Here's a Daily Show story from last week that just about made me spit a tooth across the room. It's about the amendment State Senator Constance Johnson attempted to add to Oklahoma's odious "personhood" bill. The amendment would have tacked this language onto the bill:

[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman's vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.

Video link: "Bro-Choice" from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The other day Laura and I were out walking the dog when we spotted a campaign ad on top of a taxi:

Elect Judge Kevin Horan

Yes, our minds went there almost immediately. We imagined his future reelection campaign:

Let's Keep Horan Around!

Or maybe his opponent would want to flip that:

Don't Keep Horan Around!

And then there's the thought of that dream ticket with the renowned sheriff of Aiken, South Carolina, Mike Hunt:

Keep Horan Around with Mike Hunt!

Oh, if only. If only.

Mitt Romney is used to being called "President Romney." From 1986 until 1994, he served as what's called a stake president in the LDS Church. A stake president is the lay ecclesiastical leader who oversees a local group of Mormon congregations (wards) and their bishops. Mitt led the Boston Stake, comprising about 4,000 Mormons at the time, all of whom would properly have referred to him as "President Romney" and addressed him as "President." Not only that, but once released from the calling he would still have been called "President" by his flock, as a courtesy, in recognition of his past service. Once a president, always a president.

(One wonders whether, once Mitt became governor of Massachusetts, church members started addressing him as "Governor" or continued addressing him as "President." Hmm. I could see it going either way.)

I don't want to sound prejudiced, but that past as part of the LDS hierarchy is one of the reasons I instinctively dislike Mitt Romney. I don't know if it's chicken or egg, but there's a certain demeanor that men at the level of stake president and above seem to bring to the calling. Not all of them, but certainly a majority of them. There's a bland kind of handsomeness. There's an aura of being not quite present, of being above everything and everyone around them. There's a core of certainty to everything they say, backed up as it is by the full weight of a highly centralized doctrinal structure. Their delivery is usually grave, as if they're delivering difficult news straight from the mouth of God himself, except when there's a forced, cheesy jokiness that seems calculated to soften the rest of this authoritarian, patriarchal baggage. And there is never, ever a sense of the real person underneath. The role inhabits the man, not vice versa.

The best way to get a look at the parade of blandness that is the LDS leadership is to tune in to a televised General Conference in early April or October. If you don't see a marked similarity between the way Mitt Romney comes across and the way most of the church leaders present themselves as they address the worldwide membership of the Church—well, let's just say I'll be surprised. There's a good reason Mitt comes off as such a robot to so many people. The Sanctibot-1850 is a proud Mormon tradition.

Like I say, not all Mormon leaders come across that way. I've known many of them, particularly down at the lowly level of ward bishop, who were warm and understanding and human—and also obviously not destined to rise far in the Church ranks. But on those occasions that I've met one-on-one, behind closed doors, with the Mitt-style leaders, I've always come away intimidated and not a little terrified by way they seem to channel the cold, wrathful, unshakable judgment of God in the counsel and censure they calmly and coolly offer. These are not men you negotiate with. These are men who tell you how it is, and how it's going to be.

Now that Mitt has won the Michigan primary and is that much closer to capturing the Republican nomination, I'm that much more terrified of a masked man like that, already accustomed to the title of president and with full confidence in the correctness of his calling, occupying the Oval Office.

Hugo Award nominations are now open, and that means it's time to make good on my threat promise to spearhead a campaign to get the @MayorEmanuel Twitter stream nominated.

As you may recall, Bob, @MayorEmanuel was the anonymous but highly popular tweeter who created a profane and fantastic alternate Chicago during the course of our 2010-11 mayoral election season. Though it started out as something of a lark, by the time it wound down on the night of the election the stream had grown into one of the most absorbing works of science fiction of the year.

The author soon revealed himself to be Chicago journalist and educator Dan Sinker, and late that summer the tweets appeared from Scribner in book form, collected and annotated, as The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel.

I think this innovative story is deserving of a Hugo. At the very least, a nomination for this most Chicago-centric of SF works would be appropriate in a year when Worldcon comes to our fair city. I've consulted with experts, and we agree that we're best off to nominate @MayorEmanuel in the Best Related Work category. If you're with us, then for consistency please fill out your nominating ballot in that category exactly as follows, including the asterisks:

TITLE: The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel
AUTHOR: Dan Sinker
PUBLISHER: Scribner

The book is essentially a work of non-fiction that describes and fully annotates the process of writing the original work, even though the tweets are included in full. For that reason, calling the book a Related Work seems to fit best. We think it would be dicey to attempt to nominate a Twitter stream in one of the fiction categories.

