Oregon GOP Raffles Rifles in Honor of MLK, Abraham Lincoln

There’s nothing like a good rifle raffle to commemorate nonviolent civil-rights leaders who were shot to death. At least that’s what the leaders of Oregon’s Multnomah County Republican Party thought when they decided to auction off rifles in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. Tickets are $10 apiece, the drawing will take place at the Lincoln Day Dinner—at which the keynote speaker will be none other than Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael—and the winner will take home a shiny new AR-15 rifle or the handgun of their choice.

Ohio City Council Member Won’t Apologize for Racist Email Because He Thought It Was Funny

Yeah, Norwalk, Ohio, city council member Bob Carleton sent an extremely racist email to more than two dozen people—including the city’s law director and other colleagues—and no, he is not sorry about it. The subject line of the email is “Spelling Bee Champ” and here’s how it starts: “My name be Eboneesha Hernandez, a African-Hispanic-American girl who jus got a award for bein the bess speler in class. I gots a 47 percent on the spelin text and 38 points for being black, 10 points for not bringin drugs to class, 10 points for not bringin guns to class, and 15 points for not getting pregnant during the cemester,” and so on. You get the point. Needless to say, not everyone on the email chain was amused, but Carleton doesn’t really care. He confirmed to the local paper that he did, in fact, send the email and he told the Toledo Blade, “In hindsight, I can see how it can be interpreted as racist… but that wasn’t my intent when I sent it. I thought it was humorous.”

Humans Will Become Extinct Because of Gay Rights

Gay equality will eventually lead to the extinction of humanity, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council declared on the right-wing radio show Washington Watch last week. In response to a caller’s suggestion that gay people should be reminded that they wouldn’t exist “if not for a physical relationship, intimacy between a man and a woman,” Perkins said, “the human race would be extinct within time if [homosexuality was] normal.” Perkins has spread such notions before, warning that the government’s “promotion of same-sex relations” is actually a veiled “push for population control.”

La. Senator: Poor People Should Have to Show ID to Buy Food

Louisiana Sen. David Vitter’s newest proposed bill won’t only result in humiliating his low-income constituents; it could prevent many of them from buying food. Vitter wants to require food-stamp recipients to show photo IDs when buying food at a grocery store. Vitter argues that fraud is to blame for the rising costs of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, though SNAP actually boasts a fraud rate of about 1 percent. On the other hand, about 10 percent of voting-age Americans don’t have a state-issued ID. So those people will either be forced to buy an ID—which they can’t necessarily afford to do—or go hungry. For those who already have IDs or can manage to get one, they’ll be forced to undergo the added shame of identifying themselves when presenting their food stamps at the cash register.

Pregnancy and Cancer Are Basically the Same Thing

Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck knows what it’s like to be pregnant because he’s had cancer, and they are basically the same thing. On a local talk-radio show Wednesday, the current district attorney and Tea Party challenger to Colorado Sen. Mark Udall offered unique reasoning for why women aren’t really entitled to make decisions about their own bodies when it comes to, you know, abortion and things like that. “Yes, I am pro-life,” said Buck. “While I understand a woman wants to be in control of her body—it’s certainly the feeling that I had when I was a cancer patient, I wanted to be in control of the decisions that were made concerning my body—there is another fundamental issue at stake. And that’s the life of the unborn child.”