Even in the age of the Internet, local television news remains the top source of information for Americans. And it's almost undoubtedly the worst, a festering stew of fearmongering and triviality, with the occasional waterskiing squirrel thrown in. So for your Friday amusement, via The Hairpin, here is a local news crew in Indianapolis, but most particularly the weather guy, freaking the heck out over a spider. Watch as his fear turns to panic, and then to sheer terror:

Hapless presidential candidate Rick Santorum is not a happy man. Watch how he talks about same-sex marriage, even before being challenged, in this video taken at an event at Penn State (via Andrew Sullivan):

Washington is full of people who try to get politicians to adopt their ideas. That's one of the reasons the Prospect was founded, in fact -- to create a forum for progressives to have serious discussions about government and politics, in the hopes that the ideas generated might eventually be translated into policies that solve problems. But it's hard to get politicians' attention -- they're seldom deep thinkers, and they always have more immediate concerns.

Last week's New Yorker had an article by Jeffrey Toobin about Clarence and Virginia Thomas, which discusses how Mrs. Thomas has developed a career as a conservative activist advocating on many of the issues that come before the court on which her husband sits:

A good article by Manny Fernandez and Emily Ramshaw details some ways in which Rick Perry's federalist views have yielded to other priorities:

In one of his more well-publicized shifts, Mr. Perry proclaimed that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide, but backtracked in recent weeks and now says he supports a federal amendment banning gay marriage. He has also signaled support for various federal actions to restrict abortion rather than leaving the issue to states. And he used $17 billion in federal stimulus money to balance the state’s last two budgets.

War has offered the opportunity for profiteering pretty much since the most sophisticated weapons technology at man's disposal was a spear. But the level of that profiteering these days is truly spectacular. This new report from the Center for Public Integrity explains just how your tax dollars are shoveled into the coffers of KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary that provides things like food to troops overseas. You see, when you start a war, you don't really know everything you're going to need. So the military retained KBR on what's called a Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP: