Saturday Stuff

Best Headline of the Week. From the British paper The Telegraph: "Polygamy Doesn't Work, Says Father of 77."

Consumer Reports Does it Again. Last week, we ridiculed the silliest "coverage" of Earth Day. So we owed you the opposite. The best of the bunch, we thought, was this comprehensive Earth Day Guide from Consumer Reports. Simply sublime.

Thuggish Scalia Goes Public to Plug His Book. If I could still be shocked by anything our thuggish federal government does, one of the most shocking things would be that a creep named Antonin Scalia could actually sit on the Supreme Court. Scalia (who spent a few years in Cleveland, working for the law firm Jones Day) is so disdainful of democracy and of democratic traditions that he really would be a better fit to preside over a court somewhere in a banana republic, where his creepy views and thuggish tactics wouldn't stick out so obviously. The Reuters news agency notes that the famously private justice, whose security detail once forced reporters to erase the tape they made of a public speech he gave (it would have taken about five of them to hold me down for that), is now opening up with the media. Why? He happens to have a new book out. Here's hoping the public will treat his book the same way he treats the public.

Okay, I Admit It: I'm Shallow. I would have loved to attend this presentation the other night. Wilson is a first-class thinker and writer on a crucial topic, probably the leading authority on the issue of urban poverty. But it would have meant missing part of the Cavs playoff game. Sorry, but that's simply not going to happen. For my penance, I've assigned myself the task of reading/listening to a few articles by and interviews of Dr. Wilson (if you'd like to do the same, you could start with this, this and this). Eventually, I hope to read his classic book.

Okay, I Admit It: I'm Shallow (Part 2). Rush Limbaugh famously observed on his idiot radio show, in a knock on the idea of electing Hillary Clinton, that Americans don't want to watch a woman age in the White House. Perhaps Hillary could take a page from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who recently wore a dress with an alarming (for some people) abundance of decollatage for a world leader. It apparently received considerable media attention. I thought it was wonderful, though. She'd get my vote. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Hillary to duplicate it any time soon.

Doing What Wild Animals Tend to Do. I loved this small detail from a Los Angeles Times account of the tragic killing of an animal trainer by a 700-lb. bear used in several Hollywood films. "For unknown reasons, the bear lunged at 39-year-old Stephan Miller..." Unknown reasons? How about the fact that it's a wild animal doing what nature groomed it to do?

Stop the Presses! Party girl Jenna Bush may not support McCain for president. Gosh, can his campaign ever survive such a blow? After all, who has more moral authority than she?

Finally, NPR's Michael Feldman got off a good joke this morning. During a riff about the Texas polygamist clan, he noted that the state is being forced to decide whether the children have been abused. After all, their knowledge of the outside world is so spotty that they didn't know who the president of the United States is. He concluded with the observation that "it's the state's burden to show why that's a bad thing."