that he thought he was going to win. Easily. It never occurred to him that he might lose.





Because his own internal polling showed him leading by a pretty insurmountable, um, amount. 

Eric Cantor's Pollster Tries to Explain Why His Survey Showed Cantor Up 34 Points

Less than a week before voters dumped the House majority leader, an internal poll for Cantor's campaign, trumpeted to the Washington Post, showed Cantor cruising to a 34-point victory in his primary. Instead, Cantor got crushed, losing by 10 percentage points.

This is what happens when you decide that you are entitled not only to your own opinions, but your own facts. Even when the actual facts are important to you personally, even when you might need to know the truth in order to plan your electoral strategy, the Republicans have fallen so out of love with reality, that they just can't stop lying, even to each other.

It's just like 2012, when all the polls showed Obama cruising to re-election, except the polls that FOX and the right were relying on, the "unskewed" polls that showed Romney somehow winning easily. And then they were soooo shocked and disappointed when it turned out that their made-up facts didn't reflect the actual facts.

So that's what you get, Eric Cantor.
This is what happens when you decide that facts don't matter.