Though the Time Warner decision had reportedly been threatened due to Current’s low ratings, there’s no denying that at least some segment of the U.S. viewing public has long harbored antipathy toward Al Jazeera. An editorial published today by Fox News runs through the talking points about the network it calls “anti-American terror mouthpiece Al Jazeera.” Among them: “Al Jazeera, known as the network of the Arab Street, is also known for taking anti-American, anti-Israel and pro-terror positions.”

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However, hours after the estimated $500 million deal was made, Time Warner Cable announced that it would no longer carry the Current channel, and thus Al Jazeera's new channel Al Jazeera America would not be distributed by the cable provider. Although the Current deal will still bring Al Jazeera into around 40 million American homes, the Time Warner move constituted a considerable blow for the globally respected network -- Time Warner Cable reaches 12 million homes.

As HuffPo's Michael Calderone reported:

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Bieber was reportedly not even in his white Ferrari when it was pulled over by California Highway Patrol for speeding — a friend of the singer was behind the wheel while Bieber was elsewhere. But the car – and Bieber's vehicular comings and goings – are familiar to local lensmen. In November, Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed a reckless driving charge against photographer Paul Raef, who in July was involved in a high-speed freeway chase in pursuit of Bieber. At the time, Raef's frantic driving, at speeds over 80 mph, prompted several 911 calls. But Robinson ruled that a 2010 law meant to curtail that kind of potentially dangerous behavior, "in pursuit of photos for commercial gain," could conflict with legitimate First Amendment-protected news gathering.

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How often was I right? Even if we can stipulate that there is a “right,” it’s hard to say, since the inconstancy of life synchs unreliably with value judgments that have been frozen in time. What was on the money in 1978 may seem horribly naïve in 1988 and condescending by 2008. Plus, a critic continues to hear and learn long after committing an appraisal to print, and that both alters the context and expands culture’s possibilities. When it comes to records that no longer live clearly in my memory, even going back for a refresher listen promises only a slim chance of summoning up enough sense of who I was and what I knew at the time to extrapolate what I was feeling when I wrote what I did.

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My aunt called the reporters “carrion birds.” My mom was too stunned to say much of anything about them. It fell to me to field their calls: “Columbine,” this thing that wounded 24 and killed 13 and almost took my mother, was an all-day, wall-to-wall media happening. A pair of journalists from the New York Times even used an enrolled student as a ruse. My mom arrived at a coffee shop to tutor a boy who’d been unable to return to school, and there they were, tagging along. Interrupting education. Seeking any small anecdote on murderers the 24-hour news cycle had already turned forever into figures of anti-heroic intrigue.

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Surprise, it's Rush Limbaugh.

On his radio show this afternoon, Limbaugh called the NRA leader "an adult looking for real solutions," and said he was "disrespected" by Code Pink protesters who, he claimed, would never interrupt a hearing on Benghazi.

"No matter what he said, Wayne LaPierre sounded like an adult looking for real solutions, but that's not what this country's interested in right now. Sorry. The adults are not running this show," said Limbaugh.

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But as Erik Wemple points out in the Washington Post today, Lott has not appeared on Fox News or its web site since the Newtown massacre -- but he has been a regular on CNN, on various panels and in much-talked-about arguments with Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan.

Wemple writes:

While Lott has been given ample opportunity on CNN to air his views on the Newtown massacre, he hasn’t yet spoken up on the matter on FoxNews.com. His last column surfaced Dec. 6, a second critique of Costas’ call for a new look at guns. He has written a column on the implications of Newtown — for U.S. News & World Report.

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As Rush details on his web site, Lanza -- whose mother, Nancy, was reportedly a doomsday "prepper" -- either couldn't deal with the possibility of the Mayan apocalypse on Friday or wanted to "save people" from it.

As he pushed this theory, Limbaugh had it both ways. "I'm not espousing it, I just want to bounce off of it." Here's how he bounced:

The theory that Adam Lanza somehow had been convinced the world was gonna end Friday and he was discombobulated by it. His mother was a prepper and a survivalist and showed him guns and he went in there and did what he did to either deal with the pressure of it or maybe save people from the end, who knows what.  It happened in China, is the point.

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CNN named Ryan Lanza as the suspect before noon based on a police source. Within minutes, journalists at several outlets were not only reporting the name, but passing around a link to Ryan’s Facebook account. And people I knew were suddenly telling me, Dude, you are Facebook friends with the suspect.

His wall was set to private so I was one of the only people seeing Ryan post “Fuck you CNN it wasn’t me” and “IT WASN’T ME I WAS AT WORK IT WASN’T ME.” Networks were broadcasting photos pulled from the account on national television. Buzzfeed and Gawker, in a race to snatch traffic, ran headlines speculating if this was the shooter. (Headlines with question marks now being a thing that media does.) I posted a screen shot to Twitter and Facebook to let everyone know that this Ryan Lanza, at least, was not dead at the scene of the crime. That’s when things got crazy for me.

