Richard W. Clark, RIP.

Dick Clark, The Oldest Teenager, has passed at the age of 82.

Nugent? Nothing New Here

According to the response to Ted Nugent's recent diatribe against President Obama (video here), you'd think that Nugent had said something out of character, but he wasn't. He's been something of a jerk with an inclination for violent language since...forever. Consider his onstage rant at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama from a few years back, or just about any of his appearances on television. My point is, Nugent's extremism is hardly breaking news. The pearl-clutching Shock! Horror! response feeds the beast--gives him what he wants.

Aside: In 2006, Nugent sat down for an interview with a U.K. broadsheet while visiting for a Monsters of Rock festival. The piece references, and partially debunks, a revealing bit of Nugent legendry:

At 18, he was called up to serve in Vietnam. "In 1977 you gave an interview to High Times [the cannabis user's journal of record] where you claimed you defecated in your clothes to avoid the draft."

("I got 30 days' notice of the physical," Nugent told them. "I ceased cleansing my body. Two weeks before the test I stopped eating food with nutritional value. A week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. My pants got crusted up.")

"I never shit my pants to get out of the draft," says Nugent, good-naturedly.

"You also told them you took crystal meth [methamphetamine, the highly destabilising drug sometimes described as poor man's crack] before the medical - as a result of which, and I quote: 'I got this big juicy 4F.'"

"Unbelievable. Meth," he replies, in a tone of deep sarcasm. "Yes, that's my drug of choice. You've got to realise that these interviewers would arrive with glazed eyes and I would make stories up. I never did crystal meth. And I never pooped my pants."

"But you did dodge the draft." "I had a 1Y [student deferment]. I enrolled at Oakland Community College." (The Independent).

Also in the interview: in 2006, Nugent was thinking about running for Michigan governor in 2010.

So now you know.

Added: Rosie Gray's post at Buzzfeed, "Threatening Obama is Only the 10th Craziest Thing Ted Nugent Has Done," pretty much says it all. I didn't know that he was his underaged girlfriend's guardian. Now that is just . . . ugh.

. . . And We're Off

One week into the campaign and we've got announcements that Romney is ahead of Obama, including an "edge among the all-important independent voters" (NY Daily News). Following this news? An alert declaring that a slightly newer poll has Obama leading Romney, including "a 48%-43% margin over Romney among crucial independent voters" (CNN). In a timely article, Nate Silver posts some "Notes on Poll-Watching," a series of suggestions for fans of election polling. The key takeaway? Take a breath and use common sense before celebrating/sobbing about your candidate's ranking. Place the polls in context (news cycles, economy, etc.), expect instability, don't ignore outliers (but don't shout about their results), and don't place too much faith in prognosticators. Sound advice, all of which shall be ignored. I don't know about you, but I'm not particularly excited about the upcoming election cycle and its associated media hysteria.