They ranked Fresno the stupidiestest:

"These people are here living their lives and doing the very best they can. They shouldn't be put down like this," said a lady in a bookstore.

They ranked my hometown, Vegas, right above Fresno. They haven't won any Pulitzers in the last few weeks, but they do have a UNLV professor who thinks The Daily Beast is right.

An English professor at UNLV, the 70-year-old Hickey considers those criteria and says, "Well, honestly, (the low ranking) is because the school graduates losers. It graduates people to middle management.

Go Rebels. San Antonio was next:

The Mensas at The Daily Beast are banking that you will get bent, click through to their site, read the rankings and let the Daily Beast reap the harvest of epic page views. They make you mad, you give them page views, and they scoop up the ad revenue. Trouble is, I didn't include the link, and I'm not going to include it. The Daily Beast can bite my ass. If they think I'm sending page views their way, they're not that smart.

Power to the people (and Google). Further up the list, Phoenix proved how astute they are with this cynical assessment of The Daily Beast:

The Daily Beast is one of those websites that summarizes what's on the internet on any given day.

while Houston trotted out some issues. The headline: "The Daily Beast: Houston — You Are 'Mildly Retarded.'"

Raleigh-Durham was cited as America's supreme genius city; profoundly retarded Fresno, with an IQ of 6, was listed as the dumbest. Austin was the highest-ranked Texas city, but you probably knew that already. It always comes out on top in these kinds of things.

What about the "winners?" In Raleigh, the mayor trotted out a press line. One comment on a website:

Obvious from this story that our diversity-driven schools are a complete failure.

Not much else. Seventh-place Seattle, pissed:

It's hard not to suspect some brainless methodology — considering the facts.

And New York, you're lucky number 13. A Google News search for reactions turned up virtually nothing, locally.

The lesson? America's slightly insecure, but we're not exactly a country divided. A general consensus proves that lists like these are inaccurate, pro-perception, anti-reality, useless, and that we—and I—are stupider for dignifying them. Sorry.

[Jasper Johns' Map, 1963, via MoMA]

This means the various poorly dressed and oddly coiffed young terrorist hep cats who burned the Olympic banner on the streets of the Windy City have won. Presumably they are right now pausing the Crass albums on their "Disc Mans" just long enough to cheer the failure of America. And they will be joined in that cheer by Matt Drudge!

"WORLD REJECTS OBAMA," Drudge says! That is a hilarious and easily predicted distortion! Also wasn't it weird how suddenly the right-wing hated the idea of a President trying to get America the Olympics? Like, seriously, what the fuck was that about?

Some of us were against having the Olympics in America because the IOC is run by vile old bastards, the bidding process is staggeringly corrupt, and Chicagoans, like New Yorkers, did not particularly want the Olympics, all that much. We did not want the IOC to reject our bid because Chicago has too many black criminals and because the idea of Obama trying to boost an American city enrages us, though. Why does Matt Drudge hate America? (Note: Chicago is part of America!)

Here we have the forces of American Exceptionalism and unrepentant jingoism teaming up with dreadlocked anti-American anarchists. Maybe the Spanish fascist who used to run the IOC will win the Olympics for Madrid, or (most likely) they will go to Rio de Janeiro.

As was just not reported anywhere in the US media really, but was reported quite a bit in the Guardian (and other UK news outlets), the US interfered with the trial of supposed Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi so much that his conviction was in danger of being overturned way before his release to die at home in Libya. And in exchange for his mercy release, Megrahi agreed not to appeal his conviction and embarrass the hell out of everyone.

But Megrahi has released some embarrassing documents anyway, related to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's review of how the US paid off the only witness, who was maybe lying. Maybe!

The commission found police memos suggesting that Tony Gauci, the only witness to link the Libyan to the alleged plot, expressed an interest in being paid to give evidence. He also received payments from the US department of justice after the trial, the new documents claim to show.

The commission said the documents should have been disclosed to Megrahi's defence team, and that the failure to do so made Megrahi's conviction unsafe. The papers allege that Gauci was paid $2m (£1.2m) after Megrahi's conviction, and his brother Paul $1m.

Sometimes we just want justice so much that we are forced to intervene when foreign, soveriegn nations attempt to have fair criminal trials, ok? That is the American way! And it also explains why we all got soooo mad when the Scots sent him back home to die in Libya. Don't you know how much that conviction cost us?

Steve Anderson is a Baptist preacher who prays to Jesus Christ for Barack Obama to "die and go to hell." That is just one of the many crazy hateful things he says all the time!

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, MSNBC reminds us, warned us about the crazy right-wing extremism on the rise. And as the former governor of Arizona, she should know: this insane Anderson preacher is from Tempe, Arizona!

