These Incredibly Stupid News Stories Will Make You Despair For Humanity Even More

Congress approval ratings

You know you’re failing as a country when the Gungan representative is ranked higher than the actualrepresentatives. To be fair, the characters of the Star Wars were granted a “neutral” option, which is not usually a choice on political polls. Still, Binks has a 29% favorable rating while Congress has 11.6%. Of course, this doesn’t actually mean anything because despite everyone supposedly hating them so much, 85% of House incumbents managed to get reelected anyway. And the Empire rose to power in Star Wars, so Binks’ relative success was moot, too.

While covering an actually serious story, two anchors held a world-shrinking correspondence via split-screen. That distance was about half a parking lot. It’s likely that this “satellite”-style interaction was due to the fact that the anchors, Ashleigh Banfield (left) and Nancy Grace, are on different networks (CNN and Headline, respectively, though both are owned by the same company), but when you can see the same bus in the background of both shots, it’s just silly.

Despite the fact that the US is enjoying an all-time low in crime in several decades, and that studies show that unsupervised play is beneficial, and even necessary, to childhood development, a lot of people seem to prefer living in the Law and Order: SVU land and assume that each moment is fraught with impending doom. To that end, many would like to see unsupervised play of all children under 12 criminalized. Presumably the age cut-off is due to the fact that the kids become criminals themselves once they hit puberty. This includes kids playing in their own yards as well as at local parks, despite the fact that many parents grew up doing just these activities. But, you know, facts. Who believes those?

Walmart has come under fire for not providing its employees a decent living wage, even though their 2012 profits were $15.7 billion. But hey, bloated corporations have to eat too! That’s why Walmart came up with the ideas to make its customers fund its employees by encouraging them to donate food items so that the employees can do luxurious things like eat. Walmart spokespeople describe it as “caring,” while others use terms like “moral outrage.”

I mean, there’s really nothing I have to add to this. The original writer’s opinion of this incident comes through pretty loud and clear if you ask me.

Things were going great for this couple, who were expecting the birth of quintuplets back in March. Barbara Bienvenue made it all the way to the delivery room when it came out that she was not actually pregnant. Just a bit, um, plump. She had her boyfriend, Paul Servat, and quite a number of other people going for all 34 weeks of the “pregnancy.”Needless to say, they’re a bit miffed. And it’s not a case of phantom pregnancy, either; friends and family have said Bienvenue has lied about physical conditions before, too, including having twins and having cancer. If that doesn’t make you want to get a full psych history on your next date, I don’t know what does.

Everyone remembers when the “sign language interpreter,” pictured to the right of Obama, at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service was outed as a fraud by deaf communities around the world, describing him as “a fake who merely flapped his arms during the speeches.” No one knew who the guy was or where he came from, or why no one noticed his flappy movements during the multiple speeches. Turns out, the guy suffered from a severe case of schizophrenia, which contributed to his actions here, and has had a violent past. Now it’s a little less funny.

No stranger to bringing mass-scale humiliation on herself, Sarah Palin decided to pour her heart out into a new book about the true meaning of Christmas–you know, how we should focus on the religious and family traditions rather than the rampant commercialization. Of course, she was careful to make sure it came out right around Christmas. You know, so her readers would be reminded not to spend too much money…on anything else.

It’s nothing shocking that Kim K. is the popular symbol for excess, bad makeup highlights and terrible blazers, but her “charity” stunt in 2013 was pretty bad, even by Kardashian standards. She sold off a bunch of clothes to raise proceeds for survivors of the typhoon that devastated the Philippines that year. It sounds like a good idea, but the thing was, she kept 90% of the profit. I guess she realized that she’d have to replace her wardrobe. I’m almost impressed she agreed to only replace 90% of it. What a giving soul.

Another bastion of pure class, the Beebz was recently videoed relieving himself in a mop bucket at a restaurant. And no, he didn’t pull his pants down. That, my friends, is fashion. Leaving a club via a restaurant kitchen (yes, where the food is made). Not only is that, you know, illegal and disgusting, it also means that some poor employee had to change out that water (we hope), which means getting within a 15-foot radius of not only Beiber but also his pee. Why is this guy still a thing?

In what might be the worst case of irony ever, the top prosecutor in the Army’s seemingly neverending investigations into sexual assault, Lt. Col. Joseph “Jay” Morse, was suspended after a lawyer who worked with him alleged that he had groped her and tried to kiss her–at a conference on sexual assault. The levels of ick in this are many.

Craig Cobb is an outspoken white supremacist who became known when he announced that he wanted to turn the town of Leith, North Dakota (population 19) into a white-supremacist-only haven. To drum up suport (of which there was little), he went on The Trisha Goddard Show and took a DNA test to prove something about “racial purity.” If you’re waiting for some kind of divine payoff, you’ll get it: Turns out, Cobb’s ancestry includes 14% sub-Saharan DNA. So being white doesn’t mean you can’t have black ancestry, and whatever you look like or identify as, being a racist d-bag will always make you look stupid.