“A child born to a U.S. citizen overseas through the increasingly common practice of in vitro fertilization with embryos from donor eggs and sperm is not American, unless an American is one of the donors.” [USA Today, via @daveweigel]

Playgoers like to feel that they care about the world and their place in it.

They like to feel that they are on the side of the angels.

Some years ago there was an unaccountable fashion for the plays of Athol Fugard. A fine writer whose sudden popularity on Broadway was puzzling till one turned one’s gaze from the stage to look at the audience. There they were. Well-dressed New Yorkers deploring the horrors of apartheid without having to actually do anything about it. They’d bought a ticket which proved they cared so they could ignore with a clear conscience the racism that waited outside the theatre. It got so bad that Mr. Fugard refused to write any more on the subject. He felt that he was becoming part of the problem as his work merely exploited the suffering of others, making him rich at their expense. Which, it seems to me, is precisely what Mr. Daisey has done.

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“According to the dictionary, ‘nigger’ does not mean black. It means a low down, lazy, sorry, low down person. That’s what the N word means.” —Paula Smith of Hinesville, Georgia, explaining why she’s cool selling “Don’t Re-Nig 2012” bumper stickers. [Forbes, via ThinkProgress]

We once knew a guy who was involved with the local recycling scene in Eugene. One night he took us to a warehouse — a giant, cavernous space — where materials were collected. At one end was a mountain of plastic milk jugs.

They were going to be shipped to Asia, our friend explained, because that’s where the facilities existed to deal with them. And the energy expended to process them — “carbon footprint” wasn’t yet in the language — negated any benefit from recycling them. It would be another fifteen years before Dick Cheney sneered that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue”, but we were already looking at the waste product of Good Intentions.

To be an American in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is to be an agent of destruction. No matter how lightly you tread, you’re stepping on something. No matter how virtuous your life, to be a Caucasian in Our Exceptional Nation is to be the beneficiary of some pretty nasty business conducted in your name a century or three back. We’re historical trustafarians, decrying our ancestors but reaping the benefits. You learn to live with it.

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This Super Bowl ad for the Fiat 500 Abarth had me at the moment she slaps him, but they decided this Super Bowl ad with Charlie Sheen for the same car was too hot for TV? Really?

She is Romanian model Catrinel Menghia, and she has a (probably fake) scorpion tattoo on the back of her neck. It’s the symbol for Abarth, Fiat’s tuning arm.

Title: “Hollywood Hypocrites”

Author: Jason Mattera

Rank: 50

Blurb: “The same Hollywood loons who got Barack Hussein Obama elected in 2008 will do so again in 2012. That is, unless we muzzle them. Four years ago, Republicans sat back like wimps and let Obama’s celebrity-fueled cool machine steamroll them into electoral smithereens. This time, we must do the steamrolling.”

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[@newtgingrich, via @theharryshearer]