How freaked out was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about a possible election challenge from movie star Ashley Judd? So freaked that in February he assembled a secret meeting of advisors on how to use a "wealth of material" from the actress' mental health history to paint her as an egomaniacal "mentally unbalanced" anti-Christian hysterical lady.

And, of course, they recorded the meeting.

On the 12-minute clip from that strategy session, obtained by Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief David Corn (of 47 percent video fame), McConnell can be heard telling his oppo crew: "This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out."

His brain trust then takes over. "I refer to [Judd] as sort of the oppo research situation where there's a haystack of needles, just because truly, there's such a wealth of material," the leading aide offered.

Much of those riches, the aide continued, centered around Judd's struggles with depression and family fame:

She's clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it's been documented...you know, she's suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the '90s.

The aides note that crazy ladies clearly also think crazy things about basic building blocks of American civilization, like consumerism, Christian patriarchy, and hating the homosexuals. "Like I said," the top aide told McConnell and Co., "you know, we're still drilling down and there's a wealth of material, and it's just hard to get all the way around it." They must have been so bummed when Judd declined to run.

[Mother Jones, Images via AP]

William Blakely, former Vice-Mayor of Mount Carmel, Tennessee, was accused in court yesterday of having a long-running streak of reckless driving incidents that stem from a penchant for sticking his genitals out of the window and masturbating in the direction of passing female motorists.

Three women appeared in a Kingsport court yesterday to submit testimony about their personal interactions with Blakely.

"At over 90 miles per hour, he had his penis out [the window]. He was masturbating," said one victim. "[A]nd that's when it got really, really bad."

All three testimonies followed a similar pattern: Blakely would wave and honk at the female driver in an attempt to get her attention, then he would expose his chest and ask her to "please, please" do the same.

According to Detective Terry Christian, it was thanks to one of the three women who wrote his license plate number down that Blakely was finally being brought to justice after years of harassment.

Per Christian, over the course of "three or four years," his department received "dozens of phone calls" from victims aged 16 to 65.

Blakely has been charged with indecent exposure, reckless endangerment, and attempt to commit aggravated assault.

A Grand Jury court date, where additional cases involving Blakely will be presented, has been scheduled for June 14th.

[H/T: Arbroath, mug shot via WCYB]

Take heart, German Nutella highway pirates: You are not alone. Florida state troopers arrested a 51-year-old Orlando man Monday for commandeering a tractor-trailer full of soup bound for a supermarket depot. Police pursued Eusebio Diaz Acosta with a helicopter and a K9 unit for nearly 30 miles on a South Florida stretch of the state turnpike before he curbed the Campbell's soup-laden lorry.

"The court has seen many things stolen... This is the first time the court's ever seen $75,000 worth of soup stolen," county judge Jay Hurley told Acosta at his arraignment Monday. When Hurley said "soup," an audible titter ran through the gaggle of defendants behind Acosta, awaiting their fates in other cases.

It was unclear yet whether Acosta was able to afford an mmm-mmm good lawyer. [Sun-Sentinel]

[Image via AP]

It was really only a matter of time before cats stopped being frightened of their own reflections and moved on to the next stage: Spending all day in front of the mirror practicing their Jazz Hands.

YouTube Comment of Note: "Is that you reflected naked in the tap?"

[H/T: Tastefully Offensive]

"Which camel, Monsieur Président? Oh, that camel? Ah, yes. We ate it."

Usually, a sheepish "Oh, sorry, I ate that" response comes from peckish roommates, siblings who didn't know that was "yours," or friends who believe fridge-raiding is a sign of closest intimacy. Rarely does it involve a once alive even-toed, multi-humped ungulate, weighing an average of 800 pounds.

Regardless, French President Francois Hollande discovered that his prized camel was consumed in Mali. Things are not going well in Hollande's life, what with a ministerial tax fraud scandale and Eurozone woes. And now, he is denied the comfort of a pet, of which he once declared: "I will use it as a means of transport as often as possible."

