Friday’s Quiz

1. Which of the following does not rank in the top five states for gun violence? (a) Louisiana  (b) Mississippi  (c) New York  (d) Alaska  (e) Alabama

2. Which college recently canceled a performance of “The Vagina Monologues”?

(a) University of Mississippi  (b) Dartmouth  (c) Oral Roberts  (d) Mount Holyoke  (e) Liberty University

3. Which state is not among the top five in single-parent families?

(a) New Jersey  (b) Mississippi  (c) Arkansas  (d) Louisiana  (e) Alabama

4. Who is the richest man in the world?

(a) Carlos Slim, Mexico  (b) Bill Gates, U.S.  (c) Vladimir Putin, Russia  (d) Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, Saudi Arabia  (e) Charles David Koch, U.S.

Answers

1. (c) New York is third from lowest (behind Massachusetts and Hawaii). Alaska, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi rank 1-4, Alaska’s death rate almost five times New York's. New York is the only one of the five to require a handgun permit. Suicides account for 60% of gun fatalities.

2. (d) Mount Holyoke, the 178-year-old women’s college, canceled the feminist play in January because of its “extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.”

3. (a) New Jersey has the fourth-lowest rate of single-parent families; Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama the four highest.

4. Trick question. Forbes lists Gates #1 ($79 billion), closely followed by Slim ($77 billion), who owns 40% of the wealth on the Mexico stock exchange. Prince Alwaleed, the world’s richest royal has a mere $30 billion. Adding fuel to the Democrats' obsession, the Koch Brothers combined worth of $85.8 billion outdoes all the others. Except, insists Bill Browder, for Vladimir Putin, who's worth $200 billion. Author of the chilling Red Notice and Russia’s largest single investor until his assets were stolen, his lawyer murdered and he was forced to leave, Browder ought to know.

Creepy thought: According to Forbes Putin is also the most powerful man in the world.

Stumble of the Week

Only 19 months until Election Day, and already the candidates are stumbling wildly. This week, in two breathless paragraphs in Time, Rand Paul praised the Koch Brothers who, “unlike many crony capitalists who troll the halls of Congress looking for favors, . . . have consistently lobbied against special-interest politics.” Clearly gratified by such public genuflection, David Koch looked ahead to “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” a pride of place the Wisconsin governor kept for about a day – until he appeared to oppose legal immigration for depressing the wages of working people, something to which the brothers are not averse. And then there was the Byzantine story of the Clinton Foundation raking in not-always-reported donations from foreign billionaires who developed uranium mines in Canada and then sold their company to the Russians, all while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Somewhere in the midst of this, a Russian investment bank involved in the uranium deal paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow – all of which may be perfectly legal by some letter of the law, but it seems a twisted tale in need of explanation from a presidential candidate. It is said that when Harry Truman retired from the presidency in 1953, he and Bess got in their old car and drove themselves back to Independence, Missouri, where they lived in the house they had owned all their married lives on Harry’s army pension from World War I. That seems a long time ago.

Stumble of the Week

Friday the 13th The Wrong Stuff. When I board an airplane, I assume the pilot's in charge. Not so, it turns out, on Korean Air. In the much-ridiculed “nut rage” case Cho Hyun-ah was sentenced to a year in jail for ordering the pilot to return to the gate so she could kick off the chief steward, who had already apologized on his knees. What's scary is that the pilot complied. It’s hard to picture Chuck Yeager doing that.

Candor. Asked by a British reporter about his belief in evolution, current Republican presidential frontrunner, Scott Walker said, “I’m going to punt on that one.” Now for the hard questions.

Judicial Restraint. In King v Burwell, the challenge to Obamacare that somehow found its way to the Supreme Court, all four plaintiffs, writes Linda Greenhouse, “can’t afford health insurance but want to be declared ineligible for the federal tax subsidies that would make insurance affordable for them.” Huh? One listed her address as a short-stay motel where she hasn’t stayed since 2013. Another claims Obama is a Muslim.

Accountability. “It is ironic, to put it very mildly,” writes Joe Conason, “that more than a decade after the Iraq invasion, which resulted from official and journalistic deceptions on a vast scale, the only individual deemed worthy of punishment is a TV newsman who inflated a war story on a talk show.” Still, that’s one more than the number of top bank executives who have been fired since they took down the economy in 2008.