Anyway, if you're not familiar with @MayorEmanuel and want to catch up, the annotated book is a terrific place to start. And here are a few other relevant links to get you going:

• Into the time vortex!
• The two mayors
• The last hours of @MayorEmanuel
• Revealing the man behind @MayorEmanuel
• @MayorEmanuel unmasked
• Full @MayorEmanuel archive

No politician more consistently makes me yell at my radio than Rick Santorum. Every time I hear him frothing at the ass mouth, I fly into an apoplectic rage which can only be vented by abusing the poor inanimate device that channeled his spew into my house. Now that he's come within a devil's whisker of winning the Iowa caucus, it's worth reminding ourselves that—just as we must remind ourselves that Newt Gingrich is crazy, and that Mitt Romney is a shapeshifter—that Rick Santorum is evil.

I'll say it again. Santorum is evil.

It's not just his determination to further cripple America's technological future by degrading our science curricula with more creationism. It's his insistence that morality can only be learned from an ancient, irrelevant book, and that rational thought can only lead us into disaster. It's the dangerous belief that we can do whatever we damn well please to the planet and it's all fine because Jesus will be coming soon anyway to establish his kingdom and roll the earth up like a happy scroll, so we may as well just go ahead and enshrine our Christian extremism in the Constitution.

And it's not just his frothing, kneejerk hatred of homosexuality. It's his desire to use America's irrational fear of gay sex to wedge his way into your home and your bedroom, to legislate against any type of consensual sex that makes him uncomfortable and even to roll back your right to contraception.

Make no mistake. Santorum's fight against gay rights is the opening salvo in a war on all pleasure, gay, straight, sexual, or otherwise—the opening salvo in a war on privacy itself. There's a reason, after all, that it was Santorum and not some other right-wingnut who was chosen by Dan Savage as the beneficiary of a hostile redefinition of his surname. It's because Rick Santorum is evil, and is a deadly danger to far more than just gay people. If he becomes president, he'll make George Bush look like a Unitarian.

After hearing him interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition back in 2005, I was so offended by his assertions that atheism leads to immorality that I had to vent my bile to the world at large. I said then, in part, in an open rant to Santorum:

Compassion and tolerance are so much more important when life on this tiny rock is the only life we'll ever have, but your only idea of compassion is to force the 14-year-old girls you've rendered ignorant into bringing more hungry, poverty-stricken babies into the world, and your only idea of tolerance is to slither your way into one of the most powerful posts in American government and then whinge endlessly about how so-called Christians like you aren't allowed a place in the public discourse. I may not believe in God, but I do believe in evil, and you're its simpering mug.  [read more]

Well, if his educational standards should become the norm, we sure will be.

My first reaction this morning upon hearing the news that Osama bin Laden is dead was elation. I wasn't in Manhattan on 9/11, but Laura and I were in Queens, and we rode our bikes to the southern end of Roosevelt Island in the East River from where we could clearly see the smoke pouring from both towers of the World Trade Center a few miles away. Bin Laden being shot in the head by special forces feels like justice, though inadequate justice compared to all the death, suffering and hatred he ignited.

But at the same time, I have to wonder about the timing and importance of this event. I know the operation has been in the works for a very long time, but it comes as Al Qaeda seems to be fading into irrelevance. The Islamic world, as evidenced by the Arab Spring, seems to have taken to the idea that protest and civil disobedience are more effective at bringing down oppressive regimes than terrorism, which has been demonstrated as entirely useless in that regard. Al Qaeda will soldier on, no doubt, but it's not the power it once was.

All in all, with the election season starting up, the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 approaching, and the U.S. letting itself be drawn more and more into the Libyan conflict, the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan seems almost like a distracting piece of theater.

But I do hope President Obama got George W. Bush on the phone and broke the news to him personally.

When a man like Donald Trump says that he's not sure whether or not the president is really a natural-born citizen, you should pay close attention. He's telling you something very important.

What he's telling you is that he thinks you're stupid.

Yes, Trump has conceded that Obama's birth certificate "checks out." But the man is smart enough to know that there was never any serious dispute about the president's citizenship. Any credible politician—not to mention The Donald—who has repeated and amplified any "birther" claims has done it for one reason: to undermine the president's credibility in your mind and to weaken him politically. After all, if you're frothing at the mouth and calling for the president to be impeached over a citizenship issue, it's that much easier for those same politicians to pick your pocket. And if they think they can whip you into that state by repeating statements with no more than a tenuous connection to reality, what does that say about their opinion of you?

So listen closely to Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and, yes, Donald Trump when they try to spin today's revelation to their advantage. Even now they think they've gotten away with something by forcing the president's hand, and every word they utter tells you they think you're as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Are you?

Dan Sinker, a/k/a @MayorEmanuel, appeared on The Colbert Report Tuesday night, and I have to say he hit it out of the park. Occasionally a guest will say something so funny or bizarre that Colbert has nothing to say in response. Sinker did it twice.

The first clip here sets up the interview in the second clip:

By the way, I've also meant to point out that rjl20 captured the entire @MayorEmanuel feed in chronological order, together with most of the mentions to which he deigned to respond. Read the whole motherfucking thing at:

http://www.elsewhere.org/MayorEmanuel/

The man behind the curtain has been revealed. Well, really, he came out from behind the curtain himself. As reported by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic, @MayorEmanuel is Dan Sinker, a journalism instructor at Columbia College in Chicago, and one of the founders and editors of the zine Punk Planet.