The young creature was a gift to Hollande from a local official as a sign of gratitude for driving out Islamic extremists from the country. The gift has been slaughtered and stewed, according to Jean-Yves Le Drian, France's defense minister.

However, this camel was apparently never a well-behaved or scandale-free pet. First, a man from the Timbuktu area said that the camel had been stolen from him, after his home was destroyed in a French air raid. Though this claim was dismissed, the "handover ceremony" did not go swimmingly, as the animal screeched so loudly and consistently it overpowered the Malian official's speech.

While Hollande may have given the impression he wanted to gallop down the streets of Paris astride his gifted camel, this was unlikely to be his intention. He attempted to have the camel vaccinated and brought to a zoo in France. There the creature could have enjoyed the company of many other prestigious animals given to French presidents as gifts. His best friends would be two Bengal tigers once belonging to George Pompidou, as well as François Mitterrand's haughty Asian elephant, and some bison given to Valérie Giscard d'Estaing.

Eventually, when faced with complications of transferring the camel to an unsuitable climate for a desert-dwelling quadruped, Hollande entrusted a family in Timbuktu to care for his cherished pet. Mr. Le Drian reported that the family did not babysit the camel for long before making it into a traditional tagine stew and another addition to Hollande's stream of recent disappointments.

[Telegraph | Salon , image via AP | Vladimir Wrangel, Shutterstock]

A doctor in China couldn't help herself after she recently treated a man whose colon had been perforated by the eel he had stuck up his butt.

She just had to blog about it.

Story goes that the 39-year-old man was doing a bit of drinking when he concluded that it might be nice to let a live swamp eel swim up his rectum.

Needless to say, it damn near killed 'im.

According to the doctor, the 20" eel gnawed its way through the man's colon into his body, causing massive internal bleeding.

"The eel was simply trying to find its way out," another doctor is quoted as saying.

Happily, surgeons who worked through the night to extract the fish from the man's gut were able to save his life.

Shockingly, the eel survived the ordeal as well, though it didn't stick around for long.

One Japanese news outlet reports that the story of the man's misadventure has generated much conversation in his native land, along with many "LOLs."

It seems the Guangdong province resident was attempting to imitate a scene from an X-rated film he was watching, but the eel proved more slippery than anticipated.

Three years ago, a similar story took a decidedly unfunny turn after a Chinese man was badly injured by an eel that was inserted into his anus by his friends as a prank. He later succumbed to those injuries.

More recently, a man in New Zealand arrived at the hospital with an eel the size of an asparagus sprig stuck inside of him, but doctors refused to say how it got there.

[H/T: RocketNews24, photos via tt.mop]

Working off of this column in the New York Post that suggests we should make members of congress take IQ tests—tests which, according to this guy, will quiz people on their knowledge of guns— the gang over at Fox and Friends all chimed in to support the notion. "Nobody'd be in congress!" Steve Doocey says to no one before chuckling at his own joke. Gretchen Carlson, meanwhile, was already busy thinking about the next step: when are they going to mandate IQ tests for the people that make the IQ tests for congress? "Nobody'd be left in the world!" Steve Doocey notices.

We may never know if the person who fired his gun into the BancorpSouth Arena parking lot in Tupelo, Mississippi at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning intended to hit the circus elephant traveling there while on tour with a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey show. We may never know if the shooter, in the heat of the moment, mistook the elephant (Carol) for a much smaller human-sized human with whom he was having a personal conflict. We may never know what the elephant—an honor student, active in her church choir, well-liked and respected by her peers—was doing in the shadowy parking lot so late at night. (Probably just resting.)

What we do know is that in the wee hours of this morning, a vehicle drove to the area where the circus animals were being kept, fired a gun at the show's Asian elephant, and peeled off into the night, perhaps in search of other budget safari options.

