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Wonkers from around the vast Pacific Northwest region — but really mostly just Seattle and this one guy who drove in from Boise — gathered over the weekend for conversation, beer, and attempting to hear each other over the karaoke enthusiasts. Yr Doktor Zoom actually made it this year, thanks in large part to deciding not to attempt the trip in Vlad the Impala.

The Drinky Thing was attended by any number of fine human beings, including those depicted above! Left to right we have Lionel Hutz, Esq’s an unidentified left elbow, Emmellem, a woman in a Triumph motorcycles shirt who said she doesn’t comment and whose name we misplaced, Wile E. Quixote, and SaveThisPatient, who escaped the hellish nightmare of Britain’s good medical system so he could know the joys of freedom. On the table is one of the door prizes, a book reviewed right here on Wonkette! (Protip: “Door Prizes” are a great way to get rid of stuff that’s cluttering up your apartment!)

Are there more photos? Thanks to the quick iPhone handling of longtime reader BoatofVelociraptors, there are!
The blurry bald guy at the end of the table is Yr Doktor Zoom, the pensive woman with the interlaced fingers is Big SkullF***ing Dog, and we wish we had taken better notes on who else was there. (By “better” we mean “any.”) Identify yourselves in the comments!

Here is a coup being plotted, or maybe something more convivial. Drinky Thing organizer extraordinaire Weejee is in the center and Lionel Hutz, Esq. has rejoined his elbow on the right, and we are completely blanking on the other gentleman because NO ONE SHOULD EVER TRUST US TO REMEMBER NAMES EVER GOD WE SUCK, SORRY! (Update, thanks to Weejee: behalo’d person on the left is nounverb911, and Yr Dok Zoom is still hanging his head in shame)

This one is as blurry as several Wonketteers by around 11:00! We are completely off the hook for names on this one!

There were door prizes, winners determined by creative answers to actual end-of-section questions in Hugh Pyle’s immortal classic (and eventual prize itself) Sex, Love, & Romance: Sex Education from the Bible (For example, “What is the probable similarity between the painted faces of heathen tribal dancers and the painted faces of rock stars?” Answer: “Satan”) Some people who didn’t win books got little plastic Ponies instead! Big SkullF***ing Dog got Pinkie Pie, and here she (the pony) is facedown in an empty beer glass!

Also, we understand someone accidentally walked off with Wile E. Quixote’s hard-won copy of World History And Cultures in Christian Perspective, so maybe you all could sort that out in the comments?

So that was a heck of a thing there! Fun was had! No one was arrested! Yr Doktor Zoom is especially grateful to the good folks who covered his tab, and to all the awesome folks who bought him a jerb! We could really get into this whole blogstar lifestyle — next time, let’s go trash our room in the Travelodge! This Seattle thing has happened twice now, so dare we call it a tradition?

The official Wonk Your Brains Out Midwest Southwest Orgy & World Tour is on the way any day now as Yr Editrix hits the road in her new used Prius that she isn’t sure she trusts (we hear they all wobble like that on the freeway, though).

Also, we would just like to let Portland-area Wonkegonians know that we would not turn down the opportunity to come to a second reader-organized event in the Northwest this summer, and maybe we could even remember a notebook to write names in for godssake, not that we are inviting ourselves to an event that we just demanded you organize, or anything like that. Get on it, people!

Man, George Zimmerman can’t catch a break. Remember that guy — the one who shot a kid for walking around his neighborhood with the wrong kind of Skittles, or something. Well, he apparently retained the World’s Worstest Lawyer. The whole plan of defense is that Trayvon Martin was the aggressor, and Mr. Zimmerman was only acting in self-defense. And golly gee willikers, the defense finally found that smoking gun they’ve been looking for:

Lawyer Mark O’Mara said during a hearing last Tuesday that the defense had obtained video footage of three fights, including one in which he said two of Martin’s friends “were beating up a homeless guy.

Whoa, that sure does sound like it could be damning. Surely videographic evidence of Martin & Co beating up defenseless homeless men shows that Martin had a tendency for violence. I sure hope that this video was not wildly mischaracterized and showed something much more mundane, because that sure would be embarrassing for college graduate and law school graduate, lawyer Mark O’Mara, Esq.

According to NBC News:

Attorneys for George Zimmerman apologized Sunday for mischaracterizing evidence they said boosted their theory that Trayvon Martin was the aggressor in his fatal meeting with their client last year.

It’s ok, Mark O’Mara, Esq. Maybe the videotape was all grainy, and you know how sometimes all… youths… look the same. We are sure it is a mistake that anyone could have made, no biggie. But hold on… what, exactly, was on this video that was about to be so critical to your defense?

In a statement posted on Zimmerman’s website, the defense lawyers said the footage actually showed ”two homeless guys fighting each other over a bike.

Seriously, O’Mara? Your crack defense team couldn’t differentiate between two kids beating up a homeless man and a webisode of Bumfights?!? Are you even trying here? The judge already said you can’t talk about Martin’s suspension from school, prior weed-smoking, previous text messages, or past fighting in your opening statement. Basically, you have to hope that the jury is as ALLEGEDLY racist as your defendant, or else hope that an offer to Taste the Rainbow is an actual threat to be met with FreedomLeadTM.

In any case, you are seriously bad at your job. No matter how this case turns out, you will likely be looking for a new job. May we humbly suggest running for Congress, where you might sadly be an improvement over several legislative shitmuffins already there.

[NBC News]

There is probably a pretty good dissertation to be written on the whole phenomenon of “Murderous Dictators Who Have Wacky Quirks,” like how Moammar Khadafi collected Condi Rice sideboob photos or Uday Hussein’s penchant for taking his pet tigers for a walk around Baghdad, or virtually any factoid about Donald Trump. (Not a murderous dictator, you say? Not YET, we reply.) But the master of the form was the late North Korean Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, who was born under a double rainbow on a sacred mountaintop, claimed he invented the hamburger, and drank $700,000 of cognac a year. And he had a sushi chef who was the source of virtually everything that western intelligence knew about the Kim family, according to this GQ piece by Adam Johnson. Read the whole thing for the full brain-’sploding account of wretched dictatorial excess; we can only hope to share some aneurysm-inducing highlights here.

The sushi chef, “Kenji Fujimoto,” (not his real name) told Johnson all about his incredible experiences working for ‘il Kim from 1988 to 2001. Is it all true? It is definitely as real as any other pseudonymous tale of adventure that no one ever expected to happen! And, hey, we have no reason not to believe any of it, because everything about North Korea is automagically surreal to begin with.

