A "hacker" obtained a bunch of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and posted them to some website, and for some reason Matt Drudge and the right-wing media have decided that these emails are proof of a massive conspiracy to make up global warming, for fun. The emails are mostly scientists complaining about political pressures and people they dislike and things that make their job—and their job is attempting to reconstruct climates of hundreds or millions of years ago based on fucking ice floes and tree rings—harder.

There are precisely two emails that even sound scandalous: one in which a scientist refers to borrowing another scientist's "trick"—which skeptics interpret as falsifying data and which actual legitimate scientists say means "a clever way of doing something"—to "hide the decline," which is a poor way of saying he is attempting to correct for the fact that tree rings don't reflect modern warming trends that are well-documented by actual thermometers.

The other email that is terribly scandalous is even better. As George Monbiot explains:

One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief.

So the scandal is that a researcher thought a paper was flawed and said he would do anything to keep it from being published, not because it said something dangerous that he is trying to keep hidden, but because he thought it was bad science. And then it turned out to be bad science.

Ahem:

Half of the journal's editorial board, including editor-in-chief Hans von Storch, resigned from the journal's editorial board because they felt that publication of the paper in question represented a breakdown in the peer-review process. The publisher had refused to allow von Storch to publish an editorial on the topic, but later the president of the journal's parent company stated that the paper's major findings could not "be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. [Climate Research] should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication."

So. The scandal, again, for those keeping score at home, is that academics are bitching to each other about papers they think are bad, written by people they dislike, that are being published in journals they dislike.

Also the scandal is that someone made Andrea Peyser's child sing a song about global warming!

The Post's resident sex goddess and outrage factory reports from the front lines of the Obama/Soros/Polar Bear Indoctrination Campaign:

My daughter came home from school recently with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. With no foreshadowing — or time to call an exorcist — out came this chilling refrain:

"...You can hear the warning — GLOBAL WARMING... "

By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:

A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called "The Warming Song," at a concert for parents.

B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.

C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.

Well, we're sorry you weren't allowed to "argue" with a school assembly, Andrea. That must've been hard for you! Also we're sorry that someone is scolding grown-ups for polluting the planet, but, you know, it really can't be argued that that is anyone else's fault.

The spooks at the NSA are, of course, notorious for their role monitoring internet activity, and for their use of warantless wiretaps to monitor U.S. phones, often illegally. So computer users could easily be worried to hear that the NSA has "partnerships" with Microsoft, which makes their operating systems; Intel, which makes their wireless chipsets; and McAfee, which makes their antivirus software (so-called!).

From NSA Information Assurance Director Richard Shaeffer's testimony to the Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security:

Working in partnership with Microsoft and elements of the Department of Defense, NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to engance Microsoft's operating system security guide without constraining the user's ability to perform their everyday tasks... All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later during the product's lifecycle.

Shaeffer also talked about his agency's "trusting relationship" with the private sector, including a "partnership" with Intel and McAffee to promote a security protocol — or should we say, "security" protocol? — from the federal government.

These IT companies all want to do business with the government, so it's to their advantage to be seen as cooperative in implementing federal protocols in their products. But should consumers distrust these ties? The general consensus among private-sector security experts canvassed by ComputerWorld was, in the words of one, "I can't imagine NSA and Microsoft would do anything deliberate because the repercussions would be enormous if they got caught."

Right, because if there's anything that clearly motivates these two massive organizations with virtually guaranteed near-term revenue streams, it's fear of public shame. This is why we have not seen either entity doing anything embarrassing, recently.

(Pic: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, by Getty Images.)

The only non internet person on Couric's list, in fact, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The other people who control the media, according to the CBS Evening News anchor, are all Web heads:

• Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  
• Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington.
  
• The founders of the women's blogging network BlogHer: Jory Des Jardins, Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone. This is a big stretch but we're assuming Couric is trying to imagine the less sexist world she'd like to live in and lend some buzz to a feminist cause. Fair enough.
  
• Craig Newmark, Craigslist founder.
  
• Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Couric is obviously just trying to butter up people who might be able to help her ditch the old fuddy-duddies at CBS News and expand her promising sideline in lifecasting. Which is, frankly, brilliant. We know some other people who might be able to help you Katie, call us.

Oh, and the Jewish thing? Couric is no anti-Semite, but we couldn't help but notice that her list of people who supposedly control the media does contain a majority of people of Jewish descent: Brin, Page, Newmark, Zuckerberg, Genachowski and Camahort Page.

Of course, the pace of change in Silicon Valley has a way of leveling these old-world distinctions. Page's family was non-practicing; Zuckerberg has gone atheist and Camahort Page is "a total non-religious person."

[via Bay Newser via NBC Bay Area]

The UC Santa Cruz job is no accident; it was made possible by a donation from the Dead themselves. And it's not just drug bands spreading counterculture good fortune these days:

• Amid mass journalism layoffs, a new hippie-friendly type of gig has opened up: Pot reviewer. Denver's alt weekly went looking for just such a fellow, to serve the booming local market for "medical" marijuana.
  
• Grungy well-heeled young music fans made this year's Coachella music festival a "super happy" success. Far out for concert organizers who refused to grow up and get a "real job!"
• Vegan animal activist Jane Velez-Mitchell has a hit show over on CNN's Headline News and can now aspire to the even greater level of success attained by left-wing-radio-host-turned-MSNBC-anchor (and fellow lesbian) Rachel Maddow. (Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, putting her on the high achieving side of hippiedom.)
  
• The White House installed an organic garden under lobbying from Alice Waters, delivering a PR victory to the restaurateur derided as a hippie "dreamer" on national television just days earlier.
  
• In San Francisco, the sort of company that holds "naked" meetings and makes decisions through unanimous consensus is now showered with VC cash.
  
• A protest marcher from a hippie college changed his name to the militant "Barack" from the placid "Barry" and was soon elected president of these United States.
  
• If you advocate turning your cat vegan or making men pee while sitting down, for the environment, the New York Times will publish your op-ed, these days.

And all this time you thought "get a job" was the ultimate way to insult a hippie. Who's laughing now, straight edge??

(Pic via)

Because, as we all know, the h1n1 vaccine is a big-government brain control plot. Or it is a money-making scam by Big Pharma. Or it is the mist from the Stephen King book. Or the thing the Others inject you with in Lost. Whatever it is, it will definitely give you autism. That is basically proven, now, because otherwise why wouldn't Sasha and Malia have gotten vaccinated yet? Just because there is a shortage of vaccines and children with impaired immune systems are receiving vaccines first?

(Or maybe they haven't been vaccinated yet because Michelle reads the section of The Huffington Post that is about lady issues and health and also there is a lot, seriously a lot, about how vaccines will kill you.)

Look, you have a brain, we don't need to explain how stupid and precisely backwards this "net neutrality is government control of content" argument is. We just need to point out that among the many groups supporting net neutrality are the Christian Coalition, the Gun Owners of America, and Brent Bozell's Parents Television Council. All of them are in on the plot! Everyone's a Marxist now! (Except the Maoists. It is an important distinction that only Glenn Beck can make with any accuracy.)

And Glenn Beck is apparently running out of ways to scare people. Net neutrality? Did Glenn just pick this one to take on because he knew it'd piss off the internet?

Or you may not be surprised, if you've ever heard of David Icke.

David Icke was an English sportscaster who, in the early '90s, became the national spokesman of the UK Green Party. And then he kinda went nuts. Or had a spiritual epiphany. Either one.

In 1991 he announced, on television, that he was the son of God. His basic history is laid out in this wonderful video from Jon Ronson's documentary on Icke. In 1999, Icke decided that the Brotherhood, the one world government, and the Illuminati are all led, at the top, by lizard people. Literal lizard people. Non-human Reptilian humanoids from other planets who live in underground caverns.

Icke has been accused of antisemitism, but Icke has always insisted — convincingly — that when he says "Lizard people" he literally means "lizard people." "Lizard people" do not represent Jews. Jews are humans! Lizard people are not!

