This image from a surveillance video at an adult video store on Airport Boulevard shows a burglar holding an inflatable sex doll after he broke into the business.

Let me count the ways this wingnut fails:

• First – he’s on video, so he will likely be caught, and we’ll get to put a name to that face.
• Second – While going to a store to buy your porn might be a little embarrassing to some folks in south Alabama, it’s probably not nearly as embarrassing as stealing your porn and having your picture plastered on the front page of the local paper. It would probably have been less embarrassing if Jesus, The Pope, and this guy’s mom all walked in the store and caught him in the act.
• Third – the burglar took no money, just, “an inflatable doll, a bottle of lubricant and a pocket-sized sexual stimulation device called “Devin’s Private Pleasures.”" WTF?
• Fourth – apparently inflatable dolls are not sold pre-inflated. The burglar is alleged to have inflated this one himself. Once again … WTF?
• Fifth – we think that stealing an inflatable doll should count as kidnapping, especially if you’re creepy enough to inflate it while you’re stealing it.

Stay tuned as this story blows up develops.

Now, Bristol Palin is back, doing the talk show circuit with her new baby in tow. She’s still and unwed teen mother, and that’s nothing to praise or condemn. Teen pregnancy is certainly an important social issue. Bristol is speaking out as a teen mother about the importance of the GOP solution to teen pregnancy: abstinence.

Never mind the fact that, as public health and education policy, abstinence-only education is a demonstrable failure. Teens that participate in such programs are sexually active at about the same rates as teens who participate in sex education classes that also include information about condom use. The problems appear when you examine pregnancy and STD rates among teens in abstinence only programs. Many teens in these programs don’t abstain, and they don’t use condoms effectively either. This actually puts them at increased risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Just like Bristol Palin, who gave birth on Dec 29, 2008 at the age of 18.

Regardless of the epic failure of abstinence-only education, I have to question the wisdom of selecting someone who rejected abstinence as the GOP Abstinence Ambassador. No – Bristol Palin isn’t the right person to tout the benefits of abstinence since she has no verified abstinence experience.

That would be equivalent to selecting this person as the GOP Fashion and Fitness Ambassador:

The difference between these two sets of negative attacks is that Obama’s attack on McCain is factually true. McCain’s attacks are not.

Over the past weeks and months, we have seen a John McCain all over the map as he tries to regain the lead in a race that is largely going badly for him. His faux suspension of his campaign for two days before the first debate was seen as a desperate hail-mary attempt to shift the focus to his leadership and willingness to put America first in a time of unprecedented economic crisis. When the economic deal his campaign needed didn’t materialize, he claimed victory and restarted his campaign with a “surprise” visit to the first presidential debate. This occurred after McCain’s previous hail-mary selection of a feckless governor of America’s least populated state as his running mate in an attempt to put the conservative Republican base at ease with his candidacy. That’s largely worked, but it hasn’t won him the accolades from women’s groups that he expected, nor has it swayed many Hillary Clinton supporters since many of them vote principles over gender.

For Obama to attack McCain for trotting out weirder and weirder ideas (taxing employee health benefits, anyone?), or flip-flopping on key issues (the fundamentals of the economy are strong one day and the sky’s falling the next) isn’t going negative. It’s calling things how they are.

I often wonder what might have happened if John McCain had successfully grasped his proper moment in history – if he had defeated George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican Primary. McCain was the right Republican for the job eight years ago.

He isn’t anymore.

The regulator ruled that an episode of The Montel Williams Show on ITV2 on 11 February breached rules on offensive material and potentially harming viewers by suggesting psychics could give life-changing advice.

I would suspect that Sylvia’s bad advice was both life-changing for the Hornbeck family, as well as harmful. Imagine if some quack told you that your son had been murdered. If you were to believe that “prediction” and then your son were to be found, what would you do to minimize your cognitive dissonance? Would you deny the living, breathing fact that you child was still alive, or would you perhaps question the validity of your favorite psychic’s claims that he or she had super powers?

In Britain, apparently, you can’t go around and make silly claims like that. At least, not without having a regulator call you on it. See, we could learn something from our British cousins!

You’re at a party, and the lights are flashing, the music is pumping, and people talking, laughing, clapping, dancing, and then a rumor starts: somewhere, out of sight, someone might have puked. Like a wave it moves through the crowd, touching everyone as they consider, “Oh no, I may be next”, and they swallow nervously, not wanting it to be true, but with that tentative swallow, they know the truth: they could indeed.

