The official news source of the Short Bus, and other issues...

Packed to the adenoids with a cheesy bacon and egg wrap from a local eatery, which I visit every single morning, I now settle in to my hour of free time before the storm (that is, before I go on the clock officially).

Reddit, I am learning, is a nifty little info aggregator, it can deliver comparatively high amounts to traffic to a site and gain you cred by having a fairly quick voting system. Community approval is garnered on a post by post basis.

I have often thought that I should really have digg/reddit style buttons on my page, you know, so they get tossed up with every new post, but I can't seem to do them correctly, which is frustrating when you can see how many people are using those sites and the good traffic they are generating on other blogs. Oh well. I only bring this up because the last two really extraordinarily good days that I have had come from reddit, the last one was about the Answers in Genesis unicorns and this time it's the post about Ray Comfort missing the toilet with a laser-guided poop. It had nearly 1000 hits yesterday. It already, at 9:00, has 150.

I also wanted to take a moment to award the "news" site OneNewsNow.com a special commendation for reporting above and beyond the heights of goofiness. Seriously, they are like the Weekly World News but less reputable. They are a conservative Christian source for self-congratulatory propaganda. I would put them near the dominionist end of the spectrum, as the entire staff seems to have a hole in the head where Constitutional knowledge should be.

As I have said before, their style of news almost invariably takes the form of: "Hyper-religious/hyper-conservative bozo nobody has heard of has way-out-there opinion; is news."

Chad Groening's article "Yellowcake Found in Iraq" is the most recent contribution to standardless reporting. Former general and utterly unknown former presidential candidate Jerry Curry, who I strangely know has a not entirely unpleasing voice, wrote on his blog that we found yellow cake in Iraq--you know, the stuff that we thought was there because of a crappily forged document, the stuff that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was hideously mistreated for because he could not verify the made up silliness and was not a liar or willing to be complicit in a bogus war?

That stuff.

Apparently on Jerry's blog he praises Bush for being unable to provide evidence for the presence of yellow cake. The absolute lack of evidence of yellow cake, he suggests, proves that there was a million tons of enriched uranium and it was moved to Canada, where it would be safe. Why the Defense Department did not announce that they had found the yellow cake once they had shipped it and safely stored it in Canada he does not say. But it is a sign of heroism and courage, he argues, that Bush did not share this information with anyone.

Really.

So, because of onenewsnow's standard of having no evidence whatsoever when reporting serious news, I am putting everyone on staff there on the Short Bus.

Congratulations onenewsnow! It's the most prestigious journalism award you are likely to ever receive!

HJ