In recent months, I’ve had the same conversation with some of my more liberal friends over and over again. When discussing the latest offense caused by Rush Limbaugh. At some point, I let it slip that I kind of love the guy and my friends stand back aghast. I helpfully explain that, sure, Limbaugh says awful things nearly every day, but he clearly finds so much absolute joy in pissing people off, that I have a hard time really getting mad at him. I mean, after nearly every vaguely sexist or racially suspect comment, you can literally hear the guy laughing as he imagines what the liberal blogs will say. So, keeping with that spirit, I have to give the good folks at Fox Nation credit for writing one of the most wonderfully awful headlines of all time.

Here’s an interesting debate. Currently, one of the hottest posts on Reddit is titled “More parents need to do this!!!”. It shows a picture of a young girl who appears to be crying and is holding a sign explaining that, since she posted pictures of herself with alcohol, she is being grounded from from social media. While the backstory isn’t clear, the implication is that a parent saw the girl with alcohol in a picture on Facebook or some other site, grounded her from social media, and uploaded that picture as a kind of humiliating punishment. The post has quickly inspired a fiery debate between those that view the punishment as a great idea and others that view it as some kind of “emotional abuse.”

Yesterday on PoliticsNation, Rev. Al Sharpton argued that the awkward and hesitant way the former GOP rivals have begun endorsing Mitt Romney reminds him of schoolyard children. He imagined the turnarounds, which some have seen as “creepy,” to be like little kids forced to make up and play nice by their parents. So, as anyone would, he hired a bunch of child actors to give dramatic interpretations.

The Five was settling nicely into Outrage Mode today. Andrea Tantaros and Dana Perino were outraged that David Axelrod called the Koch Brothers “contract killers.” Bob Beckel was outraged that the Koch Brothers are such criminals. And Eric Bolling was outraged that Beckel was saying mean stuff about the Koch Brothers when this was supposed to be a segment of mean stuff about the Obama Administration. Everything was going nice and outrage-y until Greg Gutfeld came in and threw a big bucket of cold common sense on the proceedings.

You know what’s a good way to piss some people off? Find a movie with the biggest opening of all time and imply on your popular Facebook page that adults excited to go see it are immature at best and not great parents at worst. That appears to be the mistake Laura Ingraham made this afternoon when she posted a picture jabbing an elbow at fans of the mega hit The Avengers.

Hey, you guys know me. There’s nothing I love more than to mock cable news channels when they fill time by bringing on random celebrities to discuss the issues. Whether it’s Vanilla Ice discussing the housing market on CNBC or Kid Rock discussing…whatever on Fox News, it always makes for hilarious “news.” So you’d think that I’d be psyched to mock CNN for bringing on American Idol runner up Clay Aiken to discuss North Carolina’s Amendment 1. Really though, Amendment 1 is so damn stupid to begin with that CNN could have hosted a panel discussion between Barney the Dinosaur and a rock and they’d still be giving it more respect than it deserves.

We live in a new media age. If you want proof, then how about the fact that the moment that best defined Taran Killam as one of the most promising young cast members on Saturday Night Live didn’t occur on the set (sorry, Tim Tebow impression) but rather on an online-only video filmed late one night in an SNL writers room. It wasn’t even a sketch. It was a video of Killam and other cast members and writers engaging in a goofy recreation of then-musical guest Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” video. A new video, taken backstage at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, shows Killam explaining the backstory of how the video came to be.

Yes, this is a post about a web-only video explaining the history of another web-only video. We clearly live in a new media age.

Following up the outrageous pranks of Borat, Bruno, and Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen is moving towards scripted hijinks with his latest, The Dictator. However, he got one last surprise gag in back in February when he attended the Oscars in character and pretended to spill the ashes of the recently deceased Kim Jong Il all over Red Carpet host Ryan Seacrest who, as those watching at home could see, didn’t seem to find the joke at all funny. Don’t worry though, there’s no more bad blood as Baron Cohen apparently made a point of apologizing to Seacrest this past Saturday.

Ah, it’s our weekly “Fuddy Duddy Group Whines about Entertainment Brand X” story. It’s the story where some ridiculous group of prudes with a ridiculous name like “the American Stars and Stripes Parents of Children Jesus Face League” or something start yelling to anyone who will listen about how some cartoon butt is going to [...]

As the War on Women (which may or may not exist) continues (or doesn’t), a video from Funny or Die’s political wing Live Funny or Die attempts to encapsulate a seeming hypocrisy in Republican views on women’s health and reproductive rights. In the sketch, Kate Beckinsale, Judy Greer, and Andrea Savage play proud Republican women helpfully explaining that they don’t want the government to interfere with their business or schools. However, they would really love for the government to shove its laws deep into their hoohaws.

Well, if you weren’t sad enough already that it was Monday, here’s some news that will really put you over the edge. Just one week ago, Anderson Cooper introduced us to Meow, a 37-pound cat from Santa Fe that was looking for a home and trying to get healthy. Unfortunately, it looks like becoming a television star and Internet viral sensation was the last thing Meow got to do. He died on Saturday due to respiratory problems.

The Republican War on Cool continues. Despite the fact that this is a Republican Party who worship at the alter of a president who was LITERALLY A MOVIE STAR, actors are now the enemy. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Republican Senator start devising a Hollywood blacklist for “Cool People Sympathizers.”

For the latest instance of this celebrity shaming, check out Laura Ingraham’s segment on last night’s O’Reilly Factor.

