Candidate #1: Arlington, Tennessee mayor Russell Wiseman, who took to his Facebook page with a message of despair upon learning that Obama's speech had trumped Charlie Brown, on the teevee. We'll just blockquote this thoroughly worthwhile Commercial Appeal story:

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."...

In Wiseman's extensive thread that attacked the president, his supporters and Muslims, he stated "...you obama people need to move to a muslim country...oh wait, that's America....pitiful."

At another point he said, "you know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has stayed in there, things would be different........"

No further comment. Contestant #2: News Corp! Which just bought a 10% stake in Rotana, a media company owned by Saudi Prince Waleed. Why the outrage? Well after September 11, you see, various Fox News commentators were outraged at Waleed! Because he suggested that maybe US foreign policy had something to do with the attacks. So NYC rejected a $10 million check from him. Media Matters has some choice quotes:

Bill Sammon: "[I]t's blood money and we're better off without it."
Sean Hannity: Al-Waleed's statement was "such an egregious, outrageous, unfair offense that I would have nothing to do with his money either."

Unless that money comes in the form of dividends from media company profits! So, vote for your god damn favorite. [Pic via]

Addressing healthcare, Obama said, "All we're trying to do is make sure that if you're buying health insurance on the private marketplace that you're not getting gouged, and gypped, by the insurance companies."

"Gypped," unfortunately, is something of an ethnic slur. At least some members of the Roma community—formerly known as gypsies—regard it as such. The word is said to have been derived from "to gypsy," and means to rip off, implying that all gypsies are thieves—it's sort of analagous to saying, "that 7-11 clerk Jewed me out of me change." When a British judge used it in open court in June, the British Roma community protested and the Oxford English Dictionary, which simply defines "gyp" as an "act of cheating," said it would likely look into the matter next year. The dictionary's chief etymolygist told the Daily Telegraph that there was a "scholarly consensus" that it was probably a "racial slur." Someone has made sure that it appears in Wikipedia's list of ethnic insults.

If a British judge caused a stir by using it a few months ago, we'd imagine that an American president employing it will cause a minor uproar. Oh look! Right-wingers are already standing up for the interests of the Roma people. You can now add gypsies to the list of people Obama hates, along with the mentally and physically challenged and white people.

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]

Contestant #1: Hero lady Ann Coulter, a non-racist who said that Maxine Waters "couldn't get a job that didn't involve wearing a paper hat without affirmative action." But Ann has a non-racist explanation!

Contestant #2: Former Bush flack Dana Perino. Who says, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term." Yep.

Vote for the Queen of Thanksgiving now!

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.

First up, the mighty Glenn Beck offers a new way to look at Obama's health care proposal:

"We're the young girl saying, 'No no! Help me!' and the government is Roman Polanski. In the end I think we're all going to be cowering in France."

The Obama administration is a child rapist. He just might be on to something. Next up, Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden gets truly provocative about Obama bowing down to foreign leaders:

But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to "hope" for "change." It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of "the 57 states" is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

How much more pride would our nation have today if only Obama's mother had been attracted not to the lowly dirt-people of the third world, but rather to fine American men, like, say, Wesley Pruden, pictured? Vote for the most outrageous American hero, below!

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]

Don't ask, don't look

In this town, gay rights trump religious and aesthetic sensitivities every time...
Next time, pal, don't look. It's safer.

Look on the bright side, gay liberals: The New York Post is finally standing up for the rights of Muslims! The right to discriminate against you, specifically. Baby steps.

And what about this dude's right to fuck horses without being sentenced to three years in jail, Andrea? It was a female horse!
[Pic via]

Knowles is scheduled to perform her first ever concert in the land of fezes, camels carpets, pyramids and other obvious, slightly condescending cliches on November 6. Tickets for the show, at the Red Sea resort of Port Ghalib, are going for up to $400, according to a report on Al Arabiya.

But straight outta Cairo, a crazy Islamist MP named Hamdi Hassan, from a gang called The Muslim Brotherhood In Egypt, said he did not want no ho who appears nekkid in no goddamned videos up in his motherfucking hood. (I can't speak Arabic, so I'm choosing to assume this is the way he originally phrased it.) He wants regulators to mount up and get her permission to perform revoked.

"The government is trying to make people indulge in sin and licentiousness to cover up the other crimes it is committing against them," said Hassan in parliament, once again proving that the word 'licentiousness' is only used in such circumstances.

The Brotherhood is under pressure from that government. And various old-school religious nutjobs are fighting with hip, young religious nutjobs within its ranks. So this is seen as a way of making a statement and reminding people that hijabs are good, and booty-shaking is bad.

Last year another spittle-flecked crackpot in Egypt, a cleric called Khaled al-Gindi, likened Shakira to a prostitute and demanded she be banned. But added that he thought she was probably a "nice person." Which makes it all OK because everyone likes a hooker with a heart of gold.

Jennings once lived life as a closeted school teacher. And, at the time — 1988 — a student told Jennings that he had consensual sex with an "older man" in a public bathroom. Jennings told the student to use a condom and later wrote in his book, that the student "left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated."

