1. New GOP Senator: Food workers must be free not to wash their hands!

Amongst the outstanding freshman class of Senators is one Thom Tillis, a Republican who bills himself as a "free market conservative" from the great state of North Carolina. He thinks health and hygiene laws are a little overblown and are a good example of government over-reach. He told a story this week during a speech at the Bipartisan Policy Center about how he was having latte with a friend at Starbucks recently when inspiration struck. Why should people who serve food be required to wash their hands after using the bathroom? It’s just this sort of onerous regulation that is killing American business.

So, perfect timing and soiled finger right on the pulse of the whole public health zeitgeist right now, what with the measles outbreak and the flu busting out. How ‘bout a little fecal dusting with your latte? As Jon Stewart suggested, maybe we could get a cholera epidemic going here. Boy, that’d be good for business!

Tillis has a solution at the ready, though. Restaurants would just have to put up a sign saying they do not require employees to wash their hands, and then the free market would just work its magic.

So amused was he at his own cleverness that he showed not one glimmer of recognition that this would also be a kind of regulation.

2. West Virginia GOP-er: Pregnancy can be a marvelous silver lining to being raped.

Republican lawmakers just keep demonstrating that they do not get the whole rape thing—okay, the whole woman thing—and they never ever will. Never. Ever. We know we should just give up on them—and we have—but that doesn’t mean they don’t continue to amaze and stun us.

So, yay, with abortion being debated again, all kinds of new loonies are coming out of the woodwork. Loonies like West Virginia’s Brian Kurcaba who thought he was being terribly enlightened when he acknowledged, that, yeah, “rape is awful.” If you sensed that there’s a “but” coming, you’re right. And it’s a whopper. “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this,” Kurcaba told the Charleston Gazette.

Yes, so beautiful. Who wouldn’t want to have that baby? Total silver lining, there!

We can’t. We just can’t.

3. Utah GOP-er just thinking out loud about unconscious people and rape.

Utah Rep. Brian Greene was just thinking out loud. That’s all. ‘Cause he’s not so sure. He was considering a bill about whether unconscious victims of rape should really be considered rape victims. Strangely, this was something he needed to think about. What if the missus . . .

“I hope this wouldn’t happen, but this opens the door to it. An individual has sex with their wife while she is unconscious—or he, if that’s possible, I don’t know—a prosecutor could then charge that spouse with rape.”

Well, yes, a prosecutor could, Mr. Greene. Then again, if they don’t wake up, they’re none the wiser, right?

In a first date scenario, he allowed, it would be rape if you had sex with someone while they were unconscious. “But to me,” he said, “not where people have a history of years of sexual activity."

Eventually, Greene came to some sort of semblance of consciousness and voted to pass the bill.

Great that he shared those thoughts though. They are some deep ones.

4. GOP-er blames measles outbreak on “illegal aliens.

Looking to blame a problem on someone? Try immigrants. They are the go-to scapegoat for whatever problem is du jour. Among their accomplishments are: ISIS, Ebola, and the decline of America. There’s just nothing that can’t be pinned on them.

Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks is already well-known for his hate-filled anti-immigrant positions. He posited this week that people he calls “illegal aliens” are possibly responsible for the measles outbreak. Any evidence of that? Nope! Absolutely none! It's pure hate with a little pseudo-scientific jargon about the “enterovirus that has a heavy presence in Central and South America that has caused deaths of American children over the past 6 to 9 months” thrown maliciously in.

It’s not their fault though, he adds disingenuously, because they haven’t had as good healthcare as American children. He said he has “sympathy for their plight.”

And yes, he expects us to believe him.

h/t: ThinkProgress

5. Glenn Beck: I’m just like Galileo because God gave me a brain, and I say no to vaccines.

Glenn Beck is pretty sure there’s something up with the measles vaccine. Here’s his thinking: "God gave me a brain. God gave me personal choice and responsibility for those choices," he said on his radio show this week. "I'm going to say no to those vaccines because I've done my homework."

Which homework might that be?

See, people who oppose vaccines are being persecuted, just like the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo, Beck said.

Exactly right.

"Here's another group of people that are now being rounded-up and pointed at and called morons and idiots and crackpots and crazies," he said. "Just totally discredited … Where is anybody saying 'my gosh, we're living in the days of Galileo'? The church has become the state and if you don't practice their religion exactly the way they tell you to practice it, you're done."

Who can we blame for this outbreak of stupid?

6. Ann Coulter is still an idiot, in case you were wondering.

Not that you were. She mouthed off this week about president Obama’s plan to make community college tuition free. She’s against that, of course. Education is bad. It makes people turn against Republicans. In other words, it educates people and leads them to have more progressive ideas. That is, of course, bad. Then who would buy her books?