bye In the 16 months since we launched Mediaite, there have been certain topics that we as a site (and me, in particular) have taken a major, sometimes obsessive, interest in. As I head out today, I want to connect what I see as the common thread between some of my favorite topics to cover.

The average age of the Supreme Court is currently 64, a year shy of retirement age. Yet that's still no excuse for the bench to be completely clueless when it comes to social media. So it was a bit disheartening when Justice Stephen Breyer revealed that he and his colleagues can't quite grasp modern technology. As he said in a speech at Vanderbilt, "If I'm applying the First Amendment, I have to apply it to a world where there's an Internet, and there's Facebook." Hey, that's this world! He continued, "And there are movies like The Social Network, which I couldn't even understand."

Imagine 233 people getting onboard a flight with "assault rifles, pistols, and machine guns" but getting hung up at a TSA checkpoint over a nail clipper? A post on Red State tells a tale so deliciously outrageous--and hilarious--that it almost doesn't matter whether it really happened or not, though Erick Erickson insists it involves a person he knows, and it really did happen.

Stephen Colbert awarded NPR with a Medal of Fear at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last month. Because nobody from that organization was ostensibly at the rally (though there were, in fact, NPR journalists covering the event on the ground), Colbert ended up giving the medal to a random seven-year-old girl. But now, after 20 medal-less days, a brave NPR staffer has finally obtained the award and brought it home to her company's headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Seeking to make hay out of Willow Palin's Facebook misadventure, among other things, Bonnie Goldstein, Editor of Politics Daily's "Woman Up" blog, writes that the Palin teens "lack supervision," and that "Sarah Palin may want to budget a companionable nanny for the older children." While we predicted that some would level this attack, it seems counterintuitive that a blog devoted to women's issues would not only see the Palin kids as fair game, but would then perpetuate the sexist notion that parenting is the sole purview of the mother. Todd Palin's name never comes up.

Sarah Palin's next bestseller, America By Heart, isn't out until Tuesday, but Palin haters and the lamestream media are already leaking portions of it. One fun nugget? Palin enjoys movies like Knocked Up and Juno - films featuring unplanned pregnancies, and decisions not to have an abortion.

Maybe you've heard about the touching of the junk? A new Twitter account, @tsagov, (Bio: "We pat your groin. We see you naked. We're the doormen to the sky. Why? Because everybody is a terrorist.") has just cleared its first 300 tweets, but has already cleared 5,000 followers.

video Republican leaders, citing "scheduling conflicts," skipped an invitation to a bipartisan meeting with President Obama and Democratic leaders at the White House yesterday. One such pressing engagement was a press conference to roll out the new GOP House leadership. While Boehner only touched briefly on the subject of the Bush tax cuts, he also held forth on blocking appropriations, Charlie Rangel's ethics hearing, repealing health care reform, and a priceless dodge of a question about the government's successful bailout of GM.

CBS News has an interesting story of a gay couple who cleverly skirted anti-gay marriage laws on a Virgin Airlines flight today. The plane's captain briefly flew into Canadian airspace where he married the couple right there in the sky.

"We have concrete indications of a series of attacks planned for the end of November," said German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, warning of a terrorist attack on par with that of Mumbi. The country is preparing for such an event, beefing up security and taking extra precautions. "What we are basically preparing ourselves for," he said, "is that terrorists coming from abroad [will] commit an attack soon after arrival."

Lest anyone believe that "culture war" is a quaint media narrative from yesteryear, we now see ourselves watching was slacked jaw a new battle emerge between the hitherto staid and erudite NPR and the now dominant and influential Fox News. Yesterday saw Fox News chief Roger Ailes refer to executives at NPR as "Nazis" in a (too?) candid interview with Howard Kurtz. Ailes later apologized for his comments to the Anti-Defamation League, but refrained from apologizing to NPR, which has elicited a response after the jump.

video It was clear who James Carville supported during the 2008 Democratic primary, squarely for Sen. Hillary Clinton over Sen. Barack Obama. So how much has changed? After telling an old campaign joke, Carville went on CNN to reiterate "I'm not sorry and I don't apologize."

Diamond Dallas Page is a three-time world champion in the WCW and wrestled for several years in the WWF, but his post-wrestling career has really taken off – and in an unusual way.

video If you don't watch the absolutely hilarious videos that The Onion puts online under the Onion News Network banner, then you are missing out. They've got every bit of the brilliance of the print version, as well as the having the images move and there being sound and stuff. Well, they've now released the a promo for their upcoming series on IFC, which is the first of two new television projects for the company (the other being a sports show on Comedy Central). As expected, the new series looks pretty darn great.

this exists The consumer advocacy site The Consumerist always has all sorts of stories about ridiculous frauds and double dealings and the like, but today they found a story that has absolutely everything: deceit, family drama, backstabbing, and, most importantly, girls dancing around in bikinis made out of bacon. Basically, if Shakespeare was still alive, he would totally be writing a play about the man who held a "bacon bikini" contest for a bogus charity and was then brought down by a nosy reporter and his own daughter.

exclusive Glenn Beck's reign as arguably the most successful media figure author has continued with his recent book Broke. While Broke broke his streak of #1s on the New York Times Bestsellers List, ending it at an unprecedented six in a row (and coming in #2 behind Keith Richards), he'll have another shot with a new book in January.

President Barack Obama's latest book is a 40-page tribute to great Americans that's aimed at kids between four and eight years old. One of the President's choices is apparently a controversial one, according to Fox News' opinion site Fox Nation: Sitting Bull, who Obama calls "a Sioux medicine man who healed broken hearts and broken promises" and Fox Nation calls an "Indian chief who defeated [a] U.S. general".

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) is currently the talk of Twitter after someone with access to his account tweeted (uncensored) "U love torturing me with this sh*t." The tweet was quickly deleted, and an apology issued, but not before the enigmatic missive was widely re-tweeted. While Dodd's Twitter feed quickly announced "From Dodd Staff - Apologies to Dodd's followers, last tweet was not from Chris Dodd," the errant tweet is already fodder for Twitter jokesters like Slate's Dave Weigel, who tweeted "Members of all parties can agree that no one should torture Chris Dodd with sh*t. #genevaconventions." The real question: where did the tweet come from? (h/t Michelle Malkin)

Finally, there's something that both the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life camps can agree on (besides the fact that the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are patently ridiculous). That something is the fact that this is really creepy and gross. Last night, Gawker reported on a Minneapolis couple who is letting Internet users vote on whether or not they should have an abortion.

video Sometimes all it takes to launch another wave of talk about a hot topic is an image. And when it comes to junk grabbing, that picture comes to us today from Denver. The Denver Post, in a front-page story Thursday morning, captures the entire debate over intensive hand-pat searches with one shot: a TSA employee with his gloved hand firmly in the junk zone of a passenger who remains--for his sake--happily unidentifiable. The TSA worker even seems to be struggling--his face fixed in a disturbing grimace.