Now, perhaps inspired by all the hoopla over Roman Polanski's arrest, the right's throwing it all back in Jennings' face. The Washington Times editorialized this week:

In this one case in which Mr. Jennings had a real chance to protect a young boy from a sexual predator, he not only failed to do what the law required but actually encouraged the relationship.
...
His job in the Obama administration is to ensure student safety, and this scandal directly calls into question his ability to perform that job. Mr. Jennings and Obama administration officials refuse to answer any questions about this newly discovered evidence. A lot of Americans want answers about this guy and how he was approved for a job in the White House.

The paper also claims that Jennings "has made extremely radical statements promoting homosexuality in schools," an allusion to Jennings work as the founder of Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which tries to teach America's little punks that gay folk and straight folk are the same. How radical.

Sensing backlash on the horizon, Jennings released a statement today expressing his regret over the situation:

Twenty one years later I can see how I should have handled this situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training or guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.

As we all know, though, White House critics are not that easily deterred. Sean Hannity tonight used his show to claim that Jennings "covered up a statutory rape" and called for him to be fired:

Now, as The Washington Times said, 'At the very least, statutory rape occurred,' and he didn't report it. Now he's saying that he made a mistake, only because it's been reported on. My question is, where's the vetting process? Why was he even put in this position?

Duh! Because Obama's a socialist who wants to destroy this once-great nation by working with anarchists and fags and all sorts of other bad people. Why do people even have to ask?

But, seriously, if all these people are so concerned about the nation's youth, focus your energies on examining why a gay kid would feel the only sexual outlet he can find comes from anonymous sex in a bathroom. Demonizing Jennings — and his gayness — will only teach younger readers and viewers that same-sex loving's nothing but trouble.

You may recall that last month Yale University Press refused to publish images of the controversial cartoons *in a book about the cartoon controversy*. Because they were scared of offending the type of religious fanatic that would find this book, hop a plane to New Haven, and burn down the Yale University Press headquarters. Even repeating that story is giving us palpitations of rage.

Anyhow, now the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, is coming to make appearances at Yale and Princeton in the name of Free Speech. Good for him! You know what else? The cartoon did kind of suck! Were you offended by it? Go tell him that, at his appearance! Go tell him his cartoon sucked and was not funny and that you were offended by it! Call him an asshole if you must! Just don't kill anyone. That's what free speech is all about.

Fuck you, Yale University Press. See?

E&P reports from the front lines of the controversy that kids are totally not taking the fact that this comic strip ran in their school paper lying down or whatever:

"We don't care if it was a black, white, orange, purple, pink person who wrote this article," Audrey Foreback, a sophomore, told local radio station WYTV. "They should not have been allowed to print it and publish it throughout the school. It's just wrong."

That extraordinarily stupid statement appears even more stupid once you read the actual comic strip in question. Also stupid is the fact that "some students showed up at the student center with nooses around their necks in protest of the cartoon," which simply does not make sense, if the sight of a man in a noose offends you so (unless the offense is only taken when said noose is rendered in cartoon form).

Keith Knight himself is gracious about the whole thing on his blog but what he's really trying to say is: Shut up, college.

[Pic: K Chronicles]

[40 year-old double amputee Gregory] Williams and witnesses say officers tasered the wheelchair-bound man twice, then left him handcuffed with his pants down on the sidewalk in broad daylight. Williams spent six days in jail before prosecutors said they lacked evidence to charge him.

If they'd had the new taser they could have hit him three times.
[Pic: Getty]

Andrews will be working on air Thursday night for the first time since the video became widespread news. She'll be the sideline reporter for ESPN's broadcast of South Carolina at North Carolina State.

Yes: She's coming back to do the Gamecocks game. Nice one, ESPN. You pervs.

This was the Wall Street Journal's first real test of journalism ethics under Rupert Murdoch's ownership. And, surprisingly, they've fucking failed, big time. The story broke yesterday afternoon—complete with a leaked email showing top execs at Burson-Marsteller suggesting how to use the latest column by Penn, their CEO, as a tool to recruit clients from the industry he wrote about. The paper assured us yesterday they were "looking into it," and cited their clear conflict of interest policy. That policy, they assured us, was the Dow Jones Code of Conduct that we excerpted in our own post yesterday, which demands that the company ensure that:

* Our analyses represent our best independent judgments rather than our preferences, or those of our sources, advertisers or information providers;
* Our opinions represent only our own editorial philosophies; or
* There are no hidden agendas in any of our journalistic undertakings.

Well. Didn't take long to throw that away! Today, WSJ spokesman Robert Christie explained the results of the paper's thorough investigation like so:

"Mark has assured us that through our conversations that he's complied with his conflict of interest policy. He does not have any glamping clients nor did they target them before the column appeared."

