The Darwin Awards for Journalism

Our winner for April, 2006 is John B. Sotos, for writing the dumbest proposal in recent memory in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post. His brilliant plan? An emissions trading scheme. For calories. And I don't think he's joking. That's right, the obesity nannies have taken what is a great idea in something that represents a true externality (air pollution) and thought themselves so clever in applying it to their own so-called public health crisis. Well, there's a fine line between clever and...stupid. I can only hope that natural selection edits this guy from appearing in newspapers in the future.