USA Today is reporting that Cold War era paranoia is alive and well in today’s society (albeit modified to accommodate the more ambiguous range of threats we face today) in the form of a booming underground bunker industry. But these aren’t your average hole-in-the-desert bunkers, mind you. These are bona fide luxury comfort subterranean shelters.

Turns out we’re not as addicted to narcissistic social media sites as we like to think, at least not where money’s concerned. Social media researchers from the University of Southern California are reporting that no one, as in exactly 0% of the people surveyed, would be willing to pay for previously free web apps like Twitter.

Lately, Facebook seems to be having a bit of trouble with its automated censoring program. After inadvertently deleting a note by Sarah Palin last week, Facebook is now blocking users from creating pages with the word “Palestinian” in the page title.

Calling all aspiring media buffs! Mediaite is seeking editorial interns to join us for Fall 2010.

Based on the website Slap Cory (where visitors can ‘slap’ some sense into infamous Aussie party boy Cory Worthingtom), Slap A Pollie allows the politically vexed to slap a cartoon depiction of either Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard or Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

The New York Times is reporting a gain in second quarter profits for its parent company, Times Co., over last year’s second quarter numbers. Though your initial reaction might be to jump and cheer for this apparent sign of recovery in the world of print media, The Awl suggests you instead take the report with a grain of salt.

In light of how smooth (and, let’s be honest, boring) Elena Kagen’s confirmation hearings were, it’s really too bad that this new study by University of California, Berkeley, School of Law didn’t come out sooner. In the new study, Berkeley Ph.D student Douglas Spencer and research partner concluded that law schools “hire more openly liberal professors than they do openly conservative ones.”

Given that Foreign Policy is known for insightful international-related news and analysis, FP blogger and Council on Foreign Relations member David Rothkopf’s latest post stands out like a sore thumb. His premise, that “The Tea-bagger worldview makes Pakistan a much more natural place for them to live than America,” is, admittedly, a funny proposition, but Rothkopf takes the joke too far.

Just when you thought BP couldn’t sink any lower, think again. Yesterday, John Aravosis of AmericaBlog reported that a photo of BP’s crisis response room in Houston was doctored to look both busier and more recent.

Lately, the media has been eating up the doom and gloom projections for Democrats in the November 2010 election, so much so that you kind of have to wonder to what degree it might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ironically, however, conservative Charles Krauthammer predicts a not-so-gloomy future for Obama and the Democratic Party, regardless (and maybe even because of) what will likely happen in November.

When you think of alleged Tiger Woods mistresses (all 14+), Donald Trump isn’t exactly the next thing that comes to mind. And yet, low and behold, there is a connection! Today, alleged mistress and Extra special nightlife correspondent Rachel Uchitel has confirmed to Gossip Cop that she received a personal invitation from Mr. Trump to appear on the next season of Celebrity Apprentice and, pending a final okay from NBC, will accept.

Past is prologue, as they say. Yesterday the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee released over 1,000 pages of declassified committee transcripts from 1968 in which committee members, frustrated with the seemingly endless Vietnam War and increasingly suspicious of the circumstances under which they voted to allow an escalation of that war, vented and debated launching a potentially damning investigation into the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

According to Wired contributing editor Jonah Lahrer, today’s political discourse has become “one big study in cognitive dissonance.” In a blog post yesterday, Lahrer expanded on a fascinating recent article in the Boston Globe that examines how cold hard facts often bolster misinformed opinions rather than correct them, especially in the political sphere.

In his latest New York Times column, Thomas Friedman takes semi-comedic offense at the fact that the Russians still want to spy on the United States, noting that there are plenty of other countries who’s educational systems, bureaucracies, financial markets, and internet resources are outperforming ours. Russia isn’t one of them.

The Associated Press reports that in a town-hall meeting with constituents on Sunday, Sen. David Vitter stated that he supports lawsuits from “conservative legal organizations” challenging President Barack Obama’s citizenship. So Sen. Vitter is a birther now?

Last week, five independent investigations cleared the scientists involved in the Climategate scandal from allegations that they had tampered with their research in order to prove global warming. But CNN’s Howard Kurtz, notes a disparity between the amount of coverage Climategate received when the controversy first broke last year and the amount of media attention it’s getting now.

Thank you, Scientific Community, for brightening up our Friday afternoon with this wonderfully hilarious proving-what-we-all-secretly-suspected study. Published this year by a group of Israeli scientists from the University of Haifa’s Department of Communication, the study proves there’s a link between the attractiveness of political figures and how much attention the media lavishes upon them.

Not only is Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich a master of silly, short-lived enterprises (see both his run on Celebrity Apprentice and his attempt to live tweet his own corruption trial), but he’s also apparently a master of procrastination. Testifying at his trial yesterday, Blagojevich’s former deputy governor Robert Greenlee said Blagojevich took to hiding in the bathroom and cutting out of work early to avoid his budget director and other aides.

Gerald Posner has succeeded where many others have failed: finding a new job in a bad economy. Earlier this year, the former Daily Beast chief investigative reporter resigned amidst a massive plagiarism scandal. Five months on, Posner seems to be settling into his new job as the Karzai family lawyer. No, we’re not kidding

Nevada’s new GOP Senate Candidate Sharron Angle doesn’t seem to like old Tea Party affiliate Sharron Angle. But her opponent, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, isn’t about to let the new Sharron Angle forget her past. The campaigns have had an amusing back and forth this week over Reid’s latest campaign weapon: Angle’s pre-nomination website.

In a long, detailed post on Monday, Arianna Huffington decided to revisit both the facts of a month-old “dust up” between herself and Liz Cheney on This Week as well as PolitiFact’s subsequent reporting on the exchange. In particular, Huffington took issue with PolitiFact’s “Half True” ruling on her assertions to Cheney that Halliburton had defrauded American taxpayers of “hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq”.

Among the dominant themes in America’s polarized media is conservatives’ outrage over their perceived ideological persecution by their counterparts on the left. Today, the National Review Online’s Dennis Prager exported that notion of perceived injustice to the world stage in his column, “The Difference Between ‘World Opinion’ and Left-Wing Opinion.”

Campaign ads (especially the bad ones) are the highlight of every campaign season. And today, New Hampshire’s Republican candidate for Senate Jim Bender has released one for the annals of awful campaign videos. The ad features Uncle Sam gorging himself on various cakes shaped like banks, ambulances, personal checks, and college diplomas. Supposedly it’s meant to represent the federal government “feasting” on everything from businesses to kids’ college loan programs.

Texas Republican Rep. Louis Gohmert is scared of babies. Specifically, the unborn children of supposed terrorists. Twice in the past week, Gohmert has made the case that our national security is at risk from a nefarious terrorist plot involving pregnant women flying to the U.S. on tourist visas to have their babies, thus granting the newborns U.S. citizenship, and then returning home to raise their little U.S. citizens to someday come back and “blow us all up.”

John Stossel’s latest column, “Entrepreneurship Helps Make America Great,” fails to articulate much of anything past a general “Yay, America!” sentiment and winds up unintentionally insulting down-on-their-luck Americans rather than inspiring them.