High Glitz. Lunacy, and Fox News

These photos make you think America is pretty messed up - It's an art gallery casting a spotlight on the truly creepy ways people dress up their kids in the search of fame these days...Like Little Miss Sunshine but real.

David Frum is generally pretty solid, and I like his recent take on the stupid "Obama has no birth certificate" conspiracy people. "So here’s the hypothesis. Barack Obama Sr. has brought his new wife to Kenya. (A journey for which there is precisely zero documentation.) There, she bears him a child. Then — in an era before jet travel and at a time when plane fares cost many, many times more than they do now — she immediately gets on a plane from Mombasa to Nairobi, then another plane from Nairobi to Cairo, then a third from Cairo to London, then from London to Gander, Gander to maybe Chicago, Chicago to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Honolulu. Arriving in Honolulu she presents her — what? two-week old infant? — to the authorities and asks for a birth certificate. Oh — and she also retroactively places birth announcements in the local papers." Uh-huh.

In related news, Gawker put together an interesting little cross-section of the approval/TV ratings of Fox News Channel and the Republican Party:

And speaking of lunacy, this pretty much qualifies: "Call these unpaid internships that you pay for...A company called the University of Dreams, the largest and most visible player in an industry that has boomed in recent years as internship experience has become a near-necessity on any competitive entry-level résumé...says it saw a spike in interest this year due to the downturn, as the number of applicants surged above 9,000."

Two Pictures

From Gallup/538, about party ID (Red is if the President was a Republican at the time the respondant turned 18, Blue had a Dem Pres at age 18, Green line shows strength of Democratic party (Dem Party ID minus GOP Party ID) - It's fascinating how it tracks pretty darn well: Dem Pres=More Republicans, generally, Bad GOP=More Dems (although LBJ, Reagan, and Eisenhower seem to buck the trend a tiny bit.) Sorry, this description is confusing. But I know what it's saying so, ha.















Today's amusement:

Just Dance?

Proving for once and for all (one hopes) the age-old saying about books and covers: Presenting Susan Boyle.

Saletan summarizes a British Medical Journal piece recapping stuff we've heard before, but the numbers bear repeating: 124 boys born to every girl. 32 million more males under age 25 than girls. Why? "Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males."

Gallup has a treasure-trove of social science polling data on its site, none particularly inspiring. To wit:

• "Attendance among Roman Catholics dropped from 75% to 45%" from 1955 to the present day. "Whatever the causes, it is clear that U.S. Catholics' once-nearly uniform obedience to their church's requirement of weekly mass attendance has faded, and Catholics are now no different from Protestants in their likelihood to attend church."

• In a similar (and I don't think unrelated) vein, "Despite the Roman Catholic Church's official opposition to abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, a Gallup analysis finds almost no difference between rank-and-file American Catholics and American non-Catholics in terms of finding the two issues morally acceptable."

[Click to see full polls.] More probably to come as I come across them.