VBVW for February 8, 2008: By The Numbers

• The Very Best

Sixty two members of the New York Mafia have been rounded up in one of the biggest organized crime stings in the last 30 years. Finally, real life is as interesting as The Sopranos.

A congressional committee has been convened to investigate Pfizer for deceptive tactics in ads for Lipitor, the world’s best-selling drug. Direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals is already ethically questionable, and Pfizer’s creepy pitchman, Robert Jarvik, misrepresents himself in the ads as someone who is outdoorsy and who gives a crap.

Karen Burton, another member of the extended family of backwoods inbreds who tortured a black woman last September (as VBVW reported), has been indicted for a hate crime. Burton is expected to join her daughter, who’s testifying against her, and the rest of the toothless clan in prison. It’s “take out the trash day” in West Virginny.

• The Very Worst

Gun nuts stormed America. A man in Kirkwood, Missouri shot and killed five people at a city council meeting. A student at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge killed two others and then herself in a classroom. Then there was Kurt Havelock, who sat in sight of the Super Bowl last Sunday with his AR-15 assault rifle and plotted to “shed the blood of the innocent.” That was because he couldn’t get a liquor license.

Nearly sixty were killed in tornadoes in the south. The storms arrived without little advance warning, which means that FEMA didn’t know anything about it until the disaster was already old news.

The journal Science reported that biofuels cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels once all related emission costs are factored in. Come on America, can’t we use one single form of energy that doesn’t flush our environment down the toilet?