We get stories about the Joy Division, which was not the English rock band but rather the ”teams of beautiful North Korean girls, most forcibly recruited under the age of 16, [who] were maintained to provide entertainment, massages, and sexual gratification.” We learn that Fujimoto really liked the black Mercedes Kim gave him. We find out that Kim thought his longevity would be increased through a diet of “perfectly shaped rice, grown in North Korea…cooked over wood harvested from Mount Paektu” — that sacred mountain again. Fujimoto was, according to Fujimoto, Kim’s BFF, the guy the dictator trusted to be straight with him because Fujimoto was ballsy enough to actually beat Kim — who Fujimoto calls “Shogun-sama,” or “great master” — in a jet-ski race that was really a test of his loyalty, according to Fujimoto.

And so on. Kim liked Fujimoto so much that he invited him into his inner circle, arranged to have him marry a popular North Korean singer, and once had him over for movie night, where they watched the 1993 Clint Eastwood flick In the Line of Fire with Kim’s security detail and the 11-year-old Kim Jong-un:

In the movie, Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a Secret Service agent haunted by what he perceives to be his failure to save President Kennedy from assassination. But Clint Eastwood’s not going to let the current president die! There’s a scene in which Eastwood’s Secret Service team is running alongside the president’s motorcade. Eight agents in suits move with a pair of black limos, each of them with a hand on a chassis to protect the president from an evil assassin, played by John Malkovich. Here Shogun-sama suddenly stood. “This is the best scene in the movie!” he announced. He turned to his secretary and pointed at him. “This is how you protect me,” he said. Then he shouted at his security team, “You have to protect me as the Secret Police in the movie do!”

Are there close shaves? There are! Fujimoto got arrested in 1996 during a visit to Japan to buy fish, and was detained for eighteen months, during which the Japanese government set him up in a sushi restaurant at an Okinawa resort. While being questioned, Fujimoto was given books on how North Korea treats dissidents, something he never gave any thought to, he says. And he was visited by a shadowy man who he instantly recognized as an assassin…but who didn’t return to kill him at the end of the day like he said he would. Fujimoto eventually returned to North Korea in 1998, and says that Kim told him it was all in good fun:

Kim Jong-il soon summoned him. Yes, Shogun-sama admitted, he’d sent an assassin to Okinawa, but he urged Fujimoto to forget about it. He was still alive, wasn’t he? It was Kim’s wife, Ko Young-hee, who’d reminded him of how funny and lovable his Japanese friend had been. Thus the killer was recalled.

After 18 months of house arrest, Fujimoto was allowed back into Kim’s good graces, but he began to fear for his life since he was now aware that those who displeased Kim tended to disappear from official photographs. So he escaped back to Japan, and even now is not at all worried that his Korean wife and children might have suffered for it, because he and Kim, they had a connection, man:

“This is a difficult question,” I said. “What did you think would happen to your wife after you escaped?”

Fujimoto told me he wouldn’t have escaped if he’d thought she would be shot.

“Remember that my wife was Kim Jong-il’s favorite singer,” Fujimoto said. “And I believed Kim Jong-il never killed girls.”

I said, “But they were sent to the coal mine, your wife and children, to be re-educated.”

Fujimoto seemed untroubled by this. He said he’d done all that he could. Right away, he started writing letters of apology to Kim Jong-il.

“And it worked,” he said. “After six years, they were freed.”

But in spite of everything, Fujimoto dreams of returning to North Korea, to be pals with Kim Jong-un and bring about peace through superior ramen. They love him there. Oh, sure, his 22 year old son suddenly died one night, but Fujimoto is convinced that it was just his poor eating habits, because why would the North Korean government kill his son and not him?

Say, did we mention that Fujimoto has written three books about his experiences in North Korea and now lives on the fees he charges for interviews? (Johnson notes that GQ did not pay for the interviews for his piece — but that the club where he and Fujimoto met charges $150 an hour for space.)

There’s something really weird and epic and almost like something out of a fantastic fictional world about some of this — Kim Garcia Marquez? The Secret Life Of Walter Fujimoto? — but we aren’t quite sure we can say whether we believe a word of it. Sometimes the whole story feels like bullshit. But it’s about North Korea, which means that the more surreal it seems, the more likely it is to almost certainly be true.  According to Fujimoto.

[GQ via NPR]

Discarded philosopher-statesman Rick Santorum’s latest column at World Net Daily is about Freedom and the taking of it by Barack Obama. Naturally, it’s a veritable Journey concert of brain-dead paleo-conservative greatest hits: We are Free Americans because our values are having guns, being hetero-sexing Christians, drowning Obamacare in the sink, and Taxed Enough Already! Yes, all of this stopped being terribly funny a while ago, but here’s the thing: Rick Santorum’s rote regurgitations distill a certain dangerous strain of American political “thought” that remains influential. Hell, they might even influence how people think and talk about politics, so what choice does yr Wonkette have but to think up new ways to eviscerate the simpleton “philosophies” that underpin them? We will do it real good, we promise. PLUS: Rick Santorum invents a new form of punctuation!

First, let’s just ignore Rick’s “religious liberty” and “gun rights” bullshit because (we think) we’ve finally arrived at a point where the folks who parrot these kinds of arguments are getting the “smile, nod, back away from” treatment from anyone with a mind worth engaging. Our work is done here!

Sadly, the “economic freedom” slice of Santorum et al’s medicine show remains as potently popular as it is totally fucking wrong. We’d love to ask Rick Santorum if a kid raised by an unemployed single mother in a dying, meth-addled Appalachian coal town is as economically free as Rick Santorum’s kids who sucked the money-teat of power. Of course he would say “Yes! Because America and low taxes, he can be Rick Santorum too!” Hey family that can’t afford college, food or medicine, at least you’re free! Hey, guy without feet, at least you have legs! This is Rick Santorum’s Best Of All Possible Worlds, we’re just suffering in it. Or maybe it would be even better if we helped you people even less, because “waste.”

We’d also love to ask Rick Santorum about this:

“Intergenerational [economic] mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.”

What would be his answer? After all, the countries where it’s easier to go from rags to riches all have higher taxes, spend more on citizens’ health and welfare, and are less religious than the United States. That’s every arrow in the Santorum quiver, except homosex! Of course, maybe he’d just say that money doesn’t equal freedom, unless you do the alchemy that turns money into speech first. Curse your ironclad logic, Rick!

