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From Reuters:

Afghanistan’s only pig quarantined in flu fear

Jon Carroll writes a column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes five columns a week. If the thought of that doesn’t fry your brain, you need to try it sometime. In public. (It doesn’t count unless you do it in public, you know.)

In today’s column, he confesses that he is the Zodiac killer. (I don’t know if this was planned or one of those deadline things. In the column business, your plans and deadlines often are in conflict.)

If you do not read Jon Carroll, you need to make this important change in your life and start reading him today. As Carroll himself has written, and as all columnists know (but not necessarily their editors), if you write multiple columns a week, it is guaranteed at least one will be a stinker. It’s a natural law or something and can’t be helped.

But Jon Carroll doesn’t write too many stinkers. I’ve been a fan for a long time. I thought I’d toss one of his columns your way. Give him a week or two. Read him every day. You will smile, you will think (he encourages it), you will notice fine sentences being built. Watching a fine sentence being built is one of life’s better pleasures, no?

This morning the Journal sports section ran a commentary by Blair Kerkhoff of the Kansas City Star. The subject was the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) schools and how they get the lion’s share of college football money. In the course of the commentary, there appeared a partial quote from Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas. (Oh, you silly goose, of course Congress is involved in college football. Where else would we go for answers to such vexing questions?)

Anyway, in the course of listing the sins of the BCS, the Republican said the system that’s been in place since 1998 is “like communism.”

I need someone to explain to me why conservative Republicans go down the “communist” road at every opportunity. I understand it when they’re talking about Barack Obama, that well known communist/socialist/fascist. Everyone understands that.

But college football? BCS Communists? Times have been tough for Republicans, but still … Why do they say these things?

Help me out here. I really do want to know. Why do they do this?