Perennial conservative douche George Will continues to distort reality in his drive to cast doubt on anthropogenic climate change, despite having been caught making shit up in his last column on the subject.  This time, he trots out the zombie lie that global warming has stopped:

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

Will, like everyone who makes this argument, is shamelessly cherry picking data.  Let’s take a look at some data and see how well Will’s claim holds up:

The blue lines show 8-year trends in the global land-ocean temperature.  Some 8-year trends show a decrease in average temperature, while others show a drastic increase.  Clearly, any given short-term trend tells us little about long-term changes.  Yet, that is exactly Will and other denialists use regularly when they claim that global warming  has stopped.  They take the short-term trend since 1998, which was anomalously warm, and use it to argue that warming has stopped.  Such an argument is clearly wrongheaded.  And this isn’t a hard concept to grasp, so the question is, then, why does anyone listen to anything George Will has to say?  He’s either incredibly dim, which I doubt, or he’s dishonest enough that he’s willing to distort science to fit his ideology.  Either way, I can’t understand why anyone thinks his opinion matters.

I bring you more absurdity from the Worldnutdaily.  Calling it “breaking” news, the WND informed its readers that:

As part of a month-long aircraft makeover, a painted American flag was removed from the tail of Sen. Barack Obama’s official campaign airplane and was replaced with the presidential candidate’s trademark “O” symbol.

Holy shit!  Clearly Obama hates America!  It’s true, at least according to Worldnutdaily readers.  Just look at the results of this WND poll (as of 1 pm edt):

And if you want a scalding hot serving of village-idiocy, check out the comments section of the poll. One commenter is curious to know “if some Islamic group has paid his campaign a huge amount of money for him to remove the American flag from his plane.”  Awesome!  My favorite comment is from a reader who says, “The sad thing about this whole incident is that so many people won’t see anything wrong with what he did.”  Hmmm…maybe they’ll think that because there is nothing fucking wrong with it! For most people, failure to plaster oneself with the goddamn flag is not equivalent to high treason.  But in the Worldnutdaily universe, if you don’t look like this…:

…then you’re an Islamic extremist bent on imposing Sharia law on the American people.  It’s depressing to know that Worldnutdaily readers actually exist.

Via Radley Balko, I’ve learned of an NPR story that seriously fails to generate much sympathy.  Titled “For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach”, the story details the plight of a struggling mother and daughter in the face of rising food prices and a crappy economy:

The rising cost of food means their money gets them about a third fewer bags of groceries — $100 used to buy about 12 bags of groceries, but now it’s more like seven or eight. So they cut back on expensive items like meat, and they don’t buy extras like ice cream anymore. Instead, they eat a lot of starches like potatoes and noodles.

Of course, I do appreciate the struggle of poor people in this country, and rising food prices are hitting many families hard.  But take a look at the women featured in the NPR story:

I have to concur with Radley when he says:

…if NPR’s point is to show how the economy and high gas prices are making working Americans go hungry, you’d think they’d have come up with better subjects than two obese women, one of whom at age 40 has never held a job.

Seriously, it’s supposed to bother me that those two women have had to cut back on their ice cream purchases?