Pun Salad

… they've joined the human race:

• Iowahawk just gets more awesome as time goes by. His recent article is in the E.J. Dionne/Michael Moore vein, describing how Your Federal Government is nuh-uh, not either broke. Why, by squeezing a mere $10 billion per day from the rich, we can cut that deficit down to size, starting on…
  12:01 AM, January 1
  Let's start the year out right by going after some evil corporations and their obscene profits. And who is more evil than those twin spawns of Lucifer himself, Exxon Mobil and Walmart? Together these two largest American industrial behemoths raked in, between them, $34 billion in 2010 global profits. Let's teach 'em both a lesson and confiscate it for the public good. This will get us through...
  
  9:52 AM January 4
  Okay, maybe I underestimated our take. […]

  A masterpiece.

• But if you want a lot fewer laughs with your fiscal reality check, there's Kevin Williamson:
  When it comes to the Scrooge McDuck set, the problem isn't that they're not rich enough, it's that there aren't enough rich -- not enough to do what liberals want to do, anyway, which is to balance the budget by increasing taxes on them.

  Or Reason's Matt Welch:

  The headline on Dionne's fantasy is "What if we're not broke?" Which is a lot like saying, "What if there was a million-dollar bill in my pants?" Only it's much worse-the consequences of this dream not coming true are truly terrible […] And the defiant can-kicking by Democratic dead-enders is only tacking a premium onto our future pain.

  Whatever happened to the reality-based community anyway?

• Owsley Stanley died a few days back, as a result of a car crash in Australia. His Wikipedia page notes that he "was a former underground LSD cook, the first private individual to manufacture mass quantities of LSD." As might be expected, he was also involved with the Grateful Dead.

  What might not be expected: he lived to be 76. Not all of his buddies managed that feat.

  The Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne" was loosely based on Stanley. I like this story from the song's Wikipedia entry:

  According to an infamous story recounted by [Steely Dan's] Walter Becker on VH1's Storytellers, Becker once informed a taxi cab driver in New York City that he was with the band Steely Dan. The cab driver remarked "Steely Dan - they had the stupidest lyric I ever heard in any song that ever has been written." Becker replied "You're kidding - what was that?" The cab driver responded with "Is there gas in the car? Yes, there's gas in the car".

  Although I've never taken LSD, I always sing those lyrics when they come up on the car's iPod, to the consternation of Mrs. Salad.