God, this decade? It sucked. Wes Anderson stopped making good movies, the Vikings lost Mike Tomlin and hired Brad Childress, and this complete asshole named George Bush was our president. For like eight years! Ugh!

The final, farcical moments of the failed Revolutionary NYU Food Court Occupation were caught on film by one of the protesters. And then shown to the world, despite being—by any standard—incredibly embarrassing.

Bush-pardoned rapper John Forte is finally home, and he's already making new music! We are truly happy for him, so we will just make three gentle points about his "video":

[Update: Now with video!] Hero president George W. Bush placed his own life at risk today by visiting an Iraqi office, where he came under heavy shoe fire:

When the newspaper industry is crumbling along with the American economy in general, the smartest people in all of journalism are the Northwestern J-school professors who packed up and decamped for Qatar. They left dreary Evanston, Illinois for beachfront condos in an oil-flush Middle Eastern paradise. There, they have only 39 students in total. And they don't talk back, because no one in the country really knows what journalism is all about:

So we're still getting threatening emails regarding the Sarah Palin Emailgate, wishing us well in prison and advising us to not "drop the soap." So it comes as a relief that, this morning, we finally got the best and last word in legal counsel, guaranteeing our freedom: a sassy TV judge on the Mike & Juliet show. She says we're fine and Geraldo Rivera even agrees with her! So that's a relief. Plus, it was just funny to see Mike say "hack hack hack" over and over again with nary a mirror in sight. Clip is above.

Back in June we told you about Gopalan Nair (pictured), a US citizen living in Singapore who was arrested for writing mean things about a judge on his blog. He accused the judge of "prostituting herself," and goaded the police by posting his address and phone number. His arrest was international news, but it appears that Singapore's authorities didn't learn their lesson: Nair now says he'll be going to trial next month, facing up to two years in jail. Who is this brave man standing up for free online speech in the face of an unyielding corrupt power structure? He's kind of a crank! But the charming, revolutionary type: Nair is a Singapore-born lawyer who became a US citizen in 2005. He says the he left Singapore because he was "harassed and persecuted" for his political beliefs. Nair has been posting long entries on his blog about his ongoing case. He strikes you as the type of person you see at City Council meetings throughout America, waiting to get up and harangue the politicians about their corruption and failure to fix stoplights. But in Nair's case, he's talking about the cane-you-for-chewing-gum culture of Singapore, so you have to believe he's on the side of the angels. This little excerpt gives you an idea of his personality:

Are you a company trying to get your products into the hands of the coveted but hard-to-reach "in prison" demographic? Why not advertise in Prisonworld Magazine? They're in over 400 institutions across the nation, and they're looking for advertisers. This could be a great placement for uh, Snickers, Newports... shower sandals? Shiv manufacturers. Just off the top of my head. And surprisingly affordable! Check out the jail rag's pitch and rate card:

Here in America, we take a lot of freedoms for granted. Sure, it's fun to get on the internet and talk freely, expressing our opinion about everything under the sun—whether the political issue of the day, or just popular music and culture. But we have to remember that those freedoms come with a price. Our brave troops overseas are putting their lives on the line in the War on Terror so that we can sit around chatting and making jokes. That said, the US Military understands the value of the internet—and blogs—as a communications medium. So when the US Special Operations Command comes out with a study [WIRED] that expresses interest in starting military blogs, co-opting existing bloggers, and hacking the sites of enemy bloggers whose message could be detrimental to US interests, should we really be so quick to dismiss it?

Britney Spears was released back into the wild today after a week spent in captivity at the UCLA Medical Center mental health ward. She is expected to seek additional treatment for her bipolar disorder. She will most likely return to her natural habitat, BP Connect quick stop shops. [US] Update: TMZ is live at Spears' house. Watch the exciting streaming footage of cars passing by.

At Fox News, it's an established trope that freedom is on one side, and terror is on the other. We're in a actual shooting war of freedom versus terror, after all, and that's one idea that Fox has no interest in evaluating in a "fair and balanced" manner. But the unfortunate truth is that freedom gets undervalued by those who supposedly enjoy it and dismissed by those who do not covet it. Terror, on the other hand — well, everyone is interested in terror. In fact, terror is FoxNews.com's best friend. After the jump, Intern Mary examines the October mentions of "freedom" versus "terror" versus site traffic on Fox News's online portal, where it seems that terror beats freedom on every single day.