Todd Hunt, executive director of the arena where the circus is scheduled to perform April 11th through 14th, took to the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal to reassure circus personnel that elephants are not usually shot in Tupelo, Mississippi.

"We want to assure them that Tupelo is safe and that this isn't normal or tolerated."

The elephant victim is alert, moving, and expected to make a full recovery.

At which point she will be forced back into the circus.

[Daily Journal / WTVA // Image via Getty]

There is so much to like about this video: The very, very clever raccoon navigating his way across a makeshift two-rope bridge like a furry James Bond; the Toronto housewife providing National Geographic-ready narration that gives Randall a run for his honey; the nuclear bomb blast toward the end of the video heralding a post-apocalyptic world in which raccoon overlords force humans to produce everlasting mountains of garbage for them to consume.

Oh, wait.

[H/T: MetaFilter]

Once you've seen the Sistine Chapel six or seven times, life in Vatican City can get a bit... boring (we imagine). So what else is there to do? According an analysis by TorrentFreak and Scaneye: download pirated porn.

Using Scaneye's data, TorrentFreak was able to take a look at which Bittorrent files were being downloaded by IP addresses located in Vatican City. Some of them were boring—The Americans; Love, Actually; Chicago Fire—and some of them were... more interesting. BDSM porn interesting:

Fleshbot was able to rustle up some clips from "WA-27788 Lea Lexis and Krissy Lynn" (that's "WA" for "Whipped Ass")—"Krissy plays an art critic and Lea plays a scorned artist who takes revenge on the snobby rich smack-talkers of the world by making an example of Krissy"—and "TPH-26967 Tiffany Starr and Sheena Shaw"—"Sheena wakes up and doesn't remember why Tiffany is in her bed, but a firm pounding from Tiffany's cock helps jog her memory." (There's also one called "Russian Slaves.") Feel free to watch, but make sure you do it somewhere where porn is okay, like the Vatican.

[Torrentfreak, Fleshbot (NSFW), image via AP]

A 6.3 magnitude earthquake in southwest Iran's Bushehr province has already killed 30 people and injured 800. Though the earthquake occurred 60 miles to the south of Iran's only nuclear power station, officials report that the nuclear plant has not been harmed and is working properly.

Rescue teams have been sent to the affected area, where about 10,000 people live in about 50 villages. Red Cross officials report that two of these villages were leveled when the earthquake struck at 4:22 PM local time. Aftershocks, the strongest with a 5.4 magnitude, continued after the initial shake.

Iran is susceptible to earthquakes as it is located across a major geological fault line. A major earthquake in the city of Bam in 2003 left over 25,000 fatalities.

[BBC, image via Flickr/757Live]

Ten years ago today, TV carried one of the most iconic, if stage-managed and misremembered, images of the invasion of Iraq: Moments before toppling the statue of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square, several Marines used a United States flag to cover Saddam's face before prudently swapping it for an Iraqi standard.

In anticipation of that anniversary, the National Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia, went looking for the American flag, hoping to put it on display. But the flag's keeper, former Lt. Tim McLaughlin, has told the Corps he won't provide it, because he doesn't want it used for pro-war propaganda.

"Over the years, I've become more aware of the symbolism that attached to the flag," McLaughlin told Salon's Jordan Heller. "But for me, it doesn't have any of those things—and I don't want it to again."

Instead, McLaughlin has already incorporated the flag into a museum exhibition of his own, intended to show viewers an unretouched perspective of the war. It was carved mainly out of diaries he kept in Iraq—colorful pages that include tallies of kills his unit accumulated. The exhibition was rejected by a series of museums and galleries, until it found a home at the Bronx Documentary Center.

"Our perception of war is mostly filtered through one, two, three, four filters," New Yorker writer and co-exhibitor Peter Maass said of McLaughlin's journals. "This is his handwriting on the wall. No filters." Maass tells much of McLaughlin's personal war story in "The Toppling," his epic postmortem of the Firdos Square photo op. As a tank officer in the first wave of troops to Baghdad, McLaughlin shot an innocent man at a driving checkpoint, and it made him tentative; later, he hesitated in recognizing an attack by insurgents, and one of his comrades died in the subsequent skirmish.

