Midwestern hardware chain Menards requires managers to sign a contract stating that their income will be reduced by 60% if employees form a union. Menards makes Walmart look like Costco! Celebrate this Christmas by peeing in the desk drawer of a Menards executive.

If listening to the current Republican presidential frontrunners speak is scaring you to death, here is something to make you feel better: there is now a semi-plausible scenario in which the entire party hilariously self-destructs.

Ted Cruz’s campaign, ostensibly speaking, has a major leg up on most of the other candidates: An in-house team of data scientists, funded by a billionaire supporter, analyzing the data of tens of millions of unwitting American Facebook users. And yet, people still find him deeply unlikeable.

At least eight students at The Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina have been suspended after photos of them dressed in white hoods surfaced on Facebook Wednesday night. Though Citadel president Lt. Gen. John W. Rosa was quick to explain the incident as a group of students “singing Christmas carols as part of a ‘Ghosts of Christmas Past’ skit,” that excuse looks even flimsier when considered in the context of the school’s racist past.

America! The greatest country in the world—where our robust free market system ensures that our economic growth is the envy of all lesser nations! Right?

How can you make a difference in the American political system? Bernie Sanders supporters are having preemptively defeatist arguments about this, about whether Sanders voters should swallow their principles and support Hillary Clinton in the general election, or sit back and let the Republican nominee win, in the hopes of shocking Democrats to move left.

A special grand jury in Ohio, convened on Thursday, charged Joel Jenkins, a recently-fired Pike County sheriff’s deputy, with murder and involuntary manslaughter in two separate incidents, the Chillicothe Gazette reports.

One of the nine most-wanted fugitives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Ladislas Ntaganzwa, the former mayor of Nyakizu, was arrested by Interpol agents in Goma, Congo, this week, the Associated Press reports.

Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, accused of sexual assault by 13 different women, and who prosecutors said targeted women of color (especially drug addicts, alcoholics, and sex workers, because he thought no one would believe them if they reported him) has been found guilty on 18 of the 36 counts he was facing, including four counts of first-degree rape.

Americans are more afraid of terrorism than at any other time since 9/11’s immediate aftermath, according to a new poll. Meanwhile, Democrats find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to take seriously the man who declared tonight anyone who found guilty of killing a cop should be executed.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder, chairman, and CEO of Facebook, shared his thoughts yesterday on the place Islamophobia has on the billion-person-strong social network. (That is: there is no place for it.) In the process, he described himself as “the leader of Facebook.” Haha, what?

This week, Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter is the first of six cops to stand trial for his alleged role in the death of Freddie Gray, who died in the back of a city prisoner transport van earlier this year. Tomorrow, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes airs an hourlong special about Gray and the city that raised him.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced Thursday that he would sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in his state. Congressional Republicans have resisted President Obama’s call for a similar ban at the national level.

A grand jury has indicted on murder charges the two deputy marshals arrested last month in connection with a shooting in which a 6-year-old boy, Jeremy Mardis, was killed and his father, Chris Few, wounded in Marksville, Louisiana.

In a statement today, the president of The Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina explained that the above photos of Citadel cadets show the young men “singing Christmas carols as part of a ‘Ghosts of Christmas Past’ skit.” I don’t know—looks like a KKK thing to me.

With the rise of the “gig economy” has come a debate over who is an employee, and who is truly an “independent contractor.” Do we need to create a new category of worker just for the Uber era?

The idea that New York City is in the throes of a historically or even notably dangerous and criminal era is a myth fabricated largely by the knuckleheads at the New York Post. More evidence to the contrary: In the years since stop-and-frisk began its great decline, murders and shootings in the city have gone down too, not up, according to new NYCLU analysis.

Luke (aka Vadim Black) and Ben (aka Sean Cody’s Sean) (links NSFW) are two straight-identified guys who make their living by doing gay porn. They were both profiled on last night’s True Life: I’m a Gay for Pay Porn Star. They were both extremely firm on their heterosexual orientation (no doubt because their line of work calls it to be questioned regularly, certainly from the outside, but probably internally as well). My takeaway is that these guys are really straight, or they’re by now very gifted at mimicking the kind of ennui that comes from performing sexual acts one wouldn’t otherwise have interest in for money.

Chet Hanks, free speech enthusiast and son of Tom Hanks (known for his role as “Dr. Dwayne Twitchell” in Season 10, Episode 5 of Happy Days), has been thinking a lot about this year’s electoral circus. Thoughts which he has kindly boiled down for us in a three-part Instagram video series that begins: “Pshhht, pthhssshttt, PSHHHTTHT.”