And everyone powerful either works for or is an actual lizard person.

The Lizard people are seven feet tall and the come from a star called Alpha Draconis in the constellation of Draco They eat fear and negativity, which is why they make us make wars and stuff, all the time, and also 9/11. Also they are the ancient Sumerian gods who genetically engineered Homo sapiens to be their slaves.

This theory takes a lot of very common conspiracies, involving The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Federal Reserve and the British royal family, and then says the puppet-masters are aliens who drink the blood of blond, blue-eyed children. This makes more traditional conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones, suspect that Icke is either a con man or actually literally a plant by the Illuminati whose job is the discredit the theorists who are really onto something big.

But Icke still has thousands of followers, across the world. Many of them are in the western United States. One of them was Richard Heene.

And according to Heene's former assistant Robert Thomas, Heene believed he could use an electrically charged weather balloon to attract UFOs. So maybe Heene planned on using the balloon to expose the UFOs of the Lizard People on live television? Or he's just going to use his Balloon Boy publicity to warn us about the Lizard People's planned 2012 apocalypse.

Regardless of what it all meant, one thing is clear: the Lizard People are responsible for all of us staring at a balloon for a couple hours last week.

Also: this is a great time to be viral marketing for the upcoming ABC miniseries event V! How about, yes, skywriting? Wonderful. That miniseries is about a race of aliens who pretend to be our friends but really they are lizard people bent on conquering the Earth and eating us.

Part one of Ronson's documentary:

Crazy World Net Daily make-believe "journalist" Jack Cashill decided Bill Ayers secretly wrote Dreams From My Father because a) Barack Obama is too stupid to write a good book and b) Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are best friends forever. All of his "evidence" is things like "both men use the word 'baleful'" and "there are people named 'Freddy' in books by both of them." Literally, that is the evidence he's marshaled in his year-long campaign to prove this theory.

Ahem:

Obama talks about our "collective dreams." Ayers uses the word "collective" the way others use "and" and "the." The Weather Underground was organized into "collectives." He refers to "collective well-being," "collective gloom," "collective goodwill" and a dozen other Marxist-spawned "collective" sentiments. Speaking of Marx, Obama uses the concept of "process" in a consciously dialectic sense as does Ayers.

Proven by science! (Enough for Andy McCarthy, anyway.)

And then some conservative blogger claimed to have run into Ayers at the airport, and she said Ayers told her personally that he wrote all of Dream From My Father himself.

Ayers, obviously, says this to all the crazies, because he thinks it's hilarious. It's apparently his version of the old Bill Murray "your friends will never believe you!" thing.

That doesn't matter, though! "Bill Ayers admitted he wrote Dream From My Father" will be shouted by someone on Lou Dobbs' or Sean Hannity's show, soon. It will be in the comments threads of newspaper stories until the end of time. You will continue getting email forwards about it for years. It will become one of the undying myths of the right-wing fringe, and believing it will be tacitly (and occasionally explicitly) encouraged by the movement's media and political leaders.

The Washington Independent's Dave Weigel is brilliant at this—finding whatever extreme nonsense will bubble up to the mainstream, or at least garner a Politico mention—so keep reading him if you want to know what insane bullshit will pop up next.

The embassy statement echoed comments from a spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who also said that he was Barack Obama's real father.

It said Yudhoyono met Obama on the margins of the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh last month and they "agreed on the importance of having a visit that would showcase the importance of growing US-Indonesia bilateral relations, and also on the importance of never telling the world the true story of what Obama learned from Imam Bill Ayers in his Madrassa."

The statement ends speculation that Obama was secretly born in the Philippines but flown to Kenya as an infant in order to produce the first of his many forged birth certificates.

Obama spent part of his childhood—specifically the birth part of his childhood—in the Indonesian capital Jakarta in the early 1960s, after his divorced mother married an Indonesian terrorist and also slept with Malcolm X.

