Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' ex-girlfriend Rachel Mardsen is the C-Grade Canadian version of Ann Coutler. Her editorial today is the C-Grade Canadian version of trying to be inflammatory to mediocre effect.

Today, the New York Times asks: what's the difference between rappers and talk radio? David Segal—who admits being a huge fan of "gangsta rap"—compares Lil' Wayne to Michael Savage, Ludacris to Glenn Beck, and Jay-Z to Limbaugh.

The most amusing thing about fameballs is when they don't realize their balls have stopped rolling. Such is bulldog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis's lot, as he desperately tries to pose as MySpace's next CEO.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, the premier public intellectual of blindly cheerleading globalization, has been wrong about nearly everything, ever. He is hailed as a foreign policy genius, and of course he was dead wrong on Iraq. He is hailed as a brilliant economist, and maybe he is, but his magical flat global future looks increasingly like the wet dream of a guilty rich liberal who doesn't want to hear about inequality that can't be solved by internet access. His most stunning insights are banal cliches, often attributed to cab drivers in exotic (developing) foreign locales. But we have to hand it to him: his joke about Sarah Palin and oil drilling is pretty funny! It is so funny, in fact, that he delivered it 500 times last week, from Letterman on through the Sunday shows. Let's all congratulate Thomas Friedman on his very first joke! Chant with him: CARBON PAPER CARBON PAPER CARBON PAPER!

Now that Hurricane Gustav seems to have safely blown past New Orleans and Baton Rouge, we can turn our attention to ridiculing TV journalists who pointlessly risked life and limb to set up more of those clichéd, wind-whipped hurricane-reporting shots. Even CNN can't resist making fun of those guys, and it employs half of them. The Washington Post said storms tend to produce a "High Chance of Blowhards" and added that "no one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle." True, but that's just because there are firemen and soldiers to keep journalists out of those dangerous situations. They'd totally shoot there if they could! Click the video icon to watch some of the most insane moments so far.

How high is Jason Calacanis on his new videoblogger? "Veronica Belmont is a Rojas-level hire," he reportedly told groupies who showed up for a dim sum dinner in New York's Chinatown yesterday. That may sound like praise for Belmont, the videoblogger he hired away from CNET. But it's really more egotism. The thing you need to know about Jason Calacanis, the boy from Brooklyn who moved to Tinseltown, is that he fancies himself a new-age Hollywood mogul for the Web. Like a studio boss of old, he hopes to manufacture stars. Take, for example, his flashy hire of Peter Rojas away from Gizmodo (like Valleywag, a site published by Gawker Media) to run Engadget. Calacanis parlayed Engadget into a blog network, Weblogs Inc., which he then sold for $25 million to AOL. As an AOL executive, when Amanda Congdon left Rocketboom, he publicly offered her a videoblogging deal — which never panned out. Now, with Belmont, Mahalo's new videoblogger, Calacanis again wants to create a new star. He's fooling himself.

Parents, your kids aren't safe anywhere, at any age. Toddlers put their fingers in outlets. Teens will act on their hormones. Twentysomethings will take jobs at Gawker Media. It's your responsibility to prevent such catastrophes from happening. Politicians will not help. Take New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, for example. Facebook today agreed to cooperate with Cuomo's office in an investigation targeting online sexual predators. This might make parents feel better about their children's safety. After the jump, why It shouldn't.