Here’s something you can tell idiots like Rick Santorum who love the “we don’t need welfare, we need freedom” argument: Maybe that was a good point a hundred years ago, when rather than issue food stamps the federal government could just give you literally hundreds of acres of FREE FUCKING LAND if you only promised to go live there and maybe try and grow something. But that’s over now, and tough luck if you didn’t get any. Maybe it was a good point sixty years ago, when the United States was the only industrial economy not bombed to rubble in the biggest war in history and any white man could get a job. That’s over, too. Not to get too philosophical, but with vanishingly few exceptions there’s no way to live without money anymore, and by this fact alone, you have to concede that every living American is constrained from birth in ways they didn’t vote for and can’t change. Going one step further and saying “OH YEAH and also nobody’s gonna help you if mommy and daddy can’t” is not only cruel, it’s philosophically incoherent.

Finally, as promised, Rick Santorum’s errata: He sort-of quotes the preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths [– truths –] to be self-evident” … maybe the weird bracketed em-dashes are because he just copy-pasted that part from one of his shitty speeches and that’s how he remembers to say the word “truths” really “passionately?” Continuing with the theme of not being good at quoting stuff that everyone already knows, Rick Santorum also reminds us about that time when Barack Obama said people are “clinging to their guns and Bible” (quotes in original) when Obama actually said “religion,” not “Bible,” because he’s a Moslem. We would hate to see Rich Santorum’s version of a Jimmy Buffett song! Also fun to read was Rick’s sic take on the French Revolution:

“The revolutionaries’ guiding words were equality (sounds goods), liberty (good) and fraternity or brotherhood – not paternity, fatherhood. That is, in France, the belief was not that rights come from a Creator. Instead, the other revolution was a secular, godless, anti-clerical revolution. Churches were burned; clergy were killed. It was a rejection of God.”

Sounds goods to us, too, Ricks! Keeps ups the greats works!

[WND]

This just in: Walmart, depressing as it is, would be an EVEN MORE depressing place to work if taxpayers weren’t subsidizing the low, low wages paid to Walmart employees. Yes, that’s right! You, me, and all the other taxpayers in the room are subsidizing the wages of Walmart workers. It’s almost like we are shareholders, except we reap no financial benefits (indirectly or otherwise) and exert no real control over its board of directors, prices, management, or day-to-day operations (indirectly or otherwise). Isn’t that a nice arrangement?

Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin, according to a study released by Congressional Democrats on Thursday.

OK well, before we get our panties in a wad, let’s all remember that this report was authored by DEMOCRATS, which are kind of like Communists, so probably this report–among other things– fails to see the benefits inherent to socializing losses and privatizing profits.

After accounting for the total number of Walmart stores and employees across the state and the per-person costs of BadgerCare, as [Wisconsin's] health care program is known, the report’s authors estimated that the cost of publicly funded health care comes to $251,706 per year for a 300-employee Supercenter.

The authors then added up the projected costs of other public-assistance programs available to families on BadgerCare, such as reduced-price school meals, Section 8 housing assistance, the earned income tax credit and energy assistance. Assuming all those workers avail themselves of those additional programs — granted, an unlikely scenario — the report extrapolates that the final tab would top $900,000.

Well why don’t we just take away all the food stamps and reduced price school meals and Section 8 housing and earned income tax and all that? If we take all of those things away, workers will have no choice but to find higher-paying jobs, the economy will improve, taxpayers will be relieved of their burden, and BAM. No more wasted tax dollars. Amiright? No, of course not, that was a trick question, but we wouldn’t surprised if Scott Walker suggested any or all of these things as a remedy.

Anyway, things are just FINE at Walmart, says a lady who works for Walmart:

In response to the report, Walmart spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said the company was proud of the opportunities it provides for employees.

“Unfortunately there are some people who base their opinions on misconceptions rather than the facts, and that is why we recently launched a campaign to show people the unlimited opportunities that exist at Walmart,” Buchanan said, noting that 75 percent of Walmart managers started as hourly employees. “Every month more than 60 percent of Americans shop at Walmart and we are proud to help them save money on what they want and need to build better lives for themselves and their families. We provide a range of jobs — from people starting out stocking shelves to Ph.D.’s in engineering and finance. We provide education assistance and skill training and, most of all, a chance to move up in the ranks.”

Did Brooke Buchanan forget to mention that Walmart compensates  its CEO more in one hour than a retail employee earns in an entire year, has refused to pay overtime, understaffs to the point of compromising employee safety, and pays such a meager wage that a majority of its employees with children are living below the poverty line ? It must have slipped her mind. But don’t worry, if you have a PhD in engineering or finance, they are happy to pay you minimum wage to stock shelves so everything will work out great.

[HuffPo]

What exactly would a Romney presidency have been like? Yes, of course it would have been horrible, we know that. But in what specific WAYS would have it been horrible? See, now we know the answer to this question, because Romney Readiness Project, the Republican candidate’s transition organization (known in certain circles as R2P) has published a 138-page report detailing how it prepared for a potential Romney victory.

From Time:

“The White House staff is similar to a holding company” read one PowerPoint slide, which would have been presented to President-elect Romney as part of an expansive briefing on the morning after Election Day. It went on to list three main divisions of the metaphorical firm: “Care & Feeding Offices,” like speechwriting, “Policy Offices,” like the National Security Council, and “Packaging & Selling Offices,” like the office of the press secretary. This was the view of the Presidency Romney would have brought with him to Washington, a glimpse of the White House that never was — and plan that never saw the light of day.

Yes, the White House is similar to a holding company, except not exactly, because a “holding company” is a company that owns enough stock in another company to control its board of directors, and White House, on the other hand, is not a “company” at all. Yet. And if you think Time is exaggerating, here is a copy of the PowerPoint slide explaining at you about the White-House-as-holding-company metaphor:

But wait! There’s more! The R2P also released a detailed set of recommendations about how, exactly, to manage this “holding company” that already had its own procedures, work culture, and norms in place, some of which had been developed over the past two or so centuries:

• Corporate-style training seminars were planned for appointees and nominees before the inauguration to teach management skills.
• A plan to restructure White House operations to suit Romney’s corporate management style, with clear deliverables.
• Detailed flow charts delineating how information and decisions were disseminated through the administration to achieve “unity.”
• Plans to evaluate Cabinet secretaries’s performance by “systematically assessing the efforts of their departments in contributing to [Romney's] priorities and objectives, perhaps by a newly created ”deputy chief of staff for Cabinet oversight.

Don’t worry, they weren’t going to ruin the White House and leave the country alone; the first 200 days also included plans to develop a “Reagan Economic Zone” to increase growth,  repeal Obamacare, repeal other “grown-inhibiting” Obama policies,  end the use of union workers in federal projects, deregulate the coal industry, and approve Keystone XL.

Ah, the long national nightmare that never was: how sad that Romney didn’t win, and that our White House isn’t run like a holding company! And ESPECIALLY how sad that your Wonkette will soon be able to get affordable health insurance due to the newly established health insurance exchanges.

