Let it spread across the land like a prairie fire. Let it peal from a thousand bells. Let it fall like gentle snowflakes. Let it be known, this day, that the customer service number for Amazon is: 1-800-201-7575

(Via Slate.)

Although Gregg Easterbrook remains an engaging writer, he has this habit of getting hold of provably wrong ideas and never letting go of them. He's at it against OU again this week in Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

Consider teams that have self-destructed by running up the score. Last season, No. 1 ranked Oklahoma ran the score up to 77-0 against undermanned Texas A&M. From that point in the season the Sooners imploded, shortly afterward losing the Big 12 title game to underdog Kansas State, then losing in the BCS championship to underdog Louisiana State. Running up the score not only placed Oklahoma's name on a list of those to be punished by the football gods, but broke the team's sense of sportsmanship. Later, when the pressure was on, the Sooners had no steadfastness to fall back on.

I've told you the truth about this before: not only did Easterbrook himself predict that the Football Gods would punish A&M in the 2003 season for firing a winning coach, he also completely missed that A&M had run up the score on a weaker team the week before OU slaughtered them 77-0, and that OU tried everything but kneeling to not score on A&M, with little success. And I still have no idea why TMQ believes that 2nd-string and 3rd-string quarterbacks, who only get to play in cases of injury or huge leads, should not be allowed to throw the football in case of huge leads. Is TMQ against playing time for non-starters? Would TMQ assert that third-string linemen shouldn't block if their team has a huge lead, because it's "unsportsmanlike?"

OU lost its last two games of 2003 because Jason White hurt his hand in the first quarter and hadn't fully recovered by the Sugar Bowl. The team had plenty of heart and did its best all year not to believe the fawning press that followed every game until the Big XII Championship; it was the sportswriters who suddenly decided that OU's "all-time greatest season in history" was worthless when the team lost its last two games with an injured quarterback.

Easterbrook is probably more famous for not letting go of bad environmental ideas, such as "polluters will be nice if we take all those nasty regulations off their backs," and "letting everyone destroy a little bit more of the environment is a nice compromise instead of keeping anyone from destroying some of it." CJR's Campaign Desk today takes down Easterbrook's latest for The New Republic, pointing out how sensible his arguments look when he leaves out the facts:

Easterbrook's conclusion to the Clear Skies saga is of a piece with his one-sided report; it's also a masterpiece of journalistic sleight-of-hand. He writes: "For reasons of political theater, Democrats and enviros were opposed to a bill to reduce pollution..." [italics his]. This is true only in the narrowest, most technical sense: Yes, the Clear Skies Act would have reduced pollution from today's levels, but those reductions would have been less than what would be achieved if only current law were actually enforced.

In any meaningful sense, Clear Skies allows for more, not less, pollution, than laws on the books. Perhaps that's why environmentalists opposed it. But you won't learn that from reading Easterbrook.