Yes, they do ruin Christmas in this web video... for most of you! But as another fat person who enjoys doing the Charleston, I'm partial to this.

If you give someone Ron Paul's book Liberty Defined for Christmas, hopefully that person specifically requested it? Because here we have some gal reading a line about Israel being an "apartheid state," and crying. Oh well, you tried. But it would be best to resume giving her the newest editions of The Best Bland Bathroom Reading for People Who've Never Left Their Bathrooms starting next year.

Jerry Sandusky's also-kid-rape-y lawyer Joe Amendola says Sandusky and wife Dottie are "considering speaking together publicly," hopefully in a televised interview. Now the question is, are these people utterly delusional, kinda masochistic, or maybe enjoying the attention?

New painkiller! Holiday eating! Gum health! Infant drugs! Fat ladies! Swine flu! Coma boy! Allergy cats! And a foolproof stop smoking plan that just might work! It's your Tuesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—fatalistically!

Christmas 2012 has come early! Democratic Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson reportedly will announce that he's not seeking reelection, a move that will disappoint precisely zero people in the United States of America.

It's easy to turn into an asshole during the holidays. Alcohol, sugar, caffeine, bad weather, enforced cheer, cramped quarters filled with god damned loved ones and awful Christmas music - everything conspires to piss you off. So bear that in mind as you judge these horribly entitled tweets from spoiled jerks who didn't get the expensive Christmas gifts they asked for.

President Obama took part this weekend in one of the most ancient and eagerly-anticipated presidential traditions: the annual Christmas Baby Eating, a ritual that goes back to well before recorded history. Said to have been started by the semi-mythical "first president," Benjamin Franklin (who archaeologists believe to be a composite of several different minor American warlords, and most likely not a historical person), the Christmas Baby Eating has recently come under fire from pundits like Nate Silver, who use statistics to argue that it has no real bearing on presidential success or virility, despite the frequent claims of the Secretary of Necromancy and Occult Services. Even so, President Obama is currently enjoying a small bump in the polls—a natural fluctuation, or the result of pleasing Yogg-Sothoth by consuming the blood of the newly-born?

The Chilean Supreme Court has ordered daily newspaper La Tercera to pay $125,000 to 13 people injured while using a recipe for exploding churros. The newspaper's recipe forgot to mention the exploding part, apparently because it didn't test the recipe carefully enough.

They put up a nativity scene there, in the Holy Land, Ohio, and can you guess what happened? The resurrection, of Jesus, of course.

Minnesota's giant shrine to the gods of mass retail, the Mall of America, erupted into a 200-person melee last night. Thirty police stormed the premises, putting the entire mall on a temporary lockdown. The mallrats are rebelling!

Just last week, as Iowans were re-suspecting that he was only in this thing to hawk his dumb Ronald DVDs and alternate histories, Newt Gingrich announced that he would launch a 44-stop(!) bus tour ahead of the caucuses. SEE GUYS? EFFORT.

Helen Frankenthaler, the great abstract painter (and legendary party-thrower) died today "after a long illness." She was 83. Frankenthaler's big abstract paintings—made by staining canvas with thin paint—were among the best-known of the "second generation" of abstract expressionism. And even if you don't like them (which, hey, whatever, "art"), you will probably appreciate this story from the Times obit:

Many were loathed in 2011; these are the ones we call our own. This is not a list of the world's most loathsome characters. This is (with apologies to the NY Press) a list of Gawker's most loathsome characters. Read more »

We loathe a lot of people here at Gawker, mostly because we recognize that humanity is irreversibly doomed and the future holds nothing but Kim Kardashian dancing in six-inch stilettos on the graves of the poor. (Silver lining: Well-aerated grave grass.)

Everyone has been passing around a fake cover of People magazine that has Twilight hunklet Taylor Lautner on the cover saying he's "Out and Proud." I hate to break it to you, but the fake cover that looks like a fake (a good fake, but a fake) is fake. Taylor Lautner is not "out and proud." I'm not going to say he's not gay (he isn't) but this cover is faker than JWOWW's boobs reading a James Frey book. Even Gossip Cop says so. Oh, Gossip Cop weighed in. Case closed!

Many were loathed in 2011; these are the ones we call our own. This is not a list of the world's most loathsome characters. This is (with apologies to the NY Press) a list of Gawker's most loathsome characters. Learn them. Love them. Loathe them.

The "Christmas rush" is over. The final, last-ditch hope for our flailing economy has come to an end. The gifts have all been purchased. The free-spending desperate trips to our nation's big box retailers have all been taken. And now, America asks itself: did it work?

Sinead O'Connor's most recent manic episode seems to be winding down: Over the holidays she announced that her recent "Cock. In. Mouth." marriage to therapist Barry Herridge had ended. The beginning of the end began "within 3 hours" of the duo's paparazzi-strewn Las Vegas ceremony, which took place in the back of a pink Cadillac outside the chapel where Elvis and Britney Spears married various significant others*:

This actor got a Lady Gaga tattoo somewhere "private." Let's hope it's his ass and not his actual privates. This actress' boyfriend pocketed the money she gave him to buy her Christmas presents. At least he didn't end up with a new tattoo.

If you've been too busy celebrating the holidays to keep track of the doings of internet blimp magnate Ron Paul, you might have missed the 50 scans of Paul's various, unbelievably hateful newsletters, published on Mr. Destructo last week. But as pleased as that made us, we're even more pleased to discover @RP_Newsletter, an enterprising new Twitter account that's re-Tweeting the best of those newsletters, 140 characters at a time!