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Finally, I leave you with a secret, just in case you ever find yourself attending a Netroots Nation convention: if you want to guess which state will host Netroots Nation next year, look for a senator attending who is not from the state you're currently in.
It's always fun to get together with a lot of people who share your interests and/or opinions. Netroots Nation is a giant mix of people who blog from a Lefty perspective, politicians who value the opinion and share the views of such bloggers, and interest groups who want to influence what folks over on the left think and write about.
The Onion, of course, is satire. They were doing fake news long before Jon Stewart was even on the air. Being satirical, their campaign for a Pulitzer is heavily laced with humor. Humorous or not, though, they've got a serious point.
For reasons which surpasseth all understanding (at least to myself), I was actually up very early this morning, before the dawn as a matter of fact. This was due to a scheduled television appearance which, unfortunately, did not occur (for technical reasons). Since I was up, though, I caught the tail end of the British royal wedding, which (for us Pacific Coast Time folks) happened in the middle of the night. Surprisingly enough, I have a few things to point out about the event.
But that's OK. Hawai'i can take a joke. Even the joke of birtherism -- Hawai'i takes it all in stride.
To clarify that title: when you pull a prank on this particular day, you're supposed to reveal yourself as the prankster by yelling "April Fools!" (or even, as a purist might insist, "April Fools'!"). I am not doing so, hence the absence of the exclamation mark. Sadly, my task is today is not to prank anyone (I did that last year and promised I wouldn't do it again), but to catalogue the recent spate of foolishness from our national political arena. A sober list of the fools of April, rather than an excited "April Fools!" gotcha, in other words. Well, maybe not all that sober. You decide.
Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, lived in the fifth century A.D., and he came to Ireland as a proselytizer for Christianity. That is about the sum total of the known, verifiable facts about Patrick. The rest is myth. Since such mythologizing began only a few hundred years after his death (which happened on March 17, by the way), these myths of Patrick are much more widely known than the thin shreds of his real history (which are limited to two surviving letters written by Patrick in Latin). Besides, it's much more fun to sit around telling these tales over a pint of Guinness than to dig up actual facts. Even if the tales are pure blarney.
We're going to do something today we haven't done for a while here -- take a cartoon break! Our resident cartoonist, C.W. Cunningham, has surfaced once again and sent in the following for you to enjoy.
-- Chris Weigant
About the Cartoonist | Reprint Policy
Thanks once again to the intrepid folks at Lake Superior State University, this year's "Official Banished Words List" has now gone viral. Whoops! I guess we're going to have to rewrite that sentence, since "viral" was on the top of the list of words and phrases that have just become so annoying that -- for the good of the language (and, of course The American People) -- the only possible reaction is to banish them completely from our lexicon.
[Note: Since it's Tuesday, I thought I'd run a favorite Tuesday-type article from last year. I promise, tomorrow I'll get back to being serious.]
[Originally published 3/2/10]
The title of this piece quotes the well-known philosopher Jeremy Hilary Boob, PhD. The full quote is, of course:
Ad hoc, ad loc, and quid pro quoSo little [...]