In true whisper-down-the-lane fashion, everyone does their part to pass the rumor, but the details change and morph as it goes, and the rumor becomes more grandiose, more twisted. First someone simply puked in the kitchen, then they puke on someone in the kitchen, then they puke while dancing with kitchen knives, then someone is almost stabbed and pukes in self-defense, and then … It doesn’t end, but builds and self-organizes. The rumor becomes a living thing.

Then the rumor is on everyone’s lips, as they share their own distorted versions, and argue over the details that don’t add up. Witnesses to the event are brought in and consulted for historical accuracy, “No, there were no knives involved”, and “no, it didn’t really look like tapioca pudding.” But in the noise and growing hysteria, these observations are misheard or misinterpreted, and are then woven back into the narrative, giving it new life: “Yes, a witness just confirmed that it looked like some kind of awful pudding.” Someone else gags, and the crowd holds its collective breath, as everyone hopes to keep their bile down.

And then there’s the confirmation, indisputable evidence that at least part of the rumor is based on actual events: Someone finds a small, puddle in the kitchen that smells badly. It doesn’t really look like tapioca pudding, but there are little pearls in it that could once have been nourishing. But it’s strange, and maybe there’s too much of what was clearly someone’s salad, and there’s an overabundance of saliva.

Even after it is cleaned away, there’s a nagging odor in the air: it’s not quite vomit, but not quite not either. Like that odor, the fervor of the rumor wanes, but doesn’t quite go away as the unanswered question lingers in an otherwise festive night. Some ass drank too much, or too fast, and now we’re paying for it with our suspicion and doubt, and our own internal efforts to control the reaction we feel in the back of our throats. We accuse one another of being the perpetrator, start new rumors about someone else’s guilt. Fingers are pointed and voices are raised. How could you, or you, or you, be so inconsiderate? How could he, or she, or they not control themselves better? You’re disgusting. I always thought you were a pig too. Way to go, pal.

And feeling much better, the dog is back in the yard, eating grass again.

BUSH: A clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries — I guess you’d call them colonialists — and they pitted one group of people against another

Bush used this bit of logic to apparently defend his administration’s do-lessness with respect to the ongoing Darfur genocide, as well as an excuse for America’s lack of response to the Rawandan Genocide. If that doesn’t peg your irony meter, maybe this will: The WAR President just called American troops in Iraq a colonialist force, while admitting that their presence was “unbelievably counterproductive”.

Sounds like Bush is getting a bit liberal in his loafers, no?

World Leaders Gather To Roast Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not be everyone’s favorite person, but to get served up in the Onion like this is quite the honor. While there’s lots of crap we might like to say about Iran’s President, and number 2 in command, who doesn’t love imagining that Shimon Peres might attend a roast and say:

“On the way here tonight, someone told me that Mahmoud was a Shi’a,” said Peres, placing one hand on Ahmadinejad’s shoulder. “At first I thought they were saying ‘He’s a shit,’ because the two sound so similar. But there’s a big difference: One’s a brown, foul-smelling tube of solid waste—and the other comes out of my asshole.”

And of course, one might imagine the ever-affable Ahmadinejad’s response:

As a scientist my life evolution works like this:
1st step- save the culture I live in
2nd step- observe all of the possibilities
3rd step- plan out the most effective re-arrival
4th step- lead one of the 5 super-civilizations
5th step- attempt to destroy the entire universe

You need to understand the universe was BUILT BY ME so that YOU ALL WOULD SEE HOW RETARDED YOU WERE IN TRYING TO PROCLAIM YOU’D FIGURED IT ALL OUT AS A BUNCH OF LITTLE RETARD HUMANS!

Michael then goes on to explain why animals and bacteria are “WAY more intelligent than people.”

In reading his claims, I am reminded of the word-salad that accompanies some types of schizophrenia.

Will Michael build universes and walk away with the Million dollars, or will Michael walk away with a decent prescription? What is your tingling Spidy Sense telling you?

No no no, says I. Skepticism is your friend, especially in a world awash with kookiness and inanity, preposterous claims, and a countless host willing to consider the unbelievable as so many Idol fans did when they thought that Sanjaya might have talent. In such a world, you can’t really function on anything more than the most primitive level without the ability to filter that noise through a critical, skeptical mind.

For those of you who don’t go to the Skeptics Society website on a regular basis, you can get a great introduction to skepticism – as well as some insight into why people (not you, of course) believe weird things from Dr. Michael Shermer, the President of the Skeptics Society in this 2005 talk.