Here's something to add to your "things I could worry about list." Mine has become rather long...almost humorously so. I recently learned on the Discovery Channel that a large asteroid is coming extremely close to the earth on Friday, April 13, 2029. It could cause a giant catastrophe if it hits (Boo!). But it won't (Yay!). But it is coming back about seven years later, and it may hit at that time (Boo!). But the scientists think it will miss then, too. (Yay!)

(Does anyone else remember the Yay-Boo stories from childhood?)

Anyway, a scientist on the Discovery show said that the way to save ourselves from an asteroid on a collision course with the earth would be to try to nudge the asteroid out of its orbit instead of trying to blow it up. He said blowing it up would cause the smaller pieces of it to all hit earth, in some cases catastrophically.

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Separately (of course you had to figure this entry would get to politics before it ended), a problem with absurd internet rumors is that there is always a portion of people who believe them. The bigger problem is that in a close election, for example, if 13% of the people think that Obama is a Muslim and one-quarter of those people might have voted for him but for that...and then if Obama loses by small margin...you get the idea. Losing an election because people don't like your tax plan is one thing. Losing because several million people believe that you are a member of a certain religion when you are not...that's another.

It's also a problem when educated people start to believe internet hoaxes. A few weeks ago, I got one from someone who I know well, who is highly educated, that said Maureen Dowd had written a column in the NYT revealing that Obama was getting huge campaign donations from non-US citizens in the middle east and China. There was a real link at the bottom to Maureen Dowd's NYT page, but of course she wrote no such column.

The e-mail "helpfully" pasted in the alleged text of column. 10 seconds at Snopes debunks this absurd hoax. And common sense tells you that if Obama was massively violating election law like that, not only would Fox News be running it 24/7, all the other news outlets in the country would have it as the lead as well.

The problem is that despite common sense and logic, the person who sent me the e-mail apparently still believes it's true, and is waiting for the media to catch up. She may recognize that Maureen Dowd didn't write about it in the NYT--that part can be somewhat easily disproved--but she thinks the rest of it is true or may be true. And she is *educated*...she has an advanced degree from a well-known university on the east coast.

Separately, I read about another e-mail going around that says Obama is the antichrist. The e-mail says that Revelations says that a Muslim man in his 40's will become a giant sensation and then will be revealed to be the antichrist. Snopes helpfully points out that since Revelations was written at least 400 years before the Islamic religion was founded, it would be difficult for the e-mail to be accurate. Oh, and that small little fact that Obama is not a Muslim should help disprove it, but the people who believe Obama is the antichrist based on an e-mail surely overlap to a significant degree with those who believe he is a Muslim.

Good grief. As I pointed out to my educated friend who forwarded the "Obama donations coming from the middle-east" e-mail: By all means, campaign against Obama if you don't like his proposed tax policies, foreign policy, etc. But please don't stoop to the level of nutcase fear-mongers forwarding internet hoax e-mail with an implicit endorsement of it.