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The producer, Nadine Shubailat, either removed her account or Twitter suspended it. It's now gone. But screen shots of her tweets made her the public face of outrage against the media for invading the privacy of parents in the midst of unbelievable tragedy.

One person, who tweets at @artayd2, became the hero of Twitter for telling Nadine, succinctly (and evoking memories of a Twitter feud between Aimee Mann and Ice-T) to "eat a dick."

Some of our favorite responses are below:

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And for a while there, the fact that every magazine writer and blogger used the Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein comedy show as their go-to metaphor made it a little uncool. Only now "Portlandia" metaphor creep is back. (In a retro and nostalgic way!) Next month, the show returns for Season 3 on IFC, and that means January will bring a wearying new onslaught of references.

But as you'll see, there's almost nothing left to compare to "Portlandia." A street fight has been compared to "Portlandia." The Republican National Convention. Rock bands and classical groups. Restaurants in every city. Waiters. Diners. Authors. Laura Linney. (And, yes, we know! That could be a "Portlandia" sketch itself!)

So before you make the same simile as everyone else, consider this list of recent comparisons fair warning:

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Watching the show’s alternately unconvincing, saccharine, tart and touching plot threads wend toward their conclusion, I steeled myself for the inevitable jolt of violence I’d learned to expect from "Grey’s" and its OB-GYN spinoff, "Private Practice."

To my surprise, the episode ended benignly. Letting down my guard, I settled in to enjoy the twisty political adult soap "Scandal," grateful writer-producer Shonda Rhimes (the force behind "Grey’s" and "Practice") didn’t feel the need to deploy visceral bloody shocks to heighten suspense on her youngest series.

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While the Times' Washington Bureau chief David Leonhardt defended the decision to simply republish an AP wire on the proceedings, Sullivan took the Grey Lady to task. "The testimony is dramatic and the overarching issues are important," she wrote.

Leonhardt told the public editor via email:

As with any other legal case, we won’t cover every single proceeding. In this case, doing so would have involved multiple days of a reporter’s time, for a relatively straightforward story. The A.P. article recounting the main points of Mr. Manning’s testimony about his conditions of confinement that ran on page A3 of The Times conveyed fundamentally the same material as a staff story would have.

However, as Times reader David Morf noted in a reprinted letter, using AP wire copy "let the story bury itself." Following Sullivan's piece, a number of commentators have taken issue with Leonhardt's reference to "any other legal case," since for many Manning's treatment by the U.S. military and his role as a whistle-blower make  his case exceptional.

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On Tuesday, the eternally tasteless Murdoch tabloid plumbed a new depth by running a cover image of Ki Suk Han helplessly clutching the edge of the platform from the tracks, his head turned in the direction of the oncoming car, with the headline, "DOOMED: Pushed on the Subway Track, This Man Is About to Die." Since then, both the image and the ethics of running it have been debated widely in other news outlets and on Twitter. In the New York Times, David Carr aptly condemned the horror of the image of "someone who is doomed, but still among us," saying the Post "milked the death of someone for maximum commercial effect … He ended up run over twice."

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But as repulsive and predictable as that narcissism is, it did inadvertently spotlight a significant problem plaguing our civic discourse. Call it Shut Up and Sing Syndrome.

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On Wednesday, students discovered a handwritten sign on a bathroom stall door in the school's Powell Library that read, "Asian Women are White-Boy Worshipping Sluts." It was the second such incident in as many days. On Tuesday, a sign saying "asian women R Honkie white-boy worshipping Whores" was tacked to a Vietnamese Student Union sign on the campus's Kerckhoff Hall.

It's not the first time UCLA has battled racism, either. Last year, shortly after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, then-student Alexandra Wallace gained YouTube infamy after posting a three-minute diatribe about the "hordes" of Asians in the school library, "going through their whole families just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing," adding, "I'll be typing away furiously, blah blah blah, and then all of the sudden, when I'm about to, like, reach an epiphany, over here from somewhere, 'OHH Ching chong ling long ting tong? OHH.'" (Wallace left the school soon after the clip went viral, saying she'd received death threats.) And last winter, a nearby apartment complex that houses students was defaced with graffiti against "you rude ignorant spic cunts" and "dirty Meximelt bitches."

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Sharon, whose father ordered a withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, called for the blockaded Palestinian region to be annihilated or re-occupied by Israeli troops.

"There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they'd really call for a ceasefire," he wrote. "We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too."

Placing all blame for the current conflict on the people of Gaza, Sharon -- a columnist for Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and a major in the IDF reserves  -- suggests that Palestinians in the region chose and deserve a painful fate, essentially endorsing civilian deaths:

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