Today, the music world received the sad news that Adam “MCA” Yauch had died after a three year battle with cancer. Yauch was one of the founding members of the Beastie Boys, the groundbreaking group which, amongst other things, was the first hip hop group to get a #1 album on the Billboard chart. So, when Rob Van Winkle, better known as the rapper Vanilla Ice, appeared on CNBC today, at least a few in the office thought he was an interesting choice being brought on to talk about one of his contemporaries. They were only a little disappointed when he instead began talking about, y’know, real estate and stuff.

Dania Suarez, the Colombian prostitute in the center of the scandal that had encircled the Secret Service for the past month, has finally spoken out. She gave an interview that was broadcast on Colombian radio and television. In it she said that she saw documents in the agent’s room but that none of them referenced President Obama. She knows this because, had she known the agent was connected to the Secret Service, she never would have called the police when he didn’t pay her the next morning as the ensuing international incident has “brought a lot of trouble into [her] life.”

Every day I get the privilege of watching the Fox News panel show The Five and, recently, it’s seemed like every other episode has featured an entire segment dedicated to ridiculing and complaining about environmental conservation of any kind. In a few of them, hosts like Greg Gutfeld and Eric Bolling have mentioned President Obama’s “flat earth society” comment, seething in anger than anyone would dare insult their denial of scientific evidence. And they’re right. That was probably a step too far for a President. But, hey, at least no one compared them to terrorist mass-murderers!

There’s always been a vaguely conservative streak in modern horror films. For instance, the preeminent sub-genre of recent decades, the slasher film, has frequently featured the “punishing” of young people for their sexual proclivities (the babysitter and her boyfriend get it on, a man with a knife hacks them up). However, at least the kids in those movies got to have actual sex…with another person. That doesn’t seem to be the case in a new film that takes the “socially conservative horror” idea to its logical conclusion. In other words, here’s a Christian horror film about ghosts attacking people who jerk it to porn!

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart tackled the noxious attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith from both the Left and the Right. However, since we’re trying to strike a blow for equality, we should take the time to look at all the bigots discussing Romney’s campaign. Fortunately, Stewart found the perfect poster boy for homophobia in the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer and his response to Mitt Romney’s (now former) Richard Grenell.

Look, most news people are nerds. Seriously, if you’ve lifted weights in the past decade, you could probably head to the nearest journalism school and be swimming in lunch money within an hour. So, I suppose it’s unsurprising that, faced with two big football stories, someone in the MSNBC graphics department mixed up whose picture they were supposed to show. Still, the mistake gets a bit worse when it happens during a story about someone’s tragic death.

Hey, remember Joe the Plumber? He was totally a thing that happened. Anyway, now in 2012, he is running for Congress in Ohio using his non-plumber and non-Joe name Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher and, yesterday, he released a pretty amazing campaign ad. In it, he demonstrates just how perfect he’d be for elected office by demonstrating that he doesn’t entirely understand how a public tour works.

Here’s a pretty fascinating controversy. A series of stories in the British tabloid The Daily Mirror about a couple of alleged sexual assaults in Germany is taking a fair amount of heat. The reason being that they have been charged with sexism. However, unlike most “sexism” stories, the paper’s victims are men.

You know those fun dinner theater shows with interactive weddings? The ones with names like Mario and Angie’s Big Crazy Family in which the audience mills around like guests at the event while actors talk to them as delightful familial and ethnic stereotypes? Well, I’ve got half a mind to believe that Boston Herald writer Jessica Heslam went to see one of these and then accidentally wrote it up as fact. That’s the only way to explain the ridiculous awesomeness of her article about a giant fight at a Boston wedding.

You learn a lot when you follow political news. For instance, yesterday after President Obama revealed a new campaign slogan, conservative pundits helpfully informed us that “forward” was secretly Joseph Stalin favorite direction to walk in! So, when Fox News’ Megyn Kelly promised a segment on tweet from the President that was “raising some eyebrows,” I naturally assumed we were going to find out that it was full of secret evil messages. However, weirdly enough, the message that the ensuing panel complained about was that President Obama wants the country to be united.

Huh. I guess that’s kind of evil?

Look, I grew up in New Jersey. I remember when our town got its first local tanning salon. I remember when girls in my high school class suddenly started appearing…orangey and acting as if that was somehow supposed to be sexy and not reminiscent of mustard gas victims (we were studying WWI at the time). I remember all of this and, yet, I was still not prepared for this WCBS segment about a tanning “obsessed” mom who was arrested for tanning her six-year-old daughter. How bad is it? At first I thought I was watching a news segment about a racist Vaudevillian who had a bad allergic reaction to her blackface makeup.

A few days ago, 60 Minutes‘ Lesley Stahl did a lengthy interview with former director of the National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez in which he discussed the CIA’s interrogation techniques. During a portion where Rodriguez discussed using “sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation” on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Stahl worried aloud that those techniques sounded like ”Orwellian stuff.” The conservative media pounced on the quote, accusing Stahl of thinking that drinking Ensure (the dietary supplement that the CIA has suspects drink) is torture. It was all very, very silly. However, it did result in us getting this (very, very silly) video!

It looks like I owe an apology to the folks at The Five. After a long day of aggressive tweets about “spiking the football” from conservative bloggers, a Drudge Report headline that proudly accuses the President of “GLOATING IN AFGHANISTAN,” and reporters still asking Mitt Romney if he would have hypothetically killed Osama bin Laden in some kind of parallel universe where he was president, I expected more of the same from Fox News’ afternoon panel show. But, that’s not what I got. Instead, the show opened with a thoughtful and touching remembrance of that momentous day a yeah ago, a segment almost wholly devoid of the politics that seem to consume every waking second of an election year.