Our engineers have carefully pinpointed the craziest figures in the news this week. Take a look at the Psychometer and let us know if you agree.
Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly trashed Donald Trump's unfounded birther claims recently. Not only that, he slammed reality star Sarah Palin for refusing to engage directly with the press. Any week that O'Reilly attacks both Trump and Palin is a week that we're seriously worried about his mental health.
"Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner's dispute with his network over the show's future reached a boiling point when AMC announced that the hit drama would not return until 2012, and would likely see the departure of a couple cast members. 2011 just got a lot less smoldering.
Tea Party parents took exploitation of their kids to a new level with the heartfelt ballad "Crying For America," a horrendous song that takes the fringe group's fetishization of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution to near self-parody levels. What 13-year-old boy isn't concerned that "the propaganda's got to stop"?
It was bad enough when former "Real World" star and current U.S. rep Sean Duffy (R-WI) complained about his $174,000 annual salary at a town hall meeting, but it got worse when the Polk County Republican Party demanded that TPM take down the video.
Presidential hopeful Rick Santoum inexplicably told a New Hampshire crowd that Social Security's supposed bankruptcy can be blamed squarely on the lack of young workers to support it, which is a byproduct of too many abortions. We highly recommend Googling Santorum to find out more about his policy positions.
On CNN recently, "Dr." Wendy Walsh explained that in disaster situations, "Most studies on survivors show that the atheists die first, because if you don't believe in something supernatural, how can you imagine that you yourself have supernatural abilities enough to survive?"
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas read the majority opinion in a recent 5-4 decision that ruled against an innocent man who had been unfairly imprisoned for 14 years. Despite evidence that exonerated the man and freed him from death row, as well as admitted withholding of evidence by the DA's office that convicted him, the Supreme Court stripped him of a $14 million award because they could not find “deliberate indifference.”
Fresh off flip-flopping on Obama's foreign policy decisions, and subsequent flip-flopping on his flip-flopping, professional groan-inducer Newt Gingrich made an interesting claim that unless measures are taken to protect the moral fabric of America, our nation will soon be "a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists."
Donald Trump gets the top spot for his shameless conspiracy theory Know-Nothing throwbacks by questioning the long debunked rumors surrounding President Obama's birth country. His most recent quip is completely unfounded postulating that Obama's birth certificate may in fact say that he is Muslim (like most birth certificates). "Or he may not have one. I will tell you this: if he wasn't born in this country, it's one of the great scams of all time." We're even more embarrassed for him than we were for The Situation at Trump's recent roast.