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Well look at this! We were totally right — it happens sometimes — and conservatives are firing up their attacks on Kevin Jennings, the nation’s gay “safe school czar.” And they’re using terms like “statutory rape.” How timely!

Jennings once lived life as a closeted school teacher. And, at the time — 1988 — a student told Jennings that he had consensual sex with an “older man” in a public bathroom. Jennings told the student to use a condom and later wrote in his book, that the student “left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated.”

Now, perhaps inspired by all the hoopla over Roman Polanski’s arrest, the right’s throwing it all back in Jennings’ face. The Washington Times editorialized this week:

In this one case in which Mr. Jennings had a real chance to protect a young boy from a sexual predator, he not only failed to do what the law required but actually encouraged the relationship.
…
His job in the Obama administration is to ensure student safety, and this scandal directly calls into question his ability to perform that job. Mr. Jennings and Obama administration officials refuse to answer any questions about this newly discovered evidence. A lot of Americans want answers about this guy and how he was approved for a job in the White House.

The paper also claims that Jennings “has made extremely radical statements promoting homosexuality in schools,” an allusion to Jennings work as the founder of Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which tries to teach America’s little punks that gay folk and straight folk are the same. How radical.

Sensing backlash on the horizon, Jennings released a statement today expressing his regret over the situation:

Twenty one years later I can see how I should have handled this situation differently. I should have asked for more information and consulted legal or medical authorities. Teachers back then had little training or guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.

As we all know, though, White House critics are not that easily deterred. Sean Hannity tonight used his show to claim that Jennings “covered up a statutory rape” and called for him to be fired:

Now, as The Washington Times said, ‘At the very least, statutory rape occurred,’ and he didn’t report it. Now he’s saying that he made a mistake, only because it’s been reported on. My question is, where’s the vetting process? Why was he even put in this position?

Duh! Because Obama’s a socialist who wants to destroy this once-great nation by working with anarchists and fags and all sorts of other bad people. Why do people even have to ask?

But, seriously, if all these people are so concerned about the nation’s youth, focus your energies on examining why a gay kid would feel the only sexual outlet he can find comes from anonymous sex in a bathroom. Demonizing Jennings — and his gayness — will only teach younger readers and viewers that same-sex loving’s nothing but trouble.

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Combine two dashes of the Huffington Post’s culty, medicine-fearing “Living” section and one dash of Fox News’ craziest host, and you’ve got Love in the Time of Swine Flu. Not even Dr. Dean Ornish could stop these paranoid fellow-travelers.

It would seem, you see, that pundits on right-wing Fox News and lefty Huffington Post have arrived at the same place with regard to Swine Flu vaccines: They are dangerous and should be avoided!

Attached, find a clip of Fox’s Glenn Beck riling up a studio audience against “this government’s” flu shots, and saying the vaccines are kind of barbaric and backward.

And over here on HuffPo you can find “Dr. Frank Lipman” saying much the same thing: He advises “NO!” against swine flu vaccines (in bold and caps), due to an unholy alliance between the government and “the Pharmaceutical Industry” (again with the caps). But he does say “yes” to Vitamin D supplements, fish oil, “antiviral herbal supplements,” “a probiotic daily… with 10-20 billion organisms,” and a reads supply of “homeopathic Oscillococcinum.”

Astronomer and former HuffPo contributor Phil Plait calls this “far-left New Age… antivax nonsense” over on Discover Magazine’s website, advising, sensibly, that people consult their actual personal doctors on the matter. Controversy also dogged HuffPo’s health coverage back in May, when another Living section writer suggested treating swine flu with colon cleanses. The writer, who just happened to be selling a cleanse book, was duly rebuked by a doctor writing for Salon.com.

At the time, we noted that the Living section, in which both these controversial swine flu articles have appeared, was stocked by writers recruited by Huffpo “Senior Editor At Large” Russell Bishop John Morton, a disciple of the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, to which HuffPo publisher Arianna Huffington belongs. At least one Living section editor has reportedly been forced by Huffington to attend an “Insight” seminar, organized by a group with close ties to MSIA.

Former members have called MSIA a cult of personality around leader John-Roger (pictured, left, with Huffington in 2004), who acolytes believe can heal the ill and who is said to eschew Western medicine. One ex-member described in his memoir John-Roger scolding him for using prescription drugs, rather than just a “natural… nutritionist,” to rid himself of parasites contracted on a trip Africa (see the end of this post for more).

We’d hoped HuffPo’s new medical editor Dr. Dean Ornish, who joined in August, could improve HuffPo’s health coverage. It’s not clear if he signed off on this latest article; we’re curious what his thoughts are. Perhaps he’ll leave a comment here as he did on our last post. In the meantime we’ll enjoy observing the comical similarities between the people near the furthest edges of Fox News and HuffPo.