Weekly Wrap™

One More War! One More War! "If you thought that two disastrous wars in the Middle East spread over 13 miserable years might cure Washington of its delusion that the next war will solve all our problems, you were wrong," wrote Paul Waldman in The Washington Post, in response to Lindsey Graham and John McCain's suggestion for bringing peace to the Middle East: Attack Syria. As the senators point out, we now know the key to success – "embedding U.S. military advisors" – a tactic that worked so well in Vietnam the Pentagon is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As for arming moderate Syrians, why not? They already supply ISIS with much of its U.S. and Saudi weaponry. Where’s Tiny? I’m not saying they get their tips from me, but after my post on Kim Jong-Un, reporters noticed the diminutive dictator had vanished from public view, which has led to wild speculation. My theory is that the “monolithic leader” is at a Fat Farm (지방 농장) in suburban Pyongyang, recovering from the “excessive eating and drinking” that accompanies his annual expenditures of $650 million on “luxury goods” (about half what he spends on missiles). He’s likely the only guest, as those places aren’t cheap and 84% of his people are already much too thin.

President Ebola. Finally, San Francisco-based radio host Michael Savage announced that the president sent U.S. troops to West Africa because he “wants to infect the nation with Ebola” as part of the administration’s war on white people.

Stumble of the Week

• State of Denial. To blacks, gays and immigrants, we must now add business people to the enemies list of Arizona’s dogged silent majority. For it was the Chamber of Commerce that finally persuaded Governor Jan Brewer to veto Senate Bill 1062 – a bill, said Senator Steve Yarborough, aimed at “preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith.” It proposed to strike this blow for religious freedom by protecting the right of bigots to refuse service to gay people. But gays shouldn’t feel special. Arizona has long been a full-service discriminator. It was denied the 1993 Super Bowl for refusing to recognize Martin Luther King Day, then gained notoriety and lost business revenue when Brewer signed the state’s draconian anti-immigrant bill in 2010. Now the Religious Freedom Act, which another senator defended as “pre-emptive to protect priests”, has been vetoed. Next up? Unwed mothers? • The American Dream. According to an Economic Policy Institute report, 1% of the residents of Alaska, Michigan, Nevada and Wyoming have reaped over 100% of their state’s total income gains since 1979. If my math is correct, that means the other 99% actually got poorer.

• Family Seat. John Dingell, the longest-serving Congressman in history, announced that he will not seek reelection for the seat he inherited in 1955 after the death of his father. But fear not, dynasty fans. His wife, Debbie, seeks to extend the family’s eight-decade tenure in the House. So why is the 87-year-old Dingell quitting? “I find serving in the House to be obnoxious.”

Stumble of the Week

Good morning, readers. As I look out the window at a thick fog, which has given the snow-covered landscape an eerie, spectral look, and the Canada geese scratch what they can from the frozen earth, I realize that it is time to take a few days off from my morning musings to recharge my imaginative batteries. I love doing this. It pushes me to try to organize thoughts, feelings, ideas in ways that might, if I am lucky, make others look at the world a little bit differently for a moment. It makes me feel connected. But when I spend two hours trying to connect an English woman who was arrested for assault for throwing a piece of toast at her husband and then smearing butter on his face with Florida’s “stand-your-ground” law, well, I’d say I was overreaching.

Time for a short break. And thank you for reading my offerings. Talk to you soon.

Stumble of the Week

• Republican Women. In 1970, Senator Roman Hruska (R, Neb) spoke in defense of G. Harrold Carswell, Richard Nixon’s cynical and mercifully unsuccessful appointment to the Supreme Court: "Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.” His words came to mind Tuesday evening as Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ stunningly retrograde response to the State of the Union transported me back to the 1950s, when women’s roles in the [H]ouse were more clearly defined, and they appeared on TV to support their husbands and sell soap suds and refrigerators. The pollsters must know more than I do, but if Rodgers’ cliché-ridden, substance-free chat represents the Republican ideal of female leadership, the party really is in trouble. • Land of Opportunity. Both parties seek to embrace the issue of income inequality, which is greater now than any time since 1929. Republicans blame government for stifling opportunities for the ambitious; Democrats blame corporate greed, obscene bonuses and repressive taxation. But recent studies question whether economic mobility was ever more than an anecdotal reality in modern America, and a report this week by 24/7 Wall Street ranked America 19^th in providing opportunities for our children. Those providing the most were countries in what Donald Rumsfeld dismissively labeled “the old Europe” – those places, our history books insist, from which people fled in search of a better life in America.

