A friend of mine sent me an email tonight with a hilarious story – did everyone see this thing about John Cusack? Just a beautiful tale about the joys of life in the age of social networking media. It used to take the commercial media at least a day or two to spread a botched news story from coast to coast, but these days, when you add new technology like Twitter to Tea Party paranoia, you can hang a black t-shirt over a web-cam and within ten minutes half of middle America thinks it’s a total eclipse of the sun. ...

Some shocking electoral results this week are providing new proof that the loony Tea Party movement has surged to levels of influence far beyond anything most of us could ever have imagined possible, with the key results coming in Arizona and Alaska. In Sarah Palin’s home state, it’s looking quite a lot like incumbent Lisa Murkowski is going to be ousted by a little-known Tea Party candidate named Joe Miller. If Murkowski loses, she would be the seventh incumbent and the fourth Republican to lose key primary challenges this year, with Tea Party activism being a driving force in many ...

Not that it's so terribly meaningful in the grand scheme of things, but for sheer comedy value, I had to mention this recent communique from the 9/11 Truth movement with regard to the Ground Zero Mosque. The instant this Mosque fiasco turned into a full-blown media circus it became clear that the Truthers had to come up with some sort of position on the matter. From their point of view, of course, there's nothing terribly offensive about putting a Mosque at Ground Zero because, after all, the Muslims and al Qaeda had nothing to do with 9/11. Instead it was ...

I'm a little late in taking notice of this hilarious and extraordinary piece of punditry, but it strikes me that not enough attention has been paid to the recent self-crucifying New York Times editorial written by Ronald Reagan's former budget chief and economic Svengali, the notorious Richie Rich weasel David Stockman. Stockman, if you remember, was the perfect Picture of Dorian Gray Republican counter-persona hiding behind the broad-shouldered, muscular cowboy image Reagan projected when he was lecturing the world about how poor people had to give up the welfare tit and do their own damn work. The self-reliant tough-guy act ...

Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times is single-handedly resurrecting the Gray Lady's reputation as a muckraker of the first order. Having already blown a big hole in the side of Goldman Sachs with her December, 2009 story exposing its crooked deal with hedge fund king John Paulson, Morgenson this week took an ax to Colorado's Democratic Senator Michael Bennet, uncovering a Jefferson-County style scam he helped perpetrate on the Denver School system on behalf of several Wall Street banks (including primarily JeffCo villain JP Morgan Chase) while acting as Denver's school superintendent years ago. The essence of this deal ...

“Everyone agrees that the recession is over.” - Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council “Of course not.” - Outgoing Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Christina Romer, when asked if the recession was over. The two senior White House economic advisers made their comments on the same day. It’s getting harder and harder to read the tea leaves with regard to Barack Obama’s economic team, which in recent weeks has seen two fairly major resignations – the above-quoted Council of Economic Advisers chairwoman Romer, and budget director Pete Orszag, two very different people with different views on the economy. ...

A housekeeping FYI: my new Men’s Journal piece, “A Jock’s Guide to Getting Arrested,” is now live and up on the MJ website. Having written a sports crime blotter column for something like six years now – I’ve been doing it for my hometown Boston Phoenix for over four years – I always get up for the pre-NFL training camp period of the sports calendar, which almost always turns out to be the most arrest-heavy stretch of the year, thanks in large part to the flood of football rookies getting their first big checks. The MJ piece goes through the ...