UPDATE 11:45 PM: THE ATLANTIC JUST REMOVED THE SCIENTOLOGY ADVERTORIAL IN THE FACE OF MOUNTING RIDICULE. THEY POSTED THIS NOTICE:

“We have temporarily suspended this advertising campaign pending a review of our policies that govern sponsor content and subsequent comment threads.”

ALSO, The Atlantic took down all 25 comments on its Scientology advertorial, but we nabbed them before they disappeared. We’re reproducing them for posterity below.

AND NOW, the Atlantic has apologized. See the latest update, below.

There’s been a stunned reaction on Twitter as readers express their astonishment at the paid article written by the Church of Scientology that The Atlantic agreed to post on its website today.

The Atlantic is a venerated magazine (founded in 1857!) which has been celebrated for the way it has made use of the Internet probably better than any highbrow publication, its AtlanticWire getting high marks for originality and innovation.

But taking paid puff pieces from Scientology? This innovation is resulting in a big backlash.

More: ATLANTIC MAGAZINE SPIKES SCIENTOLOGY ADVERTORIAL AFTER BACKLASH (UPDATED) « the Underground Bunker

“I know him. I know he’s a solid conservative. He supported Ted Cruz in the most recent primary,” Munisteri says, referring to the Texas Tea Party favorite who just cruised to victory to the U.S. Senate. “And I think that that decision on his part to be an early supporter of Ted Cruz will go a long way to assuring those of our party members in our conservative base that he certainly is a solid conservative himself.”

With the Bush name and the dominant Republican Party position in Texas, the young Bush can pretty much name his office and start picking out the drapes.

Well, perhaps not Rick Perry’s governor’s office, but he’s looking at Texas land commissioner and Texas attorney general.

“If he wants to be land commissioner, I think it’s his for the taking,” says Mark Jones, the chairman of the political science department at Rice University. “There’s also, though, a very good chance that he could run for attorney general. In the event that Attorney General Greg Abbott decides to go for the governor’s spot or for the lieutenant governor’s spot, that would open up the position of attorney general.”

George P. Bush is half Hispanic — his mother is from Mexico. Running for statewide office, that’s not expected to come into play. Bush won’t need the Hispanic vote to win in Texas.

But down the road, who knows? The young Bush, along with Sens. Cruz and Marco Rubio, could be part of the new face of the Republican Party.

More: Another George Bush Plans to Try His Hand at Politics : It’s All Politics : NPR

The B-2 is the only aircraft capable of delivering the 30,000 lb MOP

Senior Pentagon officials told Congress the nation’s largest conventional bomb, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), is ready for action.

The Air Force said as much back in June after rushing the MOP back to Boeing for $82 million in modifications and enhancements, but this report puts it on the books as deployable ordnance.

According to Bloomberg’s Tony Capaccio, on his annual report, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing Michael Gilmore confirmed that tests conducted with the heavy GBU-57, a 20-foot long, 30,000 pound GPS-guided bomb thought able to penetrate 200 feet of concrete before exploding, have demonstrated that the redesigned bomb is able to hit and destroy deeply buried targets.

The enhanced MOP features tail-fin modifications to fix bugs identified in testings as well as as a second fuse to destroy hardened underground targets.

Chicago based Boeing manufactures the MOP shown here for scale

More: Pentagon Says MOP Is Ready to Go - Business Insider

Officials say they are committed to pursuing ways of finding help for service members in trouble.

“Our most valuable resource within the department is our people. We are committed to taking care of our people, and that includes doing everything possible to prevent suicides in the military,” Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith said Monday.

Two retired Army generals, Peter W. Chiarelli and Dennis J. Reimer, have spoken out about the urgency of reversing the trend.

“One of the things we learned during our careers,” they wrote in The Washington Post last month, “is that stress, guns and alcohol constitute a dangerous mixture. In the wrong proportions, they tend to blow out the lamp of the mind and cause irrational acts.”

As recently as 2005 the Army’s suicide total was less than half last year’s.

Joe Davis, spokesman for the Washington office of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said war veterans have faced difficulty adjusting to the less intense environment of their home bases. Others struggle with leaving the military in search of work in a tight civilian job market.

“It’s difficult to come back from a war footing to garrison life,” he said, where more mundane problems intrude on troops who had been focused almost entirely on their war mission.

Each year the Pentagon performs an in-depth study of the circumstances of each suicide. The most recent year for which that analysis is available is 2011, and among the findings was that those who took their own lives tended to be white men under the age of 25, in the junior enlisted ranks, with less than a college education.

The analysis of 2011’s 301 military suicides also found that the suicide rate for divorced service members was 55 percent higher than for those who were married. It determined that 60 percent of military suicides were committed with the use of firearms — and in most cases the guns were personal weapons, not military-issued.

That study also found that most service members who attempted suicide — about 65 percent — had a known history of behavior problems, whereas 45 percent of those who actually completed the act and killed themselves had such a history.

One such case was Army Spc. Christopher Nguyen, 29, who killed himself last August at an off-post residence he shared with another member of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C., according to his sister, Shawna Nguyen.

“He was practically begging for help and nothing was done,” she said in an interview.

More: 2012 Military Suicides Hit a Record High of 349 : NPR

A part-time student at a business and arts college in St. Louis shot and wounded a school employee Tuesday before wounding himself at the institute, St. Louis police said.

The suspect, who apparently shot himself, and the Stevens Institute of Business and Arts employee were taken to a hospital, where they were in surgery Tuesday afternoon, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Sam Dotson told reporters.

More: Student Suspected of Shooting College Employee

The USA.. your place for fun with guns in the sun (or whatever passes for sun in St Louis).

A Texas lawmaker says he plans to file the Firearms Protection Act, which would make any federal laws that may be passed by Congress or imposed by Presidential order which would ban or restrict ownership of semi-automatic firearms or limit the size of gun magazines illegal in the state, 1200 WOAI news reports.

Republican Rep. Steve Toth says his measure also calls for felony criminal charges to be filed against any federal official who tries to enforce the rule in the state.

“If a federal official comes into the state of Texas to enforce the federal executive order, that person is subject to criminal prosecution,” Toth told 1200 WOAI’s Joe Pags Tuesday.  He says his bill would make attempting to enforce a federal gun ban in Texas punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to five years in prison.

Toth says he will file his measure after speaking with the state’s Republican Attorney General, Greg Abbott, who has already vowed to fight any federal measures which call for restrictions on weapons possession.

Toth concedes that he would welcome a legal fight over his proposals.

“At some point there needs to be a showdown between the states and the federal government over the Supremacy Clause,” he said.

The Supremacy Clause is the portion of the Constitution which declares that federal laws and statutes are ‘the supreme law of the land.’

More: Texas Proposal: JAIL Any Federal Officials Trying to Enforce New Gun Restrictions in the State - NewsRadio 1200 WOAI, San Antonio

That noted liberal Andrew Jackson had a very low opinion of this kind of thing. During the Nullification Crisis of the 1830s he had this to say to certain South Carolina nullifiers:

“…..Please give my compliments to my friends in your State and say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.”

In FOX’s defense the black guy they saw as white was a “high yellow” black man (if you are from the south, you get that).

nation.foxnews.com