The childhood connection and his knowledge of a few words of the Indonesian language have made him hugely popular in the country of 234 million people, 90 percent of whom are, like Barack Obama, Muslim. And secretly also from Kenya.

The embassy statement echoed comments from a spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who also said that he was Barack Obama's real father.

It said Yudhoyono met Obama on the margins of the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh last month and they "agreed on the importance of having a visit that would showcase the importance of growing US-Indonesia bilateral relations, and also on the importance of never telling the world the true story of what Obama learned from Imam Bill Ayers in his Madrassa."

The statement ends speculation that Obama was secretly born in the Philippines but flown to Kenya as an infant in order to produce the first of his many forged birth certificates.

Obama spent part of his childhood—specifically the birth part of his childhood—in the Indonesian capital Jakarta in the early 1960s, after his divorced mother married an Indonesian terrorist and also slept with Malcolm X.

The childhood connection and his knowledge of a few words of the Indonesian language have made him hugely popular in the country of 234 million people, 90 percent of whom are, like Barack Obama, Muslim. And secretly also from Kenya.

It would seem, you see, that pundits on right-wing Fox News and lefty Huffington Post have arrived at the same place with regard to Swine Flu vaccines: They are dangerous and should be avoided!

Attached, find a clip of Fox's Glenn Beck riling up a studio audience against "this government's" flu shots, and saying the vaccines are kind of barbaric and backward.

And over here on HuffPo you can find "Dr. Frank Lipman" saying much the same thing: He advises "NO!" against swine flu vaccines (in bold and caps), due to an unholy alliance between the government and "the Pharmaceutical Industry" (again with the caps). But he does say "yes" to Vitamin D supplements, fish oil, "antiviral herbal supplements," "a probiotic daily... with 10-20 billion organisms," and a ready supply of "homeopathic Oscillococcinum."

Astronomer and former HuffPo contributor Phil Plait calls this "far-left New Age... antivax nonsense" over on Discover Magazine's website, advising, sensibly, that people consult their actual personal doctors on the matter. Controversy also dogged HuffPo's health coverage back in May, when another Living section writer suggested treating swine flu with colon cleanses. The writer, who just happened to be selling a cleanse book, was duly rebuked by a doctor writing for Salon.com.

At the time, we noted that the Living section, in which both these controversial swine flu articles have appeared, was stocked by writers recruited by Huffpo "Senior Editor At Large" Russell Bishop John Morton, a disciple of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, to which HuffPo publisher Arianna Huffington belongs. At least one Living section editor has reportedly been forced by Huffington to attend an "Insight" seminar, organized by a group with close ties to MSIA.

Former members have called MSIA a cult of personality around leader John-Roger (pictured, left, with Huffington in 2004), who acolytes believe can heal the ill and who is said to eschew Western medicine. One ex-member described in his memoir John-Roger scolding him for using prescription drugs, rather than just a "natural... nutritionist," to rid himself of parasites contracted on a trip Africa (see the end of this post for more).

We'd hoped HuffPo's new medical editor Dr. Dean Ornish, who joined in August, could improve HuffPo's health coverage. It's not clear if he signed off on this latest article; we're curious what his thoughts are. Perhaps he'll leave a comment here as he did on our last post. In the meantime we'll enjoy observing the comical similarities between the people near the furthest edges of Fox News and HuffPo.

After much asking and begging of the FBI, Trentadue invoked the all-powerful Freedom of Information Act to view security tapes from buildings near the federal building, which everyone thinks Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed way back in 1995. But we were all wrong!

Or that's what Trentadue thinks, because none of the videos have footage before 9:02 that morning, which means "the real story is what's missing."

Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain't no such thing as a coincidence.
...
The interesting thing is they spring back on after 9:02. The absence of footage from these crucial time intervals is evidence that there is something there that the FBI doesn't want anybody to see.

