The farcical degree to which Caitlyn Jenner was willing to blindly defend Republicans was on screaming display during last night’s second season premiere of her reality show, I Am Cait. Jenner is famously conservative (last week, The Advocate published a profile in which she voiced interest in being Ted Cruz’s “trans ambassador”), but last night’s episode vividly illustrated just how little logic or thought she’s put into that affiliation given just how little Republicans advocate for (and how often they advocate against) LGBT rights.

Joe the Plumber is an idiot. But in his latest idiocy—a crass dance on the graves of the just-murdered mass-shooting victims in Isla Vista—he teaches us all an important lesson about exactly how conservative thought on individual rights has shifted in recent years.

According to reports on multiple conservative websites, a recommendation by Home & Garden Television to use the Star-Spangled Banner as a tablecloth has sparked outrage among viewers, with many taking to the channel's Facebook page to denounce the suggestion as "un-American."

Scientists in dreary old Englandtowne have learned that people who cleave to a more conservative ideology have a larger amygdala, the part of the brain that controls "anxiety and emotion," and a smaller anterior cingulate, which controls bravery and optimism.

So how the hell does John McCain pull this one out of the bag? Even the conservative commentators think the national economic crash has doomed him. Bill O'Reilly said Tuesday the Republican presidential nominee needed to do well at the debate or "say goodbye," and he didn't do well at all. Now comes Joe Scarborough on last night's Colbert Report saying "it's too late" for McCain because he can't win on tax cuts or a sexy VP or terrorist fearmongering or just general demagoguery when voters are scared of starving in the streets.

Slightly late to the game of fond remembrances of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. is Fox News correspondent James Rosen's essay on how the founding editor of National Review was a frequent contributor to Playboy. Many of the details Rosen digs up about this sideline beat, so to speak, are fun, but the association isn't quite as counterintuitive or shocking as he'd like to think it is. "Yes, in a union difficult to imagine involving any of today's leading conservatives...the bard of East 73rd Street wrote for Hugh Hefner's oft-vilified Playboy, on and off, for almost four decades, on topics ranging from 'the Negro male' and Nikita Khrushchev to Oprah Winfrey, the Internet, and Y2K." That's a poor use of the word "bard," and also an impaired judgment. P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley have both written for Playboy and they're "leading conservatives," if not shrieking TV banshees like Ann Coulter. But even back in 1963, when Buckley the Elder made his debut in a transcribed debate he'd had with Norman Mailer, the byline and the magazine were actually rather suited to each other in a strange aesthetic way.