Many Times Removed

President Obama and Massachusetts Sen.-Elect Scott Brown are 10th cousins.

We’ve read a lot of stories about the distant cousinhood between Obama and various American political figures.  His closest link seems to be his 8th cousinhood to Dick Cheney, and of course since Cheney has taken the lead role in Bush 43 administration apologetics in the last year, I quipped last summer:  “Don’t you just hate it when 8th cousins start airing their dirty laundry in public?”  We could have also had these stories about distant cousinhoods upon the election of most other recent American Presidents, yet the MSM play this up when it comes to Obama.  As if they feel a need to legitmize him, for some odd reason I can’t discern.

The hard truth of the matter is that just about every person is related to someone you’ve heard of.  About 80% of Britain’s population is directly descended from King Edward III of the 14th Century, and:

Among [Edward III's] documented descendants are presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, both Roosevelts), authors (Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), generals (Robert E. Lee), scientists (Charles Darwin) and actors (Humphrey Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields).

So Colin the dock worker on a Thames River port can take comfort in the fact that he’s related to George Washington.  That’s going to help him become rich, for sure.

But what does an 8th cousin or a 10th cousin really mean?  You have so little genetically in common with a second cousin (one common great-grandparent) that you can procreate with him or her and it not legally be incest.

Sunday Wrap-Up

(1)  Finally, someone in this state has the sense to link Roy Blunt and Jack Abramoff.

Need I say it any more clearly?  Vote Chuck Ferguson.

(2)  What is Mary Landrieu hiding?

(3)  Oh joy.  Lazy Clay head the House Census Subcommittee.  The last time a Clay was in charge of something, his father ran the House Post Office Subcommitee, and this is perhaps the #1 reason why the PO is full of incompetent literacy optional black letter carriers today.

(4)  How do we know that the unemployment rate would have been 25% w/o the AIG bailout?  It’s a contention that we can never have a answer to, that is, until we can manipulate spacetime and wormhole our way to an alternate universe where the only difference is no AIG bailout.  Also, is this all a matter of payola on Hank Paulson’s part?  Hint:  See 12.9.

(5)  Why is President Obama wasting time with college football?  Answer:  He’s trying to make nice with some western state Republican politicians.  People like Orrin Hatch represent states whose schools seem to be stiffed by the BCS system.

(6)  I didn’t even have to see his picture to know that the late Abraham Shakespeare, the Florida lottery winner whose body was just exhumed from his own back yard, was black.  The reason I knew that is that the radio news where I first heard about this story said that once he won the lotto, he had dozens of “hangers on” who wanted a slice of the pie.  If you’re black, and you get two nickels to rub together, you’re gonna find out about relatives you never thought you had and friends who just yesterday weren’t so friendly.

(7)  Dear Meg Whitman:  Take a long walk off a short pier.  And take Carly H-1Borina with you.

(8)  It couldn’t have happened to ten nicer creeps.

BTW, if you like Haitian children that much, then why rob Haiti of them?  Now more than ever, Haiti needs Haitian children.

(9)  I thought deseg was over.  Then again, I should have known better to think that there would have been an end to a temporary program.

(10)  The CPS just got hit by Hurricane Arne.

(11)  I agree:  The NFL is another cabal of copywrong extremists that need to be knocked down a measure or three.

(12)  Investigative journalism extraordinaire:  Greg Oden has a dick.  Because I would have never guessed…