Considering all the time it took to get the tapes — and the fact that the tapes would have shown the truck bomb's approach — Trentadue's absolutely convinced the government's keeping secrets. The government won't say. So what does this all mean? Well, 1995 was during Clinton's White House tenure. We've come to expect shadiness from the GOP — inside job, anyone? — but the Democrats? Our world's been turned upside down. Now we only have the Green Party to trust. Fuck.

Democrats win! 25% of Democrats think Bush "intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East" (that is much more specific wording than previous polls so there is less "it's fair to say Bush knew" wiggle room) and 12% are not sure. But a full 42% of Republicans are positive the President was not born in the United States and 22% just cannot make up their minds about where the President, who was born in Hawaii, was born.

And self-declared "independents," once you take away the genuine libertarians and socialists and Greens and fascists who make up .01% of the electorate, remain mostly white conservatives who voted for Clinton once.

(We continue to assert that truthers—while stupid and wrong—are not as "bad" as birthers.)

We haven't made any of these up:

* SPEECHLESS - SILENCING THE CHRISTIANS
* THUGOCRACY - FIGHTING THE VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY
* DEFUNDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD
* ACTIVISM AND CONSERVATISM: FIT TO A TEA (PARTY)
* THE THREAT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
* OBAMACARE: RATIONING YOUR LIFE AWAY
* MARRIAGE: WHY IT'S WORTH DEFENDING AND HOW REDEFINING IT THREATENS RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
* THE NEW MASCULINITY
* WAIT NO MORE: FINDING FAMILIES FOR WAITING KIDS
* TURNING THE TIDE IN YOUR GENERATION

Nor did we make up what that "New Masculinity" session was apparently about: protecting the children from being turned gay by Playboy. Take it away, Chief of Staff to Senator Tom Coburn:

A session on the "New Masculinity" went deep into the reasons why, and how, conservatives could prevent children from entering pre-marital domestic partnerships or from embracing the "malady" of homosexuality. Michael Schwartz, the chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), told the audience that praising one's parents in nightly prayers could enforce the notion of marriage, and telling children that "all pornography is homosexual pornography" could prevent them from becoming perverted.

Yes, of course!

And Mitt Romney, who is the Republican party's leading 2012 contender (and a so-called "centrist!") is openly praising this weirdo nonsense hard-right conspiratorial mystical Mormon pseudohistory called The 5,000 Year Leap. (The book also informs Glenn Beck's bizarre interpretation of history and the constitution.) It is hard to overstate how weird and fucked up that is and how terrifying the idea of these people returning to power is. This is like a 1988 speech from Paul Tsongas in which he announces that he's been seriously studying The Illuminatus! Trilogy, except all that just would mean was that he was high, not that he believed the Rothschilds banded together with Ho Chi Minh, the civil rights movement, and the Council on Foreign Relations to establish a New World Order.

The people who chant "9/11 was an inside job," who babble about controlled demolitions, who seriously think an airplane did not hit the Pentagon (our faves!)... these people, they are crazies who are rightfully marginalized and mocked and who've never been taken seriously by anyone in any position of authority in the Democratic party. They are, in that sense, like the hardcore Birthers. In fact, Philip Berg and Alex Jones are both.

But the entire equivalence argument ignores some huge fucking differences between those nutty "left-wing" wackos and our current "right-wing" wackos.

Like, there have been a couple seemingly reasonable people who've said some variation on the following this week: If Barney Frank (it is always Barney Frank) had shouted "You Lie!" at President Bush, you stupid liberals would've applauded!

Well, here is the thing, and the problem with hypotheticals: Barney Frank would not have done that, because he's not a complete moron. And if he had done that, he would've shouted it after President Bush had actually lied about something, and not just because he's a racist moron who thinks there is a secret plot to save the lives of Mexicans.

Birtherism is tolerated by movement conservatives. (The attempt by some of them to boycott World Net Daily has been called "the elite" attacking "the grassroots" by various more established conservatives, even though actual "elite" conservatives are feeding complete garbage nonsense to the "grassroots") And Birtherism usually does not bother to hide its essential ridiculousness: Barack Obama was not born in the US, because we do not like him! No one could accidentally sign on to a Birther bill without knowing exactly what they're doing, despite the protestation of Congressmen who've done just that but claim not to believe Obama is ineligible to be president.