Should we also note that these policies are almost exactly the same as those being pursued by the GOP Congress? Because why NOT do all the things that the losing candidate wanted to do, it’s not like we had an election to figure out what the country wanted to do about any of these issues. Good to know that in Romney’s absence, Congress is happy to take up the slack and ruin the country anyway!

[Time]

Hey Wonkzuelans, you probably know that Obama declared June LGBT Pride month and that now we are all perverted bigots because we love gay sex and hate everyone who does not love gay sex. But what you probably don’t know yet is that the gays have already begun wrecking/perverting/bigoting that formerly impenetrable fortress of gay-hating, Utah. Yes, it’s true. Over the weekend, the gays stone-cold murdered Utah with their cavalcade of gay.

First, the gays got to the Mormons, oh yes they did:

Some 400 people from the grassroots group Mormons Building Bridges marched under a banner reading “Family Reunion” in the annual parade in Salt Lake City.

Last year, their participation marked the first time such a large group of Mormons had joined the parade.

Mormons Building Bridges organizer Erika Munson told The Salt Lake Tribune that the group and others have helped change public attitudes toward gay people. She notes bishops no longer excommunicate members who come out.

See? Now the Mormons can’t even throw out the gays for being gay. What kind of world is this?? Worse still, the gays have gotten to the Utah Boy Scouts:

Boy Scouts and adult volunteers wore their uniforms Sunday as they marched in Utah’s gay pride parade — defying a leader of the youth organization who had said they couldn’t do so under the organization’s guidelines prohibiting advocating political or social positions.

The Utah Pride Festival Parade came a little more than a week after national delegates of the Boy Scouts of America approved allowing gay youth to join, ending controversial membership guidelines that had in recent years dogged one of the nation’s most popular organizations for children and teens.

“It just feels like the right thing to do,” Kenji Mikesell, an 18-year-old Eagle Scout and high school senior still active with his troop, said before leaving for the parade in Salt Lake City in his uniform.

“It’s kind of a way of saying we want you here,” added Mikesell, who marched with Mormons Building Bridges and whose troop is chartered by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Scouting has been a very positive influence in my life, and I’d like to see more people take advantage of it now that the ban has been lifted.

Mormons and Boy Scouts marching together for the gays, just as Bryan Fischer warned us!   Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! The world as you know it is over people, because now that Utah is vanquished, nothing else will stand against the Rainbow Tide, which is like the Crimson Tide except way more colorful and way way more gay.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, GAYS.

[TPM/NBC]

Hey ladies. How you doin? Do you like things like equal pay for equal work, being treated fairly in the workplace, and not having a partner physically abuse you? Do you think it might be nice if there were laws to enforce these types of things? If so, you are one of those goddam lesbofemanazis out to destroy the all vagina-Americans everywhere! Don’t you know that women, REAL WOMEN, don’t want those kind of radical decisions to be handed down by bureaucrats Washington D.C.! Or so says your fellow vagina-American, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), because she hates all womyn everywhere.

Rep. Blackburn was on Meet the Press this weekend spewing forth filth from her frothing face-orifice for reasons that absolutely no one can fathom. One can only assume that NBC was desperate to get a Republican woman to appear on the teevee, and the other one was scurrying back to Minnesota to begin planning the first Quitters Party presidential ticket (Yr Wonkette fully supports Bachmann-Palin 2016 with our prayers, our presence, our tithes, and our service).

While on the teevee, the panel was discussing the recent news that working womens sometimes make more monies than menfolk, which gives all men everywhere whiskey dick and will cause society to utterly collapse, because SCIENCE.

Rep. Blackburn had this Freedom-based insight regarding laws on pay equality and women’s place in the workforce:

BLACKBURN: I think that more important than that is making certain that women are recognized by those companies. You know, I’ve always said that I didn’t want to be given a job because I was a female, I wanted it because I was the most well-qualified person for the job. And making certain that companies are going to move forward in that vein — that is what women want. They don’t want the decisions made in Washington. They want to be able to have the power and the control and the ability to make those decisions for themselves.

Hear that, ladies? Quit relying on the strong arm of Washington and fend for your damn selves. Clearly, you want the power to be paid less if that is what corporate overlords want — why would you let Washington rip that power from your underpaid hands? And what about being treated fairly? Surely you don’t want laws to help — you want that power in your own hands, unless of course your employer indiscriminately decides otherwise, because what if they don’t think your delicate ladylike hands can handle it, you silly thing, you.

Rep. Blackburn has a long track record of dicking over fellow vagina-americans. In addition to voting against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, she also voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2009, and against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, “citing concerns that the law would protect ‘different groups’ such as Native American women and LGBT Americans from domestic violence alongside straight, white women.”

Since science has taught us that men are dominant, Yr Wonkette is confident that, on behalf of all women everywhere, we can patriarchally declare to Rep. Blackburn: Vagina Revoked. You are no longer allowed to speak out as a woman, because you are officially ousted from the sisterhood. As your parting gift, we give you an extra-large bag of salted rat dicks to munch on.

[ThinkProgress]

Donald Trump wants America to know that he’s not going to fade away. Not that anyone had any realistic hopes that he would. A National Review puff piece today says that Trump is once again suggesting he may run for president, because America Needs Him. This is excellent news for anyone who may have thought that the sucker birth rate was declining.

Following a New York Post story suggesting that Trump was exploring a 2016 run (but ignoring a US News story that rolled its eyes and sighed, “No he isn’t, you idiots, get real, here are some facts…Christ, why do I even bother?”), NRO’s Betsy Woodruff sought out the media-shy billionaire in the hope that he might be persuaded to share his thoughts with the world.

“Right now we’re a leaderless country,” he says. “Nothing’s going on, deals can’t be made, Congress is going in 15 different directions, and there’s nobody to steer them down the proper path. And it’s a very sad situation that’s taking place in the country, and that’s obviously one of the things I look at.”

Trump’s chief lickspittle, Michael Cohen (technically, his title is “executive vice president of the Trump Organization”), says that Trump is only thinking about What’s Best For The Country:

“He wouldn’t be unhappy if somebody great would just surface and help to rebuild America,” says Cohen. “He would be ecstatic. But that person’s not there, not in our current White House, and not in the cast of characters that appear to be the potential Republican nominees, and this is of concern to him.”

So yeah, Fuckface von Clownstick will only consider running if there’s nobody as great as Fuckface von Clownstick in the race. Or if he thinks there might be some publicity in keeping rumors of a run alive. Or if google alerts for “Donald trump 2016″ fall below a given level.

