When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, off the back of wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, Tom Lehrer called it the "moment that satire died." Someone please revive it, because we need to kill it again. Conservatives are upset about a two-year-old Sesame Street skit in which a news organisation called Pox News is lampooned (slightly - this is fucking Sesame Street) and referred to as trashy.

Posters on Big Hollywood, a blog from Breitbart, were outraged. "PBS - a network partially funded with my tax dollars - has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch "trashy" news?" said someone called Stage Right, according to the Daily News. "The message is clear, I can't even sit my kids in front of Sesame Street without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority." Yes. Crystal clear. You've really read those tea leaves, Nostradamus.

Talking of people who can see which way the wind is blowing - in Russia as well as Alaska - Sarah Palin is back and giving speeches. In which she apparently uses the words awesome and bogus hundreds of times. Maybe she watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure before going on stage. Anyway, her addition to this week's conspiracies features the decision to move 'In God We Trust' from the center of coins to the edge. "Who calls a shot like that?" she asked audience members, rhetorically one would assume unless she was addressing the US Mint. "Who makes a decision like that?" She added: "It's a disturbing trend." Finally, a financial crisis she's qualified to comment on.

Let's go straight to some quotes from the interview:

On the Vanity Fair piece: "I stand by it and I'm cool with everything I said. The route I chose to pick was just because they wouldn't let me see my kid. So I didn't really think that there was another way. That was the huge thing that made me do this. I don't want to (say it was retaliation)...I mean, I guess. If they would've let me see my kid, everything's fine, I never would've had to do any of that. They were gettin' scared. They know I know a lot. I still know more than what's out there. Then it got bad again and I said screw it, Vanity Fair article.

And on the custody issues Levi's having now: It's startin' to get bad again. They're making it kind of a pain in the ass again (to see Trip). I know I'm gonna end up (going to court). There're a lot of secrets and a lot of things that I haven't put out there that are bad...so I don't know if I want to. Some of the stuff I got, kept in, would either really hurt her or really get her in trouble. So, I really don't want to say anything else. I'm not that kind of person, no matter how much she pisses me off. I don't want to leak anything huge on her.

Okay, so, questions:

1. Is Levi Johnston screwing with all of us? It's entirely possible. An interesting way to gauge this would be to figure out the timeline on the Vanity Fair piece? Did Levi approach VF? Vice versa? Was there a lag between an offer and the acceptance of the offer? Despite all of the custodial trauma Levi's claiming, you've gotta wonder if he isn't enjoying his time in the limelight. I can't imagine he isn't. On the other hand, walking around L.A. with the same big guys he was seen at Monkey Bar with have been the most egregious extent of his famewhoring. He could, theoretically, be doing much, much worse.

2. What the hell isn't he talking about? And why isn't he? Sure, Levi's claiming principles as the obstacle we're facing to knowing everything he's got on the Palin family, but this 19 year-old kid from the sticks is either as innocent as he's assumed to be, or is far, far savvier than anyone could ever imagine (or at least savvy enough to listen to good advice). Hanging on to whatever he knows and leaking info out in droplets could maybe, possibly, profoundly scare the shit out of Sarah Palin and her oft-projected 2012 run's potential. Then again, maybe she isn't running, maybe she actually is done, and maybe a cost-benefit breakdown of what Levi's leaks could get him as opposed to the trouble it could cause for Palin's entire family really isn't worth it to him. He's a 19 year-old father, though: so what, exactly, is?

3. Will the threat of a lawsuit do anything to the Palin camp? And what could a lawsuit mean for them? Either way, we're gonna find out, and with it, the weight of whatever Johnston may or may not have, and the character of his balls if forced to move it forward. [Ed. Oh, we'll definitely know that soon enough. Intimately.]

Listen to the audio. We read and read about a lot of bullshit. We watch it on TV and in movies. But just the audio track? It's different. There's that dumb line from a movie: the truth just sounds different. Well, man, it does.

'Could be that there's another way for him to earn a buck that doesn't have to do with being in the spotlight—he remembers at the beginning of the interview his prospects in hockey or as an electrician—because Levi sounds down, out, and tired of dealing with all of this shit. Maybe he just wants to see his kid, and move forward with his life as something other than Levi Johnston, Asspain to Sarah Palin.

