Pun Salad

Some suggestions for your end-of-year clicking:

• Don't forget to smooch your sweetie an extra second tonight. Not surprisingly, the French are behind this.

• Thomas Sowell speaks wisely, as always:
  Whoever called politics "the art of the possible" must have had a strange idea of what is possible or a strange idea of politics, where the impossible is one of the biggest vote-getters.

  People can get the possible on their own. Politicians have to be able to offer the voters something that they cannot get on their own. The impossible fills that bill perfectly.

  Examples are provided, and I have the feeling we'll be able to find our own examples aplenty in the coming year.

• Jacob Sullum has highlights from the past year's blame-shifting. (And we'll undoubtedly see plenty more of that in the coming year too.) This was the most painful:
  Stop Me Before I Borrow Again. Except in cases of fraud, people who took out risky mortgages and later had trouble making their payments should have known what they were getting into. Perhaps they were careless, or perhaps they miscalculated, assuming that home values would keep rising. In many cases they misrepresented their assets or income.

  Yet when asked whether "greedy lenders" or "risky home buyers" were "at fault" in the "subprime lending meltdown," Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin replied, "Darn right it was the predator lenders, who tried to talk Americans into thinking that it was smart to buy a $300,000 house if we could only afford a $100,000 house." She was notably easier on the reckless borrowers: "I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars."

  Yeah. I like Sarah, but she should leave the coarse populist scapegoating to the Democrats.

• BBSpot posts an intriguing link:
  Who Lives Here?

  … with the helpful mouseover tip: "Keep zooming out."

  I didn't know anything about the place, and spent some enjoyable time learning about it. For your own amusement and edification, I'd suggest you try the same. But their official home page is here. And, unfortunately like us, they're having government finance woes. Perhaps we could try one of their methods:

  

  President-elect Obama, take note!

• And in local news:
  A radio-collared bear being tracked as part of a University of New Hampshire professor's research project was shot and killed last month by Nottingham police after it tried to break into a woman's home.

  Despite how it sounds, the research was not about getting bears to break into houses under radio control. At least that's the professor's story, and he's sticking to it. (Via Granite Geek.)