Now the Republicans have won a couple of minor elections, everyone seems to be conveniently forgetting that they're as crazy as a box of frogs. As a reminder: meet Todd Herman the man behind the recently relaunched $1.4m GOP website!

In your completely laid-off Wednesday media column: details on more Time Inc. layoffs and buyouts at People and Essence, Fortune Small Business folds, and various ways that magazine publishers are terrorists.

Mitch Winehouse thinks Amy's rack was worth the rumored $56,000 cost of silicone. Salman Rushdie scores another PYT. Obama Girl is mauled by a light fixture at that one ubiquitous press junket in Jamaica. Welcome to Thursday's gossip!

A physicist at CERN, the lab that is building the Large Hadron Collider—which will destroy the planet by igniting a black hole and catapulting us into an alternate dimension—has been arrested in France on suspicion of Al-Qaeda ties.

Here is the new thing for you to worry about, in terms of your own unavoidable violent death: Al Qaeda is now smuggling bombs inside their rectums. There is no hope of detection until it blows.

Take that, Dick Cheney! Federal officials this weekend made three arrests in an interstate terror investigation. Sure, it's good news for democracy, freedom and the such, but it could be great news for President Obama.

The New York Daily News says the FBI fears a "Madrid-style" subway bombing in New York, and the man reported to be the mastermind will hold a press conference today. For better or worse, this is what we voted for.

Al Qaeda may be aggressively growing its ranks by recruiting European white men to carry out attacks, a move New Yorker writer and Al Qaeda expert Lawrence Wright says allows the group to "transcend its stereotype." [The Stimulist]

One of the things we've been waiting all day to see in the aftermath of the shooting today at the Holocaust Museum was how the conservatives would spin the incident. Now, thanks to Glenn Beck and Debbie Schlussel, we know.

There is so much torture news! Honestly? Just grow up and read the Times, Journal, and Post stories yourselves. But there is one small torture anecdote that sums up the whole thing nicely.

Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahri just can't make everyone hate Barack Obama as much as they hated Bush. Maybe they should stop trying to recruit poor Pakistanis and focus instead on liberal economists?

It's not just angry rightwingers who mix up "Obama" and "Osama." Yahoo News has joined CNN and the Associated Press in confusing the most powerful man in the world with his terrorist enemy.

Remember how we all got all mad at the Bush administration for fear-mongering after 9/11? They squandered international goodwill with a dumb war, and they tried to make us all afraid, all the time, so we'd keep voting for them, forever, to keep us safe? What bad, bad people, those Republicans. Anyways. On Good Morning America today, Dan Harris, reporting from Mumbai, announced to a sleepy Monday morning audience that the well-coordinated attack in India is basically guaranteed to be repeated here in America, like there is a 100% chance that terrorists will take over the next hotel you check into and kill your children, and al-Qaeda will do a thousand more 9/11s. Is it too late to vote for Rudy Giuliani? He'll protect us!!!

Everyone in the world is thrilled that America elected Barack Obama! There was dancing and American flag-waving on streets that more recently have been burning American flags (both abroad and in San Francisco). It looks like America will have a President who'll, you know, be diplomatic and respect international law and maybe not be so much of a terrible American stereotype! This is all bad news for terror network al-Qaeda, who rely on American aggression and foreign affairs incompetence to keep that anti-Western fervor up. So they quietly talked up a John McCain presidency on their message boards while publicly endorsing Barack Obama in order to pull the old reverse psychology trick they tried against Kerry. It didn't work! So now they're just calling Obama names. They released a stupid video, of course, in which Ayman al-Zawahiri calls Obama a "house negro" and quotes Malcolm X! They have some legitimate policy grievances with Obama, of course, because while the Bush strategy was to use the 9/11 attacks as a pretense to go ahead with a pre-planned invasion of non-al-Qaeda secular dictatorship Iraq, the Obama plan is to go back into Afghanistan—and Pakistan!—and kill all of them. (Bush thought this plan so clever he secretly instituted it himself at the very, very end of his presidency.) Still, even with the threat of ramping up that particular war, Obama is simply not a very good recruiting tool for Islamic Extremists! So they are kinda reduced to just needling the President-elect, with this Malcolm X talk. Obama, of course, has written at length of reading Malcolm X: "Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me." Who knew al-Qaeda seconds-in-command were reading Dreams From My Father? But, of course, their invocation of Obama as a "house Negro" is a total misreading. As Malcolm said:

This month's Harper's reprints a series of love e-mails between alleged Canadian terrorist Momin Khawaja and his internet paramour Zeba Khan. Sexy, dashing and extremely distrustful of America, Khawaja seduced the Pakistani resident and U.S. citizen through vague militant threats and a shared love of Cat Stevens. Under the weight of this man's considerable charm, who could say no?As if we don't already have enough reasons not to date bloggers, Khawaja e-mailed Zeba Khan after reading her blog post 'Why I Am Never Going Back to America.' The two started exchanging e-mails regularly on a variety of topics before Khan was arrested because of implications he was involved in a London bomb plot. The engagement was dissolved, but the letters are proof of what these two kids had.

Today's Times opinion section features an op-ed by Ronen Bergman, an Israeli newspaper correspondent who tracks the mood of jihadists by monitoring their internet message boards. This is important intelligence work! Apparently they're all having debates about suicide bombing and should they maybe not be martyring themselves quite so often, because suicide itself is not considered a good thing. All interesting stuff! But reading excerpts from discussions on Ekhlaas and Firdaws, "two main Web platforms for discussing the technical aspects of jihad," just got us thinking: who moderates these forums? And why is their level of discourse so much calmer and smarter than Western blog comments?

How bad do you want to go viral on the Web? Al Qaeda bad? Because I hear the fundamentalist-Islamic terrorist group is the best around at spreading by word of mouse. This according to Gabriel Weimann, professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel. Weinman monitors 5,800 militant Islamist sites, and he's got bad news about the terrorists' ability to market themselves on the Web.

Like the creators of The Onion before them, the sideburned jokesters responsible for those "Chad Vader" YouTube videos are trying as hard as they can to escape from Madison, Wisconsin. They're represented by William Morris! They're flying out to New York to participate in something called "Battle of the Internet Superstars" (uggghh)! And as long as they keep pumping out lame Star Wars parodies, people will continue trying to figure out how to make money off of them. Is it wrong, though, that we'd kinda rather subscribe to the YouTube channel of militant North Carolinian jihadist Samir Khan?

After trying and failing to kill us with shoes, dirty bombs, and in-flight hair gels, it looks like the terrorists have finally decided to target us where it hurts most: that's right, our collective guilt over mid-20th century urban renewal! The Daily News reports that today's yucky non-Beaux-Arts Penn Station's a goner: