Happy Canada Day, everyone. Snap quiz, if you're up to it:
1. Exactly what are we celebrating the anniversary of?
2. Who gets top billing as "Father of Confederation?"
3. Name one other.
4. Where exactly is the Canada-U.S. border (I mean the long straight part)?
5. Why did Canadians decide they wanted a country anyway?
6. What's the national anthem? Fairly easy one.
7. What's the flag? Ditto.
8. What's the national sport? What, another gimme?
9. How many provinces are there? Territories?

Is this incredibly lame or amazingly awesome? 

Mitt Romney was on Meet the Press on Sunday, where he argued essentially that the United States doesn’t need a public health insurance option because Americans like to have choice when it comes to health care. After hearing this, I realized a couple of things.

First, Romney needs a Thesaurus for Christmas. Badly. Desperately, too.

The media continues to lionize Michael Jackson with a deluge of tributes, retrospectives, and eulogies, and a stream of breathless reporting about what his doctor said and what his sisters did and where his kids stayed. Some of my co-bloggers have compared him to John Lennon. Other articles have placed him in a triumvirate with Lennon and Elvis Presley.

It is easy to say that others are responsible for progress.  To fail to take ownership of the here and now.  Well, as one member of this community, I am here to tell you, it is time for all of us -- for me, and for you -- to take responsibility now to move our community forward, together.  There is nothing that could possibly be more important.

When Abram turned 99, God came to him and said, “'I am God Almighty. Walk before Me and be perfect.”

Commentary: Yessir, God definitely had a man-crush on Abram.

Abram complied by falling flat on his face. Then God promised several more times to give Abram many, many offspring until Abram was about ready to tell God to shut up about the offspring already.

But then God demanded a price for his largess: circumcision.

Commentary: A kinky man-crush.

I thought I'd share one of those channel-surfing moments that make you wish all TVs came with a screen-grab function. I happened to switch to TSN as they were doing an item on the end of Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension. What immediately caught my eye was the chyron at the bottom of the screen: "suspended due to darkness."

"Holy crap, TSN," I immediately thought. "You can't say that. They caught the guy fair and square." A second or so later, I realized I was seeing the second half of a line that probably referred to the game he'd been expected to play in.

Michael Jackson dead?? That's what the LA Times and AP are reporting, anyway (CNN hasn't yet confirmed). Unbelievable.

Earlier today, my brother was bemoaning Farrah Fawcett's death, trying to come to grips with the loss of his most common inspiration for those special, intimate teenage moments. (I kind of remember Charlie's Angels and thinking of Farrah as a sexy broad, but she was a bit before my prime mastubatory years).

Michael Jackson, however, was kind of like my Beatles. So I'm in shock, and surprisingly sad to learn of his premature death.

Wow, and I mean wow.  This is a quite the romantic email thread.  After reading this, I honestly think he originally went to Argentina with the intent of never coming back, but his conscience got the better of him and he decided it would be poor taste to leave his South Carolina (oh, and his 4 young children) hanging.  I can't really blame him, what would you rather do: wrangle in American politics with blowhard unscrupulous lawyers or live on the beach in Argentina with your South American lover?   The thing that strikes me about these emails is that he genuinely seems to care for this wom

I've been sort of hounding my elected officials lately; sending them poll results, asking them to commit to the public option, following up on their correspondence with me to ask them to please answer my questions instead of responding with canned crap that somebody on their staff wrote.

Seriously, how hard is it to answer the question "Do you support a public option for health insurance?" Yes? No? You haven't made up your mind yet because you get a lot of money from the insurance industry and you're afraid the Republicans will use the issue to run against you in 2010?

***Breaking News***

BREAKING: Having issued a number of bellicose threats in recent weeks, the government of North Korea has run dangerously low on epithets and histrionic adjectives. Though North Korea is the world's leading producer of hyperbole, the prolific output of the government controlled Central News Agency has outstripped their supply. Analysts fear that without wrathful verbiage, North Korea will resort to military force and patriotic parades.

Is it me, or does Nixon become more racist with every release of White House tapes? Ironically, the latest batch show him embracing moderate ideas for racist rationales.

For instance, it turns out that he supported a woman's right to have an abortion...in order to avoid those horrible mixed-race babies:

There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white.

I guess that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, didn't get the memo.

Citigroup executives have decided in their infinite wisdom to increase base salaries for many of their employees by as much as 50 percent.

The bank says the raises - which will be partially offset by a reduction in bonuses, though overall compensation packages could be higher or lower - are necessary to remain competitive ... in an environment where the official unemployment rate will soon be in the double digits no less.

From the official Korean Central News Agency:

"If the U.S. imperialists start another war, the army and people of Korea will ... wipe out the aggressors on the globe once and for all."

A week ago, in response to U.S. threats to inspect cargo coming to and from North Korea, the same news agency vowed that North Korea would treat such actions as a declaration of war of promised a "100 or 1,000-fold retaliation with merciless military strike."

In the United States we have a “drug czar,” a “terrorism czar,” a (newly appointed) “pay czar”, a “cybersecurity czar”, a “war czar”, an “energy czar,” a "copyright czar," a “food safety czar,” and we even have a “hurricane Katrina recovery czar.” This wouldn’t be alarming if this was the Roman Empire (the term was originally derived from word Caesar and meant emperor) or 13th century Russia, but it’s not, it’s 21st century America a coun

In the end, it was Sarai who solved the fertility problem. She suggested that Abram have sex with her Egyptian slave, Hagar. Abram enthusiastically followed her suggestion.

Commentary: I suppose that I shouldn't ask whether Hagar was consulted in this arrangement.

I've always sucked at making decisions. Leave where we're having lunch up to me and we'll likely be having dinner there.

If there's one thing about modern life I cannot stand, it's the plethora of options we have. Sure the freedoms we now enjoy are terrific, the new opportunities exciting, the potential adventures limitless, but instead I like to focus on all the bad choices we can now make.