Contestant #1: Drudge sidekick Andrew Breitbart knows how to handle scientific disagreements.

Thank you. Contestant #2: Some crazy birther group, that put the following ad in the Washington Times about, I don't know, British monkey Obama something something.

Who is the biggest wingnut of this day? Choose, why don't you? [Pic via]

In case you missed the NYT story this weekend (read it!), allow us to highlight these facts for you: Jim Sinkinson, the publisher of Infocom Group and owner of Bulldog Reporter, which many of you PR people subscribe to in an effort to more effectively influence journalists, is currently leading a campaign to put The Berkeley Daily Planet, a liberal weekly, out of business, because he doesn't like the fact that they publish "letters and other commentary pieces critical of Israel."

"We think that [Daily Planet editor Becky] O'Malley is addicted to anti-Israel expression just as an alcoholic is to drinking," Jim Sinkinson, who has led the campaign to discourage advertisers, wrote in an e-mail message... "If she wants to serve and please the East Bay Jewish community, she would be safer avoiding the subject entirely."

Please, take a moment to reflect on the unapologetically gangster philosophy behind that quote. Reflect, also, on the fact that Sinkinson objects to the paper publishing submitted items that are not even part of the paper's own editorial output. In other words, this "media relations" mogul objects to free speech, and is an asshole of the first order. [Pic: Flickr]

UPDATE: Jim Sinkinson sent this email to me Monday evening:

Dear Hamilton,

I want to follow up on your accusations yesterday, which are long on hyperbole, name calling and accusations, but short on factual basis. I hope you'll publish this so your readers will have a better ability to judge the truth of your analysis.

First, as a publisher, I fervently support free speech and stand by the rights of all publishers to print whatever they wish. What I oppose vigorously, however, is hate speech—-anti-Semitism in this case. I also oppose the delegitimization and demonization of Israel and the application of a double standard against the Jewish state.

Please understand also that neither I nor any of the people opposing this editorially biased coverage have ever asked or demanded that the Planet not publish this type of material. What we have done is to make the Jewish community and local advertisers aware of the constant drumbeat of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric from the Planet's publisher, outside contributors and readers' letters, many of which frequently contain egregious factual errors. Our position with advertisers is this: The Daily Planet is not good for your business. No bullying, no threats. Advertisers are free to decide for themselves. Indeed, lacking the resources of the Planet, we are exercising freedom of speech in a humble way to inform our community of the facts.

Let me offer an analogy that may help further clarify our perspective: Assume your father runs a hardware store in a small town in Georgia, and the local paper prints racist commentary (op-eds and letters to the editor) vilifying African Americans. Would you not advise your father to withhold his advertising in support of those the paper regularly offends? Might you not advise your father that advertising in such a publication could hurt his business's reputation and have a negative effect on sales to the town's 25% population who are African American? That is the situation we have here, except it's the Jewish population in the East Bay and Israel who are being vilified.

I hope this elucidates our position. It's not a question of free speech, but rather a question of not sitting idly by while hate speech is permitted to flourish in our midst. If you'd like to see examples of the Daily Planet's constant stream of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel editorial content, it's posted here: http://dpwatchdog.com/1anti-semitism.html.

Jim Sinkinson

Publisher, Bulldog Reporter

RNC member Jim Bopp and nine other committee members sponsored a resolution, to be considered at the party's winter meeting, outlining the nine essential tenets of the modern Republican party: calling Obama names and opposing everything he tries to do (besides escalating wars, unless he doesn't escalate them enough).

"THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee identifies ten (10) key public policy positions for the 2010 election cycle, which the Republican National Committee expects its public officials and candidates to support:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama's "stimulus" bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers' right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership; and be further

RESOLVED, that a candidate who disagrees with three or more of the above stated public policy position of the Republican National Committee, as identified by the voting record, public statements and/or signed questionnaire of the candidate, shall not be eligible for financial support and endorsement by the Republican National Committee; and be further

RESOLVED, that upon the approval of this resolution the Republican National Committee shall deliver a copy of this resolution to each of Republican members of Congress, all Republican candidates for Congress, as they become known, and to each Republican state and territorial party office.

