The premiere for Horton Hears a Who! was held today at Mann Village Theater in Los Angeles. In attendance were stars (and Horton voices) Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, non-star Victoria Beckham, lots and lots of children and…a totally uninvited group of pro-lifers, who were apparently uber-inspired by the film’s upbeat mantra of “After all, a person is a person no matter how small.”

The protesters reportedly “chanted” pro-life messages after the flick was over, then applied red tape labeled with the word “LIFE” to their mouths and kept on protesting. What would Dr. Seuss think (WWDRST?). Sidenote: This item was brought to my attention by Peter and since I’ve already been called a “commie” today on Slash (a first!), we thought…

The other week was only the latest takedown of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager. A phone (land line!) survey of 1,200 17-year-olds, conducted by the research organization Common Core and released Feb. 26, found our young people to be living in “stunning ignorance” of history and literature.

This furthered the report that the National Endowment for the Arts came out with at the end of 2007, lamenting “the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life,” particularly among 13-to-17-year-olds, and Doris Lessing’s condemnation, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, of “a fragmenting culture” in which “young men and women … have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or…