And, hey, it is not acceptable among actual elite liberals plotting in their liberal caves to say that "Dick Cheney plotted 9/11 himself because he wanted a Reichstag excuse to go to war against Iraq." What it is acceptable to say, because it is true, is that "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ignored the intelligence that might've helped them stop 9/11, because they were more concerned with non-threats like Iraq, and once 9/11 happened they not only completely botched their response but they then cynically exploited that tragedy to move against Iraq, which they'd been planning to do beforehand anyway." And it is also acceptable to say, once again because it is true, that "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney stonewalled and undermined the official investigation into the events of that day as part of a cover-up—not of their part in the conspiracy itself but of their breathtaking cynicism and incompetence."

And it is the popularity of those (true!) beliefs among liberals that makes the more credulous ones targets for the actual fucking crazies. If you've ever walked by Lyndon LaRouche's college student cultists, you know that they masquerade as regular Democrats who hate Bush, just like you! (Or they used to; now they masquerade as dudes who hate Obama's socialized medicine, just like you!)

And if you've ever been approached by Truthers collecting signatures you know that what they always say is "do you think there should be a complete investigation into the events of 9/11?" To which the answer is "yes, of fucking course, I want to know exactly what Dick Cheney said and did on that day, I want him and Rumsfeld under oath and on tape, and it is universally acknowledged that the Pentagon and CIA and NSA refused to cooperate with the 9/11 commission." You can want a more independent commission with more authority to compel testimony and declassify documents and not believe that BUSH DID 9/11. And multiple signatories of the famous Van Jones petition claim the wording changed between when they signed it and when it was published, with calls for an investigation suddenly supplemented with language arguing that "people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen." Which does sound like a classic Truther move.

Maybe these people who claim the conspiratorial bullshit was added after the fact are covering their own asses. But we're inclined to believe them. (You are free not to!) And in talking to Salon some of them are still saying dumb things, some of them are obviously actual truthers, some of them just still don't really understand who they're getting in bed with, and some of them have grown up, a little bit.

But skepticism of the American government based on the Gulf of Tonkin, COINTELPRO, and Iran-Contra, and skepticism of the Bush administration based on Ahmed Chalabi, faked intelligence, and warrantless wiretapping is a hell of a lot more sympathetic than skepticism of the legitimacy of the current president born entirely of racial fear.

Trutherism is particularly alluring conspiratorial nonsense because of an actual history of the government doing secret, evil things in the name of national security. But there is, as far as we can tell, no history of Foreign Nationals attempting to seize control of the nation through fraud in order to send white people to concentration camps and throw our elderly to the Death Panels. (There is, obviously, no history of the government murdering 3,000 citizens in order to justify a war, especially since governments have been justifying unnecessary wars without all that fuss and bother for some time, and that is why it is batshit insanity. But "government lies to get us into war" is not exactly as much of a stretch as "man pretends to be American in order to trick everyone into electing him president.")

That said: 9/11 was not an inside job, you morons. And you've successfully made it impossible for anyone to raise responsible and serious questions regarding the response of the government, so nice work.

In this evening's installment of his eponymous broadcast, Mr. Beck took some time to bear his soul. And what a soul-bearing it was: reminders of how booze brought him down, how he scraped himself from the gutter, lifted himself to great heights, was again hammered down and then, suddenly, came to this zen-like realization:

They can take my job and they can take my wealth but that's okay....even if the powers to be, right now, succeed in making me poor, drum me out, and I'm just a worthless loser... which I'm just about that much above that now... I will only be stronger for it.

Stronger? Perhaps. An unemployed journalistic pariah who's loved by the likes of Sarah Palin? That's more likely.

Even if he is preparing an exit, Beck appeared on fellow Fox Newser Bill O'Reilly's show tonight to attack discuss Van Jones, who's part of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality. Oh, and a tacit friend-of-a-friend of the Weather Underground. Sharpen those pitchforks!

