Anyway, the fake news stuff is pretty much just as funny — or not funny — as you'd expect it to be, but it did open with a sketch worth watching about how Congress did Joe Wilson wrong — which still ends with "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night" (???)…

"I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm not known for any other things. Nothing!"

Perfect.

They blasted President Barack Obama’s vision of health care reform, calling it outlandishly expensive, and predicted it could lead to rationing and outsized budget deficits for years to come.

McCain, Bond and McConnell took turns pounding the Democratic plan.

Uh-oh! Sounds angry! I bet that made some members of the audience really angry! Everybody duck!

The tone of the hourlong session was subdued and the questions, including one from Mayor Mark Funkhouser, were not confrontational. The audience's only response was applause.

How the… what the… is John McCain secretly a unicorn made of ice cream? What other explanation is there?

[T]he GOP forum at Children’s Mercy was by invitation only. About 100 people — mostly medical professionals and small business owners — filled seats in the small auditorium, along with the media.

Well, I guess if you want to listen to the will of the people on contentious policies, you should pick your people pretty carefully.

I'm almost disinclined to provide you with the proper context. I think I preferred it as a non sequitur.

(via BuzzFeed)

Therefore, I can only assume that Slate.com hacked into the president's Facebook account and published the results. And that, to me, seems like it might be some kind of treason. You should ashamed of yourself, Slate!

This was my particular favorite part…

It's funny because it's true (that sitting through Terminator: Salvation was painful to a degree that was in all likelyhood comparable to what it must feel like to have your fellow citizens get together to vote your rights away).

In his CPAC speech this week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell insisted that conservatives are more "interesting" and "fun" than liberals. Here's his proof: "who wants to hang out with guys like Paul Krugman and Robert Reich when you can be with Rush Limbaugh?"

Then the very first comment from destor23 knocks it out of the park…

Clearly, if I had to take Rush out to dinner or you and Krugman out to dinner, I'd pick you and Krugman.

And for the most frugal of reasons!

Yeah. What he said.

The party’s outlook is grim, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell implored, as he rolled off figure after figure of demographic groups Republicans lost badly in 2008, particularly blacks and Hispanics.

He lamented that the party is increasingly becoming a "regional party."

"That’s called a minority party," the Senate Minority Leader said, "and I didn’t sign up to be in the minority party."

Chairman hopeful Mike Duncan, for one, is confident the GOP can chip its way out of this lily-white sand trap…

Duncan defended the RNC, saying it has "50,000" on their "social network" (presumably, he means Facebook) — more than the Democrats, he contended.

Almost immediately after Duncan finished trying to convince the members of the party’s hip, social networking prowess, the lights in the room went out. The Republicans, literally, were in the dark.

It's funny because it's true! Know what else is true? Here's the RNC on Facebook: 52,991 members. DNC on Facebook: 35,197 members.

So when we start choosing our government by tallying Facebook popularity instead of votes, which should be any day now, the Republicans can stop pretending to care about blacks, Hispanics, women, Jews, Arab Americans, poor people, residents of New Orleans, etc., and get to work on issues that really matter to their constituents.

Like SuperPoking.

Or, at least that's what Al Franken and Harry Reid would have us believe…

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) met with Democratic candidate Al Franken late Wednesday afternoon to proclaim Franken the victor in Minnesota's Senate race…

"The race in Minnesota is over," Reid told a crowd of reporters and television cameramen who packed into the narrow room. "There's no way mathematically that's going to change."

Um, I'm not a law-knowing person (or whatever they're called), but I'm pretty sure that that's not how these things work. I don't think the senate majority leader gets to declare election victories by fiat. It's just the Supreme Court that gets to do that.

Can I get a little backing up on this, sad deflated GOP senators?

Coleman met with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) earlier Wednesday.

McConnell told reporters after the meeting "it remains the view of every single member of my conference that the Minnesota Senate race will be decided in Minnesota and not in Washington."

That's what I thought.

Though, maybe McConnell should have told the same thing to Coleman. Because it appears as though he's unaware…

Former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman is making preparations for life after office, having signed up as a paid adviser to the Republican Jewish Coalition earlier this week.

The move is the clearest indication to date that the St. Paul Republican is prepared to lose his legal challenges for the state's still vacant Senate seat.

Well, I suppose that if Coleman has already admitted defeat in his head, the least he can do is see to it that everybody else is strung along for as long as humanly possible just to make the transition as uncomfortable as possible for all concerned.

It's just common decency.

The dramatic late-night developments could doom General Motors to a bankruptcy and closure in the coming weeks, with Chrysler LLC potentially following close behind.

In light of this dismal information, I just want to know one thing: whom do we blame? Oh, the auto workers' union? Of course…

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said the sticking point was the United Auto Workers union's refusal to put employees at U.S. auto manufacturers at "parity pay" with U.S. employees at nonunion plants operated by foreign automakers in the United States.

Negotiations centered around proposals from Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., that would have set dates in 2009 by which the automakers receiving the loans had to reach cost cutting agreements with unions and creditors or be forced into bankruptcy…. [U]nion workers at U.S. automakers make about $3 to $4 per hour more than the non-union U.S. employees of foreign automakers like Toyota and Honda, according to the Center for Automotive Research.

The benefit costs are significantly greater for U.S. automakers, though, because they have to pay health care costs for hundreds of thousands of retirees. The union agreed to close much of that gap in the 2007 labor agreements by shifting responsibility for retiree health care to union-controlled trust funds. But those changes won't take effect until 2010.

You know what, I'm just going to put this out there. I don't think we should blame the UAW, or the auto executives, or members of Congress.

This whole mess rests squarely on the frail, greedy shoulders of those health care-having retirees. Let's make them crawl over to Hank Paulson and ask for a piece of the $700 billion TARP pie, to save their precious walkers and prescriptions and whatnot.

And then let's take away their walkers. It'll serve them right.

You can follow the results at the Louisville Courier-Journal's website.

Don't know what those 10 precincts are, but this portends a close fight for the Senate seat, which has been a target for Democrats looking to avenge their leader Tom Daschle's razor-thin loss in 2004. Also, McConnell is ugly as sin and his fellow Senators think that Lundsford's a little easier on the eyes.

Watch this space for more details on this marquee race …

UPDATED AT 7 PM: With 9% in, the race is even tighter with McConnell leading 51%-49%.

How else to justify his asinine explanation of lawmakers' relief options?

"When there's a fire in your kitchen threatening to burn down your home, you don't want someone stopping the firefighters on the way and demanding they hand out smoke detectors first or lecturing you about the hazards of keeping paint in the basement," Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said in a speech on the Senate floor.

"You want them to put out the fire before it burns down your home and everything you've saved for your whole life."

What a miserable metaphor! Let's see if we can wade through it to figure out what the Senator meant…

* "Fire in the kitchen" = worldwide credit crisis, plummeting stock markets, surge in oil prices, toppling investment banks

* "Firefighters" = taxpayers, Chinese creditors, Henry Paulson, Warren Buffet, anyone but Sarah Palin

* "Smoke detectors" = any kind of Wall Street regulation whatsoever

* "Paint in the basement" = sub-prime lending bonanzas, Phil Gramm's 2000 tax bill

* "Your home and everything you've saved for your whole life" = Your home and everything you've saved for your whole life

* "Lecturing you"= lecturing greed-ridden Wall Street traders, lecturing morally vapid bank executives, lecturing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)

Seems that metaphor is even more convoluted than the credit crisis itself!

Next time, McConnell should limit his figurative language to a topic he understands better than firefighting.

Thoroughbred racehorses, perhaps.