Stumble of the Week

Civil Discourse: Yesterday, I pulled up behind a bumper sticker that read: “Don’t Hate Me Just Because You’re A Douchebag.” I thought, what kind of a douchebag would have a bumper sticker like that? I like funny bumper stickers, but it saddens me how such verbal preemptive strikes (“First, I’m going to retaliate”), which increasingly pass for humor, simply degrade the public conversation. Privacy Invasion: Also yesterday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board declared the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records to be illegal, invasive and ineffective, noting also that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued eight years of orders before ruling on the program’s legality. Other than that, insisted President Obama, the program works fine.

Our Grandchildren: Faced with continuing economic woes, Europe has backed off its commitment to combat climate change. This is tragic because Europe has led the world in such efforts, even as the U.S. has dragged its feet. It is also ironic because big business is finally getting the message: “We believe that climate change, caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, is the greatest threat to our planet,” says Coca Cola’s website.

Nuclear Security: The report that Air Force nuclear missile-launch officers were caught in a drug sting on two continents reminded me of my mother’s flabbergasting stories from her AA meetings of an airline mechanic (anonymous, of course) who arrived on the job so smashed that he gave a whole new dimension to the home-repair expression, “lefty loosy, righty tighty.”

The Christie Boys

It was quite week for the Christie boys. Chris, the tubby one, was up to his jowls in self-mortification (“humiliated”, “heartbroken”) and personal blamelessness (“blindsided”, “stages of grief”) over what Gail Collins has dubbed Bridgegate: the closing of two lanes onto the George Washington Bridge and snarling traffic for four days in Fort Lee, N.J. as an act of political revenge. Doug, the tall one with the reality show wife, was part of Dennis Rodman’s team of basketball players celebrating Kim Jong Un’s 30-somethingth birthday 7,000 miles away in Pyongyang. The Americans, whose average age is 48, lost the competitive half of the game – which enabled the Korean team to avoid ruining the birthday party of the Great One, a man believed to be even more vindictive than the governor of New Jersey. It’s a strange world in which Americans lose a basketball game to a country where the average height is 5’5” and The New York Times devotes three op-ed pieces to smarmy politics in New Jersey. Isn’t this fodder for supermarket tabloids, rather than the last citadels of responsible journalism? Perhaps. But think what we learn about the current state of our political system in which people at the highest levels of power gleefully inconvenience – and even endanger – the lives of thousands as an act of petty vengeance. And what an image we get of North Korea, watching Dennis Rodman sing Happy Birthday to a man who has summoned his entire government to watch a pick-up basketball game.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Ridiculous

• Saying “we squandered the goodwill of the world by our actions in Guantánamo,” General Michael Lehnert, the base’s first commander, yesterday called for closing “a prison that should never have been opened.” • The Pennsylvania senate overwhelmingly confirmed Christopher Abruzzo to head the Department of Environmental Protection, despite his testimony that "I've not read any scientific studies that would lead me to conclude that there are adverse impacts to human beings or animals or plant life at this small level of climate change." Abruzzo did concede an impact on human health "from things like air pollution."

• Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming’s hard-right Congresswoman, criticized the proposed budget agreement, which isn’t surprising since she opposes defense cuts, federal stimulus, tax increases, drilling restrictions, greenhouse-gas regulation, abortions, etc. But reducing Wyoming’s porcine royalties from mineral exploration on federal lands? No way! (She ended up voting for the bill.)

• Michigan’s legislature passed a law requiring women to buy rape insurance if they want coverage for such an event. Oh, and they have to buy it in advance, not after they’re pregnant.

•  “Believe it or not,” Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey told Gail Collins, “Paul Ryan is a good friend. He calls me Mom. I call him Naughty Boy.” With Orrin Hatch again evoking his bond with Ted Kennedy, we are reminded that friendships can cross ideological divides, something I experience each time I publish this blog.

