Talk about commitment. Nearly ten years ago, Gary Weddle, a teacher in Washington state, witnessed the horror of September 11th and vowed not to shave until Osama bin Laden was captured or proven dead. Thinking it would take the United States only a couple of months at most to bring bin Laden to justice, Weddle didn’t think his vow was that big of a deal. Fast forward a decade later and Weddle, truly a man of his word, still never shaved . . . until last night.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made waves yesterday when he suggested before the U.N. General Assembly that the U.S. government may have orchestrated the terrorist attacks of September 11. (Maybe the Iranian leader was still stinging because President Obama never responded to a message) Ahmadinejad sent shortly after he was elected to the American presidency.

There’s a media storm brewing over a Florida church’s plan to hold a “Burn a Quran Day” event this Saturday, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Tonight on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the host took aim at the event, but not from the religious-freedom perspective some viewers would expect.

Today, the White House announced that President Obama would be spending September 11th attending memorial services at the Pentagon which he also did last year. Many in the media are speculating that this decision was made to avoid possible protests if he spent the day at Ground Zero. On Fox News, Lou Dobbs likened the move to a president hiding himself in “a bunker.”

This week, the New York Times Magazine was dedicated to their newly traditional Year In Ideas thinkpiece. It’s always a fantastic collection of new discoveries, shifts in ways of thinking, and products that we’re likely to hear more about in years to come. It tries, in many ways, to be predictive; to isolate still-germinating concepts [...]

Season’s greetings from Glenn Beck! On his show that aired Friday, November 27th, the Fox News host asked his audience to imagine a terrorist attack on the United States, pretending that we’d “be as lucky as we were with the World Trade Center where everybody was gone or most people were gone.”

Last night, Countdown host Keith Olbermann named Beck his “Worst Person” in the recurring segment, which in itself is not news. But last night he used language that is rarely used towards another person on a news program. After calling out Beck for “invoking 9/11 just to oppose health care reform,” Olbermann ended by telling him to “Go to Hell.” Wow.

Eight years ago Philip Bump was living in California and woke up to the already-burning Twin Towers – a moment that would have seemed dream-like had it not been instantaneously jarring.

Like a growing number of others in a time obsessively concerned with the “digital divide”, he went to his desktop computer to get more information. Unlike many others, though, he took screen grabs of the sites as he visited them.