USA Today: Now 30% More Clueless

It's dangerous to stay at hotels where they leave USA Today outside your door every morning. You risk brain damage from banging your head against the wall. Today's head-banging was prompted by bizarrely clueless bits on the two great American women who died in the last week.

On the cover, there's a blurb for a longer story on the funeral of Coretta Scott King. The picture in the blurb shows Oprah Winfrey paying her respects. (She's also in the one photo accompanying the main story.) Let me say that again: Oprah Winfrey. They might as well have had a caption reading "Oprah Winfrey, representing the Negro race, pays her respects..." Couldn't they have come up with someone like John Lewis or Julian Bond or even (God love him, because I don't) Jesse Jackson? Someone who had, y'know, some kind of connection with Coretta Scott King? And just to be clear, by 'connection' I mean something other than skin color.

On the op-ed pages, there's (amazingly) a pretty good editorial about Betty Friedan, one that doesn't downplay her tremendous historical importance. Above, though, is the headline: She led, and women followed. Ummmm...no. It wasn't about 'following'. If women had, in fact, followed Betty Friedan, it would have been a complete negation of everything she was fighting for.

I have got to stop reading that paper just because it's free.

[That's all, folks]