Three Up; Three Down

THREE UP

OK, so you’ve read all the bad news about Super Bowl economics. Hotels aren’t filling up, tickets are still available, TV ads aren’t selling at the normal clip. But we all know where the country will be Sunday evening: somewhere watching as the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Arizona Cardinals. Want evidence? Roughly 40 million people watched the conference championship games two weeks ago. The big game unites us in a way politicians never will.
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Francis Chester hasn’t yet fetched his pitchfork, but as a sheep farmer, he likely has one somewhere close at hand. Of course, Chester also is a lawyer who has taken to stirring the masses over Augusta County’s reassessment. He vows that if supervisors don’t heed his call for a rollback after residential values soared by 27.7 percent, he’ll take his case to court. Here’s to refusing to accept a raw deal.
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That chill you’re feeling these days is the resurgence of frosty weather, which Al Gore told us was supposed to give way to the emerging global meltdown. It’s so darn cold out there that even global warming’s advocates on the left are bailing on a concept that the sane among the rest of us thought was half-baked anyway. “Global warming is over,” said retired Navy meteorologist Martin Hertzberg, a lifelong liberal Democrat.

THREE DOWN

It was a good week for late-night comics and a bad one. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich took a swift kick to the backside from the state Senate, which voted 59-0 to remove him from office after the House impeached him for abuse of power. Not a solitary strand in his mountainous hairdo was knocked from place. But plenty of tears were shed, by late-night comics. What now? Of course, they never could outdo Blago himself, who disclosed with straight face to the fair dames of “The View” that he was being persecuted “because I did things for people.” Now that’s comedy.
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Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research. Hey, that’s a good line. Glad we thought of it. Or actually, Puritan poet John Milton thought of it. Southern Illinois University is facing a familiar problem. Turns out the school lifted text from Indiana University for its new plagiarism policy in 2007. That year, university President Glenn Poshard was accused of stealing copy for his doctoral dissertation and master’s thesis. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Or so somebody else said once.
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Walter Curt is taking his money and prowess in raising it and sprinting like his pants are on fire. The well-heeled Shenandoah Valley businessman has quit as the Virginia Republican Party’s top fundraiser. Why? “The organization is dysfunctional,” he says. And that’s a problem all of the sudden?