Yesterday in Pierce County:

The 2-year-old mystery surrounding the disappearance of Susan Powell might forever lack answers after police said her long-investigated husband, Josh Powell, set his house on fire Sunday afternoon, killing himself and his two young boys moments after a caseworker brought them for a supervised visitation.... Three bodies, believed to be those of Powell and his sons, Charlie, 7, and Braden, 5, were found in the same room in the house, authorities said.

Santorum in January:

For the second time in as many days, Rick Santorum waded into the issue of gay marriage, suggesting it was so important for children to have both a father and mother that an imprisoned father was preferable to a same-sex parent. Citing the work of one anti-poverty expert, Santorum said, "He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children's lives." At a private boarding school Friday, the Republican presidential candidate's voice grew emotional as he argued that only a man and woman should be able to marry... [Three] students in the audience had gay parents.

Thank goodness those boys had a father. Lesbian moms—or lesbian foster parents—would've been tragic.

In fact, I believe it was still illegal for gay couples to adopt back when this straight 48-year-old millionaire adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend:

The multimillionaire trust-fund heir adopted his 42-year-old girlfriend Heather Laruso Hutchins last fall, after being accused of drunk driving in a 2010 accident that left 23-year-old Scott Wilson dead. Goodman is being sued by Wilson’s parents for wrongful death. According to police reports, Goodman ran a stop sign on February 10, 2010 in Wellington, Florida and smashed into Wilson, sending his car into a canal.

Scott Wilson, a 23-year-old graduate of the University of Central Florida, was killed in 2010
Circuit Judge Glenn Kelly had previously ruled that the trust funds set up for his two biological children were off-limits in the lawsuit, according to the Palm Beach Post. Court papers show that Goodman adopted Ms Hutchins in October of last year, CBS12.com reported. ‘My reaction was that it was both awful and brilliant,’ Belray Beach adoption attorney Charlotte Danciu told CBS12.com. The adoption papers state that Hutchins, now a legal child of Goodman, is immediately entitled to at least a third of his trust.

Is incest against the law in Florida? (Thanks to Slog tipper Tim.)

It was the French philosopher Foucault who noted that the West as a whole didn't have something like the ars erotica of the Near and Far East...

• The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife by Hosukai

For my readers...

Mitt Romney:

Because every child deserves a mother and a father, we step forward by recognizing that marriage is between a man and a woman.

Illinois:

Fiedler walked out of her home and saw her next-door neighbor Sara McMeen standing over a baby on the ground. “I asked her, ‘Is everything all right?’” Fiedler recalled Saturday. “She said: ‘No, everything is not all right.’” Then McMeen did the unthinkable, Fiedler said. “She put the gun to the baby and she shot it.” Those chilling details echoed through the quiet streets of a rural community 90 miles southwest of Chicago that woke up Saturday still grappling with the aftermath of what police said was a murder-suicide the day before that left five people dead. McMeen, 30, was killed. So was her boyfriend, Daniel Warren, 29, and their daughter Maggie Warren, 10 months. McMeen’s other two children Skyler Lemke, 8, and Ian Lemke, 7, were also dead, according to Livingston County Coroner Michael Burke.

This image was fabricated by a Parisian ad agency, Fred & Farid, for the purpose of marketing Wrangler jeans.

Here is the video for the ad campaign...

Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian — of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? — men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.

She returns to the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. This time, however, the results are less impressive (Not Safe For Church).

La fascination de Lindsay Lohan pour Marilyn Monroe est pas nouvelle...

UPDATE FROM THE COMMENTS!
Swearengen on Lohan's nude pics...

even i have fucked hotter girls than that and i spend all day trolling on the internet

Holy Christ:

Laura Gonzalez was happy to be back at work after three weeks away that included a stay at a battered women's shelter. She saw it as the beginning of a new life. One without her husband and the father of her four children, she told co-workers. She wasn't going back to him this time, she said, and left for home. Less than an hour later, her 24-year-old husband, Jose Avila, launched a brutal final assault. First he shot his wife three times. Then, he began shooting the children. Avila's final act was to kill himself. Two of the children died at a hospital Thursday, a day after their two siblings were killed in the shooting that rattled the small southeast Texas town of Bay City. Their mother is hospitalized in critical condition.

Children deserve fit, loving, sane, stable, non-abusive, non-homicidal parents. There are unfit gay parents out there—as we've recently seen in Seattle, as we may be the case in Connecticut—just as there are unfit opposite-sex parents.

Jerry Sandusky was never gay married. He had an opposite-sex spouse at home, don't you know. (Apparently you don't, Pat.) And then there's this.

WaPo:

Kim Kardashian’s recent decision to end her marriage to Kris Humphries — the NBA player she wed in August in a multimillion-dollar, media-hyped, filmed-by-E! ceremony — became the big celebrity story of the past week. Everyone was talking about it, including people who didn’t really want to talk about it but started to complain to their co-workers about all the talk about it. Which, of course, is all part of the Kardashian cultural relevancy master plan

Horrifying. Details here and here.

