Bill Cosby is back in the news! And as cranky as ever. The Atlantic has a loooooong think piece about Cosby by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who incidentally is one of the only tolerable writers about hip hop ever to work outside of the music press. Coates runs down Cosby's whole history, and his transformation from the friendly black face popular with black and white Americans alike to a latter-day Booker T. Washington whose gruff dismissal of things like, you know, racism, rubs a lot of people the wrong way. But the key lesson of the story: whatever you do, don't ask Bill Cosby about Obama!

Global liquor conglomerates, take note: a hastily constructed website is calling for a boycott of Absolut. Run a humorous ad in Mexico and face financial ruin, Pernod Ricard corporation! "Absolut vodka is trying to sell liquor to Mexicans that aspire to control the Southwest United States," reveals boycott organizer William "Yosemite" Gheen. Now if he can only get Matt Sanchez on his side...Despite its insistence on spelling the company's name "Absolute," the website has already attracted more than 120 visits and nearly 7 comments. But its visual and documentary evidence of the brewing Mexican separatist movement that threatens American freedom may be its most powerful tool:

The American Jewish Committee wanted to run a pro-Israel ad on classical radio station WQXR in New York. The ad's opening line is "Imagine you had 15 seconds to find shelter from an incoming missile." The station decided not to run the ad, despite the fact that it has plenty of Jewish listeners. The reason, according to the station's GM? "First, the opening line . . . does not make clear that the potential target of the missile is not our listening area, and as a consequence, runs the risk of raising anxiety in a misleading way." Good to see the radio industry has learned its lesson after that whole "War of the Worlds" fiasco in 1938! This is also why old people should not be allowed to listen to the radio. [NYP]

"The Gawker is the modern day version of Playgirl, a 'straight' publication gay men feel good about buying because they're tired of low quality faggy stuff the pink media puts out." That's former gay porn star and current conservative blogger Matt Sanchez's take, and no facts will get in the way of his analysis! We asked Sanchez, who believes all contributors to Gawker are homosexual, to comment on today's post about all the gays working at the New York Times. And the former Freshmen magazine cover model blows the doors off liberal media lies such as "the Gawker's stance that it is a non-gay website"!

So Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's doughy chief strategist, finally got booted from the campaign last weekend. The majority of her campaign team hated him for some time, so his departure will be welcomed by insiders. They felt that his strategy was unsuccessful, and they were right. But the specific reason for Penn's departure was his idiot move of meeting with the Colombian government, in his day job as CEO of massive PR firm Burson-Marsteller, to represent them on the opposite side of an issue from Hillary Clinton, while running her campaign. And you know what? This moment was inevitable. The very idea of having a man simultaneously running a presidential campaign and an international PR firm is stupid, and never should have happened in the first place. You fools!

Can you imagine if every video posted online had to be reviewed for propriety by a human before it went live? Can you even wrap your mind around the amount of effort that would take, for very little benefit? The people at YouTube can, and they're telling the British Parliament it's an incredibly horrible idea. England called YouTube on the carpet after someone posted a video of London woman getting gang raped in February, and it wasn't promptly removed [Telegraph UK]. That's a serious tragedy, but sometimes the cure can be worse than the malady. Google's lawyer compared the pre-screening idea to posting a policeman on every corner of every city. Bankrupt the treasury in pursuit of justice! It's doubtful the UK would descend into a US-style "We are so tough on crime that we will destroy everything" overreaction. But there is a group who is allowed to post a video titled "Genisis19:4 Gang Rape" on YouTube: Gays4Jesus!

What is the single most repellent image that humans can conjure up? Apparently, it's scorpions. Trendhunter has a list of the Top 50 "Shockvertisements" in recent history—ads that stirred up a controversy. The most common thread, obviously, is sex; but three different campaigns on the list chose to shock people by picturing scorpions. Scorpions that are touching you! Advertisers find that no other bug comes close in its ability to disgust. Below, pictures of the three scorpion ads: one is shocking but effective, one is weird but effective, and one is just misguided.

The Smoking Gun says that the LA Times' big investigative scoop last week implicating Bad Boy records chief Sean "Puffy" Combs in the 1994 shooting and robbery of rival rapper Tupac Shakur was based on fabricated evidence. The site says that James Sabatino (pictured)—an incarcerated con man who appeared as a player in the shooting in the LAT story—is actually a fabulist who forged the FBI reports that the paper relied on to build its investigation.

After witnessing the multi-hued splendor of Tuesday's boys' night, last night's all-girl competition on American Idol was something of a letdown, each contestant virtually indistinguishable from the pageant-ready hopeful who came before her. Even Carly Smithson, the focus of some controversy for having already released a major-label album only to see it flop spectacularly, failed to impress an even-ornerier-than-usual Simon Cowell, who diverged from his two articulation-challenged co-judges to (rightfully) observe, "there's so much hype about you...so much expectation...there's a buzz about you...everything about it for me was a letdown."