It was just 18 short years ago that Chuck D and Flavor Flav were on their way to Arizona to set those dumbass white folks straight, but apparently they never made it.

The gun nuts bringing loaded weapons to town halls? Arizonans! Tent City prisoner-torturer and rounder-up-of-dark-skinned folks Sherif Joe Arpaio? He rules Arizona's Maricopa County!

John McCain? He actually lives in the DC area and has precious few connections to Arizona. But it's where Cindy and Meghan are from!

Arizona, what is your deal? Is the heat making you crazy?

Update: Oh, hey, welcome to the party, Arizona congressman Trent Franks! So you considered a lawsuit to get Barack Obama's birth certificate, did you?

Donald Sutherland breathlessly narrating the whole thing! James Woods-as-Harry Truman washing down painkillers with scotch before drunkenly deciding to drop the bomb! That annoying guy from Scrubs and the Miller Lite ads who is not James Woods also being involved, somehow! It will be wonderful.

We're still not getting Showtime, obv, but eventually we'll watch clips of it on the internet.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operating and Development released their "Society at a Glance" numbers and now we get to confirm all sorts of stereotypes about everyone, with actual numbers and charts and stuff to back it up!

Basically Americans are fat and joyless and we hate the children we keep pumping out. And for some reason we're the only country that's not getting taller anymore. What's even more fun is that all these numbers are pre-recession, so things have totally only gotten worse!

Probably the most troubling thing of all is how greedily we've slopped all this stuff up. But after making celebrity baby covers the biggest sellers for the likes of Us, People and OK!, we get the freakshow news we deserve. Still hungry for more and more babies, we've turned to the circus disaster that is regular lives made alien and shocking when bad choices mixed with a few bits of bad luck and stories were born.

Maybe it coms from exhaustion with all the other media. First it was scripted television shows, and then their high-concept reality descendants. And now we've sifted through every last layer of story until we've gone and found a low, universal denominator. People come out of other people's vaginas sometimes. The more that come out of the same one or the younger the owners of the necessary body parts are, the more we're interested. 220 channels and nothing else was on, so we've settled on the baby zoo currently on display on TLC or sitting in a dimly-lit room across from Ann Curry.

While Suleman's desire to go and get herself knocked up with octuplets when she was already a cash-strapped mother of six probably had far more to do with some murky and deep-seated emotional cataclysms than it did with a desire for fame, the end result has been a raft of high profile TV appearances, implied hopes for a reality series, and a website asking fans or followers or whomever to donate money to this Elephantitis-suffering family. Ms. Suleman has become a rickety celebrity simply by making the wreckless decision to bring many children into this world for whom she had no way of caring. Good for us!

Little Mister Patten may not have been courting fame when he got his young girlfriend pregnant, but now he's likely being paid exclusivity fees by the Sun. And, in the wake of the media frenzy surrounding the unsettling story, two more boys have come forward, claiming paternity of 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman's daughter. There are posed photos of the two boys, aged 14 and 16, on Splash, the photo agency where I find many of the silly celebrity pictures I use for Open Caption.

It had become fairly routine for celebrities to profit off the act of procreation, what with the big glossy magazine industry and whatnot. But now common folks are saying "me too!" and the troubling thing is, if you don't already have a certain degree of popularity, you have to make your babymaking pretty sensational to get any attention. And what's sensational is often ugly. Again these folks probably didn't enter into reproduction with designs on tabloid notoriety, but once the first publicist calls or newspaper camera flashes... Well, the Siren call is tough to resist.

Though humanity has its limits, and the public outcry against Nadya Suleman—and the sad revulsion expressed over the Patten thing—suggests that maybe there is a limit to this mayhem. But we don't suspect it will die down quickly. Prepare yourselves for other strange stories, for other curious and unpleasant parlor tricks of the body. After all, while everything's being torn down around it, Coney Island still has its sideshow.

Six months ago, the 19-year-old mostly-useless heiress and writer, sorta married a musician named Max Drummey in Las Vegas and moved to Brooklyn. She was escaping the winding, paparazzi-besotted streets of London for a city that hardly knew her. How exciting! How real.

But she eventually started to make a name for herself Stateside, writing a weekly column for Nylon and appearing in many an American gossip page, with increasing frequency. And then it all came crashing down. She announced her separation from Drummey over the weekend, and has apparently taken up with another musician, this one named Donald Cumming.

While she is supposedly looking for a new apartment in New York, she will still keep splitting her time between here and the UK. And we wouldn't be surprised if, just before walks down the ramp onto the plane from Heathrow, she remembers this city's sad, shuffling populace-in-recession and decides to stay in jolly old. And then the great adventure that was "Peaches Geldof Comes to America" will fade into the distance, just a dream some of us had.

Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter all had to stand in a line and get photographed, because Obama wanted to have lunch with all the surviving presidents and Bush thought it was a great idea, and now it will probably become some sort of bullshit tradition.

So enjoy this odd clip of everyone being smiley and awkward! No one wants to stand anywhere near poor Jimmy Carter. Bush Jr is trying to edge in front of Barry Hussein. Then, because the moment was not surreal enough, Bill Clinton says to Bush Jr, "I love this rug." Really? Bush says "yeah it's really neat" or something, or maybe "yeah it's awesome, it's a totally radical rug." Yes probably that one.

Oh, and guess what:

The lunch also represents one of the few times Vice President Dick Cheney has been left out of a big White House event. But in a radio interview with CBS News, Cheney said he doesn't feel left out.

"No, I'd love to be there, but the vice presidents weren't invited." He said today's lunch is "just for the big dogs."

Weird. America is weird.

For a brief second, yes! America was off the shit list, according to random white Europeans polled. (Actual line from that article: "I think this moment has the potential to do for the U.S. what the Olympics did for China: show the world we've changed." Um.) We could stop pretending we were Canadian! It was so great. And then a series of coordinated, supposedly Westerner-targeted attacks on Mumbai, India's financial district came rushing into the news. A hotel and a Jewish center were seized by "Mujahideen" (though no group, Muslim or not, has been declared the perpetrator). Those hideous, all-too-familiar images of bombs and guns and smoke were suddenly back in our faces (I mean, they'd always been there, every day for seven plus years, but now we're forced to look again).

Overall, the death toll could top 200. Among the casualties are, yes, people just like us: A young rabbi from New York was killed with his equally young wife, leaving an orphaned 18-month-year-old. A 13-year-old American girl was killed with her father. People having scrambling through the devastation of hotels and train stations the whole time, trying to find any Americans who may have been injured or worse in the attacks. We learned that some 200 tourists, singled out for having American or British passports, were being held hostage. And suddenly the caution we threw to the rumpy thumpy street party wind late on November 4th seemed to come flying back at us, taunting us with a small, ugly reminder:

It was never the World, and it was never Bush. It was something smaller and more shadowy that despised (read: violently disagreed with) us, and it was a system, a large collection of policies that enraged, not one simpish big-eared man. He stood as powerful avatar for that Big Problem, yes, but removing the spokesman does not end the scandal. (Just ask Scott McClellan.) We've bloody miles to go, we fear. And while it's still OK—don't worry!—to be soul squishingly happy about Obama, let's not forget that it's only a small seed of beginning. There are still plenty of needles in the Hope stack.

Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us of the anger of Jerry Falwell and "legitimate" right-wing attacks on activists like Dr. King:

These men didn't kill Martin Luther King, but they contributed to an atmosphere of nationalism, white supremacy and cheap unreflective patriotism that ultimately got a lot of people killed. Confronted with Aparthied South Africa, men like Helms and Falwell used the same "communist" defense. While Mandela wasted away in prison, they dismissed the whole thing as a communist plot.

Let me be clear—This is the ghost that McCain Campaign is summoning. This is the Ring Of Power that they want to wield. The Muslim charge, the "Hussein" thing is nothing more than today's red-baiting, and it is what it was then—a cover for racists. You may say I'm overreacting, and I really hope you're right. 999,000 out 1 million times we'll go on like normal and proceed to Election Day. But if some shit pops off, the thug and thug-mongers will not be able to throw up their hands and say "How could I have known?" Ignorance will not save them. Their stupidity is a scourge on us all.

Joe Klein is scared of what McCain's enabling:

Watch the tape of the guy screaming, "He's a terrorist!" McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes... and I thought for a moment he'd admonish the man. But he didn't. And now he's selling the Ayres non-story full-time. Yes, yes, it's all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today—and more, it is a national disgrace.

We forget how much Democratic governments engender violent hatred. The '60s weren't just shitty music and hideous clothes, they were a violent near-revolution. The 1930s were an era of extreme vitriol from the nation's right-wing. The polite front was Congressional rebellion and checks on Roosevelt's power—the less polite part was Father Coughlin preaching fascism and Lindbergh and Ford practicing it. The '90s had Waco and the weird Militia culture and Timothy McVeigh.

Honestly a Barack Obama presidency was always going to stir up the extreme members of society, but to play into it? To feed off of it? It's fucking irresponsible. Rallying the base always means satisfying the furthest out-there elements, but they've taken on the tone of George Wallace's racist campaign. Mocking John Kerry as a Frenchified sissy is a bit different than encouraging people to assume the guy who'll probably be our next president is a secret Muslim terrorist black power '60s radical extremist baby-murderer.

