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The latest entry in our “How Dumb is That?” Department is 3DTV.

Did you know that you can, right now, go to Amazon.com and buy a 3DTV?  This Samsung model, a 55-inch LED HDTV, sells for about $2900.  However, to watch anything in 3D, you’ll need:

• Active 3D glasses. They’re expensive, starting at about $150.  They aren’t compatible with other makes of 3DTVs. And if one person is watching something in 3D, everyone else has to wear them too — there’s no way to watch 2D and 3D at the same time. Oh, they’re also not available yet.
• Something to watch.  There’s no 3D programming available on any of the cable or satellite systems yet.  Comcast expects to have some on-demand content available later this year, but no 3D channels are expected to be available.  DirecTV is planning a total of three 3DTV channels this year: an on-demand channel, a premium channel, and a free channel.  Whether they’ll have enough content for them is another question.  Some movies will be coming out on BluRay 3D this year; that means you’ll have to add either a 3D BluRay player, or a Sony Playstation 3 to your budget.

In short, you now have an opportunity to spend a lot of money on something you’ll barely be able to use.

<sigh>

Is anyone else bothered by the Census Bureau’s new ads?  The primary message seems to be that you should fill out the Census forms so that you can get your “fair share of funding.”  I’m pretty sure that’s not what the founding fathers had in mind when they added this language to the Constitution:

[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.

The only Constitutional purpose for the Census is to determine the number of Representatives each State should receive in the House of Representatives, and by extension, Electors for the Electoral College.

Don’t get me wrong… I think that there’s a lot of interesting material in the Census. For example, 81.2% of married-couple families (that is, families with both a husband and a wife, with or without kids) owned their home, according to the 2000 Census.  That’s kind of a neat little factoid, and there’s tons of this kind of stuff in the Census.  You can search all the Census data, even to your own neighborhood.  In the Census Block where I live, which is maybe a quarter of a square mile, there were 482 people in 2000, mostly living in rental housing (84.4%).  About a third of these were married-couple families (73 households out of 208 total). Only three people (one man and two women) were over the age of 65 and living alone; all were renters.

But the purpose of it all is not (or at least, shouldn’t be) to see how much money your community can squeeze out of the Feds.  But that’s another symptom of living under Democrats, who seem to think that the purpose of the Federal Government is to redistribute wealth.

Why does this kind of thing keep cropping up?

I think the most disturbing part is this verse:

Barack Hussein Obama
He said Red, Yellow, Black or White
All are equal in his sight
Mmm, mmm, mm!

I’ve heard that song before, but it wasn’t about Obama. At the minimum, someone’s a plagiarist. Why does this man inspire such… worship?

I don’t remember this ever happening with an American President before.  I did a little Googling.  ”Kids Sing Clinton” turned up no songs.  ”Kids Sing Bush” turned up only this, which hardly compares:

Our country’s stood beside us
People have sent us aid.
Katrina could not stop us, our hopes will never fade.
Congress, Bush and FEMA
People across our land
Together have come to rebuild us and we join them hand-in-hand!

Here, G.W. Bush shows up as one of a series of actors who will help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. (I disapprove of people depending on handouts from the federal government after a natural disaster, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

My Googling turned up a number of bulletin boards where this was under discussion, complete with conservatives comparing Obama to Hitler and liberals complaining that the conservatives were overreacting.  It is a little unfair to compare Obama to Hitler (or Stalin, or Mao, or Kim Jong Il) in this regard; totalitarian regimes tend to openly require this sort of thing, whereas we have no evidence that anyone in the Administration is pushing this kind of Obama worship. Yet.

But it is disturbing that this kind of thing pops up every few months. What is it with you Obama people?