Newark Mayor Cory Booker appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to promote his jewelry line, the Caliber collection, which melts seized guns and turns them into bracelets. Each bracelet has “Newark” and the gun’s serial number etched into it. According to the website.

The Caliber Collection is made up of metal from 250 guns and bullet casings seized by the Newark Police Department. The result is a series of pieces that embody the gun’s transformation from a destructive weapon to a powerful symbol of renewal. A portion of the proceeds from each sale is used to fund future Gun Buyback Amnesty programs in Newark. It is our hope that this will be a model that we can roll out in other cities across the nation.

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Loyal Jezebel readers/ most people will have seen the charming NRA video which stays really classy by going after Obama’s children and calling the President an “elitist hypocrite.” Well, they released another video (because they are real auters of le cinema) in which they call Obama a “HYPOCRITE” again, for saying, in an interview with David Gregory, that he was “skeptical” that having armed guards in schools was the “only solution,” when “the school Obama’s daughters attend has 11 armed guards.” The only problem is the school, Sidwell Friends, has zero, not 11 armed guards. It has confirmed that their security officers do not carry guns. And while they have 11 people in their security department, as the Washington Post points out, “Five are listed as “special police officer,” while two are listed as ‘on call special police officer,’ which presumably means they do not work full-time. The directory also lists two weekend shift supervisors, one security officer and the chief of security.” So it’s not like the school is crawling with security officers.

So where does this erroneous information come from? As a screenshot (see above) from the video demonstrates, it comes from a December 24th article published on… wait for it… Breitbart.com.

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OMG. Amazing, incredible news! Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, Stephen Colbert’s sister, is declaring herself a candidate in the South Carolina special election to be held in May to fill Tim Scott’s open House seat. Senator Tim Scott is the crazy Tea Partier former congressman who was tapped by crazy Tea Partier current Governor Nikki Haley to the fill seat left empty when Crazy Tea Partier Jim DeMint retired from The Senate to go work at the Heritage Foundation. Phew. OK. If Colbert-Busch (who, unlike her brother, pronounces the “T” at the end of her name) wins the Democratic primary, she would most likely face Republican Mark Sanford, who himself resigned back in 2009 after disappearing for five days while “hiking the Appalachian trail” of his mistress in Argentina. Colbert-Busch will file her paperwork on Tuesday.

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If conservatives like sex, they sure need to do a better job of showing it. And it’s not just lefty feminists like myself who think that.

A woman at a panel held Wednesday night by the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum on how to reach out to woman had the same take. Leslie Paige, 55, who works for an advocacy group promoting smaller government, had her mind on bigger things when she took the mic and said, “I just want to say one small word and the word is sex.” Paige explained that college-aged women see Republicans as “a bunch of prudish, anti-sex, anti-reproductive freedom people.” So Paige has a brilliant suggestion for combatting the image problem: bumper stickers that say “We Like Sex Too.” The room went silent for a second, but then broke into a round of applause and hoots.

Great! Now we can all go home. Not really. The problem that Paige doesn’t get is that this isn’t an image problem. This is a content problem. I’m happy that conservatives enjoy sex, but that doesn’t mean the policies they and their party support aren’t “anti-reproductive freedom.” And if Paige doesn’t think the conservative movement and the GOP isn’t in opposition to reproductive freedom, she’s in denial.

And she’s not the only one who thinks “De Nile” is a river in Egypt, if you get my “drift” (doy! Two puns in ONE sentence). The Independent Women’s forum panelists pretended contraception was totes not an issue for conservatives. As Talking Points Memo reports,

When prodded by audience questions, the panelists said that contraception was a non-issue. As [conservative blogger Mollie ] Hemingway put it, contraception was thought up by Democrats who found it tested well in focus groups despite being a completely settled issue. Her response was to urge Republicans to respond with their own accusations that are “just as crazy,” something like, “they’re stealing your hot dogs!”

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First Kathryn Bigelow was attacked by douchebag maximus Bret Easton Ellis who tweeted, with his signature nuance and misogyny, “Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting film-maker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.” Then, on a more substantive level, senatorswrote a letter expressing their “deep disappointment” with the film, which they called a “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information” that led to bin Laden’s capture. The Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights Watch also criticizedthe film. At the New York Times Frank Bruni called the film “the political conundrum of the year, a far, far cry from the rousing piece of pro-Obama propaganda that some conservatives feared it would be.” And the film’s Washington DC premiere was met with a political protest.

Wednesday, Bigelow penned an op-ed in her own defense, in which she made clear her stance on torture:

First of all: I support every American’s 1st Amendment right to create works of art and speak their conscience without government interference or harassment. As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.

