The Daily Beast ranked American cities for smarts.

Raleigh-Durham won. Not surprising as their leading industries sold crack tobacco to America for a hundred years and Congress still can’t figure out how to regulate flavoring additives.

Minneapolis-St. Paul came in fourth, right behind San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose and Boston (Boston?!).

Minneapolis’ public-education system seems to have tragically failed its most famous son, Prince, composer of the curiously spelled “I Would Die 4 U.” But for everyone else it must being doing something right. The Twin Cities’ excellent scores in bachelor’s degrees per capita and voter participation vaulted them to the top five of our list. The Midwestern work ethic doesn’t hurt. “Knowing that we might be the best or one of the best on theyse key meausrues shouldn’t stop us from striving to do better,” says Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak.

You know, it’s very hard to take a “smarts” ranking like this seriously when they hypercorrect their own text. If “public-education system” looked odd to you, congratulations, your inner prescriptive grammarian is functioning correctly. “Public education” is a two-word noun, and doesn’t need a hyphen to modify system for the same reason they didn’t punctuate it as “public education-system.” “Public education system” is one thing. No further explanation necessary.

I’m guessing this was edited by a very smart person who’s under the age of 27. Smart people older than 27 have already had most of this kind of faux cleverness beaten out of them.

And let’s not even talk about how stupid the texting crit was. TDB bragged up Raleigh-Durham being in a university hub. The Twin Cities has, by my count, fifty colleges and universities, excluding cosmetology schools. Not that you’d know that from our “public-education system.”

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Union busting: still paying huge dividends.

Unless, of course, you ever fly on commercial airlines.

How is it that the airlines bust all their unions, lower pay, slash benefits, and still can’t make a freaking dime?

But yeah, well done. The media really has once again made Michael Moore’s new movie be all about Michael Moore, and not what’s in the movie.

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Jon Tevlin takes Keith Ellison to the woodshed over his trip to Mecca. It’s not where he went or why, but how the trip got paid for that should bother constituents.

Mild stuff, really. If this is the most serious ethics issue to dog Ellison, Minneapolis voters will have gotten their money’s worth. I hope Tevlin’s article gets Ellison to take his funding a bit more seriously because I’m sure Charlie Rangel and Norm Coleman started out with little stuff as well.

Travel is one of the great corruptors of politicians. But if we let them use military aircraft, they’d become even more removed from life as their constituents know it.

Tevlin also deals the Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy a blow far more significant than any of Katherine Kersten’s freakouts ever did. But here’s the hard part. Jewish and Christian politicians routinely accept trips to Israel, and the separation of church and charter school is strained by Christian denominations far more often than by Muslims.

Any solution here has to be one that addresses the entire problem, and not just a minority that, in all likelihood, learned these rules from the majority.

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Jeezus. They’re talking about digging through Clinton’s records to see if he illegally withheld information about the Taylor Branch recordings.

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Too early? Gov. BridgeFAIL has been running for President since Nov. 5, 2008.

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Saggy-faced Norm writes an op-ed  in defense of whichever military contractors took it in the shorts on the Polish and Czech missile sites.

Maybe Jon Tevlin could be assigned to find out who paid Norm to sign that lob-ed.

Lobbyist editorial. No, not a good joke. Not when you have to explain it. But lob-eds are yet another reason why I won’t miss dead tree news.

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Bob Herbert on late night comedy and truths we don’t like to be reminded of.

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Extreme cheerleading.

Not a joke.

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Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.

No comment. No clue as to a comment.

And no desire to discuss this one.

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I for one am shocked. Cultmaster Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the world’s leading proponent of stadium marriages, is handing over the day-to-day operations of his cult to his sons.

I guess I’d always just assumed that after the Rev. Moon ascended into heaven to rule over God the Father and his hippy son Jesus, the Unification Church would be run by the Zombie Rev. Moon.

Word out of Korea  is that didn’t work out well because the clones all proved to be brains-intolerant. Instead, the head of the Rev. Father will be sawed off and saved for the next Futurama movie.

So, until Cthulu calls, these are our new earthly lords and masters:

Hyun-jin, Hyung-jin, & Kook-jin

Hyun is the smart SOM (Son Of Moon), Hyung is the cute one, and Kook is best known as the Captain of the Moonship Dreampie.

Best of all, it smells like a big pizza pie!