It’s time for PBH to get back to what it does best: Hating on mother fuckers. Target 1 is Tyler Cowen, the vapid “Marginal Revolution” blogger who’s primary objective in life is to compete with Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman for the coveted ‘enamored with insipid and insignificant observations’ demographic. Witness his post on why Haiti is so poor:

1. Haiti cut its colonial ties too early, rebelling against the French in the early 19th century and achieving complete independence. Guadaloupe and Martinique are still riding the gravy train and French aid is a huge chunk of their GDP.

2. Haiti was a French colony in the first place and French colonies do less well.

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In the, “I think we need a new PR department”, the BBC reports that BeautifulPeople.com cut 5,000 people from its site for putting on weight during the holidays. Or, as the caustic spokesmen explained,

“Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded.”

Apparently BeautifulPeople is the Sizzlers of the internet: susceptible to the unending appetite of the overweight.

From the Eggplant Post comes some quality Thomas Friedman mockery:

“Imagine a world where everyone is a sea lion, and then imagine that world if the only way sea lions can get around is on a bicycle. You see where we are headed? Sea lions don’t have feet, so we cant peddle the bicycles. If we don’t solve this smokiness problem, we are all in for a tough bike ride.” Friedman confirmed his observations of the world during a late dinner on the 2nd floor of the Hilton: “Why does everyone here look Chinese?” he asked himself. “I thought I was in Dubai.”

Read the whole damn thing. If you are anything like me, it will make your angry heart flutter.

Best review ever:

There are many kinds of truth. There are truths based on facts, truths based on faith, and truths based on something that sounds as if it should be true (truthiness). Then there’s the kind of truth we find in Sarah’s book: stories and concepts that become truths simply because she states them. She’s a lot like our Lord and Savior, Glen Beck, in that respect.

Sometimes, she states truths that would be considered ludicrous if uttered by someone else. Her claim that the McCain campaign forced her to spend $150,000 in RNC funds to dress her family in designer clothes is one example of that. Although it might be easier to believe that she acted like a trailer park Zsa Zsa who’d found a credit card left behind at a possum feed, she blames McCain staffers. That’s good enough for us, because we have faith; we want to believe her truths.

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Pwned:

Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head. “Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination.

“Right there in the preamble, the authors make their priorities clear: ‘one nation under God,’” said Mortensen, attributing to the Constitution a line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which itself did not include any reference to a deity until 1954. “Well, there’s a reason they put that right at the top.”

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