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Per my increasingly-ludicrous vanity, I shall reply to Peter King’s MMQB column of this morning here, rather than joining the e-mail queue with the hoi-polloi.

In point 8 of his “things I think I think,” today, King muses “I think I wonder this about Cleveland: Will the city’s sports fans be happier if Colt McCoy wins a playoff game this year than it was when LeBron James lost a championship series last night?” I think, myself excepted, it would not even come close.

Frankly, it might still be tight if the Browns won the fucking Super Bowl in 2012. Even in Cleveland, football and the Browns are still of interest to only a subset of the population. The herd mentality of LeBron James as mortal enemy seems to have swept up the entire city, however. (Again, myself excepted.)

The roads still suck, the economy is in a 50-year coma, the city is a perpetual national laughingstock; population, youth and far more talent than is represented by one man, no matter how good he is with a ball, continues to drain away. But 99% of Cleveland is bursting with pride this morning because a Dallas team defeated a Miami team in a professional basketball tournament. “America, fuck yeah.”

I also have a few comments on the subsequent two points. (more…)

…ain’t just that long green strip cutting through the desert of northern Africa on Google Earth. As demonstrated by this survey widget from cleveland.com:

I think they left out one or two important options. Like, say, the bogeyman. Or the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Or perhaps the Jews, never overlook them.

And what about China, where are they? I suppose that including “China” as an option might veer too close to part of an actually plausible explanation, though, i.e. an increasing disparity between the dwindling supply of a finite resource and growing demand for said resource from rapidly-developing economies increasingly capable of backing up that demand with cash on the international oil market.

Nah, I’m just kiddin’ of course; that couldn’t have anything to do with it. Anyway, who is to blame for these rising gas prices, someone must be behind it all.

(As atrocious as the state of what passes for modern journalism is, I think it’s even more depressing that I basically predicted this exact fantasy with appalling accuracy three months ago. I suppose maybe the answer which really needs to be added to the choices is “the mainstreaming of willfully-ignorant, infantile know-nothingism in America…”)

In my continuing series of useful, simple, completely obvious and absolutely-without-a-chance ideas, may I suggest:

A free trade zone within the United States.

At this point most readers will be either preparing objections to naive libertarian dogma or, more likely, concluding that I’m drunk again. I assure you, however: I’ve had nothing to drink today stronger than green tea.

So why do I make the absurd suggestion of “a free trade zone within the United States?” Because that seems like the most effective way I can think of to express the idea of eliminating a stupid, regressive, ridiculous maze of what are for practical purposes barriers to either free or fair trade.

(more…)