This fantastic creature is very creepy. To see a sexy fairy, we have to watch the most recent Peter Pan movie. The sexy fairy is none other than the Swimming Pool beauty Ludivine Sagnier:

• Columbia Pictures

A Cleveland couple faces child endangerment charges after giving away their neglected 2-year-old girl, authorities said.... Police got a tip Thursday and went to the parents' home, where they found an emaciated pit bull and fecal matter. The child was nowhere to be found, police said. Officers learned the suspects had given the child away to friends in their neighborhood, who said they agreed to take custody of her if the couple agreed to get help for their alleged drug addiction. When the child was given away, she had bug bites and her eyes were crusted shut, police reports said.

See it here. She apparently tweeted about it.

In the shot, Jessica's bare legs are seen hanging from the top of a toilet bowl, but not quite reaching the floor. Accompanying the revealing photo is the caption, "Short Girl Problems."

The word on the street is she got a mil to show some skin for Playboy.

Lindsay Lohan is taking it all off for Playboy.

The one-time child star reportedly scored a $1 million pay day to pose nude for the famed skin magazine, according to TMZ.

Though the "Freaky Friday" actress' rep could "neither confirm or deny" the report, her mother, Dina Lohan, confirmed that the star flashed her flesh for the cameras at a photo shoot last weekend.

Yesterday a bigot made this statement:

“It is not a bigoted statement to say that children need a mother and a father."

Also yesterday:

Mark Leavitt, 37, was arrested last week for investigation of two counts of felony child abuse, three counts of reckless child endangerment, domestic violence and three counts of domestic violence in the presence of children. Thursday night, Sandy police were called to a report of domestic violence at 1065 E. and Quarry View Way. They arrived to find the mother lying semi-conscious and semi-alert on the garage floor, according to a Salt Lake County Jail report and police. While investigating that case, officers noticed twin 6-year-old boys each had one or both of their hands severely burned, said Sandy Police Sgt. John Arnold. One of the boys also had blood on his face, mouth, nose, legs and chest as if he had been punched in the nose, he said.... Paramedics who responded to the scene told police one boy "could lose fingers" if he did not receive immediate treatment.

Children need parents. They need loving, devoted, fit, capable parents who don't regard third degree burns or a punch in the face as appropriate forms of discipline. Those parents can be straight or they can be gay. And only a bigot would argue that children who don't have both a mother and a father in the home—children who have two mothers or two fathers or are being raised by single parents—are being abused. Child abuse doesn't look like this. It looks like this.

Sam Friedlander apparently bludgeoned his wife with a table leg during a bedroom struggle and shot his two children in their beds, then went down to the basement and shot himself, police said today.... Each child was shot in the abdomen with the same 12-gauge shotgun that Friedlander used to kill himself.

Jezebel breaks down the appalling way the report, quoted above, goes on to blame the victims. The murderer was, according to his friends, "belittled" and "emasculated" by his wife and her parents... so, gee, what choice did he have but to beat his wife to death and then shoot his children in a manner that would ensure both died in agony? Christ.

A California father convicted of holding his son in a hot oven to teach him a lesson was sentenced Friday to one year in jail. Gregory Colver Jr., 21, originally maintained he had been asleep while his 17-month-old child wandered into the kitchen, turned the oven on and climbed inside, hurting himself. The boy suffered second- and third-degree burns... However investigators poked deeper into the story when Colver's account didn't match up with his girlfriend's, the child's mother, who was at work when the incident happened. Colver, arrested on Dec. 30, ended up confessing to police that he had held the child in the oven purposefully to teach him the dangers of a hot oven.

UPDATE: Forgive me for feeding the troll:

The parents aren't married. They never are in "Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father." The common theme is not heterosexuality. It is that shacking up is brutal on the children involved.

Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father Who Are Married To Each Other.

Here you go:

Illinois man given 100-year sentence for killing pregnant wife

Husband and wife charged with abusing three adopted children

Husband, wife charged with abusing daughter plead not guilty

Mom charged with aggravated child abuse following husband's arrest on same charges

Teen stabbed to death; mother arrested

Husband Charged in Murder of Maryland Mother, 11-Year-Old Son Sought

Everett woman attacks sleeping husband with electric saw

2 kids, 16 dogs removed from filthy home

Parents starved and beat girl, locked her out in the cold

A gunman apparently enraged over a custody dispute walked into a crowded Seal Beach hair salon where his former wife worked and opened fire, killing eight people and critically wounding another person in the deadliest shooting in Orange County history.... Friends and witnesses who knew the salon employees said the alleged gunman was Scott Dekraai and he appeared to be targeting his former wife, who was a stylist at Salon Meritage. They said the couple had been involved in a bitter custody dispute involving their son.

"Due to the media attention being given to suicides by bullied gay and lesbian youth," writes Chris, "we have decided to create a list of straight kids who have been bullied by gays and lesbians until they were driven to take their own lives."

The list is here.