Have the Internets exhausted all the available Moon Base gags yet? Anything left at IMDb to reference? We’re covered on the Mormon Afterlife comparisons?

Well, then, nothing left to do but pour yourself a tall one of spiked Tang and strap yourself in as we launch our GOP Debate Open Thread/Celestial Unreasoning. With any luck, all the candidates will be Marooned and we’ll never hear from them again.

[NKY, via @pourmecoffee]

Jan Brewer: Obama ‘didn’t feel I treated him cordially’ [Politico]

Our guest columnist is America’s Best-Paid Historian.

At one point early in my career, I introduced the Northwest Ordinance for Space. And I said when we got — I think the number is 13,000 — when we have 13,000 Americans living on the moon, they can petition to become a state.

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Newt at Florida’s “Space Coast”: “By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” [TPM]

Eric J. Ostermeier — Ph.D., University of Minnesota, Department of Political Science, 2006; J.D., The University of Michigan Law School, 1995; Research Associate at the Humphrey School’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance — would like you to know that Barack Obama is dumbing down:

“My Message is Simple”: Obama’s SOTU Written at 8th Grade Level for Third Straight Year

Obama’s SOTU addresses have the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score of any modern president; Obama owns three of the six lowest-scoring addresses since FDR

For the third consecutive State of the Union Address, Barack Obama spoke in clear, plain terms.

And for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level.

In Obama’s own words: “My message is simple.”

But was it too simplistic?

A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama’s 2012 speech to have tallied the third lowest score on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, at an 8.4 grade level.

We thought Flesch-Kincaid was the condition that the Heimlich Maneuver resolves, but let’s set that aside.

Instead, we’d like to ask Dr. Eric a simple question: Have you ever written for radio?

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