But I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.

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We all know that regularly, uh, ejecting our feces is part of being healthy. But did you know that receiving a fecal transplant couldsave your life? Well, it can, according to a new study conducted in the Netherlands and published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Before going further, let’s address the huge elephant in the bathroom. What the hell is fecal transplantation? Plainly speaking, it’s putting one person’s shit into the body of another person. In modern medicine, according to the New York Times,

It involves diluting stool with a liquid, like salt water, and then pumping it into the intestinal tract via an enema, a colonoscope or a tube run through the nose into the stomach or small intestine.

I know what you’re thinking. It sounds divine! But it can also save your life if you are suffering from an infection caused by a bacteria called Clostridium difficile, or C. difficile, for short. C. difficile infections are caused by antibiotics which kill off healthy gut bacteria, and leave people susceptible to the dangerous bacteria, which is extremely prevalent in hospitals. The treatment is usually more antibiotics, but sometimes those don’t work and patients relapse. The symptoms include severe diarrhea, vomiting and fever. The infection can be lethal and kills 14,000 people a year in the United States. Each year, over 300.000 hospital patients contract the bacteria and the number of cases in and out of hospitals could be as high as three million. More than $1 billion a year is spent on treatment costs.

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You can sleep a little more soundly tonight, knowing that most people aren’t batshit crazy. Here are the important take-aways from a Pew Research Center poll released Wednesday.

• 63% of Americans don’t want to overturn Roe v Wade (yay!)
• Not surprisingly, 74% of Democrats don’t want to overturn Roe v Wade.
• Even among Republicans, a higher percentage is pro Roe (48%) than anti Roe (46%).
• Most religious groups support Roe v Wade.
• 76% of Protestants, 65% of black Protestants and 63% of Catholics are pro Roe.
• Seven in 10 Americans with no religious affiliation “say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”
• And don’t even get me started on the Jews*! Oy! Nearly 9 out of 10 agree “abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”

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It’s hard to keep the difference between abortion and prostitution straight when you’re a misogynist idiot. This explains why a lawmaker from North Idaho asked representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho if they supported prostitution, since, you know, they support abortion. Rep. Ron Mendive, R-Coeur d’Alene posed the thought-provoking question to ALCU-Idaho Executive Director, Monica Hopkins, on Wednesday at an ACLU legislative breakfast presentation. The question drew audible gasps (because people must have been blown away by his philosophical mind). Rep. Mendive figured the ACLU, which is pro-choice, must support prostitution because it’s a “woman’s choice.” He explained his brilliant logic thusly:

“I think that there’s kind of a double standard…. With abortion there are two beating hearts, and prostitution, there’s just one. If a woman were going to make a choice to be a prostitute, that’s her decision as to what to do with her body.”

Putting the definition of beating hearts aside, that’s a great point, because we all know about the correlation between number of heartbeats and choice-making. What the hell is he talking about?

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Today on Fox News’ America Live, Megyn Kelly revealed she’s a little obsessed with… porn names. It all started when the host was setting up a story about an alleged scandal regarding former EPA Director Lisa Jackson using the alias of “Richard Windsor” in private emails.

“We’re going to speak with a lawyer who first blew [no pun intended, I’m sure] the lid off this story. Without this guy… we might never have known that Lisa Jackson also went by the name of Richard Windsor. That was her [Lisa Jackson] alias, which is the name of a pet and the name of her street that she grew up on. Which I think technically is what you do to get your porn name … So, you go by your first pet’s name and the first street you ever lived on and then that would be your name if you ever decided to venture into naughty films.

But that wasn’t it. Later on, Boston Herald columnist Michael Graham asked Kelly what her porn name was, to which she responded, “It’s not good. Noah Ardsley. No one wants to see that.” But Kelly shared the more titillating porn names of Fox News contributors Monica Crowley and Julie Roginsky: “Monica’s is Muffin Hunt and Julie’s is Peanut Metropolitan.” Now we’re talking.

Read more and see the video at Jezebel

Next week will mark the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But, as new research from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Poll has revealed, most people under 30 don’t know that the landmark case legalized abortion in the United States. 62 percent of Americans (both men and women) knew what Roe v. Wade was all about, but only 44 percent of Americans under 30 knew the case dealt with abortion in some way or another. 41 percent thought the case was related to the death penalty, the environment or simply didn’t know. I mean, it could be worse. They could have thought it was some kind of aquatic athletic dilemma, right?

Though this is a little scary, the good news is that the same report found that 63 percent of Americans believe that Roe v. Wade should not be completely overturned, compared to 29 percent who believe it should be.

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