Since 2008, ChristWire.org has emerged as the leading Internet site for ultraconservative Christian news, commentary and weather reportage. “Hurricane Earl Projected Path, Gay East Coast of America,” ChristWire opined last Monday. One headline in late August proclaimed, “Warning! Black Music Infiltrates the Minds of Future Homemaking White Women.” Last week, referring to Ken Mehlman, the former Republican Party chairman who came out of the closet last month, ChristWire asked, “Why does Ken Mehlman think that choosing the homosexual lifestyle is more important to him than the Republican values he once held so dear?”

Too bad the content is all fake. That’s right, Christwire.org (Warning, current front page is questionably NSFW) is a big Internet fake news site, similar in intent to the Landover Baptist Church. Yet countless of its readers take it seriously.

Of course, thanks to the way our brains tend to resolve cognitive dissonance, those countless readers will probably refuse to to believe this new information that it’s all a joke, and never understand that the joke has been on them.

Meet Andrew Wakefield, the guy whose fake study on the measles vaccine — hugely flawed, results partially faked, and funded by lawyers who results they could sue on — made consumer confidence in vaccines plummet, and as a result, helped open up new vectors for illnesses that had been mostly eradicated. Always investigate your experts — find out their agendas, their qualifications, and the special interests hidden behind them. It’s always a good idea, but if you were a parent in the last 10 years, you could have been staking not just your own opinion but your child’s health on the basis of a fraudulent, groundless study.

Strip reference: Olbermann: There Is No ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ (VIDEO)

Bingo!

Hey kids, watch Fox News? Now you can play Bingo along with the Gods with our handy PDF Bingo Cards, each emblazoned with a different member of the GPP cast. Fun for the whole family. Warning: Do not use as a drinking game. (May induce alcohol poisoning.)

Bingo Card 1 ♣  Bingo Card 2 ♣  Bingo Card 3
Bingo Card 4 ♣  Bingo Card 5

Or… join Buddha and make your own Bingo Card!

Politician meltdown into gibbering conspiracy theorist, on camera.

• How facts backfire – Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains
• When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions.
• In Politics, Sometimes The Facts Don’t Matter

Vatican Revises Abuse Process, but Causes Stir

“Stir.” That’s a mild way of putting it. Why haven’t they replaced this guy yet? Oh yeah, that infallible word of God thing.

Infallible. Right.

All Glory to the Hypno-Toad!

Congratulations to the amazing folks at this year’s San Diego Comic Con, who handled being picketed by the Westboro cult with aplomb, panache and humor. This is how you do it, folks. The Westboro hatemongers are a bunch of whacked-out zealot lawyers who make their money from suing people who react in anger to their vile rhetoric. Don’t ever let ‘em win.

THREE MONTHS after poor regulation, shoddy construction and sleazy corporate attempts to avoid quality controls allowed British Petroleum to unleash an ecological disaster upon the Gulf, the leak is capped… for now.

Hooray.

To use a cliche, this is the tip of the iceberg that we have already run aground on. There’s years of environmental repair ahead of this, ASSUMING the cap holds and new leaks don’t form. It’s going to be a long, hard road. Don’t let this fall off your radar, and DON’T let British Petroleum out of the hot spot. They, not the Republicans, or the Democrats, or the federal government, or even the Marshall Islands, are the ones at fault.