Seriously? I'm British, and only moved away when I was 26, and I don't know anyone who wouldn't consider it deeply odd to take their passport on a night out.

Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri running against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D), justified his opposition to abortion rights even in case of rape with a claim that victims of “legitimate rape” have unnamed biological defenses against getting pregnant.

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

I think he meant a British person in the USA thing to do.

This guy is on the House Science and Technology Committee.

The Respect MP George Galloway has attacked attempts to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden, arguing that: “even if the allegations made by these two women were 100 per cent true. . . they don’t constitute rape.”

"Ha ha ha! Terrific!" - Mitt Romney, every time Jar Jar Binks appears on screen

I'd seen some tweets about that Askin thing, but hadn't grasped the full unthinking crassness of it until just now.

I'd only popped in to quote a Rob Delaney tweet from two months ago that tickled me.

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested—at minimum—more than $10 million as of 2011 (that number is based on the low end of ranges he has disclosed—the true number is almost certainly significantly higher). Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company.

The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.