Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley is already campaigning for the 2016 presidential election. Earlier today, O'Malley gave a 20-minute speech at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry in Indianola. A steak fry is, apparently, an event where steak is fried and politicians give speeches.

For many candidates, having one's mom on the campaign trail could prove embarrassing, but vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is using it to his advantage.

A man arrested for drunk driving in North Liberty, Iowa, was found to have a blood-alcohol level so high it could have killed him twice over.

When police in Dubuque, Iowa, stopped Jerald Reiter on Sunday under suspicion of drunken driving, they were surprised to find a baby zebra and a macaw parrot riding shotgun in his truck.

The slow-moving but determined people of Iowa continue to exact their revenge on uppity University of Iowa professor Stephen Bloom (pictured), who wrote that piece in The Atlantic a couple months back trolling the entire state by depicting them as a bunch of hound-stroking mouth breathers. The backlash led Bloom to flee the state for an "undisclosed location."

Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley is an incredulous old coot who likes to tweet unreadable shorthand nonsense, constantly, and then lash out at those who would make fun of him. Whenever the federal government gets around to killing off the dumb Internet once and for all, they should leave Grassley's Twitter page up as a memorial to fun times lost. Here's a useful perspective for considering how unorthodox Grassley's feed is: When hackers broke into it today, their tweets were instantly more professional than the graffiti that one of our most senior Senators usually vomits out from his phone.

The Iowa Republican party has a minor update to the results of this year's caucuses, something it discovered while going through the formality of certifying Mitt Romney's 8-vote victory: Someone else won. Eh, don't sweat it, Iowa Republican officials. We all change the course of a major party's presidential nominating process out of sheer incompetence from time to time.

Poor Marcus Bachmann. The gleefully gay-seeming, possibly pushy, highly catty Christian therapist husband of Michele Bachmann suffered two humiliations this week: First, his wife called out his doggie sunglasses shopping spree on live TV. Then, the famously press-conscious fashion fiend ("All I want to know is what they're saying about me," he told New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza) was forced to stand next to Michele in the critical final moments of her campaign with a giant cold sore on his mouth! Must have been the stress. Tasteful doggie eyewear is not easy to find in Des Moines.

Adorable Texas bigot Rick Perry quickly decamped to the forests of his home state last night to "reassess" his campaign, which is usually what you'd say when you're dropping out but need a couple of days to raise cash and pay off the bills. But Rick Perry is clearly too insane to concentrate on such things for more than a few minutes, so he's already made up his mind and decided to stay in the race. He announced this via Twitter, with a classic "Rick Perry Photo," and without really teling anyone. Good form, Perry! The dream will never die.

Santorum, as followers of politics know, is the Bible-thumping Republican underdog who tied Mitt Romney at last night's Iowa Caucus. Santorum is also, as users of Google and followers of Dan Savage know, a neologism for "the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex."

Michele Bachmann, the magical flightless wish bird willed into existence by thousands of liberal bloggers, is no more. After a sixth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Bachmann announced on Wednesday that she would be suspending her campaign and returning to her homeland, Quadling Country in Oz.

Well here we are, first voting night of the presidential season, and CNN is already completely insane, playing with ludicrous pastel penis holograms while Wolf Blitzer meanders around looking for some anxious correspondent to appear on a garish outer space screen and say nothing. Only in Iowa!...?? Let's get this over with.

The Gawker Political Desk will be covering the returns from Iowa tonight starting around 7:30 or 8. (Bad things happen if you start watching CNN's 80-person floppy muppet panel too early.) Pray to Allah for a Romney third-place finish!

Today is that great quadrennial celebration in American democracy: The eve of the day that our political system can completely stop caring about Iowa for another few years, aside from delivering the annual Christmas card of billions of dollars in useless farm subsidies. The Iowa caucuses, however, must be dealt with first, as Republican caucus-goers prepare to crown either Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, or Ron Paul as their new Harvest King tonight. How did things go so wrong? Let's go back and relive the crucial moments of this Iowa campaign season, together, by looking at some funny pictures and making dumb jokes.

We've got two options here: (1) A person sobs remembering times with his mother, who struggled with bipolar disorder and depression and died of cancer in 2003, or (2) Newt Gingrich does a very Newt Gingrich thing in trying to save his campaign by crying a couple of days before voting starts. Or (3), some sort of comibination. We've got three options here! You decide.

It's the best part of any presidential election cycle: That period a few days before the Iowa caucuses when no one's working and so you just type some nonsense about the weather in Iowa. What if the weather is snow? Someone wins. What if it is anti-snow, or sun? Well in that case the other schmuck wins.

We really do want to ignore the latest Rick Perry ads as they come in, but how can we ignore such odd scripts? (Also: we don't actually want to ignore them, ever.) Take this new one, featuring a children's cartoon, titled "Fox." It's a blanket attack against his opponents who've spent time in Congress. And it opens with this line:

Will the Occupy movement destroy the comely state of Iowa? Considering that they plan on interrupting a few caucuses and hollering in some offices, one can safely assume... no. But whatever they're planning on doing, it's apparently enough to scare the Iowa Republican party into secret bunkers, where they'll be safe from this nefarious grasp of "political activists."

Rick Perry is still trying to convince Iowa voters that he's the most socially conservative candidate this godforsaken planet has ever seen, in his last ditch-attempt to get anyone to vote for him. We all remember when he was like, why are gays in the military when something something children Christmas Jesus? Then he pounced on his wife, putting her in her place. And now he's announcing that he's upgraded his anti-abortion club membership, after watching a movie about ladies.

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.