Besides, he still hasn’t had a chance to use that really funny video he made where he says “You’re fired!” to an actor who looks like Barack Obama. Why would the GOP spurn something as awesome as that?

[NRO / USNews / NYPost]

Here is a weird thing: The NRA must actually believe it is bad for people with kids to lock their guns up in a safe, since there is no actual moneygrifting reason for them to oppose laws that tell people with kids to lock their guns up in a safe. Like, it is not like hollow point bullets or whatever, where there is a hollow point bullet manufacturer spreading around a little grease. Maybe the gun safe manufacturers forgot to pay up?

Whatever the reason, the NRA has now come out against bills requiring parents to lock their guns up in a safe, and it is all like, PFFFT DUMMY, how is your four-year-old gonna save your family from Intruderz if they cannot even get to your Glock, HENGHHH?

Here is a bill in Michigan that is CLEARLY very stupid, as it requires parents to lock up their guns.

Senate Bill 268, introduced by State Senator Martha Scott (D-2), would undermine a citizen’s right to self-defense by imposing onerous storage requirements on Michigan gun owners, rendering firearms useless in self-defense situations.

SB 268 would require households with children to store their guns in locked boxes with trigger locks installed. A violation would be punishable as a misdemeanor offense if a juvenile gains access to the firearm.

The bill has been assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee but has not been scheduled for a hearing.

Please contact the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and let them know this bill is not only unnecessary, it is dangerous.

You hear that, Michigan lege? The NRA says it is dangerous to lock up your guns.

We are pretty sure you do not need a litany of children saving their families from gun murders, as that is just basic common sense that it probably totally happens all the time, maybe.

[Mediaite]

Three members of Murrysville, Pennsylvania’s Franklin Regional School Board are Very Concerned about the potentially damaging contents of high school literature textbooks. Board members Larry Borland, Dennis Pavlik and Jane Tower made the case for inclusion of a new School Board category in Wonkette’s coveted Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year Award by objecting to…well, bad things, we’re sure! Really bad, anti-American things in the textbooks, which the three considered biased and maybe missing important reminders about how America Is Always Best. After all, how can high school students ever love freedom if they aren’t told what to think?

Board member Larry Borland had some very specific objections to a proposed American Literature textbook:

“These books have a very strong bias and opinion, and there is a selection of things missing… I’m not saying the intent is right or wrong, but it’s clear that the intent is to look at how these writers felt about a (political) agenda item.”

The hell you say! American writers may have had opinions? About politics? We will never forget an article we read during our student teaching back in the 1980s, “American Literature is Un-American,” which pointed out that our best fiction has always been about grumpy malcontents, largely because stories about happy people who play well with others are BORING. Nobody wants to read “Bartleby the Very Productive Scrivener And His Happy Office Pals” or “Willy Loman Makes Regional Manager.”

Borland didn’t specify what he thought was “missing” exactly — maybe reminders about how Mark Twain and Emily Dickinon were rebellious sinners? — but he is very worried that student may be exposed to dangerous questions about values that are not those of Larry Borland:

Among the questions he criticized were “Are people basically good?” and “Does everyone have a dark side?” He alleged that several pieces were included selectively for an individual agenda item.

“There’s a distinct bias in the book to basically put the historic context on the backburner of the olden days,” Borland said. “I have a problem with that.”

Borland had previously expressed concerns that history textbooks might present slavery as a bad thing without enough “historical context” to make clear that slave owners shouldn’t be judged by modern standards.(Is he one of those guys who wants more emphasis on how slave traders in Africa were mostly other Africans, because then it’s not white people’s fault? We do not know, but that is often what “context” means.) The article doesn’t say what particular readings Borland objects to; maybe he thinks Huck Finn should have stepped back and said, “You know, slavery is a very complex issue! Have I truly considered the perspectives of those who think Jim should be turned in?”

Borland ultimately voted for the books, but Tower and Pavlik did not. Tower said she worried that the books could lead to terrorism:

“I am concerned about the multiculturalism and the emphasis on it,” Tower said. “I think the texts emphasize that to the detriment of the exceptionalism of America. We saw a sad, sad example of that at the Boston Marathon.”

We assume she meant the bombing, which everyone knows happened because high school textbooks include a bunch of writers whose names sound funny. Then again, maybe she says that every year when the marathon is won by some Kenyan. Say… you know what else was won by an undeserving Kenyan?

Pavlik had previously made news by playing a central role in removing Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl” from a list of approved supplemental readings for an “Alternative Voices” elective English class. He considered the poem “horrific” and “utterly disgusting.” Yay, America!

The books are up for an approval vote on June 17, after which the school board will consider whether students are adequately protected against witchcraft and the Evil Eye.

[TribLive.com

The patriots at Globe Magazine have been warning us from the very start that this Obama was a menace, but did we listen? No, and shame be upon us! Where the hell were we back in February of 2008, when Globe uncovered the “Obama Firestorm” that he was a black Afrobaby and not even an American either? Probably getting our legs thrilled, we are such perverts! And what the hell were we doing a month later, when the bombshell “Obama Bombshell” bombshell revealed that he is a gay sex haver and a doer of crack no better than a common mayor of Toronto? Off at the Church of Satan getting gay married to whatever was handy, no doubt! It went on and on: “OBAMA STABS DYING CLINTON IN THE BACK!” … “OBAMA IN GAY BATHHOUSE BOMBSHELL”” … “Obama Lung Cancer Shocker!” … “Truth About Obama Gay Murder!” … “OBAMA’S $5 MILLION VACATION SCANDAL” … and this is but a Whitman’s Sampler of all the scandals, shockers, back-stabbings, and bombshells that Globe has gamely chronicled since we invited this national nightmare into the White House… yet we fools did nothing, leaving Globe with no choice but to call it: Obama is officially “WORSE THAN NIXON!” so let’s get this impeachment started! Also, did you know that they built a new Watergate, and it exploded!? But what are Sources Saying?

‘The 51-year-old Commander-in-Chief is so alarmed about his OWN impeachment, he can’t eat or sleep and has been walking the White House’s halls at night, bizarrely staring at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln for inspiration, says a source.’

That does sound bizarre, a source! And evocative of something, maybe a movie we saw, who knows. But why impeachment? Seems harsh, no? Unfortunately, it’s really that serious, as you would know if you were willing to spend $3.99 for the Truth:

• “The Internal Revenue Service specifically targeted his political enemies and right-wing Tea Party groups who were critical of his policies.
• “His Justice Department secretly spied on a slew of journalists, who are American citizens, and tried to identify who they were talking with by seizing their phone records in a secret probe.
• “His Administration lied to Congress and covered up the truth about the murders of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.”