• Finally, a Georgia woman is suspected of supergluing herself to a Home Depot toilet seat.

Stumble of the Week

An occasionally regular Friday feature • According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Michael McStay of Newcastle-upon-Tyne filled his room with gas with the intention of committing suicide. He changed his mind, shut off the gas and opened his window. He then lit a cigarette and blew the roof off his apartment building.

• Notre Dame quarterback, Everett Golson, suspended last spring for academic transgressions, assured Sports Illustrated that "it wasn't due to poor grades or anything like that." No, "I had poor judgment on a test." "Did you cheat?" asked Andy Staples. "Yeah, something like that," said Golson.

• Having used Citizens United to establish freedom of speech for corporations, the Supreme Court may soon decide they also have freedom of religion. Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma-based evangelical crafts store, has sued the government over the Affordable Care Act’s inclusion of morning-after pills and IUDs, which the company argues violates its religious beliefs. The 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, seeing “no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.”

• Barack Obama stumbled mightily this week as criticisms of the health care rollout – and more generally of his disappointing second term – went bipartisan. I have issues, but I also ask myself which signature legacy I would prefer: passage, over vitriolic opposition, of legislation that has many flaws but the goal of providing every American with decent health care – or the invasion of Iraq, approved over spineless opposition and predicated on a lie?

Stumble of the Week

• China’s first national water census has reported the disappearance of over 28,000 rivers. That is not a typo. According to The Atlantic, over half the 50,000 rivers flowing 30 years ago have “vanished.” The government is blaming a combination of bad maps and global warming (which its heavily censored Internet has not yet discovered is a hoax). A more likely culprit is China’s out-of-control growth, which has extracted water and paved over rivers at an unsustainable rate. Given the intense fears of Chinese expansion throughout the region, its neighbors might want to make sure those missing rivers don’t reappear on their maps. • It will be hard laying into turkey and all the fixins’ next Thanksgiving after reading about Henry’s Turkey Service, whose 32 workers at an Iowa processing plant were just awarded $240 million. Under a special provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Henry’s paid its mentally handicapped workers $65 a month, a figure that hadn’t changed since the 1970s and was completely unconnected to hours worked. The company also provided room (a leaking, rat-infested bunkhouse), board and “care” (a tough love that replaced medical coddling with working through pain and heaps of physical abuse). It withheld the costs of such services from the workers’ payments, while simultaneously reimbursing itself from their social security benefits. And how will the workers spend their $7.5 million-per-person windfall? In their dreams. Henry’s is defunct.

• Finally, in Chester County, Pa., Sheriff Carolyn “Bunny” Welsh has organized a charity raffle, which features an AR-15 assault rifle similar to the one used at Sandy Hook.

Stumble of the Week

A once-regular feature returns. • Honor. America’s continues to stumble at Guantanamo Bay, where people disappear, seemingly forever, into a place that violates our most basic principles. A hunger strike expanded this week to dozens of inmates, although the only people who seem to notice are the ones who already detest us.

• Language. Newt Gingrich and his Orwellian bombast are back, talking about gay marriage and the “tyranny of secularism.” In the new speak of the far right, the efforts of people to participate fully in American society are deemed a threat to the beliefs and institutions of those who disagree with them. Asserting your place in the communal fabric is, apparently, not justice, but tyranny.

• Education. The indictment this week of 35 teachers and administrators in the Atlanta school system illustrated, as if we needed another demonstration, that the lowest people on the educational totem pole are the children. Mimicking hedge funds and investment banks, the Atlanta system doled out huge bonuses to those who made their numbers. They made their numbers by cheating – by erasing their students’ wrong answers on the standardized state tests and checking the right boxes. One principal even wore gloves so as not to leave fingerprints. What these people did was wrong, but it was abetted by a system that – from No Child Left Behind to all the reforms it has spawned – is obsessed with quantifiable results, has little use for true learning and treats children like assembly-line products.