That's right: The WSJ's investigation consisted of calling Mark Penn and asking him, "Hey, did you comply with that conflict of interest policy?" The world-famous investigative skills of the WSJ in action, ladies and gentlemen. As a follow-up, we asked Christie if he was implying that it's fine for a columnist to go recruiting clients from a column he just wrote after it's published. His reply:

Obviously when you have a contributor, they use a column to market themselves. Clearly what was done is not something that we liked. But we're pretty sure that it's going to stop.

The Wall Street Journal is "pretty sure" that Mark Penn's PR firm will stop using its CEO's purportedly unbiased column as a business recruitment tool! Why are they "pretty sure?" Because Mark Penn said so! Fuck that published email evidence, anyhow! It was on a "blog," and "blogging" hasn't been a Microtrend for like two years.

Here's what this means for you, the reader of the WSJ: You should assume, when you read a Mark Penn column, that Burson-Marsteller will run to the leading companies in any industry mentioned in that column and set up meetings for them with Mark Penn, who will try to use that column as a tool to recruit them as PR clients. If you really want to be safe, intellectually, it only makes sense to also assume that Mark Penn may decide what to write his columns about based on the business needs of Burson-Marsteller—which are, after all, his primary responsibility.

You should also assume that any other WSJ contributing columnist could be doing the same thing. Because the paper clearly does not consider it a firing offense.

Don't worry, Mark Penn. We won't forget about you. We're looking forward to your next column.

[Previously: The Full Story]

[Shamelessness is ranked on a 1-10 scale, lowest to highest. "1"= Inklings of genuine shame, "5"= Milli Vanilli-level shamelessness, "10"= Donald Rumsfeld.]

NYP Story: (Jewish) In-Laws Suing (Black) Comedian in the Family For Joking About Them!
Real Story, Publicity Stunt, or Pure Invention?: 80% pure invention, 20% real story.
Sexxxy pic potential: Disappointingly low. Unless the fight gets dirtier!
Actual NYP Glee outweighs professed NYP outrage by a factor of: 2, but only because the Post has a hard time working up outrage against things that let them make "Black-Jew" jokes in the lead of stories.
Shamelessness: 3

NYP Story: Zach Hyman Taking Nude Pixxx of Ladies All Over Town!
Real Story, Publicity Stunt, or Pure Invention?: Publicity Stunt by Hyman, clearly.
Sexxxy pic potential: Extremely high.
Actual NYP Glee outweighs professed NYP outrage by a factor of: 3
Shamelessness: 4

NYP Story: Skankblogger Calls Model a 'Skank' on Internet!
Real Story, Publicity Stunt, or Pure Invention?: 90% invention. 10% real story.
Sexxxy pic potential: With one attractive lady suing another over for posting sexxxy skank pics, not too shabby.
Actual NYP Glee outweighs professed NYP outrage by a factor of: 10
Shamelessness: 6

NYP Story: Sexxxy Nude People Are Having Sex in the Windows of the Standard Hotel Where Everyone Can See!
Real Story, Publicity Stunt, or Pure Invention?: What started as a publicity stunt by the Standard Hotel has now spiraled into a subject for the Post's bottomless inventiveness.
Sexxxy pic potential: Stratospheric.
Actual NYP Glee outweighs professed NYP outrage by a factor of: 25
Shamelessness: 8.5

Click to enlarge it, why don't you?

Big shout out to non-racist Gawker image wizard Steven Dressler for the chart.

Several Midwestern towns with Danish heritage have seen fit, over the years, to use a portion of their municipal budgets to construct replicas of Copenhagen's famous "Little Mermaid" statue. Now the ancestors of the sculptor are going after poor little Greenville, Michigan—demanding licensing payments for the town's statue (even though "it's half the size of the original and has a different face and other distinct features, including larger breasts"). This is just the beginning of the Danish assault!

Annette Andersen, a resident of Kimballton, Iowa, headed a community group that raised the $12,000 needed to restore that town's mermaid statue a few years ago. "Oh boy, I hope they don't find us," says Ms. Andersen, when told about the controversy in Michigan. She says she knows of several towns that have mermaids, including one in Minnesota, but adds, "Theirs aren't as pretty as ours."

Rest assured they've found you now, Annette. Who are the layabout Danish sculptor ancestors to decide how Real Americans see fit to honor mermaids, big-breasted and otherwise? Particularly when the Danes themselves are god damn statue hypocrites:

The statue in Copenhagen is itself a copy; the original has been attacked repeatedly — pieces stolen, arm cut off, painted pink, draped in a burqa — and is now stored in a secret location.

That secret location: Kimballton, Iowa. We hope nobody finds out.
[WSJ. Pic via]

Words are simply not sufficient to express the New York Post's fury at this perverted, unnatural desecration, which was first reported by our jocky sibling Deadspin. No, it will take a slide show of images from the nude video for the Post to properly communicate how livid it is at this breakdown of all that is good and moral. The powerful caption, accompanied by three Erin Andrews nooodddzzzzz:

VIOLATION: ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews (above) was the innocent victim of a perv-cam-wielding sicko who secretly took these images of her in her hotel room and posted them online.

The New York Post is both nauseated and indignant.