At first, all this struck us as extremely tendentious, speculative, and hard to prove, given the facts as we know them and the high bar of impeachment. But then we realized: Globe Magazine is so far ahead of the curve because they are literally reporting from the future:

In this mad world to come, a poll will find that “more than half of those surveyed want to impeach Obama “for the trifecta of scandals now consuming Washington,” pollster Fritz Wenzel of Wenzel Strategies says.” Even Roger Stone, who was among the trickiest of Nixon’s CREEPs, says of the president: “Obama is worse than Nixon. The scandals are worse than Watergate.” He would know!

Thank you, Globe Magazine, we are sheeple no more, and please do keep up the side-boob, A+ for real! One thing, though: We know the president is important and all, but did you have to bury the living members of the cast of M*A*S*H on page 34? What, do you hate the troops?

[Globe]

Why is top Obama adviser and ’08 campaign guru David Plouffe being so Uncivil as to call crybaby car robber arsonist Darrell Issa a crybaby car robber firebug? Probably because flibbenflobbenslobberIRSghazi the Obama Administration is the most dastardly and intimidating administration the world has ever known, and this is just one more instance of how COMPLETELY UNFAIRLY they will intimidate you by calling you a crybaby car robber firebug just because you were charged with stealing cars and suspected of burning down your own buildings, and also because you love to cry. (Apparently, David Plouffe forgot to put “crybaby” in his Tweeter, can somebody ask him to correct it?)

Steve Benen remembers the good times in this New Yorker report about Darrell Issa’s car robbing and firebugging, the one we always get great glee in citing whenever we talk about how Darrell Issa loved to rob cars and start fires (and cry).

For the record, Lizza’s report on Issa highlighted one run-in with the law after another, including arrests and indictments. There are also many suspected crimes — he’s accused of deliberately burning down a building and threatening a former employee with a gun — which did not lead to formal charges, but which nevertheless cast the congressman in a less-than-flattering light.

The New Yorker report also noted an incident in which Issa was in a car accident with a woman who needed to be hospitalized. He drove away before the police could arrive because, as he told the person he hit, he didn’t have time to wait. Issa didn’t face charges, but he was sued over the matter, and agreed to an out-of-court settlement.

And in case that weren’t quite enough, the same article also noted instances in which Issa appears to have lied about his background.

LIES? How dare you, The New Yorker! Pistols at dawn! (Also, Bill Ayers is Darrell Issa’s real dad, pass the word.)

[Maddowblog]

Victory! Conservatism ascendant! The GOP is once again eating liberals’ lunch! DRUDGE SIRENS!!!!! TWITCHY TEAM, ASSEMBLE!!!!

We’re speaking of the crowing we caught on Twitter yesterday over the news that Elbert Guillory, Louisiana State Senator, has switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. We guess Guillory decided he would rather be the first black Republican state senator in Louisiana since Reconstruction than the first Democratic nominee for Wonkette’s coveted Legislative Shitmuffin of the Year Award. Oh well, he’s still eligible for the prize and he already has our everlasting scorn for voting against science teachers’ continued freedom to teach science in high school science classes.

What all the crowing missed was this: Guillory was apparently a member of the Republican Party until 2007, when he switched his affiliation to run for the Louisiana House of Representatives in a heavily Democratic district. He served until 2009, when he won his current seat in the Senate in a special election where his only opponent was another Democrat. He was re-elected in 2011 over another Democrat in an election in which the Republicans again did not even bother to run a candidate. They are not big on running, let alone electing Republicans in that corner of Louisiana, is what we’re saying.

Nonetheless, Guillory was a reliable conservative and ally of Governor “Bobby” Jindal, himself no slouch in the faith-healing-is-legitimagatical-medicawhatsit department. In his speech announcing his party switch, Guillory said he was motivated by recent comments by another Democratic Senator, who claimed during the debate over a bill to expand Medicaid in Louisiana that fellow lawmakers had told her that their opposition to Obamacare was driven by President Obama’s race more than anything else, comments Jindal had denounced.

Also in Friday’s speech Guillory recited the usual litany of your standard conservative complaints, hitting all the checkboxes in denouncing Democrats for support of “abortion on demand,” every type of marriage except “traditional marriage,” unions, gun control, and trying to limit oil drilling after BP turned his state’s coastline into a chemical dump. We guess Guillory thinks oil-coated pelicans and eyeless shrimp are a culinary delicacy. What this guy was doing in the Democratic Party, even in Louisiana, we can’t even. Oh right, the whole wanting to win elections in his district thing.

To top it all off, Guillory chose to make his announcement at @large, a conference held in Baton Rouge to discuss ways to attract more black conservatives to the GOP. Guillory was accepting the Frederick Douglass Republican Award, which was being handed out by our old friend K. Carl Smith, who not long ago had us <headdesking> into nearly permanent brain damage over his appropriation of the great orator as a symbol of Republican Party — and thus, American — values. We’ve already spent enough time explaining why K. Carl Smith is a ridiculous huckster, but we’ll note that Guillory has bought the GOP’s modern-day rewriting of the history of American race relations:

Guillory said under Republicans the black community has “gotten some pretty good deals.”

Among them, he said, are fighting for black rights during and after the Civil War, helping Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson pass the 1965 Civil Rights Act over the objection of most Southern Democrats, and Republican President Richard Nixon opening the doors to higher education and to government contracting for minorities.

GAH! We know! The Democrats had long been the party of reactionary Southern racists, until those guys all fled to the GOP and made it the party of reactionary Southern racists, and Nixon courted and sucked up to those guys as long as it kept him in power! Have guys like Elbert Guillory and K. Carl Smith been in a coma in a cave on an asteroid in the outer orbit of one of Saturn’s rings for the last fifty years?

Once again, all together now: <headdesk>.

By the way, this news first came to our attention via a tweet from our old friend Lee Stranahan, intrepid Pigford reporter and still-alive friend of Andrew Breitbart, who is reeling from the fizzling out of Blog About Pigford Day last month and will now forever be known in the Wonkette pantheon as Sad Lee. Thus it has been decreed, forever and ever, world without end, amen. Lee has written a short piece on Guillory for Dead Breitbart’s Playland For Play Journalists, and he manages to leave out, oh, anything relevant about Frederick Douglass and 19th-century Republicans, not to mention everything in Guillory’s political history that made this the least shocking party switch since ever. That’s some fine journamalising, Sad Lee.

