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Candidate Sen. Barack Obama faced plenty of criticism for being wet behind the ears on national security issues, particularly in contrast to his war hero opponent. And yet the highlight of his tenure so far has been the near eradication of Al Qaeda. On last night’s program, Rachel Maddow looked back on the Obama administration’s terror victories and asks whether the fact that the two leaders killed this weekend had American citizenship should change the legal status of the attacks that killed them.

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It turns out that a recent “birther” sign — which also appeared at the recent Iowa debate in the form of a large billboard — comes courtesy of the folks over at WorldNetDaily, who are not quite the greatest fans of Obama. Maddow described their mission as essentially “trying to make a buck off the more gullible elements of the conservative base.”

She then pointed to some of the group’s previous projects, such as their reports on the need to wage a war on Islam itself rather than on terrorists acting under their own fundamentalist interpretations. Maddow brought on Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, who broke a rather amazing series of reports about how the person behind that WorldNetDaily report has been instructing FBI counter-terrorism officers using ideas prevalent in what Maddow describes as the fringe of the right wing.

Like the proverbial question regarding the tree in the forest, the wedding between bloggers/writers Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) and Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) raises the question: if bloggers marry and it’s not discussed on Twitter, did it really happen?

Just after 4pm yesterday Gawker published an enormously disturbing slide show of photos depicting the “animal house” antics. When I saw the post an hour or so later it had already clocked over 12, 000 views. As of this morning 95,000 plus people have seen it. Yesterday evening a State Dept. spokesperson announced an investigation had been ordered. Was the quick response due to Gawker’s involvement?