Pun Salad

… I'm leaving:

• Like most people who care about liberty, I'm pretty amazed that a potential Supreme Court Justice can't forthrightly deal with with a hypothetical madcap Congress using the Commerce Clause as a big old loophole to implement totalitarian legislation. John McCormack's summary:

  On Tuesday evening, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) posed a hypothetical question to Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan: If Congress passed a law that said Americans "have to eat three vegetables and three fruits, every day ... does that violate the Commerce Clause?" [...]

  Kagan wouldn't say whether or not she believes the Commerce Clause allows the federal government to pass a law requiring Americans to eat fruits and vegetables.

  My only regret is that Senator Coburn didn't just shut up and let Ms. Kagan hem and haw more than she did. (Daniel Foster makes a similar point.)

  McCormack posts the C-SPAN video of the whole 30-minute Coburn-Kagan interaction, useful if you're worried about context.

• 

  I've occasionally mentioned that I'm a minor Jimmy Webb fanboy, approximately since I realized that "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", and "Macarthur Park" were all written by the same guy.

  Jimmy has a new album out, and I'm pround to plug it over there on the right. (No, your right.) It is full of great music, mostly his golden oldies. Collaborators are some folks of which you might have heard: Vince Gill, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, Jackson Browne, Glen Campbell, Michael McDonald, J. D. Souther, Linda Ronstadt. Whoa.

  Jimmy's Webbsite is here, and there's a very entertaining interview with him here. (In which, among other things, he bemoans false-rhyming "time" with "line" in "Wichita Lineman" over forty years ago. It's okay, Jim, we forgive you.)

• I hope everyone knows that organic gardening is a mainstream activity now. It's not just for long-haired blissed-out hippies with scruffy beards, tie-dyed t-shirts, faded print bandanas knotted around their necks, and suspenders holding up their unbelted jeans. That's just a stereotype we need to grow out of.

• For fans of good bad writing, the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton contest results.

  When Hru-Kar, the alpha-ranking male of the silver-backed gorilla tribe finished unleashing simian hell on Lt. Cavendish, the once handsome young soldier from Her Majesty's 47^th Regiment resembled nothing so much as a crumpled up piece of khaki-colored construction paper that had been dipped in La Victoria chunky salsa.

  Good (bad) stuff.