• LIVE LIKE A SUICIDE: At least one U.S. index is rising — American Suicide! More people are killing themselves, especially middle-aged people. [LA Times]

Of America’s many great achievements in this young century, nothing can really top the savage rape and murder of the American Dream. Nobody really mentions it anymore, but ancient texts refer to this notion that everyone, through hard work, could become free and happy through the earning of riches, and then their kids would do even better, etc. Well, it is no longer true. Since the year 2000, only the wealthy have made more money. Everybody else is fucked, and the divide is rapidly getting wider. This is the conclusion of a three-year study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a communist-terrorist group consisting of the United States and other rich nations. MORE »

The fattest people in the world got even fatter this year, as the obesity rate kept rising in 37 states and didn’t decline in the other 13 states. Mississippi, West Virginia and Alabama won the triple crown of fat-assery, surprising nobody, while Michigan was the only state in the Top Ten of Fat that’s not in the South, which also surprised nobody. Now let’s see how the Democratic Convention and Barack Obama’s vacation birthplace rate! MORE »

Here’s your latest “Miss USA,” falling on her ass during the Miss USA Show, just like the last Miss USA, who fell on her ass last year. But this one starts seal-clapping for herself after tumbling, which is kind of … repugnant? She was taken out back and executed immediately after the program. [News.com.au/AFP]

Our pretend buddy and former colleague Will Leitch left the sports blog Deadspin last week. As he invented that popular website and has a reputation for being an agreeable human being — rare for the Internet — we were interested in his parting words. Here are some of them. MORE »

Our girlfriend Peggy Noonan has been more enjoyable than usual this year, as a tragically drawn-out Democratic primary battle provided her with endless opportunities to touch herself while Barack Obama spoke pretty things, and to then guiltily wash her hands and realize that Obama was, in fact, the Democrat and not Ronald Reagan and, indeed, kind of “multicultural,” if you get our drift. But all that tortured eloquence has vanished from Peggy’s column, because the oxycontin/vodka cocktail hit hard as soon as she finished typing the relatively sane setup of today’s “Declarations.” MORE »

New York Times “lightning rod conservative” columnist Bill Kristol’s youth and young manhood was exactly this: Manhattan prep school, Harvard, more Harvard. Since then, he has devoted his career to sending other young people to die in catastrophic wars based on a false ideology of pre-emptive regime change. But as he notes in his column today, despite these great achievements, he can’t write an adequate commencement speech! MORE »

For somebody who’s always accusing his opponents of being “out of touch” with the Working Man, John McCain sure does hang out with a lot of fat-cat plutocrats who don’t even have the decency to be American. On a recent visit to the tony U.K. — a nation populated entirely by decadent, incestuous polo players with “smart” accents and harelips — McCain attended a fundraising luncheon hosted by Lord Rothschild and Nathaniel Rothschild. The problem is, American candidates aren’t allowed to take campaign contributions from such fancy foreign nationals as the Rothschilds! But does “hosting” an event constitute a “contribution”? MORE »

SUPPORT THE TROOPS: “The U.S. Army doubled its use of ‘moral waivers’ for enlisted soldiers last year to cope with the demands of the Iraq war, allowing sex offenders, people convicted of making terrorist threats, and child abusers into the military.” [Guardian]

The rampant, raging Absolut vodka controversy took on new dimensions this weekend when a pack of insane nativists vowed to boycott Absolut and demanded the firing of the employee who approved an ad that encourages the Mexicans to take over the Northern Hemisphere. To be fair, it is well known that The Illegals and their cohort take most of their political marching orders from liquor ads. MORE »

Hey everyone, only 365 days left (leap year!) until November 4, 2008, when we hold our massive election things! What a wonderful opportunity to listen to our candidates’ stump speeches and teevee bits a few more thousand times before making a lesser-of-sixteen-evils decision, and then regretting it and voting for other people two years later. MORE »