Pun Salad

… mail by the door:

• Michael Moore seems upset that President Obama joked about killing the Jonas Brothers with Predator drones.

  It's unclear what part of that upsets him though. Is it using the Predators? Or is it targeting the Jonas Brothers?

• Ed Morrissey comments on a Washington Post story that there are efforts to grant the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) broad new powers to regulate commercial Internet sites, tucked into the "financial reform" legislation making its way through Congress. Ed makes pertinent observations and asks relevant questions:

  Neither the FTC nor the Internet had anything to do with the Wall Street meltdown in 2008. If this financial-regulation bill is so desperately needed, why did House Democrats lard it up with this power grab at the FTC? Why does the FTC need any further authority over the Internet, where fraud and abuse regulations apply already? The Internet economy has been one of the bright spots throughout a dismal period of recent history. Do we need to attack the one area that shows growth and promise?

  The FTC was last noticed trying to regulate the color of beer cans; that's just the kind of thinking we need overseeing Internet innovation.

  Seriously: some proposals come pre-stamped BAD IDEA.

• If you're a movie fan, but not much of an Al Gore fan: Iowahawk presents the script for the upcoming blockbuster Citizen Gore:

  OPENING SEQUENCE

  Camera slowly zooms in between the security fence of a huge seaside mansion looming over the storm-tossed Pacific. Dissolve to a melting arctic ice floe, on which sits a distraught polar bear. As the camera pans back, we see it is a snow globe held in a man's hand, inside an opulent study paneled in Amazonian hardwood. Close-up of the man's lips, which whisper "Seagate." He drops the snow globe which crashes onto a priceless Persian rug in front of a roaring fireplace. In silhouette, a nurse enters the study and hurriedly covers his motionless body in a blanket. He expels one last mighty death fart, and is gone.

  I predict Oscars for this wunderkind.

• UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who lived in the Soviet Union until he was seven, has bad news for Harvard University: their intellectual climate "is only a pale echo of Soviet Communism."

  Note to Harvard: I'm sure you can do much better. More show trials, coerced informants, public confessions, etc. If you need a site for your Gulag, might I suggest Fitchburg? Not Siberia, but probably as close as you can get to it in the Bay State.

• And, 25 games into the young Major League Baseball season, the Washington Nationals have a better won-lost record than the Boston Red Sox. Moan.