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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Links

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:

While the photo is fake, the support of Saban is real, Davidson and her campaign manager, Kevin Morris, maintain.

“My dad, Larry Morris, and coach Saban are friends,” Morris said Tuesday. “We were on the golf course one day, and I asked him myself if this would be OK.”

Morris said Saban agreed. Morris said he would not have created the campaign flier, which has the upcoming football schedules for the University of Alabama, Auburn University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham on the back side, if Saban’s endorsement was not legitimate.

You see? All good. Just kidding, they are terrible, dirty liars. Morris admitted later yesterday that he’s full of crap and they never got Saban’s endorsement. Pretty pathetic routine these people are running. But the victim isn’t the voter and it’s not you and I as the news audience. The victim here is Saban. How dare Davidson and Morris drag his honest and pure name through the mud? That man is respected from Coral Gables to Baton Rouge and it’s an insult to the thinking man to try and besmirch Saban’s dignity.

May our prayers be with Saban and his wife as they deal with this horrific ordeal.

In the meantime, I discovered some other people who have taken advantage of Saban’s kindly, generous nature by using his image for their poorly photoshopped personal gains.

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]

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.

On Wednesday morning, the mayor began, but did not complete, an official name change petition, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Civil court staff gave the petition a docket number but said they did not expect to file it, in part because they did not receive the required check for $108 to process the change, the newspaper reported.

In other words, it was a half-assed attempt at an empty gesture.  And Pittsburgh loves him for it!

Ravenstahl said he did not come up with the idea… That honor, he said, belonged to callers to a local radio station’s morning show… “As soon as I heard it, I thought it was a great idea.”

Oh yes, people who call in to morning radio shows are known to have all sorts of great ideas.  Why, Franklin Roosevelt only implemented the New Deal after someone suggested it to Scooter and the Zoo Crew on Wacky 101.  Scooter’s slide whistle and fart noises are what sold the President on it.

The Brooklyn Cyclones, a Single-A Mets farm club and the first pro baseball team in Brooklyn since the Dodgers left, will host what will become the most popular minor league promotion in the borough’s history when they become the “Baracklyn” Cyclones for one night in June.  Here’s just part of what the club is offering:

-Alternate red, white, and blue jerseys adorned with the team’s new name
-FREE Barack Obama bobbleheads to the first 2,500 fans in attendance, featuring the President in a Baracklyn Cyclones Jersey
-The Economic Stimulus Package: From 10am on January 20th – Inauguration Day – to midnight on January 23rd, ticket prices for the June 23rd game will be “rolled back” to the Cyclones’ inaugural 2001 season rates: $10 Field Box Seats, $8 Box Seats, $5 Bleacher Seats. Beginning January 24th, tickets will be priced at the regular 2009 rates ($15, $12, $8)
-Universal Health Care: Free Band-Aids to the first 1,000 fans

I can’t even begin to describe the extent to which this is a wet dream for every set of parents in gentrified Brooklyn.  There are two staples of Brooklyn fashion: hooded sweatshirts that say “Brooklyn” (I own at least twelve), and anything with the word “Obama” on it.  They could sell those jerseys for $1000 apiece and they’d still sell out in 40 seconds.

[Curbed via Big League Stew]

Now THAT is change I can believe in.

Oh my God, did you guys see the crazy stuff on TV last night?  MTV totally had a marathon of Paris Hilton’s “My New BFF.”  So awesome.

The site’s gonna get a late start today.  Please be patient while I re-orient my brain to the world of sports.

(thanks to Christmas Ape for the screencap)