Stumble of the Week

Historical Truth. As a 16-year-old during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, I remember the collective fear of a nuclear attack, followed by relief that the calm and steely resolve of President Kennedy had made the Soviets blink. In a review of Sheldon Stern’s new book, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Benjamin Schwartz writes that almost everything we have been taught about the event is not true. The miscalculations and political considerations of the Kennedy administration brought us to the brink of war, and a legendary counter-story was concocted and fed to a gullible press. One of the villains is Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “whose histories ‘repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts.”’ Schlesinger, who left academia for the halls of power and became the model of the “public intellectual,” was long considered a sycophant by his old academic colleagues. They have been vindicated. His “accounts – ‘profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive,’” writes Schultz, “were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.” Women’s Rights. The fight for the hearts, minds and other organs of the Republican party continues stage right. The Daily Beast reports that the “transvaginal ultrasound” is back on the legislative dockets in Michigan, Tennessee and Alabama. A year ago, the Virginia legislature passed – and then rescinded after a national outcry – a bill mandating the procedure, which the Michigan GOP insists “further protects the interests of the women seeking an abortion by assessing the viability of the fetus and confirming the approximate gestational age of the fetus.” The party of non-intrusive government has embraced women’s rights.

Stumble of the Week

The first reminder of how much the world of air travel has changed came with the $25 fee for my checked bag. “I’ll pay cash,” I told the agent, who replied, “A credit card is faster.” How is that possible? I wondered, before realizing that (1) my entire adult life is contained on the magnetic strip of my Visa card and (2) there is no need to hold greenbacks to the light to see if they are counterfeit. Thus began three hours of non-stop marketing. Upgrade your seat for $29. Purchase extra bonus points so we can do this again. Buy snacks. Swipe your card and watch TV ($5.99 for short flights, $7.99 for longer ones). I foresee the day when your ticket will only get you onto the gangway to participate in an auction for the 23 middle seats that weren’t presold. Once on board, you’ll need your credit card to use the toilet, where toilet paper and soap are extra. Ice in your drink? Two-fifty, and of course you’ll want a cup. Swipe your card.

Already, you don’t get a whole seat. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but each row has only four armrests for  six arms, assuming everyone has two, and the knee jockeying often requires an unannounced lowering of your tray table on your neighbor’s thigh. Although the TV screen threatens to go blank if I don’t swipe my card, it keeps rolling out one ad after another for the entire flight. Finally something's free, and I can’t get rid of it.

Stumble of the Week

A Friday feature (revived) Journalism. Today is the day management has threatened to close The Philadelphia Inquirer and/or sell its assets if the unions don’t deliver $8 million in givebacks. Whatever happens today, it has been quite a tumble for America’s third-oldest daily newspaper and long one of its best – in 15 years under editor Eugene Roberts The Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. But how the mighty have fallen: In 1993, The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the Boston Globe, a paper very similar to the Inquirer, whose current owners bought it for $55 million a year ago.

Lennay Kekua is not dead! It should be good news that Manti Te’o’s 22-year-old girlfriend did not die, as reported, from leukemia last September, following her hospitalization from a serious car accident. In perhaps the most inspirational story of 2012, Notre Dame’s all-American linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up played a monster game after learning that both his long-time girlfriend and his grandmother had died earlier the same day. In the weirdest story of 2013, Lennay turned out to be a hoax. Overall, it was a bad week for big sports: Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds didn’t come close to election to Baseball’s Hall of Fame; Lance Armstrong demonstrated on “Oprah” that he is a pathological liar; and Lennay never existed.

Pornography. The dirty movie industry has launched a stiff protest against Measure B, which requires actors to wear condoms, claiming that Los Angeles County’s new regulation violates filmmakers First-Amendment right to make movies they way the want.

Stumble of the Week

A storm rolled through southeastern Pennsylvania early this morning with magnificent force. It was not the kind of storm we nostalgically associate with the winter solstice and the advent season: soft snowflakes falling gently across an Arcadian countryside, leaving the world still and peaceful. No this was blinding rain and roaring winds that pounded against the house as if the world were about to end. “Wait a minute,” I said to myself. “Today is the day.” So far so good.

Meanwhile, back in the more mundane world of John Boehner’s psyche, the Speaker pulled “Plan B,” his plan to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for everyone who makes under $1 million per year and thus avert the “fiscal cliff.” Boehner was unceremoniously dumped by the right wing of his party, who insist that people with annual incomes over $1 million certainly are in the middle class. In their view, everyone is in the middle class, except the 47 percent who are in the freeloading class.

