Satirical website The Onion has completely owned an Iran news agency.

The Iran news outlet published as true a story from The Onion saying rural white Americans would rather vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than Barack Obama.

Just because it's satire doesn't mean it isn't true.

You probably remember the steady stream of various hangings of effigies around the nation since Obama took office, many of them done on or near Christian churches.

It's probably still fresh in your mind, too, all the boos and catcalls the Obamas receive wherever they go, even if it's to do charity work somewhere.

Two billion more people will be added to the planet in the next 38 years.  Food prices will edge up sharply as larders empty.  The next wars will be fought over clean drinking water -- even as we now foul clean supplies and threaten aquifers with fracking and pipelines.

We're suffocating ourselves with CO2 from our ravenous use of energy too dirty to burn anymore.  As tundras warm and thaw, methane is released, too -- many factors more dangerous than killing CO2.

Yes, and sea ice will calve, collapse, and melt.  Oceans will rise.  The lost reflectivity of snow and ice spirals up our heat, too.  Rising CO2 poisons the seas, whose creatures provide half the air we breathe.  Droughts march and wildly imperil anything green -- food stocks, plants and forests trying to trade us poison for fresh air.

It's an old story, one that keeps poking back into view this election cycle:  How to reach people with your particular message?  Most of the time, we're stuck in our own channels and ruts, either stuck preaching to the choir or unable to usher new people into the tent.

This trend of stuck messaging, to pick a phrase, is clearly present in politics today,  with each so-called "side" aghast at the clearly observable insanity of their opposites, everyone's listening skills turned off at the source.

Two camps have been routinely described by the Occupy movement:  the elite 1%, and all the rest of us rabble in the remaining 99%.  As it turns out in real life, 1% of the population are also likely psychopaths.

Thank goodness it was a mammoth, well-connected corporation like Halliburton that lost a radioactive device on September 11.

After all, if a small company or a few individuals had been involved, there would have been a need to crank up the manure-blizzard machines, and make sure everyone was socked and clobbered with terrorism charges aplenty, for starters, following such mindless behavior.

As it is, only the -- let's see now -- the NRC, the FBI, the Texas Department of Transportation, the Texas Department of State Health Services, local law enforcement, and a special National Guard team has so far had their bells rung with this news and been forced to chime in.

Officials say the 7- or 8-inch long stainless steel rod, which is about an inch around and is stamped with the radiation symbol and the words "do not handle," doesn't produce radiation that's "extremely dangerous" -- although, they add, if the device is spotted, it's best to stay back 20 or 25 feet.

Good to know it's not dangerous.  Much.