Oct. 2: Shirvell’s crusade against a gay college student went national when Shirvell inadvisedly decided to appear on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show to explain himself. Shirvell’s target is Chris Armstrong, the first openly gay student body president of Shirvell’s alma mater, the University of Michigan. Armstrong ran on a platform of expanded dining hall hours and coed student housing. So, of course, Shirvell — an adult, with an important and serious job working for the state of Michigan — started a blog dedicated to proving that this college student is a racist, elitist, Nazi-like recruiter for the cult of homosexuality, and “Satan’s representative on the Student Assembly.” Shirvell also puts “gay” in scare quotes, for some reason …

On Friday Shirvell decided to take a “personal leave,” after which he will face a disciplinary hearing. Let’s hope he uses the time off to think, long and hard, about why, exactly, he’s so obsessed with young Chris Armstrong.

Read the entire entry here.

Feb. 27: Jenny McCarthy is the loving mother of a special-needs child, a staunch supporter of other parents with similar challenges, and a tireless advocate for fierce inquiry into the root causes — and potential treatments — for autism. She’s also the highest-profile member of a camp that lays much of the blame for the enigmatic disorder on childhood immunizations. As such, McCarthy’s been on a bit of a roll lately, ever since Lancet retracted Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s much-ballyhooed 1998 paper that first suggested a correlation between the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and autism, calling the report “dishonest and irresponsible.”

Read the entire entry here.

Dec. 4: John McCain has finally, inexorably stumbled upon the weirdest and most transparently trollish reason yet to oppose the repeal of the military’s ban on gay and lesbian service members: The economy sucks. For those playing along at home, John McCain conditionally supported the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” until Barack Obama got elected and began pushing the Senate to do something about it. Once military leadership told McCain the policy should be repealed, he said he would vote to repeal it, and now that the Republican defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs have told McCain that it should be repealed, he is vowing to fight it with everything he’s got.

Read the entire entry here.

Sept. 4: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer will not participate in a second debate with her Democratic opponents. Which is sad, because that first debate was wonderful television. When Brewer was actually able to form sentences, they were full of nonsense. But things actually got even worse after the debate, when a gaggle of reporters asked Brewer to explain something she refused to respond to in the debate: why she claimed, falsely, that illegal immigrants were beheading people in Arizona, and leaving the bodies in the desert. It is one of the most inept and artless attempts at dodging a question that we have ever witnessed.

Read the entire entry here.

Someday, when historians of the 21st century are writing their hover-textbooks, they will note, gravely, that the darkest moment of its first decade involved Mike Myers, but it wasn’t “The Cat in the Hat.” Yes, a weird, off-script moment of Kanye West awkwardly speaking his mind on live TV apparently defined Bush’s presidency as much as the exact same thing would later define a Taylor Swift song. And in Kanye’s defense, the idea that his ad-libbed response to the horror that was the response to Hurricane Katrina was worse than the actual destruction and death that resulted from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina is significantly crazier than thinking Beyonc

Feb. 12: In a Playboy interview with Rob Tannenbaum, Mayer let loose with a now-infamous litany of wackadoo — most notably boasting that “Black people love me” before clarifying the meaning of “hood pass” as truly a “nigger pass” — and then going on to describe his fondness for white chicks by saying, “My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock.” The reaction to Mayer was swift and unsurprisingly negative. I think my favorite was the Jezebel commenter who described him as a “guano faucet.” Yet even without the whopping sensitivity fail of comparing any portion of oneself to the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan — seriously, are you kidding me? — the entire interview is a gold mine of lunacy.

Read the entire entry here.

June 5: When you’re the guy at the top of the corporate ladder that’s ultimately responsible for spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico (and, soon, probably fouling the East Coast as well), it’s not easy to make your reputation even worse than it already is. But Tony Hayward didn’t get to become CEO of BP by doing what was easy. And so this week, more than a month into the horrific Gulf oil spill, Hayward managed to sink to a new low.

“There’s no one who wants this over more than I do,” the beleaguered oilman told the “Today” show on Sunday. “You know, I’d like my life back.”

Read the entire entry here.

April 3: Being the front-line guy for an organization that’s harbored a truly outstanding number of child rapists can take a toll on a person. And so, as Catholics around the world began the Holy Week sprint toward Easter, the 82-year-old pontiff was sounding a tad defensive. … During a Good Friday service conducted by the pope’s official preacher, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, the pontiff sat quietly while the priest quoted a letter he said came from a Jewish friend. “I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole word,” he said. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.” That’s right — comparing the outrage over real crimes and cover-ups to anti-Semitism. And this from the people who gave you the Crusades!

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Nov. 13: As if he knew that his usual conspiracy-mongering, fake tears and suffocating paranoia just weren’t cutting it anymore, Beck aired a series of shameless attacks on George Soros this week that seemed ripped from the pages of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The message? Financier and philanthropist George Soros is a “puppet master” secretly at the center of a vast conspiracy that aims to destroy our economy and take over the nation through deceit. The proof? A lot of selectively edited quotes, wild innuendo and the fact that Soros “collapsed regimes” in “four other countries.”

Beck knows full well that Soros dedicated his life to promoting democracy in Communist nations, which an avowed anti-socialist like Beck should theoretically be championing him for. But Soros is a progressive, and in the Beck world, progressives are socialists are Maoists are Communists are totalitarians, so any enemy of Soros is a friend of Glenn Beck’s. Insanity makes strange bedfellows.

Read the entire entry here.

Oct. 23: “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. OK, have a good day.”

So went Virginia “Ginni” Thomas’ message for Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas’ husband, Supreme Court Justice Clarence, of sexual harassment 19 years ago. The voice mail was left on Hill’s office phone, at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday, suggesting … well, what, exactly? What did any of this mean? Why would Ginni Thomas even do this? What drives a woman to reopen an ancient public wound via weekend voice mail on a work phone? Gawker immediately concluded that Ginni had been drunk. Jezebel theorized that maybe she’s just stupid. Or, you know, maybe she’s crazy. Most people seem to be going with crazy.

Read the entire entry here.