So. You are allowed to disagree with two of those, if you would like to be a Republican, but disagree with three of them and you will be shunned.

Wait, you might be saying, I thought "cap and trade" was a market-based alternative to a carbon tax? To you, the RNC says "go back to Russia."

This does open up the door for a Republican who is pro-gay marriage and anti-gun, as long as they hate immigrants and love war. So, you know, still a big tent!

But they really should've gone further.

(11) We support the right of people to assemble and demonstrate peacefully, as long as they have guns and racist signs.
(12) We support keeping government out of Medicare.
(13) We support being oddly terrified of a loosely organized network of community organizers.
(14) We support claiming that everyone who accuses us of racism is a reverse racist.
(15) We support pretending we didn't support the bank bailout and purposefully conflating it with the stimulus bill.
(16) We support believing that angry southern white males are all the votes we'll ever need.

A member of the NYU revolutionary vanguard alerted us to the pie-ing, and her note is reprinted in full below. The victims were Elan Journo of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, and Robert Spencer from "Jihad Watch," both of whom were there to talk about how there is apparently a Jihad, threatening America? Did you know about this?

Anyhow the kids were not about to let this intolerance of opposing viewpoints stand, so they interrupted the guys with a pie assault. Spencer himself writes about his close brush with whipped cream here. One eyewitness account says the two speakers "ended up largely unscathed." Our tipster tells us that the revolutionary cameraperson assigned to film the pie-ing for propaganda purposes "was tackled by security at the very beginning and didn't get any footage."

How are we supposed to repel the Jihadists if our military-age youth can't even stage a proper pie attack? Very troubling indeed. Full revolutionary press release-type thing below.

Islamophobic Warmongers Pied at NYU!

Tuesday, November 17, 7:15PM

NYU students disrupted a university event this evening featuring Robert Spencer from "Jihad Watch" and Elan Journo from the "Ayn Rand Institute for Individual Freedom." Students called out the panelists for their Islamophobic, warmongering hate-rhetoric, shouting and launching pies at the speakers. One student was detained, and several were escorted out of the building.

The event, entitled "The Jihad Still Threatens America," encouraged viscous Islamophobia and promoted aggressive military intervention in majority Muslim nations. Speaker Elan Journo actively promotes devastating attacks on Iran, claiming that "victory in World War II required flattening cities, firebombing factories, shops and homes, devastating vast tracts of Germany and Japan.... Victory today requires the same: smashing Iran's totalitarian regime and thus demoralizing the Islamist movement and its many supporters, so that they, too, abandon their cause as futile." Fear-mongering comments such as these promote the expansion of US imperialism, and contribute to the wave of anti-Muslim hate that is sweeping our nation.

The pieing came on the heels of an anti-hate sit-in hosted by the Islamic Center at NYU. The event was a response to NYU professor Tunku Varadarajan's recent article entitled "Going Muslim," a new term he has coined in the vein of "Going Postal" (article available at ).

While it is disturbing to see hate being expressed on such institutional levels on our campuses, the students' refusal to be silent is an inspiration to us all.

[Pic via]

Andrea today issues her sentencing recommendations in the case of liberal lawyer Lynne Stewart: Let the fat bitch rot. That is an accurate summary!

Let her rot.

Charismatic terror monger Lynne Stewart is no beauty. But she is a great actress.

The lady ex-lawyer who loves terrorists too much lumbered into the Manhattan federal courtroom in 2006, all 200-plus pounds of fire-breathing radical.

What a terrible, fat lady. She should have gotten more time, just to do those prison workouts! Eh?

Her lawyers said — are you ready? — Stewart was too fat for the lockup.

Lawyer Elizabeth Fink said her obese client's breast cancer was sure to return in a place where women are denied the dignity of wearing bras.

