Here’s one for the KEEP YOUR POLITICS OUT OF MY SPORTS tag. From College Football Section (wait, what?):

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum visited LSU’s Alex Box Stadium over the weekend and found time to show off decent form in the batting cage. President Bush and President Obama both have done first pitch duties, but if Mr. Santorum is elected, he might be the first to take batting practice.

At first it looks like “The True Conservative” (who looks, sounds and acts exactly like Jim Bob Duggar) is taking some good cuts, until you realize that those pitches are coming in at dead turtle lob speed and might as well be sitting on a tee. Regardless, it’s fun to see these incognito space monsters attempting to look human, and it’s a nice break from Barack Obama’s liberal basketball agenda.

For further “Republican Presidential candidates taking batting practice” jokes, Rick Perry couldn’t step into the cage because of his rampant menstrual bleeding, but Mitt Romney took a relaxed attitude toward work to watch the baseball match, mentioning that the Nye-mets are his favorite squadron.

Is the Muslim Brotherhood trying to assassinate the Emperor? Get your sh*t together, Rick.

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Christina Hendricks Was Adorably Goth In These High School Yearbook Photos - The most important thing you’ll read all day. Although I could’ve told you that the woman who dyes her hair red in her 30s dyed it black in her teens. [UPROXX]

This Week in Movie Posters, Presented by Newsboy Cat - My brain doesn’t process the Men In Black 3 poster. I might as well be looking at calculus homework. [Film Drunk]

The Dying Art Of Rap Battles & Beefs - |Smoking Section|

The 15 Most Promising Shows of the 2012 Pilot Season - A woman (supporting actress from different TV show) has a job where she’s really great and smart, but her co-workers are all SO WEIRD and it’s just like real life, only even the nerds are handsome enough to be on TV. There, that’s every show. [Warming Glow]

20 Geeky Fake Criterions We Wish Were Real - I would buy almost all of these. Something about calling Weird Al “Al Yankovic” is really funny to me. [Gamma Squad]

Romney Misquotes George Costanza - “I want some serenity!!!” [Buzzfeed]

Bill Maher Compares Newt Gingrich To ‘A Batman Villain’ On ‘Late Late Show’ (VIDEO) - Then he just stands there smirking at himself for 59 minutes until someone turns off the camera. [HuffPost Comedy]

Dennis DeYoung on the Mr. Roboto controversy that destroyed Styx: “I should have had that robot mask made larger” - The most jealous I’ve ever been of my dad was finding out he went to a Styx Mr. Roboto concert. [FARK]

Pilar Sues Deion Sanders For $200 MILLION Because He “Mind Tricked” Her… “I’m Convinced I’m a Gold Diggin’ Ho!” - “These are not the bitches you’re looking for.” /waves hand around [Bossip]

Nephew Sues Uncle for Posting Embarrassing Photo on Facebook - “Would you recognize the man who made you make the duck-face? Is he in the courtroom right now?” [The FW]

What TV Show Do You Wish You Lived In? - Wow, that’s hard. Maybe ‘Family Matters’, because of how hard it is in real life to find love and tradition of the grand design. [Pajiba]

Seven Lies Perpetuated By Modern Cinema - This might’ve been written from the least cool perspective ever. Nobody kisses in the rain? Sex is bad? You can’t knock someone out easily? Speak for yourself, n00b. [Unreality]

I don’t like quoting The National Enquirer as a reputable source, but when a story like this breaks you have to share it with everyone you know — according to the Enquirer, Joe McGinniss’ upcoming book Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin features claims and confirmation that the former governer and Vice Presidential nominee hooked up with three-time NBA All-Star Glen Rice circa 1987, when he was still in college and she was an Alaskan sports reporter. Glen Rice had sex with Sarah Palin. That is today’s actual sports news.

From the story:

In the book, which will be published on September 20th, McGinniss claims Sarah had a steamy interracial hookup with basketball stud Glen Rice less than a year before she eloped with her husband Todd.

Sarah hooked up with the NBA great, then a 6-foot-8 junior at the University of Michigan when he was playing in a college basketball tournament in Alaska in 1987, the book says. At the time, Sarah, just out of college, was working as a sports reporter for the Anchorage TV station KTUU.

A publishing source told The ENQUIRER that McGinniss claims Sarah had a “fetish” for black men at the time and he quotes a friend as saying Sarah had “hauled (Rice’s) ass down.”

I don’t even know what that means.

I guess the premarital sex is sacred unless you’ve got a chance to hook up with a basketball player. And despite a “fetish for black men at the time” (good job seeing black people as people and not things, Presidential Hopeful), Palin ended up marrying the whitest guy on the planet, and none of her brain damaged kids — and I’m talking about Bristol here, don’t get me wrong — get to paternally claim the stars of NBA Jam. Does Rony Seikaly know about any of this?

In case you’re ready to believe Sarah Palin when she goes on TV later and claims the story is an “out and out fabrication” perpetrated by some portmanteau word combining “media”, “liberal” and “spend-o-crat”, don’t … at least one of the people snuggling in that sleeping bag on a cold, mooseless night in 1980s Alaska is confirming the rumor.

In the book, McGinniss quotes Rice as confirming the one-night stand.

What’s next, are we gonna find out that Manute Bol nailed Michele Bachmann?

[h/t Deadspin]

Some people in this world simply have no integrity and no moral fibers. Take Dorothy Davidson, for instance. The candidate for mayor of Bessemer, Alabama recently passed out some campaign fliers featuring a photograph of herself and University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban with a message of the National Champion coach’s endorsement for her election. The only problem is the picture is photoshopped and Dorothy’s people digitally added her picture over Saban’s wife.

But it’s totally cool, you see. Saban told Dorothy’s people that she could do it because her campaign manager’s father and Nick are good friends. He just didn’t have enough time to meet up with Dorothy to take a new photo, so he passed along the photo of him and his wife taken in 2007 (after the jump) and said, “Just go ahead and slap your photo over my wife.” So these pesky newspaper and TV reporters need to leave Dorothy alone, because she and her campaign manager swore repeatedly yesterday that their story was valid, and her campaign indeed had the Crimson blessing of the Tide.

Go ahead and question the photo of me and Marisa Miller exchanging wedding vows, Birmingham News:

Read the rest of this entry »

War Machine — né Jon Koppenhaver — got dropped by the UFC in part for insensitive comments about the death of former UFC fighter Evan Tanner, and judging from his latest MySpace blog post, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he probably won’t get picked back up any time soon. That is, unless publicly announcing that you hope the nation’s first black president gets assassinated is seen as a good thing.  It seems like a bad idea to me, but then I’m not very politically astute.

But seriously, why should the media keep pushing this story about some stupid new president taking office down our throats?  wtf indeed, War Machine.  wtf indeed.

[Fightlinker]

From the littlest blogger to ESPN, everyone in the sports world is trying to take a sports angle on Inauguration Day and Barack Obama’s impending presidency.  And it’s times like this that make me want to slap the shit out of sports fans for their selfish and narrow perspective on the world.  More than usual, that is.

Yes, Obama plays basketball.  Yes, he wants a college football playoff.  Is that really so remarkable?  Is the elimination of the BCS somehow more important to people than refocusing the war on terror to Afghanistan?  Call me a bad fan, but if the president puts sports ahead of the economy, or education, or changing our reliance on fossil fuels, or international affairs, or anything that happens to actually affect our lives in tangible ways, I will be one pissed-off citizen.

I understand the need to write stories relevant to the day’s biggest news (just last week I worked some plane crash jokes into sports stories), but I’d prefer some deference to the issues over trying to shoehorn the frivolity of sports into something momentous, something with real gravity.