First, an Apology to Our Readers: the post that follows does no justice whatsoever to the most brilliant headline we’ve written all year. But we had the post first, and we don’t have time to go back and pull an Area Man out of our ass. It’s not like we get paid for this.

So, while you’re imagining a hiliarious fantasy post* involving WorldNetDaily’s discovery of a notarized placenta in the possession of Barack Obama’s step-grandmother in Kenya, let’s move on to the mundane subject that triggered our awesome inspiration: the afterlife of the Birther Meme.

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No time to work up a formal introduction, so we’re going to dump you straight into our Open Thread/Door-Slamming Concerto for Sarah Palin’s final speech as governor, live from Fairbanks. If you’re near a TV, CNN’s got the show. Otherwise you’re on your own.

Title: “Fahrenheit 451”

Author: Ray Bradbury

Rank: 93

Blurb: None. And by this point, none needed.

Review: “If you are a thinker, Faherenheit 451 is book for you. You will also want to read Zollocco: A Novel of Another Universe.”

Customers Also Bought: “Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller

Footnote: Given how the Collected Doorstops of Ayn Rand have been showing up in the Amazon Top 100 lately, we wondered whether there was some bizarre wingnut angle to Bradbury’s classic moving some inventory. False alarm: Bradbury himself — who turns 89 in August — has been making the rounds, with interviews, a new graphic novel of 451, and an appearance at San Diego’s Comic-Con on Saturday.

So we’ll take this moment to give props to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDnet, who came up with the best line about the recent fracas over Amazon deleting books from its reading devices: “If it had been Fahrenheit 451 instead of 1984 or Animal Farm, the Kindles would have probably burst into flames.”

Fahrenheit 451 [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

Poor WorldNetDaily. They’ve been flogging the issue for months, raising money for billboards, even producing a new DVD — and when their moment of glory finally arrives, they’re left out in the cold:

On a story that no news organization has followed more closely than WND – questions surrounding Barack Obama’s birth certificate – one of the Internet’s top news portals, Google News, is now placing dozens of sources and even left-leaning blogs higher in the search rankings than WND.

Shocking! that Google would give Glengarry placement to news sites with Glengarry audiences. Less Shocking! is that WND is treating it as a conspiracy even more threatening than President Mombassa himself:

“In more than 12 years of Internet experience, I have never seen anything like this,” said [WND Editor Joseph] Farah. “As of today, all the major search engines systematically began scrubbing our content. This happened at the very moment this story broke into the mainstream.”

From a geek perspective, the thought of Microsoft and Google cooperating on anything is even more hilarious than WND styling itself as a “news organization”. Game over, folks: the shark has jumped.

And the long-gestating Birther Meme is about to die.

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NY Post

It’s Star Wars Day at Comic-Con, the annual Sandy Eggo geekfest we’ve managed to avoid for seven years now, despite the fact we found ourself in the neighborhood the other night, amidst street banners for James Cameron’s upcoming epic disappointment.

But since we don’t want to talk about Skip Gates and the Legion of Doom, we’ve discovered instead a controversy that cuts even deeper than our nation’s not-yet-post-racial divide: an interstellar gap between fans of the original trilogy and deluded souls who prefer the simulacrum of storytelling manifested in the later abominations.

Which we’ve learned is a fancy way of saying that we’ve entered the Geezer Galaxy:

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Ladies and gentlemen, there come moments in a satirical blogger’s existence when reality is so fabulous, so divine, so fucking awesome, that no premise can hope to achieve the Platonic grandeur of the Thing Itself.

This is one of those moments:

Sarah Palin’s opponents like to throw things at her. They throw slanders at her, they throw trick questions at her, they even throw frivolous ethics complaints at her, but we need to let Sarah know: “No matter what the jackals are throwing at you, Sarah, we are throwing roses!”

On the day Sarah Palin becomes a private citizen, July 26th, we want to make sure she knows how much Team Sarah loves and appreciates her for the hard work, integrity, and VALUES she represents and FIGHTS FOR everyday. What better way to say “We love you and support you” then to send bouquets of roses? What better way to show the world that support for Sarah Palin HAS NEVER BEEN STRONGER?!

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