"If you send her to prison, she is going to die," Fink intoned.

We should be so lucky.

You can write to Andrea at andrea.peyser@nypost.com.

World Net Daily—the completely insane right-wing "news site" that promotes and "researches" and obsesses over conspiracies like Obama's Kenyan birth and the NAFTA superhighway and FEMA concentration camps—held a press conference on Capitol Hill to celebrate their successful campaign to have their crazy (but spendy!) readers send "pink slips" to members of Congress. Lots of Republican congressmen went! Including Michele Bachmann, pictured with WND editor-in-chief Joseph Farah, one of the foremost birthers.

And remember earlier this month, when Bachmann helped organize and promote the anti-health care reform tea party protest at the Capitol? For the record, that was not a protest. That was a "press conference." It may have looked like a protest, as it was an explicitly partisan event at which the organizers encouraged the public attendees to tear up copies of a bill under consideration, and there was no point at which the press asked anyone questions about anything, but there was one important factor that made that a "press conference" and not a "demonstration": a "demonstration" would not have been allowed under House rules. Because they never sought a permit from the Capitol Police.

Furthermore, if that was a "rally" or a "protest" or a "demonstration" (which it wasn't! it was a simple "press conference"!) Bachmann would've violated House rules when she used her House website to organize and promote it.

That announcement described the event as a "Health Care ‘House Call' on Washington Press Conference" and urged citizens to "tell their Representatives to vote no to a government take-over of one-fifth of our economy."

According to the Member's Handbook - guidelines issued by the House Administration panel that govern the use of official office budgets - lawmakers "may not include grassroots lobbying or solicit support for a Member's position" on their Congressional Web sites.

Yes. Well. Seems pretty clear-cut! But the House Administration Committee decided Bachmann did not violate any rules, even though it basically looks like she completely did. The upshot is that we are granted one of those very small ironies that bitter coastal types cling to, like real Americans and religion: this means Bachmann's anti-government spending "tea party" protest was eligible to be paid for with funds from her official Members' Representational Allowance, making it a tax-funded tea party.

This, by the way, is the cover of this week's Minneapolis City Pages, which is running its millionth "history of Michele Bachmann" piece. This one actually kinda elides much of the crazy! Like the baby-farming and the hiding in bushes and stuff.

• Your Own Apartment: You can't smoke in your own apartment? Get the fuck outta here. You live in a dorm? No? Get the fuck outta here.
• The Sidewalk Outside Your Apartment: They tried to just sneak that in with the apartment ban, as if it wouldn't make people quadruple times as mad.
• Any Other Sidewalk: If someone smoking on a sidewalk bothers you, stop standing directly in front of them and sucking the smoke from the tip of their cigarette into a large hose attached to your mouth. That's bad for you.
• The Park: There is so much fresh air out there. Come on.
• Concerts: Other than, you know, the Symphony Orchestra. Any concert venue without chairs, definitely. Hardcoreness demands it.
• Your Car: Open the windows to be nice.
• Anywhere Else Where There Is No Physical Barrier Between the Tip of Your Cigarette and The Sky: It's all about dispersion.

The "Black People Tweet Like This" thing does not hold a candle to the "antisemitic British National Party members tweet like that" thing, in terms of windows into confusing and unfamiliar worlds.

It's all here: death, UFOs, swine flue as UN extermination plot, and typos.

‘Antarctica's Icy Lakes Home to Plethora of Viruses' ‘American Exceptionalism' 'Brit Tapes UFOs Beaming Up Water Buffalo'

from the UK today: 'IM NOT BEING RACIST BUT ETHNICS ARE PANDERING TO ETHNICS AND GAYS' 'I think am on another plant with you'

‘UN GLOBALIZED tyranny' ‘Flu Found In Denmark Minks' ‘FROM OUR PIG WITH LIPSTICK IN CHARGE' ‘FBI Boss Taken To School On Marijuana Reality'

'seek medical help & stop ur filthy acts & golden showers' 'Palestinians used by Arabs 2incite vilence Comeon Israel just build the Temple'

'#bestfeeling the joy when you see the look on someones face when they call you a "racist!" & you reply I KNOW!'

