Too Fat Foxes And Beautiful Clean Coal
The Pre-Labor Day Dumbest Commercials of 2026 Award goes to…
Drumroll, please…
The fluffy bears toilet paper series!
If you’re lucky, you’ve never suffered through even one of them, because the sponsors insult your intelligence with the ideas that (1) a whole family of puffy/fluffy bears – Molly and Leonard and cubs (oldest to youngest) Bill, Amy and Dylan – would consider abandoning their hotel room because they’ve just discovered it doesn’t have the right TP; (2) Momma Bear chastises one of the kids for using the wrong TP while away from home; (3) the family appears to celebrate the brand’s new wave-like perforations between sections on a roll.
Oh no! We almost forgot!
Selection Committee judges may have given extra points for the sponsor’s apparent social consciousness.
As a tribute to Evolution (or, God forbid, DEI) the family has a knack for changing colors – brown, red, blue. Perhaps the result of inter-sleuth/inter-sloth/inter-maul – Yup! All terms for groups of bears – matings!
Why Pre-Labor Day awards?
Because the season of (Is it acceptable to say “really stupid” and “fear inducing”?) political campaigns will begin to on September 8.
In our February 20 post (“There Are Three Kinds Of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics”), we began a list of campaign scare words: WOKE and ANTIFA and any combination of “emptying” with “insane asylums,” “mental institutions,” “jails” or “prisons.”
Fear not!
There’s more awards coming.
The International “I Don’t Know Nothin’ About The Fourteenth Amendment” Award goes to the man who declared:
"Birthright, that’s a big one. It’s ridiculous. We are the only country in the world that does this [Emphasis added.] with the birthright, as you know, and it’s just absolutely ridiculous." (Donald J. Trump, January 20, 2026 – Inauguration Day, when handed a presidential proclamation to end automatic birthright citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to undocumented parents or those with temporary status.)
Unconditional birthright citizenship (jus soli – “right of the soil) is granted by Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, eight South American countries, nine Caribbean nations Pakistan, Tanzania, and Lesotho. More than thirty nations offer conditional or restricted birthright citizenship when a child is born on their soil and at least one parent was a legal resident or born in the country. Germany, Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand confer citizenship when at least one parent is a legal resident or born in the country.
In a surprise move, the Committee Studying Birth Tourism has presented the 2026 Award for Statistical Hyperbole to member of the Cherokee Nation, former mixed martial arts fighter, plumber, U.S. representative and senator from Oklahoma, and current Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin.
“There are tourist visas that they get to come into the United States or into our territories just simply to give birth; they’ll come in the eighth month, maybe one, two, three weeks left, give birth here,” (Markwayne Mullin, July 1-2, 2026, following Supreme Court birthright citizenship decision.)
Birth tourism accounts for fewer than 0.3% of all U.S. births in any year from 2014 to 2024; approximately 86% of tourist births are to Hispanic mothers, most often from Mexico; Asian tourist births remain below 0.2% of all Asian births in the U.S.; Mexican birth tourist mothers are more educated that Mexican mothers living in the U.S. and have education levels similar to mothers giving birth in Mexico.
Tourist births reached their highest level in 2015 and plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic; the 2024 tourist birth rate still did not reach the pre-pandemic percentages.
Asian birth tourist births remain below 0.2% of all Asian births in the U.S.
Statistics cited from “The Demographic Composition of Birth Tourism in the United States. U.S. Migration Metrics.” (usmigrationmetrics.org) (Penn State University, A,N. Kreisberg and N.D. Chin, 2026)
Members of the What the H-E Double-L Is He Talking About 2026 Award Committee will honor the proponent of the “Beautiful Clean Coal” myth at an undetermined date in a South Florida cabana club.
President Donald Trump was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” during a White House ceremony on February 11. The award was presented by the Washington Coal Club, “an obscure group with financial ties to the coal mining industry.” (“Trump Orders the Pentagon to Buy More Coal-Fired Electricity,” The New York Times, February 11, 2026, Brad Palmer) The president received a trophy after ordering the US Department of Defense to purchase billions of dollars’ worth of power from coal plants.
