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"Selective ‘N-Word’ Outrage: William Morris Agency Dumps Mel Gibson" says Michelle Malkin's guest blogger Doug Powers:

Let me get this straight — the William Morris Agency has reportedly dropped Mel Gibson as a client because he used the “N-word” in an unhinged privately recorded rant, but William Morris continues to represent the likes of P. Diddy, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem, 50 Cent, and many more, who broadcast the same awful word to millions — daily, unabashedly and continually?

Get that? Eminem uses the "N-word" daily, unabashedly and continually.

Well, actually, he doesn't. Arguably, neither do Kanye West or Mary J. Blige. But whatever.

County Fair: Karl Rove's punditry: where facts go to die

Newsarama: Is THE LAST AIRBENDER Shyamalan's Last Chance?

The Onion: Obese Engage In Unsafe Sex More

Chunky lovebirds? LOL.

The Register: Drive suppliers hit capacity increase difficulties

From "How facts backfire" by Joe Keohane:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This made me think of the immensely popular conservative blog Gateway Pundit's continued insistence that President Obama voted in favor of infanticide. (That's not true.)

it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbain-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong anti-welfare bias.)

I'd like a breakdown of how strong of a correlation this phenomenon had with the liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum.

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion.

Appropriately enough, despite the evidence, I'll continue to hope for the human race.

NSFW: