“Labor unions and liberal interest groups are going all-out for President Barack Obama’s reelection — but they’re just as ready to turn that firepower back on him if he betrays them with a grand bargain. These groups fear a victorious Obama would ink a deal with Republicans during the fiscal cliff negotiations that slashes entitlement benefits.” [Politico]

Our guest colloquists are Ralph Gilles, Senior Vice President of Design at Chrysler, and Donald Trump, a Short-Fingered Vulgarian.

@realdonaldtrump you are full of shit!

— Ralph Gilles (@RalphGilles) November 1, 2012

[Jalopnik, via @pourmecoffee]

Our guest columnist is Jim Messina, campaign manager for Obama for America, who’s stepping up his guilt-tripping in the final days.

According to our records associated with this exact email address:

— Total you’ve donated for the 2012 campaign cycle: $0

— Date of your most recent donation: September 09, 2008

— Suggested donation today: $15

You stepped up and made your mark in 2008 — but it looks like you haven’t made a donation yet to the 2012 campaign. With five days to go, what’s holding you back, Nojo?

Message received, Jim. You know where to find us when you prosecute the Bush War Criminals and pass the Public Option.

[via email]

Okay, fine, let’s deal with this:

Two women from the Dominican Republic told The Daily Caller that Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez paid them for sex earlier this year.

In interviews, the two women said they met Menendez around Easter at Casa de Campo, an expensive 7,000 acre resort in the Dominican Republic. They claimed Menendez agreed to pay them $500 for sex acts, but in the end they each received only $100.

First, let’s all agree that if true, Bob Menendez is a cheapskate. (For the record, the Menendez campaign denies the paid tryst.)

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“The brother of Kerry Bentivolio says the Michigan [GOP] congressional candidate, who’s favored to win on Tuesday, is ‘mentally unbalanced’ and could end up in jail. ‘I’ve never met anyone in my life who is conniving and dishonest as this guy,’ Phillip Bentivolio said… ‘He’s my brother so it’s hard to talk about this, but I believe that if he gets elected, he’ll eventually serve time in prison.'” [Politico]

Silent Creative Partner draws so we don’t have to.

Our guest columnist is theoretical physicist Ben Tippett.

In 1928, the late Francis Wayland Thurston published a scandalous manuscript in purport of warning the world of a global conspiracy of occultists. Among the documents he gathered to support his thesis was the personal account of a sailor by the name of Gustaf Johansen, describing an encounter with an extraordinary island. Johansen’s descriptions of his adventures upon the island are fantastic, and are often considered the most enigmatic (and therefore the highlight) of Thurston’s collection of documents.

We contend that all of the credible phenomena which Johansen described may be explained as being the observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature. Many of his most incomprehensible statements (involving the geometry of the architecture, and variability of the location of the horizon) can therefore be said to have a unified underlying cause.

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