On June 26, a federal appeals court rejected a Trump administration Environmental Protection Agency attempt to abandon a President Biden-era rule that set tough standards for deadly soot pollution and established tighter standards for pollution from coal-fired power plants, factories and other industrial sources.
The Trump EPA was attempting to overturn a Biden administration rule reducing the annual limit of 12 micrograms of fine particle pollution – soot per cubic meter of air; the 12-microgram level was established more than a decade ago.
Biden’s EPA had determined that the tighter limits would prevent more than 800,000 cases of asthma symptoms, 2,000 hospital visits and 4,500 premature deaths. An EPA spokesperson in November said the 2024 rule would cost “hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to American citizens” and was not based on a full review of available science.
On December 25, 2025, the Center for American Progress (“Climate Deniers of the 119th Congress and the Second Trump Administration.” Kat So) reported:
“President Trump and his administration have made no secret of their friendliness with the fossil fuel industry. The combustion of fossil fuels is changing the climate, as the fossil fuel industry has long known and sought to cover up. During the 2023-24 election cycle, the industry spent nearly $250 million lobbying Congress, with 88 percent of funds going to Republicans and 12 percent to Democrats, and donated upwards of $75 million to support Trump’s presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee, and affiliated committees.
“Since the election, the Trump administration has responded in kind by appealing to corporate insiders and enacting policies that are making it easier for polluters to evade health and safety regulations. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry continues to profit off Americans, who are left to bear the brunt of the negative economic, health, and safety impacts caused by their products.”
[EDITORS’ NOTE: We were unable to find “stand alone” images of the Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal or the created-just-for-Mr. Trump FIFA Peace Prize. Please accept our apologies.]
The United Kingdom’s Society for Putting Those Fat Foxes On A Diet has announced that the President of the United States will be honored with the 2026 Slim the Foxes Award. The story is so whackadoodle, we’ll rely on the reporting of lbc.co.uk - Leading Britain’s Conversation, originally London Broadcasting Company. (“Trump claimed ‘foxes were getting fat from eating birds killed by windmills’ in first call with Starmer,” July 2, 2026, Ella Bennett):
“Donald Trump claimed in his first call with [recently resigned UK Prime Minister] Sir Keir Starmer that foxes were becoming too fat to recognise [sic] after eating dead birds killed by wind turbines, the Prime Minister’s former top aide has claimed.
In his first-ever media interview, former No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney said that the Prime Minister “held it together” when the remark was made, while officials in the room were struggling to do so.
Mr. McSweeney said he realised [sic] the relationship with the US president would be “very unpredictable” when Mr. Trump’s campaign filed a complaint after he attended a Democratic Party convention in August 2024.
Labour [Starmer’s political faction in Parliament] then “prioritised building those relationships, understanding the politics of the president and his people”, leading to the early charm offensive by Sir Keir’s Government, Mr McSweeney said.
The former Downing Street chief of staff also said Mr. Trump was “much funnier than I expected him to be”, as he told a story about the first phone call between the president and Sir Keir.
He told the Political Thinking with Nick Robinson podcast: “The first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills, and he started saying, ‘Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills’.
Fine, he was making his point; he’s made that publicly enough times.
“Then he started to say, the windmills are killing your birds, birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds.”
Mr. McSweeney added: “At this point the officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves, because it was extremely funny, but this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the president, and everyone wanted to be professional, but were struggling to hold it together.
“He went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds and became lazy, they became fat, and as they became so fat, people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were, because they were too fat. ”
He continued: “This was the first call between the president and Prime Minister. I thought, this is just going to be so, so very, very different.”
Mr. Trump has frequently tilted at Britain’s adoption of what he calls “windmills”: the drive to build wind turbines to generate more clean power, at the same time as the North Sea fossil fuel industry winds down.
Asked how Sir Keir had reacted to the call, Mr. McSweeney said: “He just held it together. I don’t know how.”
Campaign season begins right after Labor Day Weekend. Get ready! More prizes are coming!
In the meantime, if you have a nomination or an award you’d like to suggest, please let us know.