Here is a bizarre thing that we will chalk up to some deep conspiracy. NYT, real estate section, August 21: Look at this adorable couple that lives in a Fort Greene brownstone:

Two recent arrivals to this stretch, a pair of 30-year-old newlyweds named Alec Friedman and Skye Parrott (yes, everyone asks if that's her real name, and yes, it is),

Okay sure. And then the Metropolitan Diary, yesterday:

Dear Diary:

Many years ago, I took my daughter, Skye, and her friend Katie, both 7, to MoMA. The girls were bored. Not wanting to waste a trip into the city, I decided to take them to Tiffany's. That was a hit.
When we got back to Hoboken, Katie announced to her mother very seriously, "Mom, I've decided that I like rubies best when they're surrounded by diamonds." Virginia Parrott

And a god damn wedding announcement last month! Skye "Sulzberger" Parrott? Who are you?
[Clearly she is an upscale hippie but what else?] [Pic via]


The Tribune Co. has finally completed the sale of the Chicago Cubs, for $845 million. In the 28 years it owned the team, Tribune Co. brought as much success to the Cubs as Sam Zell has brought to Tribune Co.


The Hallmark Channel is restructuring as its parent company tries to cut its own copious debt load. Reader's Digest officially filed for bankruptcy today. And JPMorgan is now a bigger publisher than Time Inc., thanks to all the publishing companies falling into its lap after financial collapse. The new media!

Advertisers are fleeing from Glenn Beck's show because he's a little too crazy, but could the backlash spread to slightly less crazy political talk shows, as well? Ad Age believes it just might happen! First, you know, Procter&Gamble pulls its ads from Beck, but then they figure why not just pull them from everything politically controversial, and before you know it O'Reilly and Olbermann are outta advertisers too! 1. As long as these shows pull big ratings they'll have advertisers. 2. Maybe those advertisers would then flee to, you know, worthwhile journalism shows? And blogs like ours, hmmm? 3. But if they did eventually savvy marketers would take advantage of the ad dearth to sneak back onto political talk shows, and there you go. Don't worry, fans of drivel.

The folks who think really hard about the machinations behind cable news — that'd include us — are wondering: Was Glenn Beck forced off the air this week by contrite Fox News executives in the wake of an advertiser boycott over his increasingly insane meltdowns? Or does Fox just want you to think that?

TVNewser reported today, citing "several sources inside" Fox News, that Glenn Beck was pulled off the air and sent on a forced, unscheduled vacation this week after executives became increasingly alarmed over the advertiser exodus from his show and wanted to "let some of the heat surrounding him die down." If true, that would be an almost unprecedented instance of the network backing down—rather than its preferred tactic of attacking viciously—in the face of criticism. Aside from the firing of E.D. Hill after her "terrorist fist jab" remark and an oblique apology after a graphic referred to Michelle Obama as "Obama's Babymama," it's hard to recall a case where the famously truculent network acknowledged criticism or reacted defensively.

Fortunately for fans of Fox's unrestrained dickishiness, it's not true: Not long after the TVNewser posted the item, Beck's personal publicist Matthew Hiltzik provided evidence to Politico that Beck's vacation was long-planned: An e-mail from an employee of his production company, dated July 14, saying, "All: Glenn will be off of radio & TV the week of August 17th, returning to air August 24th." Beck didn't start getting into serious trouble until July 28, when he said Barack Obama hates white people. So if it's authentic, the e-mail is fairly solid proof that Beck was planning to be out long before his latest psychotic episode began.

For what it's worth, a tipster tells us that she spotted Beck with his family and a bodyguard—so much for that "just us folks" image—leaving the Museum of Natural History today in Manhattan at about 12:30 p.m. So whether the vacation was planned or not, there was no travel involved.