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If Roman Polanski wins his petition for house arrest he’ll probably end up here at “Milky Way,” the chalet he owns outside Gstaad. At least it’s got a view. [Images via Getty]

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So far the public outrage hasn’t been nearly as intense as Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate, but once the thought of a naked ladyflower on prime time television settles in, the reaction will be huge. Next up, FCC fines.

Last night, when a contestant on So You Think You Can Dance celebrated making it to the next round, she got so excited she fell to the floor, writhing in excitement, and let the camera film up her skirt. Too bad she wasn’t wearing any panties. Oopsie!

After the Janet Jackson debacle, where she showed her breast on live television during the Super Bowl halftime show, the reaction was immediate and fierce. After all, bare nipples are the greatest threat to our national order. Well, nipples and gay marriage are close, but nipples always win by a hair. Now there may have been a real live vagina on television, we have no idea what the precedents are. Viacom, the owner of CBS, paid $550,000 for showing first base, how much will Fox have to pony up for the whole infield?

Well, that depends on a few factors:

• Since this was taped television instead of live, did Fox know there was a cooch in the broadcast when it aired? If so, big fine.
• If not, why doesn’t Fox have an official person in charge of making sure that no genitalia make it on to television? If they don’t, big fine. If they hire one, thus stimulating the economy and our Puritanical sense of decency, then the fine will go down.
• Was this a stunt to get everyone talking about a show whose ratings are off from the summer season. If so, Fox better get out it’s wallet. (Also, kudos).
• How many form letters will the Parents Television Council fool people into sending to the FCC? The number is a direct correlation to size of the fine.
• Will Glenn Beck or another cable new yahoo take up the cause? If so, the decibel level of his loudest, sternest scream on the subject multiplied by the square root of pi will be used to determine just how much a vagina on TV will cost.
• How many tween girls were blinded by seeing a woman’s nether region on TV? Each one will be awarded $300, or a free pair of tickets to a Miley Cyrus concert (but, you know, the back rows, cause it’s not like they can actually see anymore).
• Was the girl in the clip 18? If not, every person who watched it on YouTube will be tracked down by their IP address and thrown into jail for watching child pornography. If not, then it’s cool. We’re all just pervs.
• Is there an actual vagina on television? Cause if not, well, is that even indecent?

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The Hills are on fire! Everyone is talking about last night’s sixth season premiere, but it looks like Lauren Conrad leaving has doomed the show. Know what, who cares? The City is a million times better, anyway.

The big news for the sixth season is that Kristin Cavallari of Laguna Beach fame was returning to bitch it up after LC, the show’s grand dame of drama, left for greener pastures. And those pastures are green with big money. Today it was announced that the Twilight team will adapt her novel into a movie. Earlier this year Audrina Partridge decided to call it quits for her own reality show and today Stephanie Pratt, the prattling sister of reality über-goober Specer Pratt, said she was quitting the show because she’s sick of it.

I can understand why. Last night, I decided it was finally time to cave in to the peer pressure of the pop culture machine and finally watch an episode of this show. Yes, last night Kristin Cavallari popped my Hills cherry and it was excruciating. During the episode, she returns and attends a welcome back party for Spencer and Heidi Pratt (nee Montag), the amalgamation of everything insipid that is known and self-promoted as Speidi. It was less of an excuse to have a party and more of an excuse to have Kristin show up and start some shit, which she does. Because the show exists in its own beautiful snow globe of wealthy white people who only interact with each other, because Kristin wasn’t on the show it’s like she fell into a wormhole and was transported clear into the Alpha Centauri galaxy never to be heard from again.

Brody Jenner (who I find horribly dreamy in spite of myself) isn’t tense about his ex-girlfriend Kristin being teleported back into their tiny sphere by a black hole the producers created out of money and Kristin’s failed acting career, but his girlfriend Jayde (who spells her name like a drag queen) is afraid she’s going to steal her man. And so is Audrina, who recently broke up with Justin Bobby—who looks like the punchline of a Joaquin Phoenix performance art piece, except he is totally missing all the irony. So they all sit around and talk about this with the sort of tepid trepidation of a year book committee that doesn’t want the cover of their magnum opus to be maroon, but navy blue, because they have always dreamed about having a navy yearbook on their coffee table for the rest of their lives, but the school colors are maroon and white, so they have to deal with the color scheme even though it’s ruining their lives.

