Scattershooting

Scattershooting while wondering whatever happened to Clay Johnson:

Did you catch Ted Kennedy's howler in endorsing Barack Obama? Mary Jo's last chauffeur said that Obama "truly has the power to inspire and make America good again, from sea to shining sea."

Shouldn't believing that this is not merely a good, but a great, country be a bare minimum prerequisite for public office?

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James Taranto brings up a question I've also pondered:

In an age of heightened sensitivity over slurs involving race, religion, sexual orientation and so forth, why is anti-American bigotry considered socially acceptable?

Certainly slurring America is no less offensive than slurring preferred groups. But for some reason the same folks who condemn slurs against blacks, or women, or gays have no problem with, and even participate in, the slurring of blacks and women and gays, all at the same time, in the form of slurring Americans. Rank hypocrisy, that.

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Police: Crack Found in Man's Buttocks

If not, a run-in with the law is the least of his problems!

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My favorite story of this election season is that Vice President Dick Cheney and presidential candidate Barack Obama are eighth cousins.

You already suspected that Obama was just another piece of the vast Halliburton conspiracy, right?

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Kobe Bryant, closet neocon?: "I'm a soldier, man. It's not a soldier's job to question whether or not he should fight the war. You've got to go over there and fight. It's not my place."

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Who's overpaid? According to Forbes, the top 10 CEO's earned an average of $59 million in 2004, while the top 10 athletes/entertainers earned an average of $116 million the same year.

Of course it was a trick question anyway...none of them are overpaid, they are just earning what the market will bear for their services. Nothing could be more American than that.

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Idiot alert: This is from an actual letter to the editor from an actual human being to the Oregonian, whom I will not embarrass by printing his name (The paper was not so kind).

It's incredible that so few understand and are alarmed by the very high probability that humans will very soon be extinct if we don't greatly reduce the number of people depending on the planet's limited life-support systems.

The United Nations' conclusion that "only urgent global action will do" in dealing with climate change (Nov. 18) is sobering indeed. But since human activity is the primary cause, the solution is a right-in-our-face no-brainer: Reduce human activity! And do it now, with aggressive, mandatory, global birth control! [...]

Life on Earth could be truly beautiful for all living things if there weren't so many humans competing for all the good things it has to offer. [...]

There's no time left for arguing. [...]

I get that this dolt thinks that humans are so evil that the only answer is global fascism, but why birth control? Why not just cut out the middleman (err, middlewoman)? Wouldn't concentration camps and mass executions be a more efficient means of accomplishing his goal? That has worked (and is still working, in places like North Korea and Cuba) for Nazis and communists for close to a century now, how could the author not have thought of it?

Maybe he just doesn't think the problem is really that urgent.