The good news just keeps coming these days. One day I’m informed that baby broccoli (a k a sprouts) will ward off stomach cancer, the next it’s licorice kicking bowel cancer’s ass. Ever since the Franklin Mint famously went to the Pom land, the first question I have is: Who sponsored this miraculous discovery? And of course I sat right up in suspense the other morning, wondering when the writer of a damning op-ed on “free-range” pigs would disclose who exactly underwrote the study finding animals raised in filth on antibiotics are safer. I jokingly Tweeted and soon had an answer. Yep, it was your friendly National Pork Board. Those guys want you to eat pork like chicken; they certainly will not get fat and happier by promoting meat from small farms where pigs get to live as pigs should, the now-unnatural way. I can’t fault the catapulter of the propaganda. But I do wonder where the backstop was on the editorial side. As the Journal has demonstrated, you lie down with Turdblossom and you wake up with no credibility. If I were the cynical sort, I’d propose a piece on how endangered snapper is the answer to pirates in the Indian Ocean. Hungry Somalian researchers say it’s so. 

And that, of course, was the other big-laugh bonus of newspapers today. The Pollan Wannabe let his carnival mask drop and smart readers suddenly noticed he’s just talking the talk for maximum gain. And I would be bonding with all the alert readers who wondered where his editors were if I had not slogged through the Drivelist in gap-jawed fascination yet again. While she was dragging mollusks all over the kitchen in search of a nut graf, who could possibly look away long enough to wonder what the Google says? No worries, though. A Colbert shout-out is worth lost credibility any day. Just ask a certain new Dallas resident.