Joker, Joker, And A Triple

John Ziegler, who probably has about 10 talk radio show firings left in his career, is I guess trying to make it now as a "filmmaker." This being a film on how stupid Barack Obama supporters are, he decided to sponsor a "poll" asking them a series of questions which had, er, idiosyncratic answers, and appeared designed to push negative information out about Obama. You can read Nate Silver's interview with this guy to get a sense of the man. Meanwhile, I'll associate myself with TBogg's remarks:

To be fair, you have to feel bad for a 41 year-old man who leads off his biography with the fact that he was captain of his high school golf team. Yes. "Golf team" and that's "captain" to you, bitches. There is a world of sad when that is the highlight of your life to be followed by a series of firings, shitty radio time-slots and being ranked the "54th most important talk host in the country by Talkers Magazine.".

As I understand it, that'll get you free refills at Denny's and the use of a handicapped parking space once a month.

The part where Ziegler loses it and starts cursing because he can't come up with the name "Jim DeMint" is my favorite part.

A friend of mine once got set up on a blind date with Ziegler, wherein he proceeded to call all women stupid and unfunny (my friend was a stand-up comedienne) and THEN try to set up a second date.

I wonder if the order was so catastrophically wrong on his poll as well.

Irony, Thy Name is America

While we've been changing 200 year-old laws to get one person hooked up to life support, we've been systematically starving a generation of Iraqi children:

GENEVA (AP) — Almost twice as many Iraqi children are suffering from malnutrition since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, a U.N. monitor said Monday.

Four% of Iraqis under age 5 went hungry in the months after Saddam's ouster in April 2003, and the rate nearly doubled to 7.7% last year, said Jean Ziegler, the U.N. Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food.

The situation is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," he said.

I know, the kids are browner than Americans, but still, this qualifies as ironic. Billmon (who's back, by the way) mentioned in a recent post that Stalin once said "one death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic." And if anyone would know about a million deaths, it would be him. But these recent events have certainly seemed to illustrate that quote.

This quote needs to be put out as a disclaimer:

The authors of the report in the British-based medical journal The Lancet — researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad — conceded their data were of "limited precision," because they depended on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.

But I think it'll be hard to argue that conditions in Iraq haven't contributed to malnutrition. And what households would be motivated to lie to their fellow Iraqis about the deaths of their children? I don't know. But I'm sure this paragraph will be used by the right to discount the whole thing.