Every night at 8 p.m. on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann awards his daily pick for "Worst Person in the World." Some contenders are lucky — or unlucky —enough to be nominated more than once.
The bronze goes to Joseph Clark of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. He was driving around all night, allegedly with a suspended license, and his girlfriend and his 4-month-old daughter and some marijuana in the car, when he spotted what he assumed was a deer standing motionless in the meadow. So he did what you or I would do, he drove into it. Fortunately the deer was actually just a decoy being used by three game wardens to catch illegal hunters. Mr. Clark said he just wanted to bumped the deer. Of course, he bumped the decoy hard enough to send it flying 30 feet.
Speaking of things made out of wood, our silver tonight goes to Bill-O, whining about something in the Bay Area in his not so widely read newspaper column.
He wrote, "I coined the term San Francisco values and well understand they have little to do with democracy."
Be quiet fat head. The computer search engine Nexus shows Bill Early first using it last month. A California congressman used it in a campaign as early as 1996. You coined it and you got a Peabody Award for it.
But tonight’s winner, Linda Crosshauer, the National Science Teachers Association president. Laurie David, co-producer of the Al Gore movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” and wife of the actor Larry David, tried to donate 50,000 DVD copies of the movie so science teachers could show their students.
She said they e-mailed back that they couldn’t accept the DVDs because, among other things, doing so would place, "unnecessary risk upon the National Science Teachers Association capital campaign," especially certain targeted supporters. Who might they be?
Who wouldn’t donate lots of money to the Science Teachers Association if it accepted copies of “An Inconvenient Truth?” Try Exxon Mobile and Shell, which had already donated millions to the association and the American Petroleum Institute, whose own movie the association happily accepted and distributed. It’s called “Fuel-Less, You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel.”
I got Copernicus and Galileo on the phone. They say the Earth revolves around the sun. What hang up on them? All right, I’m sorry, we have taken millions from the Flat Earth Society. Linda Crosshauer, president of the National Science Teachers Association, available at the right price, Monday's Worst Person in the World.