“As we collectively decided to pay attention to this trial instead of any number of things that might actually shake the world to its knees…” And more from Jay C. Ford.

Our Founding Fathers are pure gold heroes, right? Not so fast, if you read just a bit of Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States.’

And more in today’s If You Read the Paper, by John McManus.

Any cynic can ridicule Sarah Palin’s War on English, but let’s give the doll some credit: Below the surface, it actually looks like she’s trying to harness The Elements of Style. Plus yard sailing, cardboard boat racing, and collaborative consumption – oh my!

With our social networking, with our plastering our personal mediocrity on youTube, with all of the twats we tweet on Twitter (just kidding, nobody uses Twitter), and indeed with blogs such as this one, we are a nation of ignorant media whores, and Sarah Palin is about the best of our kind at branding her very person onto a fractured media landscape without any visible qualification to do so.