Movement begins to create Superman specialty license plates in Ohio [Plain Dealer, via Comics Alliance]

So we’re looking for something other than the debt ceiling to riff on, and we’ve already played our Crazy Thomas Friedman card so we can’t play another one, and the Yahoo news blog helpfully offers this headline for our consideration:

Yahoo!, communities across U.S. to honor 9/11 anniversary

There’s nothing unusual about the grammar, as far as headlines go. But there’s something wrong about it. Let’s look at some alternatives to tease it out.

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We ignored Thomas Friedman’s column this week, because we always ignore Thomas Friedman’s columns, and ignoring Thomas Friedman’s columns is a right we cherish as an American.

However, upon reflection and incessant reminders from all over the fucking place, we realize that we have made a mistake — an exceptional mistake — because finally, Thomas Friedman has removed the mask and revealed himself to be a Tom Tomorrow cartoon:

Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand, a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012. I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but an impressive group of frustrated Democrats, Republicans and independents, called Americans Elect, is really serious, and they have thought out this process well. In a few days, Americans Elect will formally submit the 1.6 million signatures it has gathered to get on the presidential ballot in California as part of its unfolding national effort to get on the ballots of all 50 states for 2012.

Yes, an “Internet convention” does sound gimmicky, unless you’re talking about Comic-Con. But more to the point, it also sounds profoundly naive — because it focuses solely on one office.

Oh, and it also produces counterproductive results.

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“Yes, many want government to start living within its means. And many are fed up with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle-class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few. But do you know what people are fed up with most of all?”
—Barack Obama, Monday night

• Craven Democrats
• Centrists being mistaken for Progressives
• Triangulation being mistaken for Principle

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If we understand the timing, Our Exceptional Nation actually hit its debt ceiling back in May, but thanks to a high-stakes shell game over at Treasury, nobody noticed. Entropy being what it is, however, the shells aren’t being shuffled as fast as they were, and eventually they’ll come to a full stop on August 2.

The other nominal deadline in the news was last Friday, which The Preznit set as the last possible moment to achieve a Grand Sellout Bargain. Any cocktail-napkin deals signed off by then would still have needed to be translated into actual mind-numbing legislation and passed by Congress, and allowing two weeks for that would be cutting things short, what with other national emergencies like Demon Light Bulb legislation to tend to.

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Maybe it’s because we’ve lived our entire life on the Left Coast — where religion is certainly present, and just as certainly not suffocating — that we fail to see the point of something like this:

Because we represent such a small sliver of the American population and are often seen in a negative light, I believe that it is imperative that atheists make themselves known. A 2010 Gallup poll demonstrated something the LGBTQ community has recognized for some time: people are significantly more inclined to oppose gay marriage if they do not know anyone who is gay.

We weren’t aware that living La Vita Heathen was a matter of genetics, and the writer — who himself happens to be gay — should know better than to make a comparison like that. For that matter, his later comparison of atheists to Muslims, while at least categorically correct, overlooks the nasty distinction that American bigotry against Muslims is actually racist, seeing how most Muslims don’t exhibit Nordic traits.

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Our exclusive series of Inadvertent Metaphors Illustrating the Congressional Drive to Default America continues today with this forty-foot sinkhole that suddenly appeared under the bed of a nice 65-year-old grandmother.

That sinking feeling: Woman finds giant sinkhole under her bed [Yahoo]