McLaughlin had been at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and the flag was given to him by a staffer from the office of Sen. Chuck Schumer, in recognition of McLaughlin's aid to his colleagues in the aftermath of the attack. He took it with him overseas, hoping to photograph himself with it somewhere in Iraq. But after the Saddam statue encounter, after his tour, after he'd made it back to his parents, he stowed it away in a safe-deposit box near their New Hampshire home.

"For me it was a period of death and killing people," McLaughlin—now an attorney for indigent clients in Boston—told Salon. He didn't like how the flag "facilitated the media's narrative of wars as neat and tidy things."

[Salon, New Yorker, DNAinfo/Image via AP]

The only thing stolen during a recent home invasion was the family dog, an East Wenatchee, Washington, couple told police.

According to a police department spokesman, the burglar broke into the couple's residence Saturday night, and was still inside the house when they returned.

"He was standing there with the refrigerator door open and feeding their dog some pudding," assistant police chief Dan Reierson said.

The suspect, later identified as 38-year-old Jason L. McDaniel, said he was searching for a man he wanted to kill, but was informed that his intended victim lived elsewhere.

After spending a short while longer sitting in the couple's rocking chair, the man made toward the door. However, before exiting, he called to the dog, who left with him.

McDaniel was later arrested but Buddy, the ironically named lab-pitbull mix, was not found at McDaniel's home.

East Wenatchee Police are asking for the public's assistance in finding the dog, who is described as black with "a white stripe down its chest." Tipsters can call (509) 884-9511.

[H/T: Fark, photo via Shutterstock]

Rehtaeh Parsons, a 17-year-old from Nova Scotia, died this past Sunday in a hospital, after attempting suicide on Thursday. Her mother stated that a rape in 2011 and subsequent bullying led to her daughter's suicide.

In 2011, Rehtaeh Parsons attended a party where she consumed enough vodka to not remember most of the evening. She recalls throwing up out of a window. Four boys then raped her; one of the boys allegedly yelled, "take a picture, take a picture." According to Rehtaeh's mother, "That picture began to circulate in her school and community three days later."

The picture prompted a torrent of online bullying as well as verbal abuse at her school. When Rehtaeh confessed the incident to her mother a few days later, they called emergency health services as well the police. After a year of investigations, the police told her it was a case of "he said, she said," without enough evidence to press charges. They told the family that though she was underage, the photographs were not a criminal issue.

The family moved from Cole Harbour to Halifax. Leah Parsons reports that her daughter attempted to maintain high spirits, but was depressed:

"Every text, every negative thing she would read to me. It was hard. She tried and she kept trying... She was never left alone. Her friends turned against her, people harassed her, boys she didn't know started texting her and Facebooking asking her to have sex with them since she had had sex with their friends. It just never stopped."

Rehtaeh admitted herself to a hospital in March because of suicidal thoughts. She attempted suicide on Thursday and was taken off life support on Sunday. Parsons has created a memorial page for her daughter, where she wrote:

"She made my life complete. When Rehtaeh was born, I dedicated everything to her and promised her the world. Others in this world took that away from her."

[CBC, image via Rehtaeh Parsons's Facebook Memorial Page]

The sheriff's deputies in Harris County, Texas are reporting that at least twelve people were wounded in a stabbing incident at Lone Star College just before noon, local time. A suspect as been detained, but officials report that another suspect is still at large.

Some of the victims with minor injuries were rushed to area hospitals, while four victims in critical condition were flown by LifeFlight medial helicopters to the Memorial Hermann Medical Center in Houston.

College officials issued a warning to the campus, which has been locked down. This is the second violent incident this year at Lone Star College. In January, a gunman wounded three people at another of the College's campuses, also in Harris County.

