Meet Heidi. Heidi is auditioning to be our Official 2011 Mascot. Thank you, Heidi. We’ll be in touch.

Your Adorable, Fuzzy, Cross-Eyed Meme Of The Day [Nerdist]

So, we were thinking, what absurd thing will wingnuts choose to feign outrage about the Tucson memorial service?

Batting for the Reds, Michelle Malkin:

More whoops and hollers for the National Anthem singer.

More whoops and hollers for the University of Arizona president…

And immediately, the sobriety is broken by massive whoops and hollers for Janet Napolitano.

Just. Gross.

Strike One! The fervent applause at the arena certainly caught us off guard at first, but we quickly decided that there was no reason a memorial should be somber. Why shouldn’t joy serve as a repudiation of the intent of the crime? Keep hope alive, y’all!

Besides, Tucson isn’t our town, nor is it Michelle’s. Let them find their own ways to deal with it.

And here’s the next pitch…

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[Bloomberg]

So PepsiCo is running a contest for Super Bowl Doritos ads, and somebody submitted the above, and then Fox caught wind of it last week, and, well, you know the rest:

After Media Wave submitted the ad in early November, a number of Catholic groups, including one called America Needs Fatima, took issue with the ad, which the group believed mocks the Holy Eucharist. That group started an online petition to ask Pepsi to reject the ad.

We were actually going to run this early Saturday afternoon, but then we got, um, distracted.

PepsiCo Snafu Illustrates Dangers of Crowd Sourcing [Mashable]

Eugene Register-Guard, Sunday, November 18, 1979:

Khomeini orders some hostages freed

No, not that.

Showers

No, not that either. Lower.

Dismal day

If you were among the standing-room-only crowd of 41,235 fans at the University of Oregon-UCLA football game Saturday at Autzen Stadium, you know how wet it was. If you weren’t there, this gives you a good idea of what you missed. For Duck fans, the game was as bad as the weather. The Bruins broke on top early and sloshed their way to a 35-0 victory over Oregon…

Okay, fine. It rained and the Ducks sucked, neither of which was news in 1979. So what are we doing with a generation-old newspaper clipping in the files?

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We really don’t care either way about Yet Another Daley occupying the national stage — it’s not like Yet Another Quayle — but we’re getting somewhat annoyed with remarks like this, demonstrated for us by Marc Ambinder:

Choosing Daley, a well-respected Washington-and-Chicago figure, is a further signal that Obama ties the fate of his presidency to the fate of the economy and recognizes that his relationship with Congress will be much less helpful than a better rapport with the nation’s employers and job creators.

It’s long been remarked that reporters don’t know shit about economics, and as a former adept of that Evil Cult, we must include ourself among the Congenitally Clueless.

But as little as we know, we do know this:

Employers don’t create jobs. People who buy shit create jobs.

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It must have been late 1994 or early 1995 when we met Pete DeFazio, Eugene’s Congresscritter for Life, at a campus event. Having missed that particular installment of Schoolhouse Rock, we asked him what the practical difference was between Demrats and Repugs controlling The People’s Funhouse.

We forget the exact wording of his response, so we prefer to remember it as follows: “It means you don’t get to do shit.”

Meaning: Repugs were now driving, and the best Demrats could hope was that the airbags were working. Maybe you can crack open a window for air, but hands off the radio. We’re cruising on Classic Rock the next two years, and stop whining, you indie poser.

That’s as it should be in These United States, never mind that the Senate is driving some training car where everybody gets a brake. You win, you get the wheel.

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