The News Just Keeps Getting More Weird

The meltdown of Toronto's cocaine-addicted Mayor Rob Ford has been an entertaining distraction, but the sad news is that it's not an isolated event. We learn today that a freshman Republican congressman from Florida, Trey Radel, was arrested in Washington, D.C. on Halloween night for possession of cocaine. Radel blames the arrest on an alcoholism problem and the stress of the debate in Washington over health care reform and the government shutdown. The real curiosity is how he managed to keep news of his arrest a secret for nearly three weeks.

In Virginia, the stressed out son of Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds, the Democratic Party's candidate for governor in 2009, nearly stabbed his father to death before turning a gun on himself and taking his own life. The 24-year old Austin Deeds had taken time off from college to work full-time for his father's campaign for governor. According to the Washington Post, a magistrate had issued an emergency detention order on Monday to have Deeds' son hospitalized after a psychiatric evaluation but they were unable to find a hospital that could spare a room to treat him. Deeds and his son were reportedly very close despite Deeds' divorce from his son's mother and subsequent remarriage to another woman.

Former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris had a stressful day as well. Her 68-year old husband, Anders Ebbeson, a successful businessman from Switzerland, took his life today in the couple's Sarasota home. Harris' husband reportedly had suffered unspecified health problems in recent years. Harris bowed out of politics after an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Harris stirred controversy while in Congress when she claimed during a speech in 2004 that a Middle Eastern man had been arrested for trying to blow up the Midcontinent ISO in Carmel, a claim denied by state and local officials. It was never clear who the source was for Harris' claim.

The stress of the battles in Washington seem inconsequential to President Barack Obama. He remains the pathological liar and narcissist the nation's voters foolishly entrusted with the presidency. His repeated lies and finger-pointing regarding his train wreck of a health care law reminds us of how Nancy Pelosi told us that we needed to pass the Affordable Care Act in order to find out what was in the bill. Apparently, Emperor Obama no longer needs a Congress to make laws. Anything the public learns that's in his health care law that becomes untenable to defend, Obama simply issues an edict amending the law. Nobody even seems to question the constitutionality of the chief executive's actions.

During a teleconference yesterday with the faithful discussing his health care law, Obama made an outlandish claim that over 100 million, or one-third of the entire American population, have enrolled in Obamacare. The real number is closer to 100,000, but who's going to quibble over the numbers. Like the time he claimed to have campaigned in all 57 states, the media brushed this whopper off as a flub that required no official response from the White House to clarify the President's obvious misstatement. The Organizing for Action political action committee, whose adherents were participating in the conference call, made the incredulous claim that over 200,000 followers were participating in the President's pep talk, apparently undeterred by the fact that the Healthcare.org website was down once again.

Speaking of lies, remember when a number of observers doubted the unemployment statistics released by the Census Bureau in the months preceding the 2012 general election, which showed the unemployment rate tumbling, only to be labeled by Obots and the lamestream media as tin-foiled hat wearers? Well, it now turns out that the conspiracy nuts were right. The New York Post reports that the Census Bureau caught an employee fabricating data that goes into the unemployment rate calculation two years before the November election. According to the Post, the deception extended beyond that single employee and escalated in the months immediately prior to the election. One of the employees caught faking the numbers, Julius Buckmon, says he was instructed to fabricate data by higher-ups at the Census Bureau. If they can fabricate Obama's entire biographical narrative and get by with it, why wouldn't they fabricate government statistics to make The One's record appear better than it really is?

While we're on the subject of conspiracy theories, the strange deaths of "Clueless" actress Brittany Murphy and her husband in 2009 just got more bizarre. An LA coroner's report claimed that Murphy died of natural causes after suffering from pneumonia and anemia. Her husband, Simon Monjack, died of pneumonia a few months later. Investigators blamed black mold in the couple's homes for their illnesses and deaths, a claim denied by family members. Murphy's father now claims that toxicology test results taken using hair samples from Murphy showed the presence of heavy metals consistent with rat poisoning. Prior to their deaths, Murphy and her husband, an immigrant, had become paranoid that someone was tapping their phone and spying on them. It turns out that the couple was under investigation for marriage fraud by the Department of Homeland Security.

Here's where it gets really strange. Murphy is tied to a DHS whistle blower, Julia Davis, who claimed several years earlier that U.S. border patrol officials knowingly allowed a large number of illegal immigrants with ties to al Qaeda to cross the border with Mexico illegally. The government retaliated against Davis and launched an investigation of her and her husband for marriage fraud, claiming Murphy as a source that Davis had illegally helped Murphy's husband obtain work on a movie. Davis is a Ukranian-born immigrant to the U.S. The government's retaliation against Davis for whistle blowing included descending on her home for a raid with a Blackhawk helicopter and 27 armed agents during which they broke down the doors of her home and assaulted her parents. Davis' father was taken into the desert and held during the raid where he suffered heart complications and later died. A friend of Davis' who filmed the raid later died under suspicious circumstances. Davis eventually prevailed in a court of law on her retaliatory claims against the government but not before Davis, family members and witnesses were subject to continuous aerial surveillance by Blackhawk helicopters, vehicular surveillance, Internet activity monitoring and warrantless searches and seizures. It's all enough to make you wonder what happened to the country we once thought of as a beacon of freedom for the world.