'Lucifer is Mechanical – God Miraculous: keep this in mind' Keep that in mind when? When you read the words *deus ex machina*? Actually...

'govt using Sesame Street/"elmo" to indoctrinate kids on H1N1' 'White Pride Emails' 'MightBeALiberal if u think hilary clinton isn't a dyke'

So. Here are some more data points for the "what Twitter does to your brain" scientists.

The AP got a copy of Goin' Rogue, Also: Modern Warfare 2 and they totally read it even, which is probably more than Sarah can say.

"... [S]he says that most of her legal bills were generated defending what she called frivolous ethics complaints, but she reveals that about one-tenth of the $500,000 was a bill she received to pay for the McCain campaign vetting her for the VP nod.

She said when she asked the McCain campaign if it would help her financially, she was told McCain's camp would have paid all the bills if he'd won; since he lost, the vetting legal bills were her responsibility."

You may be shocked to learn that this is not a thing that happens, ever, "billing" someone for their own "vetting." The McCain campaign paid for its own vetting. Maybe Sarah Palin paid her own lawyer for lawyering work during that process? In that case, her lawyer would've been billing her for his services, to her, and that is not a thing John McCain made her pay for.

And the other thing, where the McCain campaign did not pay her legal bills for her own legal problems related to Troopergate and other ethics investigations? In addition to not being his responsibility, the McCain campaign thought it would probably violate the law to pay her legal bills with campaign money.

(Oh, Sarah Palin Facebooked about this:

As you probably have heard, the AP snagged a copy of my memoir, 'Going Rogue,' before its Tuesday release. And as is expected, the AP and a number of subsequent media outlets are erroneously reporting the contents of the book.

To be fair, the AP originally reported that McCain handed her a $500,000 bill. The real price on the imaginary bill that Palin made up for her book of lies and hate was $50,000. So she is totally right.)

We could not help but to enter Bill O as a contender after his classic "Devil's advocate" bit last night:

Let me play Devil's advocate here: Barack Obama wants to win hearts and minds in the Middle East. Which is a good thing. And you know that, as a soldier, we can't kill all the Muslims. So we want to win as many hearts and minds of good, moderate Muslims as we can.

Not kill them all? Provocative! His competitor is Bryan Fischer, the "Director of Issues Analysis" for the American Family Association:

It is time, I suggest, to stop the practice of allowing Muslims to serve in the U.S. military...
Of course, most U.S. Muslims don't shoot up their fellow soldiers. Fine. As soon as Muslims give us a foolproof way to identify their jihadis from their moderates, we'll go back to allowing them to serve. You tell us who the ones are that we have to worry about, prove you're right, and Muslims can once again serve. Until that day comes, we simply cannot afford the risk. You invent a jihadi-detector that works every time it's used, and we'll welcome you back with open arms.
This is not Islamophobia, it is Islamo-realism.

The preposterousness of allowing Muslims to not be killed, or the Islamo-realism of banning them, just in case? Vote now!

[Pic via]

What are the chances that any particular envelope full of unknown white powder is, in fact, full of deadly weaponized anthrax? Quite small! Exceedingly small. Vanishingly small. The original 2001 anthrax attacks were so spectacular precisely because it is so fucking hard to pull off something like that. Much easier to send bombs, really! Said bioweapons expert Richard Spertzel, "In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them." Also: "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

Here's what that means, in practical terms: The envelope full of white powder that you just opened in your Congressional office or governmental office or media outlet office or UN office is full of flour or baking soda or maybe even cocaine, but it is almost surely not full of anthrax. So stop evacuating place and shutting everything down. For chrissake. Some nut in Texas knew he could force the UN one-world foreigners to run in fear with less flour than it takes to make a cookie, and that's exactly what he did, and now it's worldwide news. Contrast that with what these places could have done when they got that envelope: Nothing. Set it aside, let the cops come test it, and keep working in the meantime. There's at least a 99% chance that you'll be fine.