[The Houston Chronicle, image via AP]

Last Monday, Madonna arrived in Malawi a VIP. Last Saturday, she left the country with her VIP status revoked.

She and the first female president of Malawi are having a real bitch-off.

The Madonna camp's version of events is that the singer flew to the country last week to check in on some projects she had helped fund through her charity, Raising Malawi. She went to some classrooms her foundation had helped build. She visited a hospital and some orphanages. Before she left, she scrawled out a bizarre handwritten note (on her bright yellow personal stationery) to Malawi President Joyce Banda, in which she:

1. Casually addressed the president as "Joyce"
2. Misspelled the word "responsibility"
3. Said it "would be great" to meet if Joyce had time

Joyce, it seems, did not have time.

When Madonna arrived at the airport to fly home on Saturday, her VIP traveler status, the Telegraph reports, had been revoked. By official directive.

That sneaky Joyce.

Now, VIP service at Malawi's international airport isn't anything crazy. It would have let Madonna bypass check-in and security lines. It would have provided limo service to her private jet. It would have granted her access to a special lounge where other VIPs would have pretended not to notice she was Madonna. If you're Madonna, this is the bare minimum of VIP service. This is the complimentary cheddar bay biscuit basket of star treatment. The point is she'd had it on every previous trip, and now all of a sudden, it was gone.

After U-IP Madonna had flown away on her private plane into a distinctly non-important sunset, President Banda wasted no time launching a volley of criticisms against the trip. She complained to a journalist that Malawi officials hadn't been notified of Madonna's visit. She implied that the popstar was taking advantage of ordinary citizens:

"She just came unannounced and proceeded to villages and made poor people dance for her. And immigration officials opened the VIP lounge for her just because previously she enjoyed the VIP status."

Trevor Neilson, Madonna's philanthropic advisor, accused Banda of being influenced by a "grudge" her sister Anjimile Oponyo holds against his client, who fired Oponyo from her position as head of Raising Malawi a couple years ago on suspicion of theft. (A report by Neilson's Global Philanthropy Group consulting firm placed much of the blame for Raising Malawi's failure to construct a girls' school, after receiving $3.8 million in funds to get started, on Oponyo, who is alleged to have mismanaged funds for personal gain. At the time, Malawi officials blamed Madonna for failing to provide the $15 million she promised.)

President Banda has previously said that she cannot bar Madonna from visiting Malawi because "Malawi is a free nation."

Which isn't exactly a "You're welcome any time!" kind of salutation.

[Telegraph / NYDN / NYT // Images via Getty]

After giving the owner of a book containing $20,000 five months to claim his treasure, the Massachusetts man who found it in the trash says he's willing to wait one more month.

But then he plans to start spending it.

Carlos, who is holding on to his last name for fear of being hassled by false claimants, made headlines late last year after news of his found fortune went public.

A middle-aged Brazilian immigrant from Marlborough, Carlos was dumpster diving at the Wellesley Recycling and Disposal Facility in search of interesting books and magazines.

And he certainly found one: A hollowed-out hardcover with cutaway pages that concealed some 20,000 dollars in cash.

Thinking the money might belong to an elderly person whose books were discarded by a family member unaware of the makeshift safe deposit box, Carlos decided to place an ad in a local newspaper and wait six months.

Many people have since emailed him, but none have been able to correctly identify the book.

The deadline Carlos set for the book's owner — May 8th — is fast approaching, and the family man, who has several kids of his own, already knows what he's going to spend it on.

In addition to setting some aside for the children's college education, Carlos also wants to donate a portion of it to charity.

Even in the unlikely event that someone does come forward at the last minute, Carlos won't be going home empty-handed.

He says talk show hosts from Ricki Lake to Oprah have reached out to him for an interview. And he's also planning on writing a book called Wellesley Treasure all about the book that changed his life.

