There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.”
No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.




A trillion is a huge number — when you're talking dollars or euros. But a trillion miles is not so much in the cosmic scheme of things. Astronomers say they've now found a planet that orbits two suns a mere thousand trillion miles from here. It's yet another example of a weird solar system being discovered around nearby stars.
Former Libyan military officers packed an auditorium here on Wednesday to listen to the man who has been appointed to lead the country's army as the leaders of the movement that deposed dictator Moammar Gadhafi's last month attempt to consolidate their control.
Joe McGinniss's book on Sarah Palin is finally here. After years of hype, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin does not disappoint, offering the kind of salacious allegations you'd expect from a guy who'd move next door to Palin to write a book about her. What's in it? Cocaine, a one-night stand with a basketball hero, a love triangle.





























