Mark Meckler (pictured) is the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots and a big shot national Tea Party Leader. He supports Second Amendment rights, if you know what we mean. What we mean is he has been arrested for trying to carry a gun on a plane.

Tonight is that most important of nights for Iowa Republicans: Their final chance to see our beloved field of Republican presidential candidates say the same things they say in every debate. But will they say these things differently? Who will fuck up most comically? Go soak that tampon in grain alcohol, put on a fresh pair of pants, and let's find out — together.

There's another Fox News GOP debate in Iowa tonight? Let's make silly jokes about it for two hours! The Gawker Political Desk's coverage will start at 9:00. Until then, we'll be stocking up on chemicals to huff.

Thanks to mildly encouraging small business hiring, mildly increasing consumer demand, and a mild uptick in the real estate market, economists and businessmen across America are becoming afflicted with "economic optimism," at least to the extent necessary to justify a USA Today "Money" section feature. Smell that? It's a course. We're back on it!

One hundred and forty three—can that possibly be right?—yes, one hundred and forty three people have died so far in one town in India from drinking a batch of bootleg liquor this week. Police say the liquor was spiked with methanol to "boost its kick." That has the side effect of killing you. The AP reports:

Tonight, the American Broadcast Company airs Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2011, wherein TV's grande dame of celebrity reacharounds offers profiles of some of the most spellbinding figures of our time. This year's list includes the likes of Katy Perry (fascinating breasts), Donald Trump (fascinating hair), Simon Cowell (also fascinating breasts), Herman Cain (finds breasts fascinating), and the Kardashians (fascinatingly stupid). As a companion piece, we have compiled this list of The 10 Least Fascinating People of 2011. Think of it as a love letter to everyone who bored, bothered, or left us utterly cold over the past 12 months.

Facebook is offering a way to report a friend's suicidal posting, and get him or her help via instant message. It's not the most direct or energetic way to get help for a terminally depressed pal, but at least it's something.

The New Yorker has just posted Mattathias Schwartz's excellent piece in last week's magazine on the disastrous raid to arrest Jamaican druglord Christopher "Dudus" Coke. At the DEA's insistence, Jamaican authorities reluctantly raided Tivoli Gardens, the West Kingston slum Coke ran as a de facto governor, two years ago. Coke didn't turn up, but Jamaican police officers killed 73 civilians, many of them allegedly in cold blood. A Department of Homeland Security surveillance plane was overhead the whole time.

The sale of late screen legend Elizabeth Taylor's concluded yesterday and the collection fetched more than $116 million, well above its estimate. La Liz is a blockbuster even in death!

Thrown off a plane. Subject to a proposed boycott. And now this, a final humiliating insult to Alec Baldwin, for playing an iOS app when he shouldn't have: The Federal Aviation Administration says the actor's airline nemeses can use iPads in flight, even while prohibiting Baldwin from doing the same thing.

President Obama set another horrifying legal precedent today, by messing around with that most important of statutory laws: The 2005 Presidential $1 Coin Act, which "requires the U.S. Mint issue new presidential $1 Coins with the likeness of every deceased president." The White House announced today that the U.S. Mint would no longer make these coins for general use, since it's a silly vanity project that no one cares about.

Russ Stanton is stepping down as editor of the LA Times, a job he's held for the past four years, through some of the shittiest layoff-plagued times in the history of the newspaper industry, and under the ownership of the thoroughly incompetent Tribune Co. He'll be replaced by Managing Editor Davan Maharaj. Perhaps the biggest story here is how small of a story this is, in 2012.

Hot out of the inbox, from Friends of Christine O'Donnell: "Christine O'Donnell to announce her 2012 GOP Presidential Endorsement tonight." The famed Delawarean anti-onanist will announce this on one of those cable television shows. Sorry to whoever gets endorsed!

Last week, national experts traveled to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to convey hotly anticipated knowledge to the social network's engineers. The computer programmers "listened intently," according to a reporter who was present, to explanations of compassion, tact, sensitivity, and the psychological differences between children and adults. So it was that, nearly eight years after the world's biggest social network began, Facebook learned some basic social skills.

Let us thank the Obama campaign's senior strategist David Axelrod for this sterling metaphor today, regarding Newt Gingrich's anus — something we'll see more of as the primary season lingers on.

Fat dick and Fox News chief Roger Ailes is shopping a memoir, New York's Gabriel Sherman reports. It looks like the man who devoted his life to building a multibillion-dollar platform from which to attack his political and personal enemies wants to sum it all up in a book attacking his political and personal enemies.

Thrice-married serial adulterer Newt Gingrich has "endorsed" Iowa's marriage pledge, meaning he has to stop cheating on whoever his wife is now. That's quite a sacrifice. (Update: He left himself some wriggle room, naturally, and didn't technically "sign" it.)

Just as Newt Gingrich was rising to his spot as the nearly prohibitive favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination, he made a pledge not to "go negative" on his political opponents. Or, in cocksure Newt-speak: "They're not going to be the nominee. I don't have to go around and point out the inconsistencies of people who aren't going to be the nominee. They're not going to be the nominee." But guess who's pointing out his opponents' "inconsistencies today, and always, very negatively? This is the worst pledge ever.

The journal Astrobiology has published a paper by some Australian National University scientists who assert that "large regions" of Mars could support "Earth-like microbes." That's us! We'll just have to live below the planet's surface so we don't freeze to death or dehydrate.

While campaigning in Iowa, secessionist prime minister of Texas Rick Perry leaked some classified intelligence when he told his audience of hecklers and hog farmers that, for an unknown period of time, the U.S. has been secretly funding "the country Solynda."