[NOLA/The Advocate/Ballotpedia]

Do you remember when you were young and you played…well, whatever the hell imaginary thing you played? Dress-up, tea party (no, not that kind), transformers, whatthefuckever? You probably grew out of that by, say, college, because then girls (or boys! or whoever!) started looking at you a little weird. This is not true if you are Wonkette’s favorite attorney, Larry Klayman. On the heels of such smash hits as losing a lawsuit against Rachel Maddow really bad for her crime of quoting his client Bradlee Dean and racesplainin’ that Obama wants to kill all the white people, Klayman is back, motherfuckers, with a toe tapper called “My Imaginary Grand Jury Just Indicted Obama.” Hit it!

Larry Klayman, the founder of political watchdog groups Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, organized what he called a citizens grand jury for the third time this week seeking “indictments” against President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, among others.

The Ocala panel, Klayman said, did indict those and other members of the Obama administration, as well as two Supreme Court justices and key officials with the IRS on charges ranging from divulging national security secrets to involuntary manslaughter.

“We put this together because of the lack of responsiveness in Washington,” Klayman said Tuesday, hours after the grand jury finished meeting. “The American people need to be shown that we have the future in our hands, our destiny.”

THE FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS AMERICA. Seriously, Klayman sounds just like we did when we played Star Wars in 11th…ummm we mean 3rd grade and pretended we were Luke Skywalker and roped our little brother into being Darth Vader. (SHUT UP YOU DID IT TOO.)

We are sure you are dying to know who Larry Klayman pretended to indict and why! Fortunately, Klayman has a very rich fantasy life and indicted pretty much errrebody, including Bamz, Old Handsome Joe, Eric Holder (who we are mad at also but we do not think he should be indicted!), IRS officials, John Roberts, Elena Kagan, and your mom. What happens now?!!

According to Klayman, those who were indicted will be arraigned, then publicly tried sometime in June or July here in Ocala. Klayman is looking for a judge or retired judge to preside over the trial.

“If they don’t show (for the arraignment), we will enter a not-guilty plea for them and they will be tried in absentia,” he said.

Oh. OK then. That sounds totally reasonable. Surely all of America’s leaders will respect your show trial where no one actually shows up. Look, people. If it were this easy, there is an almost endless list of people yr Wonkette would indict:

• people who wear stretch leggings as pants
• anyone who uses the word “incentivize”
• Bjork (just ’cause, that’s why)
• Larry Klayman
• direct mail solicitations

That last one is a thing, not a person, but as long as we’re playing make-believe, we’re going all out.

[Ocala.com]

Here’s one for your SAT analogy section: George W. Bush is to to Iraqi journalists and shoes as Australian Prime Minister Julia Gilliard is to high school students and sandwiches. For the second time within a month, the Sydney Morning Herald reports, Gilliard has been the target of a “bread-based missile” flung during a school visit, this time while visiting a high school in Canberra to announce some education grant thing. Earlier in May, a student at a high school in Queensland was suspended for nailing the PM with a vegemite sandwich. (The student’s motive was unknown, but the working theory is that the PM asked him if he speaka her language.)

Happily, no one seems to be going too nuts about any of this, because for godssake it’s a couple of sammiches. Possibly because Rupert Murdoch is now an American,  and nobody has informed Alex Jones that the student in the vegemite sandwich incident says he was merely an innocent bystander who was framed. Gilliard simply said at a press conference later in the day, “They must have thought I was hungry.” Australian Capital Territory Chief Minister Katy Gallagher (we think that is like being the Mayor of DC, or maybe Princess of The Moon) also laughed off the incident, saying

“Schools are full of kids, kids occasionally do silly things. Occasionally you’re going to get a rogue student…From what I saw ––and I was squashed in the crowd — it was a really excited student population eager to talk with the Prime Minster and she was very generous with her time.”

Still, we have to fault the Aussies on Twitter who have started the #sandwichgate hashtag. Come on, people, it should be #sandwichghazi.

[Sydney Morning Herald]

It’s time, Pacific Northwest Wonkers! Join Yr Doktor Zoom at the reader-organized Seattle Drinky Thing TONIGHT (Saturday, June 1) from 7 to ????? at The Blarney Stone in beautiful Downtown Seattle. Additional details at this linky. And then on Sunday, the embarrassing sideways photographs! Hey, does somebody have a USB cord that fits a Kodak digital camera? We’re just asking…

 Just in case you are unfamiliar with Reinhart-Rogoff: they are a pair of economists who published a very famous paper purporting to show that high public debt to GDP ratio leads to negative economic growth. This paper was waved around by people like Paul Ryan, who used it to argue that cutting Social Security and Medicaid and unemployment were important tools for staving off recession because of the magical thing that happens to economies when the GDP to debt ratio hits 90%.

Will you be shocked to learn that Reinhart-Rogoff’s famous paper was wrong? As a graduate student from UMass demonstrated, Reinhart and Rogoff not only based their conclusions off cherry-picked data, they made a serious error in the Excel spreadsheet they were working with. (Math is really hard, you guys.)

But wait! There’s more! Not only were Reinhart-Rogoff working with a cherry-picked data set and a thoroughly screwed up spreadsheet, they fell victim to one of the most classic blunders and got the causal relationship backwards: slow growth causes higher debt, not the other way around. D’OH, and cetera.

From HuffPo:

As you can see from the chart from [University of Massachusetts professor Arindrajit] Dube’s paper below, growth tends to be slower in the five years before countries have high debt levels. In the five years after they have high debt levels, there is no noticeable difference in growth at all, certainly not at the 90 percent debt-to-GDP level that Reinhart and Rogoff’s 2010 paper made infamous. [University of Michigan economics professor Miles Kimball and University of Michigan undergraduate student Yichuan Wang] present similar findings in [a] Quartz piece:

No big deal, it’s just the total opposite of what Reinhart-Rogoff has been saying, and also, the total opposite of the economic policy we’re currently pursuing, that’s all! Did we also mention that Reinhart-Rogoff are from Harvard and are therefore supposed to be the “best and brightest” economists out there? Conclusion: if they are the best and the brightest, we are interested in what stupid economists are like.

[HuffPo]

An 18 year old airline passenger is suing the pants off United Airlines after a flight crew took no action on her repeated complaints about a disgusting passenger who was “masturbating and exposing his penis” for “long periods” on a six-hour flight last October. Monica Amestoy, who was 17 at the time, is seeking damages for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and false imprisonment. Yr Wonkette hopes that United is also found liable on grounds of Aggravated What the Fuck, Man? and recommends that everyone who ignored Ms. Amestoy’s complaints is sent.enced to sit next to some sweaty wheezing guy in a cramped commuter jet. With a broken toilet. And seat-kicking toddlers behind them. Forever.

