Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul appeared on Morning Joe and raised some eyebrows on a bunch of issues with the panel interviewing him. Paul joined Newt Gingrich’s dislike of Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget plan, but for the complete opposite reason: “it just wasn’t enough for me,” Paul said, yet “at least he’s going in the right direction.” Although when the conversation turned to foreign policy things got even more interesting.

On Reddit, the website that arrogantly (but not necessarily incorrectly) calls itself “the voice of the Internet,” discussions are split into various boards or “subreddits” that cater to a specific topic. This morning, in the subreddit based around US politics, a poster wrote in to say that another section of the site was the only one “getting the Obama death right.” The section in question? The Conspiracy subreddit. The reason they were right? The majority of them think the government is lying to us about Osama bin Laden’s death. Forget the birth certificate. An entire generation just got its grassy knoll.

Last week, Rupert Murdoch made headlines when details about his iPad-only newspaper emerged. As Neal Ungerleider writes at Fast Company, though, Murdoch also did something else of note last week: he began “investing in an Israeli-American oil shale company with ties to Dick Cheney.” Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.

Conspiracy theories have something for everyone. For some, these theories, disturbing as they are, are almost comforting in that they seem to show that, however chaotic things get, there’s actually an order to the madness and, even if the people in control have sinister intentions, we can stop them if we just pay close enough attention to the clues. For others, these theories are great because they’re hilarious and sometimes involve reptile people! A new theory gaining traction and being reported by the New York Observer certainly fits into both categories. It proposes that The Simpsons predicted the 9/11 attacks and not just because the show began to get terrible right around the time of that terrible event.

Jesse Ventura‘s TruTV show Conspiracy Theory got contemporary last night when it covered two of today’s most-debated topics: global warming and Climategate. Last week, the show proved that it wouldn’t shy from controversy by taking on 9/11 conspiracy theories. But Ventura had already been on the record as a 9/11 skeptic before the show. With his unique take on global warming, Ventura takes it up a notch:

Jesse Ventura‘s promotional blitz for his new truTV show Conspiracy Theory has been surprisingly political. On last night’s Joy Behar Show, he touched a nerve when he bluntly asked if President Obama “really run[s] the country” given his escalating commitments in Afghanistan. He also stormed out of The Opie and Anthony Show after being heckled by comedian (?) Jim Norton over his antiwar stance; both videos after the jump.

In the midst of promoting his TruTV show “Conspiracy Theory,” Jesse Ventura casually dropped a conspiratorial claim of his own. Speaking to the LA Times, “The Body” told an interviewer that when MSNBC found out that he opposed the war in Iraq, the network “silenced” him by canceling his cable show and refusing to let him broadcast anywhere else:

The 40th anniversary of the moon landing yesterday saw slews of retrospective coverage. But in an effort to “spice things up,” a good number of these stories introduced drama and conflict in the form of moon landing conspiracy theorists, or “truthers,” who believe the whole thing was faked. Let’s take a look.