Or he's an underdog genius who's playing the media and the entire Palin narrative to his liking. At this point, pick one: the odds are about the same. More highlights:

On Sarah Palin's Vice President nomination: "Didn't mean anything to me. I didn't care. I didn't think it was that huge. I'm just gonna sit here and not say a word."

On Palin's personal interaction nature: "You can catch her in a lie a lot of the time. She don't read the newspaper. A lot of the things she's sayin', I know she's lying."

On the outdoorsmen nature of the Palin family: "I'd say (Sarah's) definitely stretchin' it big time. They're not a big hunting family."

On racism in the Palin household: "No, not (Sarah Palin)..no. She never said anything like that. She's not the racist type."

On Palin's loss: "After the election, she didn't want us to get married, really. You could tell that they're all sad about everything. I don't know, just her attitude towards everything was pretty down. I don't think she had much care for anything for a while. She hung around in her room a lot. I think she just wanted to be left alone for a while. She just went through a big depression, I think. She was bummed out bad."

On his breakup with Bristol: "There's no one to blame for it. I mean, if it didn't work, it didn't work."

On what he thinks of Sarah Palin now: "I still don't think bad about her. But...You know, just some of the shit she pulled on me—encouraging Bristol not to let me see the kid and everything else, from her acting like she liked me for four or five plus years, and then going on saying that stuff, is just ridiculous how fake they are...it's just ridiculous."

Again: the truth just sounds different. Is this it?

[Photo of Levi in "happier" times via Getty Images/Robyn Beck]

Here's how The Twitter World Works, according to Kaus: Twitter needs celebrities on its service to attract millions of new users every month or quarter or whatever. Celebrities, in turn need adoring fans, but (key point) have very fragile egos. So Kaus suspects Twitter of keeping a secret team of interns in a back room somewhere, poring over the massive stream of tweets directed at celebrities, and deleting the mean nasty tweets from search.twitter.com. The offending tweets still appear on Twitter, but won't show up in search results.

Kaus knows this because he tweeted something mean about CNN president Jon Klein, and it never showed up in Twitter search. Plus, in Kaus' experience, searches on celebrity names "almost invariably turn up... pleasant comments." Pretty ironclad. Ahem.

But you know what? The conspiracy might just be real. (Cue sinister music.) Here's a chummy little conversation between Twitter CEO/co-founder Ev Williams (pictured above, left, with celebrity tweeter Michael Stipe) and known celebrity Alyssa Milano talking about Kaus' conspiracy theory. She called it "interesting," followed by Ev's slick — too slick! — non-denial denial of Kaus' allegations.

Williams could have knocked down Kaus' conspiracy allegations by simply saying "that's absurd" or somesuch. But he didn't. Now we're actually kind of intrigued, at Kaus' seemingly crackpot ideas. Tell us it ain't so, Twitter people. Or better yet confirm, preferably with a picture of your secret cabal of celebrity gladhanders.

(Top pic: via Ev Williams)

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.)

All we know so far about his death: not much.

The Palm Beach Fire Department told ABC News that Picower had no pulse when fire rescue workers arrived at his oceanfront mansion after his wife called 911. She and his housekeeper pulled his body from the pool shortly after noon.

But (not that you should read anything into this) we do know that Picower inspired a lot of hate. He reportedly made $7 billion in profit off his Madoff investments since the 1970s. That automatically makes him a villain. Irving Picard, the trustee overseeing the recovery of Madoff assets, is trying to get that money back. And, according to the WSJ, federal prosecutors "are looking into whether Mr. Picower or several other longtime Madoff associates had knowledge of or complicity in the fraud."

His $28 million mansion was known as "Casa del Sud," and is pictured above. WHAT A TALE.

[House pic via]

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:

You would think a meeting between fighting tribal factions in Iran, would be a super safe place, but a suicide bomber killed at least 29 people at a "Shiite-Sunni Tribes' Solidarity Conference" on Sunday. The dead included six commanders of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards. A Sunni insurgent group took responsibility for the attack, but even with other people taking credit for the bombing some Iranian officials say there's an American conspiracy at work.

The Baluchistan truthers include Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani who said "If we review the past, there have been many secret and public reports on the US connections and aids to the terrorists in the province... and this shows Americans' enmity towards Iran's progress." In a statement released through the Fars news agency, the Revolutionary Guard said the bombing was the work of "terrorists" backed by "the great Satan America and its ally Britain." Iranian officials also promised to strike back at those responsible for the attack, which makes the allegations of US involvement pretty ominous.

