1. Butthurt in Rhode Island - abuse of State Resources
This article by Ken White over at Popehat explains how State Representative Scott Guthrie, butthurt and possessed of a hissy-fit by a satirical web site aimed at him, somehow managed to persuade law enforcement to expend significant time and effort on attempting to identify the author of the satire.
There are two problems here; (1) as Ken pointed out, Guthrie is a thin-skinned twit, and (2) the police should never have even started the investigation, knowing that satire, by court rulings at all levels, is protected expression under the First Amendment. Somebody in law enforcement needs to be forced to explain why they pissed away time and money on a wild-goose-chase (and possibly illegal) investigation.

2. When a CBO report says the opposite of what some people would have you believe
GOP partisans and opponents of the PPACA fell upon the recent CBO report like vultures on roadkill, claiming that it says that the PPACA will cost the USA two million jobs. Except that this is NOT exactly what the CBO report says, as this article explains. Yet another example where the need to fit facts into a prior partisan rhetorical framework results in the twisting of said facts. A less polite person might call it juvenile, nihilistic GOP bullshit, but not me...
The PPACA is definitely going to change the work landscape in the USA, and like any major piece of legislation it has already had unintended consequences. However, there are upsides to the legislation, one of them being the erosion of the umbilical link between employment and healthcare, and the ability of creative and artistic individuals to actually be able to sfford healthcare. The US healthcare delivery system is still broken, but it will take more than half a dozen PPACAs to fix that bigger issue, and before a fix can be defined, enough electors in the USA have to actually come to terms with how bad the US is at delivering healthcare.

3. Commuting to work between countries
This article on Gizmodo explains how commuting to work between countries is already a reality in Europe, and how it could become commonplace in the Americas, but that some changes to transportation models are needed first.

4. The Woody Allen - Mia Farrow family dramas
The worst thing about this whole affair is not that it reveals the chronic dysfunctionality in the families of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen (anybody who had not just landed from Mars would have already worked that out), but that both parties to the mess and their children are now conducting a proxy war in public. The right answer would be for all of them to STFU, but I fear that genie is not only out of the bottle, but currently circling the globe at great altitude.
It is not easy to find sober, useful comment on this mess, partly because Woody Allen remains a deeply polarizing figure (people seem to either love or hate the man and his creative works), and partly because the allegations involve both rape and child sexual abuse, which stir powerful and primitive emotions. My blunt assessment, without passing judgement on the validity of the expansive claims being made by either side, is more along the lines of "a plague on both their houses". That may sound like a cop-out, but I am deeply reluctant to go along with the current process, which seems like a variant on "let's try these people in the court of public opinion". I seem to dimly recall that we did that a few hundred years ago when persecuting people for being witches and engaging in satanic practices. I thought that we had matured as a civilisation and dropped that sort of mass hysteria down the mineshaft of history...but there I go being naive again...

5. Blast from the Past #1 - Christian dismissal of Atheists from 2008
It appears to be an article of faith among many confirmed Christians in the USA that Christianity is under attack from evil forces, including (but not limited to) Atheists, who are seen as agents of the Devil or Satan.
This is not a new viewpoint. Back in 1994, when I was working at Texas Instruments in Dallas, I sat patiently at lunch and listened as a fellow IT colleague who had been elected to a local school board, and who seemed to be spending at least 2 hours a day on the phone campaigning to have Creationism inserted into the district's Science curriculum, insisted that Christianity in the modern USA was "under attack". He was not thrilled when I pointed out that the USA is one of the most religion-friendly countries in the modern world. I pointed to all of recent religious groupings that started in the USA (Mormons, Scientologists being just two) and the extent to which religions enjoy financial privileges such as tax exemptions not available to non-religious groups. He went silent, changed the subject, and did not sit at lunch with me any more. Which was a relief, since if he had continued with his bloviations, I might have had to become more pointed in my dismissals.
Lost in all of the huffing and puffing about Christian persecution are occasional incidents that prove that some Christians are, when the mood takes them, cheerfully capable of being dismissive and sometimes offensive towards non-Christians. This incident from a Ford dealership in San Diego in 2008 is a good example. They produced an advert that essentially told Atheists (who they apparently determined were 14% of the population) to Shut Up.
The reaction of the dealership was schizoid in the extreme. After initially appearing to issue a Notpology (the concept of the Notpology is the subject of an article that I am currently writing), they then back-tracked and doubled down on the message behind the advert, reverting to jaw-jutting defiance.
The dealership may have determined that they were more likely to get additional business from Christians if they were rude about Atheists, and that the additional business from Christians would outweigh any additional business from Atheists. Personally, given that the ad writer lived in Oklahoma, which is one of the more overtly Christian states of the union, I have my doubts about whether anybody involved in this did any analysis. However, as a general rule, in any competitive marketplace, it is bad business strategy to gratuitously insult part of your target customer base. No sensible professional advertizing group would propose to advertize for a business by insulting part of that business's target audience.
While there is no constitutional right to not be offended, there is also a fundamental human interaction rule that it is not a good idea to be gratuitously offensive either. Somebody forgot that rule in this case, and the dealership ended up looking like a mean-spirited bunch of Christianist twits.

5. Blast from the Past #2 - The rise of bizarre reasoning in modern America
The author actually has a more blunt term for it, as you will see if you read the article.