Mitt Romney has always been a bit wishy-washy. But he seems to have ramped up his say-anything-to-get-support strategy recently, like earlier this week when he totally reversed his position on unions in 24 hours. And yet Romney's GOP presidential poll numbers haven't changed much over the past year. On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart put forth a theory as to why.
The first man in U.S. history to be successfully convicted of organ-trafficking is a 60-year-old man from Brooklyn named Levy Izhak Rosenbaum. Prosecutors say he would farm his kidneys in Israel, paying as little as $10,000 for one. He'd then transport them to the U.S., where he'd sell them for upwards of $120,000 to grumpy bubbies waving crumpled Take-A-Numbers and grumbling, "What? You got nothing fresher?" over a backroom butcher case.
You might think Insane Clown Posse's people—known as the Juggalos—are just a group of face-painting teenagers who wonder how magnets work. Not so, says the FBI's 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment. To the feds, Juggalos are a "loosely-organized hybrid gang" that are "forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity."
Legendary Lawrence of Arabia actor Omar Sharif slapped a fan at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar. (Wouldn't exporting a festival named after a neighborhood sort of defeat the purpose?) Sharif is posing for pictures when the woman steps up to have her picture taken with him, at which point the 79-year-old slaps her and shouts:
Oh no: violent protesters! An NYPD police association is threatening lawsuits against protesters who assault police officers and is warning of "growing violence," even as Occupy Wall Street has proven its non-violence time and again.
Laura Chavez, a 60 year-old New Mexican, was drinking and playing a nice game of Monopoly with her grandson and her boyfriend, Clyde "Butch" Smith. When Chavez suspected Smith of cheating, she sent her grandson to bed and proceeded to hit Smith over the head with a bottle and then stabbed him repeatedly with a kitchen knife.
Marian Thompson, the widow of an exotic pet enthusiast who unleashed 56 dangerous animals into Zanesville, Ohio before committing suicide, wants her leopards back.
A majority of unemployed Americans say they're confident that they'll find a job in the next year—a better job, at that. Meanwhile, college grads as a group are despondent over their own economic prospects. Now: considering the state of college in this country, we hesitate to make too much out of a college education. But when all the people who may have actually taken an economics class are the most pessimistic, we'd gently suggest that that's a bad sign. Perhaps the unemployed should tone down that optimism just a bit.
Now that Glenn Beck's revival show is out of the picture, there's room for another gauzy, revanchist "movement" at Fox News. And it looks like it will be led by corrupt falafelist Bill O'Reilly. His corporation has trademarked the phrase "Restore the USA" for use on key chains, coffee mugs, and t-shirts.
According to Wendy Williams and this other lady whose parents must be very proud of her for becoming a "pet fashion stylist," it is very trendy and important to dress your dog up for Halloween because there are a lot of events you both should be attending.
The immediate question everyone asked when hearing Dr. Seuss' classic The Lorax would be a full-length movie was how are they going to pad out a tiny book to make a full-length feature? Turns out by adding some Zac Efron and Taylor Swift.
In your misty Thursday media column: NBC's newsmagazine will be like every other newsmagazine show, a lawsuit against HuffPo goes forward, the WaPo's chairman leaves, the NYDN screws up, and a press release newswire war.