Update: Now Iran is also blaming Pakistan for this bombing. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters in his best James Bond movie villain voice that "some security agents in Pakistan are co-operating with the main elements of this terrorist incident... we regard it as our right to demand these criminals from them."

So, you can read the entire recap here, but to summarize: Erica Wang tried to spin the press in her direction after TV chef and restaurateur Todd English left her at the altar. As it turns out, they had a terrible relationship, and English just filed a domestic abuse charge against her for clocking him (heh) with a watch. We've been trying to figure out the two remaining mysteries, and put a call out for tips on this yesterday. We might've found what we were looking for. Here's what we now know:

• English didn't bill her for any part of the wedding – the $12,000 bill Wang received was the balance the band was owed for performing and the band billed her instead of English. This was one of her major grievances: that English sent her the bill for exactly half. Would she and English have been billed that had she canceled the reception as soon as she found out? (She says she found out at 3PM that day. I find that hard to believe).
  
  
• The other $150K the wedding cost was paid for by English, already. He sunk his cash into it and didn't bill her for that money.
  
  
• Wang held a lavish dinner at Olives NY for her family after the split but before the wedding, and charged it to English's credit card. Olives is one of English's restaurants that he no doubt has a house account at. Are the Olives NY people going to question his bride-to-be Erica Wang before she's about to be married? Probably not.
  
  
• Finally: people in the Todd English empire are apparently pissed over one thing in this entire fiasco: the fact that the press keeps referring to Erica Wang as his assistant (which she gave up her job as a concierge at the Peninsula Hotel to "be."). English has a long-time assistant who's paid for her work, and Wang supposedly never—never—supplanted that.

Now, tips are tips, and I'm pretty skeptical of any press plays on this thing at this point, so to provide counter-balance, here's another one we got. It's, uh, maybe less credible?

Todd, no, Toad English called her on the phone " I can't marry you today. " at 1pm Oct 3rd on their wedding day while hiding in Miami's night club. I am sure there is a phone record should she need to verify one day :))) I assume you live in New York City, so please get your facts straight before asking yourself, "Why the hell Wang thinks it was a good idea to carry on the wedding party....?" Do you think Erica Wang would be so low like the toad to leave their 150 guests stranded in their tuxex and evening gowns in the rain? Would the hotel doorman tell the out of town guests " Sorry, no wedding, no party,no dinner. " I think it was very classy of Wang to put on a brave face to greet her guests.

By the way, the day Toad English sent two security guards to watch her pack, he called NYPD to report there was a " domestic dispute" in her apartment. The two disgusted policemen soon apologized and left after they saw there was only Erica Wang, her mother and the moving company. English used our PUBLIC SERVANTS to do his dirty work while our city is constantly in need of law enforcement to protect the general public. Now, what do you think?

I think Erica Wang's friends also have sugar daddies because they've clearly never had to write an important email.

I also think the timeline's starting to become a little more clear. It goes something like: English knew this thing was dunzo earlier in the week, but how could Wang not know? She didn't hear from him that entire week except when he canceled the wedding, which it sounds like he definitely did, at 1PM on the day of. Who would actually go on with a wedding to a guy who hadn't called her the entire week before they were supposed to be on the altar?

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.

AXELROD: How about you guys give slightly less credence and airtime to America's most vitriolic anti-Obama wingnuts? In exchange, we'll offer Fox News better access to Obama.
AILES: Okay.
(Awkward pause).
AILES: Onion ring?
AXELROD: No, but please, take your time and finish. I...have to go.

More or less.

[Pic: Getty. And look at Ailes using a teleprompter. LOL!]

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.)

CASE IN POINT: Obama ends our protective missile shield. Bright side: Saves money. Dangerous money fire side: We will be killed by missiles.

See, it's easy for the power structure to convince the sheeple that something sounds good because it will be good for us. That's what they tell you. "Hey, we're going to put steep taxes on the sugary sodas you like because then you'll buy less of them and get less fat and cost The System less money when you get heart disease and diabetes and your teeth rot out from overconsumption of Coca-Cola and you didn't have health insurance because of a preexisting condition of overconsumption of Coca-Cola."

