This is the homepage of the Obama campaign’s Fight the Smears website. It was launched to great fanfare as a one-stop shop to counter the scurrilous slurs circulating among opponents and your misguided relatives.

We don’t know how effective it was in practice, but we liked the symbolism: A candidate who wasn’t going to sit back and let smear merchants define the terms of debate. A campaign that would aggressively rebut the wild charges against it.

The website hasn’t been updated since November 2008. Because, as everybody knows, smears against Obama, Democrats, and their policies completely stopped the moment he was elected.

Speaking of pandering to the right wing and medals:  “President Obama will present the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to former president George H. W. Bush and 14 others.”

At least it isn’t going to W.

Yet.

[NYT Caucus]

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association can’t let a good deed go unpunished:

We have feminized the Medal of Honor.

According to Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, every Medal of Honor awarded during these two conflicts has been awarded for saving life. Not one has been awarded for inflicting casualties on the enemy. Not one…

So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?

If only our soldiers behaved more like — well, more like Jesus:

Read more »

While we remain freakishly unmoved by the plight of the Don’t Touch My Junk dude, there’s a fresh angle to the story that catches our attention:

Amid recent controversy over airport pat-downs, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality is calling for the Transportation Security Administration to institute some “common-sense, healthy ‘discrimination'” by banning “self-acknowledged homosexuals” from doing security screenings, “so as to avoid [passengers] being put in sexually compromising situations.”

We’d like to congratulate the previously unknown AFTAH for getting some pixels by piggybacking on the outrage over a thwarted pheasant hunter, as well as moving the story to a more absurd point where we’re more comfortable addressing it.

Anti-gay group targets gay TSA workers [Salon, via Lux Mentis]

“Hehe ya grabbin your ass huh? I just puked! Eww and I thought you exiting this conversation. And good idea Jon! You’ll be as successful as my baby daddy. And actually, I do work my ass off. I’ve been a single mom for the last two years…”

–Bristol Palin, arguing on Facebook with critics of her mother’s new reality TV show and referring to Levi Johnston, without any apparent irony, as her “baby daddy.”

Joe Miller, the Tea Party backed, would-be Senator from Alaska is down by more than 10,000 votes against write-in candidate Lisa Murkowski, and there are just a few thousand more votes left to count. This figure is doubly significant given that the sum total of votes in that election was in the neighborhood of 200,000. It’s very unlikely Miller can overcome this lead absent a shocking legal ruling that would invalidate more than 5% of all votes cast in the election. Read more »

Our lovely and talented assistant Maru performs an interpretive dance expressing our frustration upon encountering story ideas too small to merit our attention, forcing us to resort to a kitty video to meet our self-imposed deadline.

And yes, we’re fully aware that the celebrated Don’t Touch My Junk incident happened across the freeway from Stinque World Domination Headquarters. Yet somehow, we still can’t feign interest in it. Maybe because we’ve only flown maybe a dozen times in our life.