Hooray for Common Sense

So I've long been a pretty big hater of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The ad agency behind burger king, the weirdest of the VW ads, and pretty much any other frat boy, low brow, d-bag ad campaign you can think of.
Apparently they just realized that the BK ads aren't working. You can read about it here
http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/daily-bread/2009/06/22/burger-kings-freaky-problem

Madmen

For the second time in the last few weeks someone espousing traditionally conservative causes has walked into a room and killed people.
I have no idea if this is statistically relevant. It just seems to me there is starting to be a trend.
I'm a pretty conservative guy. I don't smoke, don't get drunk, go to church, I'm crazy about the free market, I own a business, etc. That said I'm seeing increasingly un-wackjob conservative friends believing things that are disconnected with reality. Obama was born in the US. He's not a secret muslim. We don't need to "Get our guns while we still can" etc.
I don't know what right wing talkers and bloggers are saying, but if you get lots of your news from those sources that's cool I guess. Just make sure you're checking stuff against reality. If reputable sources that should hedge in the nut balls are spouting crazy junk, then the nut balls will continue to go nuts in dangerous ways.
I read a book about the US during the early Kennedy Administration and that's what this feels like to me. I'm a little scared.

Annoying Semantics

Obama had a group of people from both sides of the abortion debate looking for common ground. A lady from the Pro-Life said said (echoing Obama) that a reasonable mutual goal was to reduce the "number of abortions" at which point a lady from the Pro-Life side said, "No...we need to reduce the need for abortions."
Her point is that if they concede that reducing the number is a good thing it puts abortion somewhere on a graded scale of morality. If this thing is wrong than why would it need to be reduced.
BS.