“The number of people living in poverty has climbed to 14.3 percent of Americans, with the ranks of working-age poor reaching the highest level since at least 1965. The Census Bureau says that about 43.6 million people, or 1 in 7, were in poverty last year. That’s up from 39.8 million, or 13.2 percent, in 2008.” [AP/Raw Story]

A few months ago, the second anniversary of our Accidental Blogging happened to coincide with “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”, so we outfitted our customary Joyride Jalopy with a special guest from South Park. Which is about all the attention we paid to the event at the time, except to note a few weeks earlier that the event’s instigator had chickened out.

And now she has — let’s capitalize this — Disappeared:

[Molly Norris] is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program — except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

Whoa. We’re gonna need to retrace a few steps here.

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Freshly minted New York GOP gubernatorial nominee and naughty-email aficionado Carl Paladino puts the frosting on today’s Crazee Cake with the declaration of a new standard for the Ground Zero Mosque-Exclusion Zone:

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Washington Times, 2003: “Dorm life has evolved into a blending of the sexes, from coed buildings to coed floors, coed bathrooms and now even coed rooms. ‘What’s next? Orgy rooms? Menage a trois rooms?’ asked Christine O’Donnell, spokeswoman for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., which publishes a college guide.” [Salon]

Edwin Newman, TV Journalist, Dies [NYT]

[Yahoo]

We’re not going to trawl through all those Christine O’Donnell Politically Incorrect appearances that TPM dredged up, but God bless ThinkProgress for doing the heavy lifting. Let’s join a 1998 conversation with Bill Maher and Eddie Izzard about the morality of lying, already in progress…

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