We've said this before. Anthrax! It's a ridiculous thing. Just forget it. Do you smell that? No? That's because we had our operatives fill the room you're in with sarin, a colorless, odorless nerve agent 500 times more toxic than cyanide. You better evacuate now, because it kills in less than one minute.

Kidding! But sending you an envelope full of white powder would have been only marginally more difficult than that. So, seriously. Until further notice, just put it in the trash can. At least make the crazies come get you in person.

Pat Robertson, great Jesus-like man:

So you are dealing with not a religion. You're dealing with a political system. And I think we should treat it as such and treat its adherences as such as we would members of the Communist Party or members of some fascist group.

Can you top that, bearded Forbes columnist Tunku Varadarajan?

[We] must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub—disconcertingly—"Going Muslim." This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.

Not the friendly donut vendor!

The difference between "going postal," in the conventional sense, and "going Muslim," in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological "snapping" point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis.

Yes, I've heard of cases of Muslims shedding their "American" skins like so many reptilian aliens from 'V.' Provocative point, Respectable Columnist Tunku Varadarajan. Vote for your favorite outrage now!

[Pic via]

Meet Lionel McIntyre (pictured), an "Associate Professor in the Practice of Community Development and the Founding Director of the Urban Technical Assistance Project at Columbia University." According to the Columbia Spectator and the NY Post, he went out to a bar on 125th St. last Friday night with Margaret Davis, a white female colleague, and practiced community development by technically assisting her with a sucker punch in the face:

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about "white privilege" with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white...McIntyre, who is known as "Mac" at the bar, shoved Davis, and when the other patron and a bar employee tried to break it up, the prof slugged Davis in the face, witnesses said.

Dude Lionel McIntyre we hope you were really drunk, for your own sake. Judging by all the sources cited, this is an accurate report of what happened. Professor McIntyre is a veteran of the civil rights movement but appears to have descended into either a serious drinking problem or total bitchassness.

The Ivy League Punch-Edginess hypothesis has failed.

Raymond Jessop allegedly has nine wives and is the first to be convicted (for sexually assaulting an underage girl) after the ranch, run by a sect called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was raided last year and 439 children were placed in foster care.

Among them, presumably, was the baby (now four) Jessop fathered with a 15-year-old. Experts said the child had a nearly 100 per cent probability of being his. Which was somewhat awkward for the defense. As were seized documents that show the girl, now 21, had been "assigned" to Jessop's brother but then passed over to him when she was 15. Who says romance is dead?

The sect's prophet, Warren Jeffs, is still awaiting trial in Arizona for being an accomplice to rape and for underage marriage.

All of this was an excuse, really, to run the picture. Which I can't stop looking at. I also can't shake the impression that the world would be a better place if women ran it.

Scientology refugee Marc Headley has written a book called Blown For Good—featuring a dramatic, action-scene-type cover—detailing his 15 years of work inside Scientology. The Village Voice interviewed him about his 1990 "auditing" session performed by Days of Thunder-era Tom Cruise himself.

"You do a lot of things with a book and a bottle," Headley says. "It's known as the book-and-bottle routine." Cruise, he says, would instruct Headley to speak to a book, telling it to stand up, or to sit down, or otherwise to move somewhere.

"You do the same with the bottle. You talk to it. You do it with an ashtray too," he says. "You tell the ashtray, 'Sit in that chair.' Then you actually go over and put the ashtray on the chair. Then you tell the ashtray, 'Thank you.' Then you do the same thing with the bottle, and the book. And you do this for hours and hours."

This was supposed " to get your intention over to the bottle...to rehabilitate your ability to control things." Well then. Tom Cruise can control books and bottles with his mind and don't ever let anyone tell you different.