It's all basically a nasty, nasty preview of what we could be in for in an Obama administration. With particularly rabid conservatives already declaring the election pre-stolen by ACORN and (horror of horrors) the poor, black, and homeless (how ACORN is rigging public opinion polls has not yet been adequately explained), the illegitimacy of Obama's presidency will always be a convenient excuse for seething hatred.

And with the economy heading south? With a rise in unemployment probably on the way? With a full-blown recession around the corner? We anticipate a resurgence of Lou Dobbs nativism. The Times is already warning that crime could come roaring back to our rapidly gentrified city:

Whatever fate awaits New Yorkers, many say they are bracing for a crime increase, particularly in petty crimes, if the economy gets worse. But opinions are mixed about whether any signs of disorder have already begun.

Mya Bee, 34, a filmmaker from a Brooklyn neighborhood once ravaged by crime, said that while it was still too early to gauge the full impact of the economic downturn, she had begun to notice some troubling trends. People seem less confident, she said. Some were selling personal belongings. One friend told her he had pulled his money out of the bank.

“When you can’t use your credit cards, it will get worse,” said Ms. Bee, a resident of Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I know when people are really, really feeling it, it’s going to get bad. When that happens, all hell will break loose. People will resort to their old methods of making money, whether it’s robbing or stealing or hustling.”

If the cities fall apart? Obama can't control the Blacks. If the Rust Belt keeps failing? Obama doesn't care about the Whites.

Then, in 2010, if things really suck, we'll get a rerun of the 1994 Republican revolution, with a new, crazier, more nativist breed of lunatics hell-bent on making Obama into the nation's biggest villain. Anti-immigration violence doesn't sound too outside the realm of possibility.

This is all, obviously, worst-case scenario fear-mongering, but things look fucking grim right now. A pissed-off newly poor populace is never a great sign for anyone in a position of power. A minority in a position of power faces god knows what challenges.

Thanks, then, to American Hero John McCain for stirring shit up as much as possible weeks before the election.

John Paul II made Peggy cry, you see. Like, every single time she saw him, or thought of him, or looked at the framed picture she has of him on her desk next to the framed picture of Ronald Reagan bowling with Jesus. Ratzi, though—"John Paul made you burst into tears. Benedict makes you think."

(The use of the second-person in this column, as in all Peggy Noonan columns employing it, will eventually wear down your spirit and drive you mad. "Benedict, the reporter noted, is the perfect pope for the Internet age. He is a man of the word. You download the text of what he said, print it, ponder it." I... I do? Why??)

Oh, yes, that Internet age thing. Peggy means that Ratzi writes very intellectual speeches about vagaries of Catholic dogma, and also how the Islamists are demons who we need to destroy, because they're currently doing a better job of recruiting desperately impoverished third-worlders than the formerly reigning champion Catholics, but whatever. It all sounds to us a bit less "information age" than some other "ages" we could name.

Also wouldn't the first Pope of the Internet age deliver Mass not in the original Latin but in comical LOLSpeak? Or perhaps in the form of a 10 Ten List of YouTube clips? (Let us Digg.)

Ok, here is more from Ms. Noonan's column about the Pope she is sad she doesn't like as much as the last one:

An American journalist took it upon himself to remind papal representatives that the pope turns 81 while in Washington. Perhaps people could be urged to sing . . . "Happy Birthday"? Benedict some time back wowed a group of schoolchildren when he spoke to them of Antonietta Meo, who may in time become the church's youngest nonmartyred saint. Is he meeting with schoolchildren here?

Another small fear, born of hearing him last week at the mass. Benedict spoke in many languages including English, which he speaks fluidly and with a strong German accent. This is an accent that 60 years of World War II movies have taught Americans to hear as vaguely sinister, or comic. The nicer commentators may say he sounds like Col. Klink in "Hogan's Heroes." I hope he speaks even more than usual about love, for that may remove the sting, as love does.

Yes! Perhaps people could be urged to sing Happy Birthday to Nazi Pope Klink! Children, maybe? A band of Austrian siblings, perhaps! Led by their plucky governess!

Something Beautiful Has Begun [WSJ via our favorite new blog, Christ Our Hope: Pope Benedict XVI: Apostolic Journey to the United States (Part II: Back in the Habit)]

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FEELING TAXED?
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WHAT: According to the IRS, one in five of the nation's taxpayers wait until the final week to file their taxes by the April 15 deadline!
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• Church Street Post Office - 90 Church Street
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