Did you catch the "code words" in there? "The System." That's what it's all about for these people, the bureaucrats of the power structure. What do you have that "The System" doesn't have? That's right—a heart. The Wizard of Oz was a warning. We haven't even learned. We sit around singing the White-Collar blues because we live in Michigan where the white collar job market has collapsed, and drowning our sorrows in mercifully as-yet-untaxed soda while the bureaucrats, the big shots, they pose like they're your buddies, see, like they really want to help you with all stuff. And you're so god damn distressed about this economy thing that you never take the time to ask yourself, "What are these government fellas spending all my taxes on, when I can't even afford a new white collar?"

Shark tanks. That's what. They're spending millions and millions buying bigger and bigger shark tanks to give free housing to more and more sharks and meanwhile there you are, the hardworking American, standing in the grocery store with tears streaming down your face and telling yourself, "Look on the bright side, at least grocery prices are coming down!" And the whole time the price of one grocery isn't coming down at all: Blue shark meat, because fisherman consider it to have no commercial value. But the government man thinks it has value: Millions of your tax dollars to build that shark a big tank. Then you have to pay to go see it.

What a world.
[Pic via]

The Obama administration just announced a new cloud-computing initiative. It claims it merely wants to streamline $75 billion in federal IT spending. So what's with the "mind mapping" component of the plan? And why so cozy with Google?

The "mind mapping" software is listed under "productivity apps" on the cloud computing initiative's website. Glenn Beck, call your office! To paint the president as a socialist big brother, a monster computer "cloud" that centralizes sensitive government information and is deeply interested in your brain is a boon.

Especially when it is tied, however loosely, to that all-seeing corporate eye in Mountain View, California, Google Inc. Google is the leading proponent of cloud computing, in which shrink-wrapped PC software (like, say, Outlook) is replaced with Web applications (like, say, GMail). In fact, NASA Ames CIO Chris Kemp, who is in charge of NASA's cloud computing program, has quoted Google's CEO as an inspiration for it. NASA Ames is where today's federal announcement is being made, so presumably Kemp's work is now spreading.

It seems likely Google will be on hand for the announcement: NASA has announced that "top Silicon Valley information technology leaders are scheduled to attend," and, besides, adjoining Moffett Federal Airfield is where top Googlers park their private jets, per arrangement with NASA. Google cronies at private zeppelin company Airship Ventures are also allowed use of the field. Kemp, in turn, has apparently used a Google jet for NASA "meteor hunting," and heralded the release of high-resolution NASA imagery for use on moon.google.com (see 9/17 entry here). He has also hosted "VIP guests," including from the Silicon Valley tech scene, at a space shuttle launch.

This must all seem, no doubt, perfectly innocent to Kemp, who is steeped in the startup world. The 31-year-old worked as chief architect at Classmates.com before being "pushed aside" as co-founder of vacation rental broker Escapia and detouring into the public sector. But amid the increasingly paranoid partisan rancor of Washington, DC, the Obama Administration's "mind mapping" cloud computing plans and ties to Google will inevitably be re-marketed on the distinctly irrational market that is national politics.

(Top image via, second pic via)

Like the current movie-star governor, the carefully-shellacked San Francisco mayor makes the Golden State's gubernatorial race feel surreal in a "fruits and nuts" way that competitors like ex-eBay CEO Meg Whitman and even former hippie governor Jerry Brown just can't. This is the guy whose press secretary jokes merrily about weed, and who recently had the gall to tell the New York Times that his affair with his friend's wife was "much more benign than [things] actually appeared in print."

The blog I Love You Gavin Newsom claims that City Hall and campaign sources say Newsom will quit the governor's race, probably in the fall, since he's anywhere from 9 to 29 points behind Brown in the polls. On the other hand, Newsom is rumored to be getting an endorsement from former president Bill Clinton, and I Love You Gavin Newsom has proven a touch too conspiracy minded in the past (we sympathize!). So let's hope they're wrong on this, if only because we might otherwise have to draft Gary Coleman to run again.

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.

Last week Mallory was arrested for boosting nearly $100k worth of jewelry belonging to clients of the PR firm where she used to work. Daily Intel posited that hey, maybe she was the victim of mean girls at her job. Those mean girls must be really mean, and also well connected in law enforcement, because now Mallory's also charged with stealing $13,000 worth of clothes from Bergdorf Goodman when she worked in PR for them two years ago.

