So enjoy.

Probably the only thing funnier than Wanda Syke’s joke about Rush Limbaugh last night is watching uptight commentators analyze its seriousness.

Regardless of the level of the contrived outrage, Wanda Sykes must be loving this. If you’re a comedian, there’s gotta be nothing better than getting a huge laugh, a national headline, and a television debate discussing whether or not you went over some metaphorical line.

Number of Americans that have died of regular flu this year: 13,000

This pretty much buries the imaginary feud between ESPN’s two most famous writers, Bill Simmons and Rick Reilly, or as I refer to them respectively, “the writer who gets paid millions of dollars a year to write 800 words per week” and “the writer who gets paid millions of dollars a year to record podcasts and never writes anything.”

This may sound weird–but hear me out–I was relieved to see Osama bin Laden reappear again on the news today. After a long absence, he released a brief audio tape challenging our soon-to- be President Barack Obama to catch him (although he didn’t stoop to calling him a “house negro” like al-Qaeda honcho #2 ). No, I am not relieved he is alive and I will be much more relieved when he is dead, but I was just happy to see a villain in the news I can whole heartedly root against. Strangely, these days really evil villains are hard to come by.

First, there is Hot Rod Blagojevich who is everything a politician shouldn’t be, yet I can’t help but root for at least a prolonging of his political life. His crimes have been well reported and are too numerous to mention here, but put it this way–a person’s evilness is never in doubt when their least known transgression is trying to extort money from a children’s hospital. He deserves to rot in prison, but I still find myself looking forward to his inevitable circus-like appearances on the nightly news. Blagojevich knows he’s eventually going down–afterall he is caught on wiretaps trying to sell a Senate seat to the highest bidder–so he is relishing every minute in front of the cameras and bringing everyone along for the ride.

Last week after somehow outwitting the United States Senate Majority Leader into seating his tainted appointment Roland Burris (see I want to play poker with Harry Reid for more details), he was impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives. Instead of admitting defeat, he held one of his now famous surreal press conferences where he literally trotted out ten near death hospital patients behind his podium and declared, “The House’s action today and the causes of the impeachment are because I’ve done things to fight for families who are with me here today,” he said with the confidence and bravado of a righteous moral crusader. Yes, he actually accused every representative (except one, the vote for impeachment was 114-1) of being anti-sick people.

Throw in the fact Blagojevich has been ending these pressers by quoting poems from memory by Tennison and Kipling for no discernible reason and you have a much more entertaining and outragous soap opera than anything seen on daytime TV. As I have said before, you literally can’t make this stuff up.

But the other public enemy story in the news this week you can make up and apparently John Grisham already did. A financial scam artist named Marcus Schrenker was feeling the pressure of the Feds from one side and the clients he had swindled from the other, so he decided to fake his own death.

Schrenker flew alone on board a small plane that took off for Florida from Anderson, Indiana, on Sunday.

As the plane crossed over Alabama, he made the fake distress call, put the plane on autopilot and parachuted out, investigators said.

The empty plane then crashed in a swamp near a housing development in Milton, Florida. No-one was injured.

Meanwhile, Schrenker parachuted safely to the ground near the city of Harpersville, Alabama, where he got a police officer to drive him to a hotel.

He had already stashed a motorbike in a storage unit near that hotel and fled before local police learned of the plane crash.

An affidavit attached to the charges said that the red motorbike Schrenker drove carried saddlebags stocked with maps, survival paraphernalia, military ready-to-eat meals and what appeared to be a bullet-point script for his distress call.

Sure, he duped many people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but a daring parachute jump from a prop plane before purposely crashing it into a mountain!? How can you not root for him to escape? Unfortunately for him, he jumped about two hours before the plane actually crashed, leaving time for the Air Force to scramble jets to see what the distress call was all about. Realizing the plane was empty, they figured something was up. Needless to say, he is now in police custody.

Here’s hoping he has enough dare left in him to attempt a prison break.

Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs: Volume Eight of the Bootleg Series is Rolling Stone’s second best album of the year:

This is one of Dylan’s most consistently gripping albums, even though it is a roundup of outtakes and orphaned songs, many cut for the haunted triumphs Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. Like any night on his Never Ending Tour, each track is a fresh portrait of Dylan at the crossroads, cutting new roads in rhyme, tempo and emotional emphasis: the introspection of “Most of the Time,” the looming apocalypse of “Ring Them Bells” and the heavy weight of “Ain’t Talkin’.” The veering tempers of Dylan’s medicine- rattle rasp are a wonder to themselves. His enraged growl in the piano demo of “Dignity” — “In the next room a man fightin’ with his wife/Over dignity” — sounds like he’s ready to jump right in.

Essentially, Bob Dylan is so good, even the shit he leaves off his albums is better than what everyone else releases on purpose.

Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser was one of the youngest people to be tenured at Harvard and later became its president. His budget director went to Princeton and the London School of Economics, his choice for ambassador to the United Nations was a Rhodes scholar, and his White House counsel hit the trifecta: Harvard, Cambridge and Yale Law.

It looks like Obama had the gall to pick the smartest people for some very complicated and demanding positions. Sounds horrible.

At least some “conservatives” think so:

The Ivy-laced network taking hold in Washington is drawing scorn from many conservatives, who have in recent decades decried the leftward drift of academia and cast themselves as defenders of regular Americans against highbrow snobbery.

This is a prime example of the growing Pro-Dumb contingent of the Republican Party. The smart ones have been jumping off the sinking ship in droves for months now, so there’s no one’s to stop the increasingly influential ignorance pushers (read: Sarah Palin) from railing against quality education for the next four years! I can’t wait to see their results in 2012.