So what gives? The strange thing about the TVNewser report was the response from Fox's flack: "A Fox News spokesperson denied our accounts and simply told us, 'Glenn Beck will back on Monday.'" That's awful weak stuff considering how easy it would have been to simply knock down the story from the start by, say, providing the e-mail proving that Beck's vacation was long-planned. And the fact that it was Beck's personal publicist, who's paid to look out for Beck's image and not Fox's, who eventually got that e-mail out there leads us to the following highly improbable-and-yet-irresistible conspiracy theory:

Fox deliberately planted the forced-vacation story, knowing it was false. The network generally has no interest in placating critics, but it is highly motivated to placate advertisers, who have moved their spots off Beck's show in droves. Beck's sudden absence from the air presented an opportunity to appear to be sensitive to criticism without actually doing anything: By spreading word that he was taken off the air, advertisers see that Fox has gotten the message. But by not actually taking Beck off the air, they don't have to deal with the blowback from Beck. That would explain the difference between the two flacks' responses. Fox's flack remained deliberately vague enough to keep the story alive, while Beck's flack provided the proof that would have killed it from the get-go.

If you think that's a preposterous theory, you're right. But you've also never worked with the Fox News' dedicated public relations team.

Gawker has learned that Vanity Fair's Craig Unger and John Connolly are currently looking into the prospect that the banking and financial interests that Spitzer took on during his tenures as attorney general and governor of New York tipped off the feds to Spitzer's proclivities and launched the investigation.

While we'd love to see Spitzer emerge tormenter-in-chief for Goldman Sachs, this is not good news for his ongoing rehabilitation. First off, it casts his burgeoning anti-Wall Street crusade in a different light. Is his anti-bailout populism a function of his experience as the Sheriff of Wall Street, or of his desire for revenge against that bastards that brought him low?

Second, it only reminds people that Spitzer is a hooker-banging ex-governor. And no matter how the investigation got started, Spitzer's culpability on that count isn't in doubt. But if it is true that representatives of the Wall Street interests Spitzer tangled with handed the case to the Department of Justice, then the case takes on quite a different hue: A prominent Democrat's political enemies handed damaging intelligence to a Department of Justice that happened to be serving under a Republican president during a presidential campaign, and the FBI turned it into a prosecution for a crime that federal law enforcement agencies usually don't get involved in.

So far, no one knows precisely how the FBI came across a little operation called The Emperor's Club VIP, which was supplying high-end prostitutes to Spitzer and other bigwigs from New York to D.C. to London and beyond. According to the criminal complaint [pdf] against the prostitution ring's proprietor—the complaint in which Spitzer famously made a cameo as "Client-9"—the case began in October 2007 as a joint investigation between the FBI and the IRS. But what, exactly, the FBI was doing looking into prostitution, a crime usually handled at the local level, isn't clear. And

The New York Times is also interested in how the Emperor's Club crossed the FBI's radar—the paper has filed a request in federal court to compel the Department of Justice to release its applications for wiretap warrants in the case, which have so far remained under seal. The application, and other sealed documents the Times has been trying to lay hands on, might shed light on how the investigation got started, and the Times has argued that it wants to see the documents because "because the public has a legitimate and understandable interest in reviewing and monitoring the decisions made by the Government in determining to pursue this case, which involved at least one high-level public figure, and then to not seek charges against any clients." A federal judge sided with the paper in February and the government appealed; the case went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals last month and a decision could come at any moment.

After Mike Castle got booed during a town hall for telling the crowd that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, which is the truth, other non-insane Republicans are trying to figure out what to do about Birthers back home as they prepare for the August recess.

Some of them are just going to avoid town halls, others are just going to tell Birthers that Obama was born in Hawaii and that is the end of it, and some are just going to change the subject. But some elected Republicans will try to "find the elusive middle ground," because it's always best to meet an insane racist halfway.

Sen. Jim Inhofe has also tried to find the elusive middle ground.

"They have a point," he said of the birthers. "I don't discourage it. ... But I'm going to pursue defeating [Obama] on things that I think are very destructive to America."

Well. We guess we're just going to have to demand documentation of Inhofe's 2006 claim that no one in his family has ever been divorced or gay. Where are the marriage certificates, Senator?