Two headlines that were right next to each other in today's NetNewsWire reading:

They meant Aaron Spelling, but still…

Actually, there were several headlines in the news today that prompted double-takes, or would have, if they hadn't been right in front of me:

Tests Negative at Senate Office Building (AP)

Tests for what? Intelligence? Humanity? Hidden brown people?

Georgia governor signs sweeping immigration law (Reuters)

Leave it to Georgia to protect only those immigrants that do the sweeping.

Details Revealed About Huge Dinosaurs (AP)

Who, exactly, had been hiding these details from the public until now?

Purcell clergy ask town to keep praying (The Oklahoman)

Purcell's having a rough time of it, but honestly, are there clergy in any town that ask the residents to stop praying? It's pretty obvious that no one really knows what to make of what happened down there, but that's no reason to turn on the stupid:

Events in Purcell shock suspect's boss (The Oklahoman)

I think it would only be news if the suspect's boss were not shocked that his employee has been accused of killing a 10-year-old neighbor so he could eat her. If the guy thought, "Oh, that sounds about right," then that's news.

Marines fire on mosque to repel assault (CNN)

Who was the mosque assaulting? And last, but not least:

Leizpig to give out condoms at World Cup (Reuters)

Trophies are so passé.

Thank you, thank you; I'll be here all week.

A few months after the Columbia Journalism Review named the Daily Oklahoman to be The Worst Newspaper in America, the paper was looking to restore its credibility. It hired a new executive editor, Stan Tiner, who had a mandate to come in and restore the paper's credibility as an accurate report of news and not the one-sided propaganda of Oklahoma's moneyed interests and the state GOP.

Tiner was fired eight months later, in December 1999, and was replaced by Sue Hale, one of Gaylord family's longest-serving cronies. One of Tiner's last acts as editor was to see the Oklahoman run the first of a planned three-part series on the Karen Silkwood saga.

Silkwood worked for a nuclear plant owned by Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp., which, she charged, had committed safety and security violations. She was killed in a car crash in 1974, reportedly on her way to meet with a journalist. The first article recounts the 1979 federal trial in which Kerr-McGee was found liable for contaminating Silkwood with plutonium.

Mere days later, Tiner was fired, and then:

Ten days after the story ran, an Oklahoman editorial praised Kerr-McGee for its contributions to the state and its citizens.

Tiner, who said the loss of his job was "devastating" but refused to comment, went back to his native Alabama. In May 2000, he took the executive editor position of the Biloxi, MS, Sun-Herald.

On Monday, the Sun-Herald shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Stan Tiner, whom the Gaylords fired, just won the Pulitzer Prize.

The Oklahoman has not won a Pulitzer Prize since 1939, when Charles G. Werner won for Editorial Cartooning. The paper has not even had a finalist for a prize since then.

Lest you think that Biloxi and New Orleans had a shoo-in because of Katrina, note that the Oklahoman did not win any Pulitzers in 1996 for its coverage of the Murrah Building bombing that happened 11 years ago tomorrow. Charles Porter won the prize for Spot News Photography in 1996 for his photographs of that day, including of the late Miss Baylee Almon at the site, and Julia Prodis of the AP was nominated for the Feature Writing prize in 1997 about that photograph. No one from the Oklahoman was even a finalist, although Ed Kelley, the editor whom Tiner replaced, did get to be on the jury for the "Breaking News" prize in 1998, awarded to the Los Angeles Times.

Is it any wonder the state keeps electing Inhofe and Coburn?