Introducing: JackeHammer's "Bullwinkle" Award

Since this is the first "Bullwinkle" Award JackeHammer has issued I want to explain from whence the term Bullwinkle comes. I'm not referring to the moose.

Furniture Factory Outlet in Springfield used to have a couple who did their commercial spots. "Earl" passed away some years ago but my favorite Earl and Edna commercial was the one in which they were behind some kind of hill, presumably in a flower garden and, I think Edna, had some gardening tools in hand. Earl, who always had trouble with names and the English language and got words confused, identified some unseen flowers as "bullwinkles." He might have meant periwinkles, who knows?

Anyway, my first Bullwinkle Award goes to Michael Savage for inadvertantly raising autism awareness. A lot of folks have spent a great deal of time discussing autism due to some controversial remarks Savage recently made on his nationally syndicated radio program, "The Savage Nation." Many of these people might not have had an opportunity to raise the issue in a public forum if not for Savage's insensitive comments.

The News-Leader has their roses and thorns. I want to stay as positive as possible, here at JackeHammer, so I only have my "bullwinkles."

Related: Apparently, much of this debate was spawned due to a research paper from 2006, written by Paul T. Shattuck, PhD of the Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin: "The Contribution of Diagnostic Substitution to the Growing Administrative Prevalence of Autism in US Special Education

More: An erratum has been published to the above Shattuck, PhD study, in the interest of disclosure I thought the link should be posted here.

More related: RealClearPolitics - Thomas Sowell - Crusades Versus Caution