Anyway, Kristin shows up at the party and starts some retarded fight that I don’t understand, probably because I haven’t had enough Patron shots and don’t speak the spoiled patois of the Malibu faux-lite but it had something to do with Kristin talking to Justin Bobby’s beard and that made Audrina upset. She yelled a lot and cowed the Year Book Committee to scurry back to the cafeteria to regroup and talk about whether or not they were going to go to some birthday party. Where the same drama is repeated, except without as much yelling.

I watch a lot of really trashy television, but I just don’t get The Hills. I understand that it’s fun to watch these little wind up toys sputter and twist when faced with the petty squabbles and slights of an insular social circle. I understand that the characters have been made into heroes and villains and that they’re all so stupid that there is a certain pitiful superiority one feels while watching them try to navigated massaged reality before the cameras. Yes, I understand it, I just don’t get it.

The City, though, I not only get, but totally love. While The Hills feels like regression, The City feels like a progression. It’s a similar sort of snow globe, but one where characters actually have goals, things are actually happening, and the fights have real-world consequence.

Whitney Port, a refugee from The Hills, tries to play like she’s the poor girl taking on the big, bad city, but she’s got a fat pad in the West Villiage and a boss—PR maven Kelly Cutrone—who is encouraging her to work less so she can start her fashion line. Last night, Whitney’s old friend Roxy shows up in New York and needs a job and a place to crash. Whitney hooks her up with both, but how does the affably daffy Roxy repay her? By throwing a giant party in her apartment that is so noisy the neighbors call the cops. This sounds just like the Jane Hotel, but it’s happening on our TV screen. It’s a fun arc that easily plays out easily over 30 minutes and really illustrates the trouble of starting a professional life in the big city in your early 20s—well, if you have a camera crew following you around and a big fat check from producers for just allowing your burgeoning life to be the entertainment for the masses.

The real star of the show, however, is socialite Olivia Palermo, who has been given a job as an accessories editor at Elle and faces off with the magazine’s PR chief Erin Kaplan. This is real reality. Everyone knows only privileged and connected white girls get the plum jobs at fashion magazines. And when she gets there, Olivia has the sort of attitude you could expect to find in a girl with a prep school education who probably doesn’t have to work for a living. And when she gets in a fight with Kaplan, it’s not about who might have flirted with who in front someone’s exgirlfriend at a party at the Pink Taco or who didn’t say hi to such-and-such because they thought they had bad body odor. It’s about a segment on the real live Today show. It’s like an actual something. And if Olivia fucks it up then Kathie Lee Gifford is going to track her down and beat her like she’s a Chinese sweatshop worker who won’t sew fast enough. What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen to Kristin? Audrina isn’t going to like her? Aww…

Yes, I love trashy reality television, but I want there to be real stakes along with the drama and I want it to have some sort of reflection on the world we all live in—that The City it has a reflection on the very specific Manhattan media world I live in probably makes me love it a little bit more. Earlier this week, when Lauren Conrad was asked if she would still watch The Hills she said, “”Probably not, I’ll watch The City.” Finally, someone from The Hills had something intelligent to say.

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Lynn Vincent, the woman who is writing a book called Going Rogue “by” Sarah Palin, sure can pick her co-writers. She’s written books before with a general who kills “demons” for God and a guy who finds interracial dating “revolting.”

As Charles Johnson—whose ongoing reformation from Muslim-hating wacko to right-wing apostate continues to puzzle and delight us—points out, Palin’s ghostwriter’s previous work includes Donkey Cons, a thoughtful investigative look at the Democratic Party’s criminality that blows the lid off that “killer and traitor Aaron Burr.” Vincent’s co-writer on Donkey Cons was Robert Stacy McCain, a former Washington Times editor who writes things like this:

[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

That was from a private e-mail McCain once wrote that a recipient posted online, so in his defense, McCain (no relation to Palin’s running mate) wouldn’t write something like that in public. In public, he says things like slaves and whites in the Old South had “cordial and affectionate relations,” is a member of the League of the South, which wants to secede from the Union (again!), and writes for a web site called VDare, which proudly publishes the work of “rational and civil…white nationalists” who “unashamedly work for their people.”

Anyway, when Palin was doing her due diligence before hiring Vincent, she probably didn’t look into her association with McCain, because she probably just assumed it was John McCain, because she’s an idiot. We’re sure she will promptly reject and denounce Vincent’s racist affiliations.

Vincent also ghost wrote the memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the former head of the Army’s Special Forces Command, who literally believes that his job in the U.S. military was to defeat Satan for the Christian nation of America. Of one of our enemies in Somalia, Boykin said, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” And why does the world hate us? “We are hated because we are a nation of believers.” And how do we defeat terrorism? “[W]e come against them in the name of Jesus.”

In summary, Sarah Palin’s book will be awesome because her ghostwriter has abundant experience in shaping the confused, fevered thoughts of religious fanatics into sentences.

