Dodo birds may be extinct, but dumbass birds are alive and well.

Don’t get to excited by the subject line, Southerners, ‘cuz I mean it in the international sense of the world, which doesn’t care which side of the Mason-Dixon line you hail from. I refer to this dumbed-down version of a Times of London article about a man who died when some rescue workers decided he wasn’t worth saving. The story itself is obscene enough, and probably warrants a blog entry of its own, if only to show that 911 horror stories are not limited to the United States, though in this case it wasn’t the operator who screwed things up, but the “help” that wasn’t. But that’s another matter. My concern with this post was FoxNews’s editorial decision to falsely state that a British man had dialed 911 in an emergency, when of course he had actually dialed 999. A bit pedantic on my part? Maybe, but then again, some of us ‘Mercuns might actually like to travel to Britain someday, and if we do, it would be good for all of us to know what number to dial in the event of an emergency. And what better way to help educate us on this matter, than to report what actually happened rather than what would have happened if the same event had occurred here?

Coming next: FoxNews inverting all photos that show cars on streets, so it will look as though the Brits drive on the right rather than the left. And maybe a few superimposed guns here and there, just so we gun-loving Yanks can relate.

Kindly give me one good reason why I should pay you more money for the “service” of transmitting enough ones and zeroes over the Internet to enable me to print something on my own computer than I pay Amazon to actually, you know, send me stuff through companies that actually charge you money to send me stuff.

I’ve long argued that Reid and Co. don’t really want to “win” the fight against Roland Burris, not so much because of the phony racism argument as because he’s really the best Democrats have to hope for, as long as they don’t take the heat for having been seen as supporting any nomination by Rod Blagojevich. Today I heard Rush Limbaugh argue the opposite theory, namely that they really do want to keep Burris out, they just want to make it look like they tried to work with him. If Rush is right (in the sense of “correct”), Secretary of State Jesse White’s refusal to certify Burris may be the fig leaf the U.S. Senate needs to say that maybe Burris wasn’t really “appointed” after all. It’s a weak argument, but not nearly as ludicrous as Reid’s earlier claim that the Senate can do as it damned well pleases.

In short, it seems like we can all be sure we’re watching professional wrestling, we just can’t agree on which side has been preordained to “win.” Or perhaps I err. Does anyone think this whole fight is anything but a farce?

Harry Reid has an interesting view of the U.S. Constitution:

Under the Constitution, Reid said, “We determine who sits in the Senate. And the House (of Representatives) determines who sits in the House. So there’s clearly legal authority for us to do whatever we want to do. This goes back for generations.”

So the Constitution allows the Senate and the House to decide who their own respective members will be. Not the governors who appoint them on occasion, or the voters who elect them under normal circumstances. It’s up to the legislative bodies themselves. So why have elections at all? And why didn’t the Republican House and Senate have the good sense to retain their majorities in ’06 by refusing to seat all the newly elected Democrats, and choosing to seat unelected Republicans instead?

Reid’s sabre-rattling notwithstanding, I remain convinced that Reid and his fellow Democrats really don’t want to win their frivolous fight against Roland Burris. Burris is the best they can hope for right now, and the alternative could be a special election that the Democrat (who Reid probably won’t like any better than Burris, anyway) may lose. The only reason Democrats are pretending to oppose Burris’s appointment is because it wouldn’t fly politically to support it. So better to “oppose” it on a frivolous legal theory where they know they will ultimately “lose,” getting both what they want and the credit for having the “principle” to oppose it.

But we taxpayers’ve got the biggest balls of them all.

Bzzzt, wrong answer, at least for the playground at Plaza Fiesta Carolinas. There, the correct would appear to be “Yes, Mr. Garrison, we can get rid of all the Mexicans, but only weekdays from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.”

And to top it off, their web site says the playground is open until 8:00 on Saturdays. So apparently they’re trying to keep both the Mexicans and the ‘Mercuns out for one hour a week.

This puzzled me when I was a kid, but I never knew who to ask at the time: what is up with the “heat miser” who melts everything he touches and the “snow miser” who freezes everything? Aren’t these two about as un-miserly as it gets? They should be called the Heat Philanthropist and the Snow Philanthropist, or something. Or if they must be called misers, at least they could trade names, on the theory that anyone who freezes everything he touches isn’t really dishing out coldness, but withholding heat.

Via commenter Trained Dog, it’s amazing how the L.A. Times can publish this without even mentioning this.

If you’re one of the three people on the planet who reads this blog but not Patterico’s, read this.