To McConnell, the Woeful Walrus Award

To memorialize   the  35,000 walrus who moved to the Alaskan shore for safe ground from their melting off-shore ice base, we are urging friends of these forlorn creatures to join us in awarding Senate minority  leader and climate change denier Mitch McConnell the first Grumpy Abe WOEFUL WALRUS award.

McConnell conceded that "I'm not a scientist", which is the preamble to many deniers' responses to questions about global warming before they damn the idea altogether. The senator needs an asterisk in history, and this would be a good start.  As Lewis Carroll once quoted the Walrus:

"The time has come to talk of many things: Of shoes -  and ships - and sealing-wax - of cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - And whether pigs have wings."

Nonsensical, of course.  But a perfect fit for Mitch, (although the sea is not yet boiling hot) who says a lot of nonsensical things.   Bottom photo is the one with the senator.     

When Palin says refudiate, it's now a word

IS THERE NO end to the milestones that Sarah Palin has reached in her carefully planned jaunt to the Oval Office? From her vice presidential candidacy, to her book-writing, to her Tea Party universe, to her TV shows, she's now made it to the pages of the New Oxford

American Dictionary with a single word! Well, not really a word until she made it one, probably unintentionally at that!

The word: Refudiate. Translation: part repudiate, part refute. The New Oxford editors were so taken by it that they toasted it as the Word of the Year. Given that there are still about six weeks remaining in the year and the Mama Grizzly will still have a lot of things to say, the editors obviously are convinced that it's worth the risk that she won't come up with anything better. (The word was born in her protest of the proposed mosque near the Ground Zero site.)

So her linguistic miscue will forever be acknowledged in the New Oxford pages as a kind of nonsense chatter that was offered to us by Lewis Carroll in such meanderings as Alice's meeting with Humpty Dumpty in Jabberwocky. (Slithy, he explained , merged lithe with slimy.

But Palin is no Lewis Carroll. He knew what he was doing when he consciously created the words. With her, it just came out that way. We expect to see it on the Palin crowd's t-shirts. Operators will be standing by.