The Sunday Funny Pages

Today's Forecast: Neutral Letters, Followed by Mostly-Conservative Op-Eds

Today's Biased Letters to the Editor:

Conservative chastises the News Journal for referring to the Senate seat formerly held by Veep Joe Biden as "Joe Biden's seat." This is the second letter of this ilk that we've seen on the NJ Opinion page -- either that, or the NJ liked the first letter so much they reprinted it. A splendid illustration of the apoplexy the name "Biden" generates among certain groups in this state -- they'd probably be happier if the seat was referred to as "the seat formerly held by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named." This letter also makes me wonder which Repub-... oops, conservative --talk show host first told their followers that "the seat doesn't doesn't belong to the Bidens, it belongs to the people of Delaware."

Letters to the Editor balance out today with a liberal pointing out that the right-wingnuts currently living in a permanent state of "the economy sucks because of Obama OMG we're all gonna DIE" need to remember that it was 8 years of Republican rule that got us here.

Today's Biased Op-Eds:

Article by Roy C. Smith on how wrong the current administration is in their approach to fixing the banking industry. The NJ tells us that Mr. Smith is a professor at NYU. It doesn't tell us that Mr. Smith was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for more than twenty years before retiring to write books and magazine articles defending investment banker-ing. A tiny samping of Professor Smith's other articles: "Greed Is Good" and "Five Myths About Executive Pay," as well as several articles for The Independent Institute, a libertarian organization whose policy position on the economy is that an unregulated free market will solve everything. Evidently he woke up and smelled the coffee a couple of days ago, though, with an article entitled "How to Protect Taxpayers From the Biggest Banks."

Local Gay Guy Douglas Marshall-Steele tells us gays are mad as hell with Obama and everybody else and aren't gonna take it any more, and vaguely threatens revolution. The real story here is that as of late Sunday morning, not one comment has been posted online in response to it.

Uber-conservative George Will rounds out today's funny pages with an article showcasing his rich fantasy life as he forecasts life in 2013, when our next president is Mitch Daniels and our new Veep is Paul Ryan. Yeah, "Who?" was also the first thing that popped into my mind. Apparently these geniuses -- actually a former Illinois governor and a former Wisconsin congressman -- are going to get elected by virtue of an innovative approach to solving our economic woes, one so bold and new that Will calls Ryan a one-man think tank for dreaming it up, and anoints him as living, breathing proof that Repuglicans actually have Ideas with a capital I. His Idea? Wait for it... A FLAT INCOME TAX. Now, that made me wonder: has Will got his Pauls mixed up? Did he maybe say Paul Ryan when he really meant Ron Paul? No, Ryan's idea is new and different -- it's a 2-tiered flat tax, which nobody has ever thought of before. 10% for poor people and 25% for rich folks. But here's the real kicker: it will guarantee "universal access to the health care system." New. Different. Genius.