Pun Salad

[Together:] "It's an entirely different kind of flying."

• 

  Leslie Nielsen passed away, and you can't go anywhere on the web without running into YouTube clips. Everyone (including me) loved him in Airplane! and the Police Squad TV series and movies. If you read only one thing about Mr. Nielsen, make it David Zucker (Airplane!'s producer/director/writer).

  Mr. Nielsen was also in Forbidden Planet, the first movie I ever saw, back in Oakland, Iowa, 1956. Monsters from the Id! I don't think I had the slightest idea what was going on, but I still remember getting scared out of my 5-year-old wits.

• Loudon County, Virginia, is wealthy by any measure. In 2007, it had the highest median household income of any US county.

  That did not, unfortunately, prevent $9.4 million of your tax dollars from being showered on Loudon Co., part of the Obama Administration's "Bold Action to Save Teachers' Jobs."

  The cash saved zero point zero teacher jobs in Loudon. But it did save Loudon teachers from a two-day unpaid furlough before Thanksgiving; it allowed Loudon to convert it into a two-day paid vacation.

• Mark Krikorian notes the ever-expanding smear campaign of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
  Last week they formally designated -- I am not making this up -- the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage as "hate groups," the same as the "United Society of Aryan Skinheads" and the like.

  Jesse Walker put it this way: "As far as the SPLC is concerned, […] skinheads and Birchers and Glenn Beck fans are all tied together in one big ball of scary."

  As noted a couple days back, SPLC founder Morris Dees has been invited to present the Martin Luther King Celebration Commemorative Address at the University Near Here. Unfortunately, his speech is not titled "One Big Ball of Scary".

• The Concord Monitor reminds fiscal conservatives why we won't be too sorry to see Judd Gregg leave the Senate.
  You won't likely see Sen. Judd Gregg's name on an election ballot again. But you can still drive over the Judd Gregg Bridge, study the weather at the Judd Gregg Meteorology Institute, or take a college class in Gregg Hall.

  Senator Gregg (as the article notes) wasn't the worst earmarker in the Senate. But he perpetuated the myth of "free" Federal money, available for projects states and localities weren't willing to pay for themselves.

  In the "too little, too late" department: Senator Gregg voted for an earmark moratorium in FYs 2011-2013 today. Our state's other Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, was one of five Senators who could not be bothered to vote.