The names of all the designers of things that she's accused of stealing do show up in the news stories. But that's probably not so much "devious fashion PR girls wiping out an enemy and getting client media placement in one fell swoop" as it is "in the police report." We're guessing!

In any case PR people are criminals and swag is poison.

YouTube user LosAngelesCot24 posted this video, his or her only upload, in which someone in a white shirt gets out of a coroner's van. And, according to the poster, the van has the same license plate as the one that transported the king of pop. It must be true!

As one friends said, "If Michael Jackon's was secretly still alive, do you think some asshole with a handy cam would be able to catch it?" And that's the truth!

According to "art community consultant" Patrick Courrielche, who supports those Obama Joker posters, the NEA organized a recent conference call to assemble an army of artists who will maybe possibly (hopefully?) use their work to inspire service in key social arenas, such as health care and energy.

The call, he says, included the NEA's Director of Communications, Yosi Sergant, White House Office of Public Engagement Deputy Director Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy, who directs outreach for United We Serve, the President's community service initiative. All parties apparently highlighted the importance of these pressing national issues.

The call's participants were "encouraged" to use their myriad mediums to concoct "creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country." Now, it's not unusual for the government to use art in times of economic need. Long ago, the New Deal's Works Progress Administration set up the Federal Art Project, which had artists beautify the Depression-pocked landscape and remind them of essential needs, like good dental care. But the WPA and NEA are different beasts, and Courrielche worries that the NEA, which offers grants to artists and often drums up even more money for grantees, will use this initiative to pick and choose ideologically motivated artists.

Discussed throughout the conference call was a hope that this group would be one that would carry on past the United We Serve campaign to support the President's initiatives and those issues for which the group was passionate.... A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy.

After voicing even more concerns about government overreach, Courrielche asserts the call's maestro described the initiative as a "brand new conversation," yet intimated that the group itself doesn't know the legality of the project:

We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely…

Yes, this could all be very scary, but Courrielche — who only includes that one direct quote — offers little more in the way of proof for his art-induced anxiety. While we don't doubt this conversation happened, it seems to us that the government should be encouraging artists to use their craft to raise awareness.

It's not like all Americans read the news. Some of them simply like looking at pretty pictures. If the government used its funds to back artists who agreed with the administration's proposals — well, that would be a problem, but Courrielche hypothesis basically assumes that Americans are stupid and will believe anything they see. In more ways than one.

[Update: That's a new clip above of mashed crazy by our own Mike Byhoff and intern Sergio Hernandez.]

He lied, of course, about health care, a topic he's never ever pretended to care about before in his zillion-year political career, but it was way more entertaining when he spilled water all over himself, made the famous crazy McCain face, and then tacitly acknowledged that he'd ignored a heartfelt question about how the two-party system has failed Americans.

Oh, and also: do you remember ACORN? Back when that was something conservatives thought would help them rile up some old-fashioned resentments and base-rousing fear, we used to hear about ACORN all the time! They were going to steal the election and then they were going to steal all your census information, or something. Who knows. That was so long ago, and no one cares anymore, now that we have The Death Panels.

But this lady remembers ACORN!

And John McCain is like oh god they are just community organizers and no one took them seriously but I guess I have to pretend that they are still scary, or something, because I wouldn't shut up about them last year, ugghh I want to go back home to Arlington.

See, when you throw that little bit of conspiratorial nonsense out there because it's useful for you in the short term, politically, it just festers and grows until it becomes part of the mythology of an entire subculture of people. And then they start to wonder why no one is doing anything about this grave threat to democracy that you told them all about!

Well, some people wonder. Other people, mostly old people, just nap. Can you stop the two sleepy old men in this picture?

Like it is barely even about how Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and is the son of Malcolm X! Most of the movie is just clips of cable news people talking about the election and Obama's first few months in office. But the highlight is surely this all-time classic of unintended consequences:

At the height of its sloppiness, the producers use, in its entirety, a video that Media Matters put together to mock Fox News coverage of the president's first 100 days. You can spot the rip-off because the blue bars and white text that Media Matters mark the 100 days with are still on the screen. Where the liberal group meant to mock the hyperbolic rhetoric of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the network's line-up, WND treats this like pages from the Gospels.

Hah. Nice one, Media Matters. Way to expose and contribute to the crazy. It is nice to be reminded that what is self-evidently batshit nonsense to "us" is just speaking truth to power to "them."