Watching the Iowa speeches last night, it was a bit unsettling — if not quite Shocking! — to see Ron Paul introduce Jesse Thorsen, an active-duty Army corporal, to share a few words. In uniform. Can he do that?

Answer: No.

Guidelines laid out in the federal Hatch Act specifically prohibit uniformed members of the military from making political speeches or taking official roles on political campaigns. Members of the military are permitted to attend political rallies, but must not be wearing their uniform while in attendance. On stage with Paul, Thorsen was wearing green Army fatigues.

Opinions are like assholes, and we’re all entitled to one. But in Our Exceptional Nation, we exercise our rights as citizens — not soldiers.

Not yet, anyway.

Army soldier rallying for Paul violated military ban on political activity [CNN]

Jakadrien Turner ran away from her Dallas home two years ago. She was 14. She turned up last spring. Somewhere else.

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Columbia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — deported an American citizen to Colombia. A young girl. Who doesn’t speak Spanish. And who isn’t even Latino.

Oh, and Colombia’s not giving her back. She’s in detention.

The Obama Administration deported a record 400,000 folks in 2011. Gotta hit those quotas.

Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported [WFAA]

She might not get to be preznint (apparently God changed his mind) but he will always be queen.

God tells Michele to run. Also, to change her stylist.

Twitter Hipsters complain that the joke’s getting old. On the contrary: It’s just getting started.

[Spreading Santorum]

Interesting.  You’d think that Shelly Bachmann would give it up, losing badly in her backyard and all.

It still says here — I insist — that Bachmann is done.  Anybody donating money to her at this point would do better at a slot machine.

But someone who doubled her up in the vote total has been strapped to the gurney.  Yes, fans: Ranger Rick Perry is going to spend more time cutting his family’s budget.  (Officially, he’s going to pray about the best way forward.  Given the results when he prayed for rain, you’d think that the Big Fella has heard enough from Rick for one lifetime.)

You have to admit, though, he was kind of responsible for the crystallizing moment of the race so far, when he drew applause for killing more prisoners than anybody else.  That, I must say, was a genuinely shocking moment, which you don’t usually get from a presidential debate nowadays.

For that, Rick, we say thank you. And fuck you.

Well, we lost a few guys before the election season properly started.  Seeing as The Donald, Sarah Plain and Dumb, Timothy the Dull, and Herman Cain were late scratches, we cannot really say that they were felled by the electorate.

Ah, but we can say hail, and farewell, to Michelle Bachmann tonight.  Born in Iowa, she was the only one from a state which touches the Hawkeye State, and somebody who was banking on the tea partiers and thumpers and disheartened Mama Grizzlies to bring her across the line.  And she looks like that she has converted her straw poll win into… sixth place.  Thud.  (Noted: the votes are still coming in, but it looks uniformly awful.)

And so, the Stinque Decision Desk is prepared to call it.  Shelly’s torch — lighting, incandescently, her bid to make Black Eagle a ONE! TERM! PRESIDENT! — will have to be carried by another sucker.  And thus she can go back to not sleeping with her husband, and to railing against energy-saving lightbulbs and HPV vaccinations from the august halls of the House of Representatives.

We come not to praise Bachmann, but to bury her.  So let’s do it.  And anything worth doing is worth doing right.

[UPDATE (2345 ET): Bachmann, channeling her inner zombie, vows to fight on.  No idea when the money runs out, but I don’t think she makes it to South Carolina.  Book it.]

Hey, did you know that Dennis Rodman is going to coach a topless women’s basketball team in NYC? “I don’t know too many men that don’t like a good-looking woman running up and down around the court,” he says. Which has nothing to do with our Iowa Caucus Open Thread/Deep Throat, but then, Iowa Republicans have nothing to do with the rest of America.

[via Nabisco]