Figuratively washing his hands of the mess he himself had created in just four days, the Speaker said, “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.”

We do want to avert the much-maligned cliff, whose arbitrary combination of tax increases and spending cuts would suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of an economy that is barely standing now.

And with Plan B dead, it seems fair to ask, “What's Plan A?”

Maybe the Mayans know.

Stumble of the Week

The Disabled. After what Gail Collins did to Rick Santorum yesterday, anything more would just be piling on. But thanks to Santorum, the senate refused to ratify a United Nations treaty that is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. Apparently the treaty somehow threatens our national sovereignty and could allow the New World Order to forbid him from homeschooling his child. The U.S. has also yet to ratify UN treaties on the rights of children (sole ally: Somalia) and women (Iran has joined Somalia), and the Kyoto Protocol on the warming hoax. Well, at least we aren’t hypocrites. Resignations half a world apart provide hope for a saner future. In Egypt, nine ministers resigned in protest over Mohamed Morsi’s power grab, which may signal enough political will to derail his efforts to reverse Egypt’s “Arab Spring.” And Jim DeMint, the avatar of Tea Party narrow-mindedness, is leaving the senate to run the Heritage Foundation. He can do plenty of damage at the conservative think tank, but for now let’s savor his departure from the senate.

Color. Jack Brooks died on Tuesday. The Texas congressman backed civil rights in the deep South, abortion rights in the Bible Belt, and led efforts to impeach Nixon and Reagan. He was also staunchly pro-gun, and his ability to bring federal money into his district got him elected 21 times. Brooks is a reminder that we vote for real people, not bullet points. His obituary ended with the story of his last effort to bring home millions. “If it’s pork,” he said, “it’ll be tasty.”

Stumble of the Week

• Maine. When I applauded Maine for the diversity of its political system, I noted that its GOP governor had been a disaster. He is not alone. Tea Party Republicans have at least one more loon: party chairman Charlie Webster announced that Obama’s victory was a fraud because “in some parts of the state, there were dozens of black people who came into vote. Nobody in town knew them.” While it is certainly true that African Americans, who compose 1.3% of Maine’s population, would have stood out in rural towns, there must have been a lot of them trucked in to swing the election. Obama beat Romney by over 100,000 votes of the 700,000 cast. The Obama election team may be ruthless, but it isn’t stupid, and the image of busloads of Blacks heading north on the Maine Turnpike defies reason. Webster’s claims have never been validated, nor has the question of how he became GOP chairman ever been adequately answered.

• Global Warming doubters. 2012 has proved (again) to be one of the hottest years on record, and Arctic icecap melting outpaced both 2011’s rate and predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

• Common Sense.  By a vote of 138 to 9 (with 41 abstentions) the UN granted Palestine nonmember observer status. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, why did the U.S. vote against the resolution, which isolates Hamas and reaffirms the two-state solution? Do Israel and the US think they can choose the Palestinians’ negotiating team? When elections were last held, Hamas won. It’s time to get real.

Stumble of the Week

Personhood. Since the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, it stands to reason that they can be criminals as well, and yesterday British Petroleum pled guilty to 11 felonies in connection with the fatal oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago. BP will pay $4.5 billion in fines and stands to lose up to $21 billion more for violations of the Clean Water Act. Three of its employees have also been indicted. Unlike other kinds of people, however, a corporation cannot go to jail, so BP has instead returned to profitability and increased its dividend. There is ongoing debate as to whether that is a sign of rehabilitation or recidivism. Finally, while felons lose their right to vote, BP can continue to give millions of dollars to those who promise to vote on its behalf. Right-wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day connecting the dots from the Petraeus affair to the Benghazi incident. I myself am on to a somewhat larger story, one that traces a devious line directly from Paula Broadwell to Benghazi to Nairobi to the Clintons’ murder of Vince Foster to the LBJ single-bullet cover-up to John Wilkes Booth to Aaron Burr’s 1807 indictment for treason. Democrats all, they have been funded by a secret cabal of secular humanists, from the Marquis de Sade to George Soros, whose unwavering goal is to impose the party’s alien ideology and elitist values on an innocent America. Think big, Krauthammer. Think DaVinci Code. I’ll keep you posted.