[H/T: Uproxx, screengrab via CBS Boston]

What the internet giveth, the internet also taketh away.

Thanks to a sneaky new program called CourseSmart, professors will be able to determine how much of the reading each ostensibly dedicated student actually churns through. Professors can track whether their students skip pages, when they read, if they don't use the highlight or note-taking function, or if they open the assigned reading at all.

As dean of the business school at Texas A&M, one of the eight schools currently testing the program, puts it, "It's Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent."

The Silicon Valley start-up—soon to be known as betrayer of bullshitting college students across academia—was founded by publishers Pearson and McGraw-Hill Education. It has been gathering information from the 3.5 million students and teachers already using the system and plans to expand the tracking program broadly by fall semester 2013.

CourseSmart can present professors with an individual student's "engagement index" for each of the assignments, as well as whole class evaluations. Now, professors might tell the story of how long, long ago, assessing student's completion of the reading relied on the level of 'panicky' they looked after being asked a question or how patient they seemed to be in the face of mind-meltingly boring, stiltedly-translated primary sources.

[New York Times | BetaBeat, image via Wave Break Media/Shutterstock]

A Hooters waitress from Missouri has filed a lawsuit against her employer for allegedly pushing her out after she underwent brain surgery that left her with a buzz cut and a sizable cranial scar.

27-year-old Sandra Lupo had been working at the same Hooters restaurant in St. Peters since 2005 when she was forced to take a few weeks off last Summer to extract a noncancerous mass that had formed on her brain.

While in hospital, Lupo says she was visited by her manager, Brent Holmberg, and assured that she still had a job, and that her cropped hair and scar would not present a problem.

However, just prior to her return, she was informed by regional manager Joe Ozment that she would be required to wear a wig while at the restaurant.

Lupo tried to accommodate Ozment's demand, but noted that the wig was interfering with the healing of her scar, and refused to wear it.

She subsequently found her hours reduced to the point where she had no choice but to tender her resignation.

Court documents show that Lupo and her lawyer are asserting that her rights were violated under the Missouri Human Rights Act which prohibits discrimination based on disability.

But Lupo may have a hard time arguing her case against a company that relies on the sexiness of its waitstaff to sell wings.

"In the disability context," St. Louis University associate law professor Marcia McCormick told ABC News, "if Hooters is to say she's not as attractive now without this wig, if they're selling her attractiveness, that might be a real function of her job and mean she isn't qualified by the Americans With Disabilities Act."

For its part, Hooters says Lupo's claims are wholly without merit and has filed a motion to have her lawsuit dismissed.

[H/T: Eater, photos via STLtoday, Myspace, Facebook]

Social media has steadily grown to become a significant component of mass casualty events, bringing breaking news from the scene before more established outlets can sift through the noise.

But today's stabbing spree at the Cy-Fair campus of Lone Star College appears to have brought with it a novel twist on the increasingly familiar formula.

An Instagram user claiming to have personally subdued the student responsible for stabbing 15 people at the school posted a photo to his account alleging to show the attacker on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back.

"Fuck this mothafucker stabbed 5 people.2 girls in the cheek," wrote cheesin365. "Everyone ran the other way I said fuck that. Me and this kid got em #lonestarstabbing #fuckthiskid #copsaretooslow"

He later followed that up with another photo — a selfie — supposedly showing him re-hydrating in the back of a squad car.

Photos released by Houston's KHOU 11 News suggest that the person seen face down in cheesin365's photo is indeed the alleged attacker (see below).

cheesin365, whose real name might be Steven Maida, appears to have taken to Twitter to elaborate on his heroism:

According to a student who spoke with the 21-year-old as-yet-unnamed suspect, a far more serious incident was prevented when the attacker's knife broke.

All told, 12 people had to be transported to the hospital, most with minor injuries. Two victims remain hospitalized and are listed in critical condition.

[H/T: BuzzFeed, photos via Instagram, Twitter]