You might have heard that old joke, "How does every racist joke start?" and then the person looks over his shoulder. It's true! No one wants people to think they're a racist, especially racists. Well, we're finally sick of them.
The great news about a Herman Cain presidency is not just that we'd have a president who hates ever thinking about foreign policy. We'd also get his 9-9-9 tax plan, a cartoonishly regressive transfer of the tax burden to the lower and middle classes! Okay, even our Congress isn't dumb enough to pass this. But. This is what Herman Cain's running on, so why not check out some fancy reviews, hmm?
To the illustrious and soul-deadening genre of McDonalds Beatings Caught on Tape, we can add this: the one where two irate customers jump the counter so the McDonald's cashier runs in the back and fetches and metal rod and beats the hell out both of them, but the cashier was a man who just spent a decade in prison for manslaughter and the customers were both women so there really aren't any folk heroes here, folks.
A Kansas City grand jury has indicted Robert Finn (pictured, at right), the city's Roman Catholic bishop, for failing to report suspected sexual abuse of a child by a priest in his district. "The indictment is the first ever of a Catholic bishop in the 25 years since the scandal over sexual abuse by priests first became public in the United States." Well, I guess we can put that behind us.
A new biography of Vincent van Gogh, which is getting a featured segment on 60 Minutes this weekend, posits that the post-Impressionist master didn't commit suicide by shooting himself in the abdomen, as previously believed.
In your finally Friday media column: newspaper circulation wanes, a brilliant plan to avoid reporters, the News Corp board battle continues, Fox News people are bad liars, and Nancy Franklin's replacement.
President Obama is sending a total of 100 troops into central Africa to help a resistance movement fight the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group known for committing atrocities across the continent.
It's time we talk about the most important part of the Occupy Wall Street protests: just what celebrities are wearing when they visit! But don't worry, we also find time to pick on Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Michelle Williams, Heidi Klum, Christina Aguilera, and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Rick Perry's wife, Anita, has an explanation for his terrible collapse in presidential polls over the last month: That Perry has been "brutalized," by everyone, over his deep faith to God. This is a questionable assertion!
There's no easy way to break this to you so we're just going to rip off the ol' band-aid: we have another entire decade to go before American "income"—stuff they pay if you ever get a job—claws its way back to where it was ten years ago. That's a twenty year income pit. Years to dig ourselves into the hole, years wallowing at the bottom, and more painful years to get out. But! Let's look at the bright side.
It used to be impossible to predict what videos would go viral. But as "Facebook Official" proves, all you need now is a huge budget and a bunch of cliches about Facebook.
There is much hatred for the eight guidos on Jersey Shore, the most important sociological experiment of our time, but even people who love the guidos and even the guidos themselves hate The Situation. He is the black sheep of the black sheep, and he will be his own destruction.
Here's a trailer for the new action comedy This Means War, the tale of two suave, sexy CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy, both alums of the Star Trek franchise) fighting over the same girl, Reese Witherspoon.
Let's say you're a woman who's worked hard, climbed the ladder, and risen to the very pinnacle of your profession—a historic achievement. You're taken seriously as a writer, a thinker, and a boss; you alone have the power to set the agenda for how many of our most important issues are covered by the national and international media. You have made it. Why—hypothetically speaking—would you not shut up about your stupid dog?
The congressional supercommittee established in the debt ceiling deal has about a month left to come up with trillions in deficit reduction and then move its plan through Congress, lest the dreaded "trigger" go into effect that would viciously cut defense spending and more. So what if the supercommittee gets stuck on, say, tax increases that Republicans will never accept? Will they just give up and let the trigger go into effect? Nope! Old man John McCain let us onto the real Plan B yesterday.
Public relations is about "relationships." Flacks develop "relationships" with reporters by calling them and yelling at them until the reporters start to realize, before they write something, that an unpleasant conversation might ensue. So they start to be...more careful. We recently came across an internal email written by Daniel Senor, the former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, that summed up the dynamic in crystalline fashion.