Headley also says that there are only about 10,000 Scientologists in the whole world. They could be whupped by the Unitarians!
[Village Voice. Pic by Richard Blakeley]

America's tabloid television programs are the only thing that stand between our nation and total forgetfulness of past momentary tabloid sensations.

Braunstein: "Everyone sees a lot of me in the ‘Joker' character here. It's kind of a running joke, like, ‘that guy's a lot like you.'"

Once we put criminals in cages, it makes it all the more entertaining to tease out the manifestations of their mental illness, for laffs!

Braunstein: "Monday nights, it's like sacred, man. Everybody in the cell block knows that. Nobody talks to me when Gossip Girl is on.

Watch and be amazed as Peter Braunstein confirms that he is still a ruined post-traumatic victim of the celebrity-media-complex wars!

Braunstein: "Even though [Blair Waldorf is] scheming and has a thing about power, she's loyal. She's everything that I wanted in a girl."

Thank god the media's purged itself of the cancer of immorality. Watch the promo clip on InsideEdition.com now!

The FBI says that two Pakistani men who lived in Chicago came up with this CODE NAME: "Mickey Mouse Project," which was to fly over to Denmark and murder Kurt Westergaard (and his editor!), who drew the dumb cartoon so long ago that made so many dumb people so upset. He is 78 years old! How about waiting and letting god deal with him, soon enough?

The master assassins left behind a few clues, according to the Chicago Sun-Times:

In October 2008, Headley used his birth name, Daood Gilani —which he changed in 2006 to avoid suspicion while traveling — when posting a message to a Yahoo group called "abdalians," authorities said.

"Everything is not a joke . . . We are not rehearsing a skit on Saturday Night Live," Headley said in the posting. "Call me old-fashioned, but I feel disposed towards violence for the offending parties."

So this dumb and pointless plot to fly overseas and kill and old man over a cartoon has now been foiled, and these guys will doubtless spend decades in jail over it, and Kurt Westergaard is understandably angry that crazy people half a world away still want to buy airline tickets in order to fly over and kill him, for this bullshit. Come on.

Conspicuously not targeted in the plot: Yale University Press.

Grand Rapids resident Cynthia Luke, 51, was the first person to die of H1N1 in Kent County, Michigan last week. After her family released her cause of death to the media, a shit storm blew in on a cold front of fear so powerful that it quickly wiped out any illusions of dispelling our swine flu ignorance in 140 characters or less. Reported a ">local news station:

Luke's family says they have barely been allowed to mourn because of all the controversy and rumors surrounding her death.

Friends of the family have been calling, sending their regrets for fear attending [Luke's funeral] would be "dangerous."

The family spent the weekend talking to the media, trying to convince friends and relatives that it was safe to pay their respects at Luke's funeral, which was yesterday. The local news report even sought out a forensic pathologist to tell everyone in an appropriately science-y way that "I can't imagine a scenario where you would be able to contract the H1N1 virus from a body in a funeral setting." After which he must have sat staring blankly at his forensic pathology degree in the semi-dark as he felt a shade drop around all of his previous accomplishments.

As for family's own outreach efforts: "It didn't do much good," Luke's brother, Frank Balsitis, said when reached by phone today. Around 65 people showed up to the funeral, he said. (A church employee said "about 100," but she was probably trying to be nice?). Balsitis said they were expecting as many as 400 close friends and relatives.

"I had only four people from my whole dad's side of the family," he said. Everyone else was "afraid of the unknown," and steered clear because of rumors that the hospital had been so concerned about Luke's case that they kept a log of everyone who visited her.

This whole episode is a bit too similar to something you might read in an account of burial during a medieval plague. Which, conveniently, I have one right here:

"It was often the mother who shrouded her son and placed him in the coffin... for everybody else refused to touch the dead body. No prayer, trumpet or bell summoned friends and neighbors to the funeral, nor was Mass performed."

Which would probably not be terrifying—just an interesting the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same-type-observation—except for the fact that those people didn't have science or reason or really any way to deal with the world except being afraid all the time and starting holy wars in the Middle East. The more things change!