False Sense of Maturity

DURANGO, Colo. — Ever since John McCain discovered “Joe the Plumber,” he has exalted “small business” owners — inviting them to announce their professions on signs at rallies — as the country’s only virtuous economic movers. …But now McCain has begun to define the term upward, leaving no mogul or tycoon behind.

On Thursday in Sarasota, Governor Charlie Crist introduced J. Robert Long, the CEO of Marine Concepts as a “small businessman.” The man McCain dubbed “Bob the Boat Builder” spent, as Crist noted, most of his career at Wellcraft Marine, which reported revenues of $67 million last year, according to Yahoo! Finance.

Tonight in Colorado, Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of the McCains, described Cindy as “a great small businesswoman.” Her “small” business — Hensley & Co., a family-owned Anheuser-Busch distributor that is the third largest among the 800 in the country — had revenues of nearly $200 million last year, according to Yahoo.

FREAKED-OUT firemen had to use a pneumatic saw to cut off a piece of steel pipe stuck while being used as a sex toy - by a 73-YEAR-OLD man.

The crews were called in when staff at St Luke’s Cornwall Hospital at Newburgh, near New York, couldn’t remove the pipe by normal methods because of the extent of the swelling.

I’ve come to notice that Islamic clerics have way too much time on their hands. The latest target of their scorn? Malaysian tomboys, of course:

Malaysia’s main body of Islamic clerics has issued an edict banning tomboys in the Muslim-majority country, ruling that girls who act like boys violate the tenets of Islam, an official said Friday.

The National Fatwa Council forbade the practice of girls behaving or dressing like boys during a meeting Thursday in northern Malaysia, said Harussani Idris Zakaria, the mufti of northern Perak state, who attended the gathering.

Harussani said an increasing number of Malaysian girls behave like tomboys, and that some of them engage in homosexuality. Homosexuality is not explicitly banned in Malaysia, but it is effectively illegal under a law that prohibits sex acts “against the order of nature.”