Having myself waxed rapturous over the @MayorEmanuel tweet stream, I can't help but feel a little disappointed that the mystery is no longer a mystery. I'm not nearly as disappointed as Jim DeRogatis is, because, hey, that Twitter account was a brilliant, engrossing, and uplifting example of a new form of literature, accidental as that might have been, and its author has every right to reap the benefits of his achievement. My disappointment is more that of a fan for whom part of the thrill was the not knowing, and the hope that we would never know. Did you honestly want to know for certain whether or not that top in Inception was ever going to stop spinning? I didn't.

But to be pragmatic, it was probably better that Dan Sinker control the revelation than that someone else out him, which no doubt would have happened sooner or later. And at least now we know whom to nominate for that Hugo next year in the Best Related Work category. (Hey, Chicago in 2012!)

Hats off, Mr. Sinker. As your character wrote: "Only things that fucking suck never end: look at laundry, or dishes."

Motherfucking pro tip: soy sauce and fucking cognac. Motherfucking amazing.
9 Dec

[WINTER PARKING IN CHICAGO]
Axelrod is a motherfucking parking-space shoveling artist. They should hang his fucking shovel in the Art Institute.
26 Dec

He's marked his space with 14 lawn chairs, an ironing board, and a pyramid of milk crates. He'll fucking shank someone if they move them.
26 Dec
[/WINTER PARKING IN CHICAGO]

Jesus fucking Christ, there is not enough motherfucking coffee in the whole fucking world this morning.
29 Dec

[ANGRY BIRDS]
Fuck these Angry Birds right in their motherfucking feathered fucking vents.
30 Dec

These giant bowling ball red birds would be motherfucking amazing if this whole game wasn't fucking me in the ass right now.
30 Dec

All I want right now is a motherfucking cheeseburger and to claw my goddamn eyes out. Instead I'm fucking flinging these fucking birds.
30 Dec
[/ANGRY BIRDS]

[RESIDENCY HEARING]
Carl the Intern's at the circuit court with three pounds of my shit in ziplock bags. He's tossing 'em if the verdict comes in wrong.
4 Jan
[/RESIDENCY HEARING]

Fuck this motherfucking brutal fucking cold right in its frozen fucking asshole.
21 Jan

[BEARS-PACKERS PLAYOFF]
We finally got Spielberg to take off his cheesehead, but he's got a Packers doo rag on underneath it. What the fuck.
23 Jan

Kanye's choking back fucking tears: "Cutler's knee injury is a nice match for my heart injury."
23 Jan

CALEB FUCKING HAINE! YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL FUCKING MAN!
23 Jan
[/BEARS-PACKERS PLAYOFF]

Double birds to the motherfucking world. TO THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD.
24 Jan

[ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT RESIDENCY RULING]
We're all fucking crying and laughing and barking and quacking and the city has never looked more beautiful, and in four weeks I'll be mayor
27 Jan

Now we're all crammed in Axelrod's fucking Civic, the ceiling's still dented in, driving down Lake Shore Drive, just fucking freestyling.
27 Jan
[/ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT RESIDENCY RULING]

[BLIZZARD]
Report from Axelrod's weathercenter has the big storm hitting later this afternoon. Perfectly fucking reasonable to get drunk now.
1 Feb
[/BLIZZARD]

[CAMPAIGN SPEECH AT THREADLESS]
Speech preview: "We're Chicago. Maybe--just fucking maybe--we can build something better than stupid T-shirts and half-off deals."
8 Feb

Original plan was to do this speech at Groupon, but now everyone thinks they're fucking assholes. Note to self: Lay off the Tibet jokes.
8 Feb
[/CAMPAIGN SPEECH AT THREADLESS]

Hanging out with nerds at Google today. Up half the night building up my elfin sorcerer, in case anyone throws down a motherfucking 20-side.
10 Feb

Snow stopped, week's done, MOTHERFUCKING BEER O'CLOCK, BITCHES.
11 Feb

Our Grammy party got ruined when we remembered that the Grammys are motherfucking awful.
13 Feb

HOLY FUCK, THE MOON IS MOTHERFUCKING ENORMOUS.
18 Feb

[ELECTION DAY EVE]
Hambone just brought the schedule: (1) shake 10,000 voters' hands (2) pick up Ari from the airport (3) keep Ari away from voters. Fuck.
21 Feb
[/ELECTION DAY EVE]

[SACRIFICE IN THE TIME VORTEX]
"There must be something we can do..." But there's not. Only things that fucking suck never end: look at laundry, or dishes.
23 Feb
[/SACRIFICE IN THE TIME VORTEX]

This can only give a bit of the flavor of the feed, if you haven't followed it. For two good distillations of the story's climax, I still recommend you read Tim Carmody's "The Two Mayors" and "The Last Hours of @MayorEmanuel."