Amestoy’s unwanted encounter with Luke Skywanker started shortly after takeoff as she was returning to Los Angeles after a high school debate tournament in New York. She was in an aisle seat, and Captain Joystick was in the seat immediately across the aisle.

“After the plane took off, the plaintiff saw to her horror that the male passenger directly across the aisle from her had exposed his penis and was masturbating. That passenger had stationed his airline blanket in a way that concealed his activities from other passengers on one side of him. His conduct was very visible to the plaintiff, however,” the complaint states.

And yes, we did see that Amestoy is represented by Gloria Allred, who is a celebrity lawyer and all, but if this complaint is at all accurate, this case could be won by Lionel Hutz (the one on The Simpsons, not the one who’ll be at the Seattle Drinky Thing tonight).

Amestoy complained to a flight attendant, who didn’t speak to the man, but did stand “in the vicinity of the offending passenger,” at which point he put his Piper Cub back in its hangar, only to resume high-speed taxiing when the flight attendant left to take care of other duties.

“Later during the flight, the plaintiff got up to use the restroom. On the way to the restroom, the plaintiff passed by the same flight attendant to whom she had complained, and the flight attendant asked if the perpetrator was still exposing himself. The plaintiff said that he was. The flight attendant then stated that the perpetrator’s conduct was ‘disgusting,’ but took no other action. In particular, the flight attendant and/or crew took no action to relocate the plaintiff, to prevent the perpetrator from exposing himself or masturbating, or to report the offensive conduct to the flight deck,” the complaint states.

So yeah: nobody at United Airlines assisted a seventeen year old girl who had to spend long portions of a six-hour flight sitting a couple feet away from an asshole who felt free to wave his dick at her, apparently in complete confidence that the cabin crew was too busy or too lacking in decency to stop him.

Oh, but surely someone from the airline at least called the police to meet the sicko at the gate? Hahaha, you have not been paying attention at all, have you? No, Amstoy says that

it was left to her father to report the incident to the police. The man was investigated, charged, and pleaded guilty to the alleged crimes, the complaint states.

But don’t worry! A United flack contacted by Courthouse News wrote back to say, “The comfort and security of our customers is our top priority.” That is a relief.

As for the unidentified masturbator — why is he unidentified? Does Anonymous know about this yet? Dox him nao, pls! — Wonkette sincerely wishes him nothing but deadstick landings for the rest of his life.

[Courthouse News]

It’s time, Pacific Northwest Wonkers! Join Yr Doktor Zoom at the reader-organized Seattle Drinky Thing TONIGHT (Saturday, June 1) from 7 to ????? at The Blarney Stone in beautiful Downtown Seattle. Additional details at this linky. And then on Sunday, the embarrassing sideways photographs!

Yr. Teen Kolumnist has been noticing a nerve twanging-ly annoying trend among his pubescent peers. We are getting more hypocritical. Or maybe I am noticing it more. And I don’t mean saying one thing and doing another. I mean fervently believing in an idea, repeatedly stating your belief in said idea, and then saying something that is to the exact opposite of the idea. This was briefly mentioned in the homophobia edition, but damned if it doesn’t require, much like women and rooms, a column of its own.

First and foremost, a brief segment of repetition is in order, a return to the strange and hateful universe of homophobia ‘n’ teenz. As you know, homophobia is part of our very vernacular, like how if you say “vernacular,” somebody’s going to call you a faggot. However, the mental divide between fake homophobia and true homophobia is shrinking faster than the relevance of that one lady with the fake tan in New Jersey. It is common knowledge that most of the people objecting to gay marriage are Wingnut Oldz, with a few outlying exceptions. However, literally two minutes (two goddam minutes!) after a right leaning jackass jock said “well, YEAH gay marriage should be legal. That’s basic,” he followed it up with “Dude, don’t be such a fag.” The dude needs either a brain transplant, vigorous education, or a swift kick to the ass. I personally vote for the 3rd option. [Dok Zoom's note: Kid, you have a little reading to catch up on...]

Second, there are many things that I thought would stop being an issue in a socio-economically high class, left-leaning, and above all inclusive school. Chief among them was race. However, the standard “I’m being hip and ironic when I say racist stuff” seems to have spread to the sacred and hallowed halls of our public schools, not like in the good old days of our fathers’ education when children were polite and respectful and blah blah shut up dad. Unfortunately, while “just a joke” might work on certain British Automotive shows, in high-school that excuse is a lot less believable.

As is an excuse I thought was long dead. Seriously, I *had* only ever heard of this as an example of mocking stupid people. However, this archaic gem of stoopid is still around: “I can’t be racist: I have a black friend.” I’m going to give you a second to process the fact that, for some people, this is still a valid excuse. Done contemplating the layers of human stupidity? Of course not, there’s not enough time or brain power in the known universe for a task of that magnitude. Unfortunately, however much we might hate it, this steaming heap of bovine fecal matter permeates much of the discussion of race. For instance, a friend of mine once stated that he and his “black friend” always walk on opposite sides of this one street, and that bad things happen to him because, and I quote, “it is the negro side of the street.”

But at least I haven’t heard any white kids call other white kids the “N-word*”

*in the past day.

Kid Zoom is a high school sophomore singing “School’s Out For Summer” in the wilds of Idaho. He is the son of Doktor Zoom, and is starting driver’s ed this weekend.

Today has been a real kick in the nads, huh Erick Erickson? It has been all dead babies and rats on prisoners’ leashes and Hitler and Democrats voting for guns. Well, after scouring and scouring the Intertubes to find something that would not put your head in the oven, we have found one at last: “Transgender Prom Queen Crowned in Massachusetts High School.” Thank you, MSN, that will do nicely!

Cody Tubman, who was born a male, was selected prom queen by her classmates at Middleborough High School in Massachusetts.

A Massachusetts teenager who became her high school’s first transgender prom queen says she hopes she’ll be an example for others.

“People need a leader and someone to look up to and someone to help them through the process themselves, so I think I could do that,” Cody Tubman told Fox 25 News.

Tubman was the belle of the ball Tuesday as she proudly wore her tiara after being selected prom queen by her classmates at Middleborough High School in Middleborough, Mass.

“It was surprising and it was exciting, ’cause I was like, we’re coming really far,” Tubman told the TV station.

Tubman, who was born a male, “came out” her freshman year to her mother, Tammy.

“I leaned over and I gave him a big hug,” Tammy Tubman told Fox 25.

Cody started dressing as a female around her sophomore year. The school was accommodating, allowing her to use the girls’ bathrooms and lockers.

Also, she is a big girl, so that’s even nicer!

What’s even nicer than that? That prisoners pooing in plastic bags isn’t the last story you’ll see today, while mama leaves you all to get her tuneup.

[MSN]