UPDATE: McCain responds: “I know lots of interracial couples.” Oy. Are any of them your best friends?

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The government has a lot going on right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s too busy for matters of the heart. That’s why one of its virtual offspring set up a scheme to get you a ring, or die trying.

The National Healthy Marriage Resource Center, a “clearinghouse” spawn of the Department of Health and Human Services, earlier this year launched the Twoofus.org, a multimedia campaign it hopes will spark “a national conversation about marriage among 18-30 year-olds” and “increase confidence that marriage is a viable option.” Sounds sexy.

So, how can you survive the “daunting” dating game and tie yourself down? Here are some things to remember…

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Think things in America can’t get any more unsettling? Well, you’re wrong. Meet the American Police Force, which will soon take over a Montana jail that once asked to house Guantanamo inmates. And, shocker, they’re shady as hell. Let’s look…

Unorganized militia’s played quite the role in America’s revolution, and they’ve been experiencing a bit of a revival in the scary recent past. The anti-immigrant Minute Men are out in full force down Arizona way, while the once-defunct Michigan Militia seems to have revived itself: they just had a training exercise called Operation Pita Storm.

But those groups are small potatoes compared to a new, ultra-mysterious “security force” called the American Police Force, which just agreed to take over an indebted prison in Hardin, Montana. And sounds a lot like a militia, only far more organized, less forthcoming and, therefore, more frightening.

So let’s get some facts, if such things exist anymore.

• The prison in question was built two years ago, but, sadly, never got off the ground. Earlier this year, desperate for funds, the prison put in a bid to take some prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. That effort failed, apparently, because the city’s economic group, Two Rivers Authority just called on the APF to takeover the prison’s operations, although there’s no official contract just yet…

• APF’s website claims that the group “successfully provided assistance in training foreign military organizations in combating transnational terrorism” and boasts that it’s “recognized as one of the top security and investigation forces in the world.” Too bad no one’s ever heard of them — not even the U.S. government, a group with which APF says it has worked.

• In addition to fighting terrorism overseas and defending democracy, the group’s online digs say APF’s renaissance agents work on “kidknapping [sic]” cases, investigate cheating spouses and offer convoy security in places like Pakistan. We love a well-rounded trooper.

• A group spokesperson who called himself “Captain Michael” told local news channel KULR 8 that APF’s more interested in setting up a $17 million training camp than in operating the prison. This man would not specify how they plan to use the camp.

• Another fun fact: the group’s press secretary is a woman named Becky Shays, who used to be a reporter for Montana’s Billings Gazette and covered the Hardin Prison story. Now that she’s in her new role, however, she’s not so big on disclosure: she told her former colleagues that she will not name the APF’s true leaders, the source of its funding or how it plans to take its future prisoners.

• APF’s lawyer, Maziar Mafi, a malpractice expert who was hired a month ago, also offers few details, other than that the Force is a satellite of a larger security firm. And he seems to revel in the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere:
  

  It will gradually be more clear as things go along. The nature of this entity is private security and for security purposes, as well as for the interest of their clientele, that’s why they prefer not to be upfront.

  Muckraker Kevin Flaherty, however, discovered that APF’s website shares an IP address with Defense Product Solutions, which was founded in 2004, has contracts in the Middle East and works with a man named Edward Angelino, who in turn has worked with the militarily-inclined Allied Defense Systems, Inc. and Defense Consulting Group, Inc. A tangled web, indeed.

• The only other things people seem to know about APF is that it has a fleet of Mercedes SUVs that say “City of Hardin Police Department,” they use a double-headed eagle emblem, have “virtual offices” in Washington DC and registered its website on May 15th, two weeks after Hardin made its Guantanamo request.

  This group may not fit the criteria for a good old fashioned American militia, but their ominous takeover of a small town’s police force sounds pretty fucking paramilitary. Welcome to the future!

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Here is the new thing for you to worry about, in terms of your own unavoidable violent death: Al Qaeda is now smuggling bombs inside their rectums. There is no hope of detection until it blows.

Here, let CBS just clarify it for you:

“Absolutely nothing [can detect these rectum bombs] other than to require people to strip naked at the airport,” said Yates.

And al Qaeda says it will share its new technique via the Internet very soon. There is nothing that can stop that either.

There you have it: there is no stopping it. Just pray that it will be quick.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

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First there was the nude guy at the taco truck. Now there’s another nude guy running the Williamsburg streets in broad daylight, for laffs. We thought you should know.

See, one is the World’s Fastest Nudist and the other one is “The Radical,” who I found funnier than I would really care to admit. Technically it’ll take one more street-running nudist dude in Williamsburg to make an Official Trend, but why wait? Get running, bored pervs!

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