The big news today seems to be James O’Keefe punking NPR. Since we haven’t listened to NPR in, oh, fifteen or twenty years, we’ll keep our indignation dry until the next Shocking Exposé. [TPM]

It’s not that we care about the Estevez Spawn who didn’t star in Repo Man (okay, fine — or The Breakfast Club), it’s that we keep stumbling across shrapnel we just can’t ignore:

“The fact is, during Mr. Sheen’s recent criminal case in Aspen, Colo., the studio was willing to have him plead to a felony and still take him back while charges were pending against him,” says [lawyer Marty] Singer. “Yet in this case, all my client did was make alleged disparaging remarks about [producer] Chuck Lorre.”

The fact is, Marty’s right: Sheen was charged with felony menacing after a Christmas 2009 fight with his wife, Brooke Mueller. He eventually cut a deal and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault.

But to get the full flavor of that episode, let’s revisit the original account:

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“Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday dismissed as ‘ridiculous’ a letter from a Democratic state Senate leader who suggested a meeting ‘near the Wisconsin-Illinois border’ to discuss the state’s budget impasse.” [CNN]

Daily Mail:

A teenager who sent threatening letters to right-wing US politician Sarah Palin has been arrested in her home state of Alaska.

Shawn Christy, 19, from Pennsylvania, had been issued a court order in October warning him to keep away from the Republican former-vice presidential candidate.

But Mrs Palin’s family have revealed that Mr Christy was held by the FBI in Anchorage, 50 miles from her home town of Wasilla. Authorities have ordered him to return to Pennsylvania.

Palin’s father, interviewed by the BBC:

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“Sen. John Ensign is expected to announce at an afternoon news conference in Las Vegas that he will retire rather than face a brutal 2012 re-election campaign, according to knowledgeable sources.” [Roll Call]

In composing Sunday’s Stinque Book Club entry, we were faced with a quandary: What is there to say about professional cretin Dick Morris that hasn’t been said already?

We chose a reader review about Mom listening to an audiobook version filling the presumably lonely rooms of a presumably large house as inspiration: What kind of world do you have to live in for that kind of fetid monologue to fill the air? How thoroughly divorced from reality do you have to be to accept that as anything approaching fact?

We toyed with declaring a significant proportion of Americans to be clinically psychotic, before settling on the observation that the Wingnut Establishment does a much more professional job of turning its audience into cultists than Charles Manson.

And then, Sunday evening, we read this in the Paper of Record:

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Local news: the Psychometer feature is no more.  It has ceased to be.  (Frankly, it has ceased to be for months now.  Now it is official.)

The fault, dear cynics, lay not in the concept, but myself.  We were all gung-ho to track the stupid.  Then real life happened to your humble servant.  Now we look at it and the House segment of the Congressional Record runs to almost 1600 pages.  Sifting through that to find every stupid thing that the GOP said for the record?  Though offers for help came (and thank you, btw), you could put the entire staff of a major metropolitan newspaper to that task, and it would never get done.  Through my overreaching and reality-based sloth, the idea has wasted away, and has now died through my own fault, through my own grievous fault.

So hail and farewell to Psychometer — an ingenious plan that turned into a brilliant mistake.  Sleep well.