Happy birthday!

On what planet, with how many purple suns spinning in which direction through the methane sky, is it the third-most-important story in the world when some provincial constabulary decides to yank some redneck's conceal-n-carry permit on grounds that he threatened to indulge in a "shootout" starring a business rival?

Aw, you peeked.

Anyway -- see what we mean about keeping the pivot foot down? It's technically true that the permit was yanked "after" ("during" might be more accurate) a dispute about a bog-standard racist editorial, but it's pragmatically a bald-faced lie, as Fox's lede makes clear:

A local school board member and radio station owner under fire for airing an inflammatory editorial denouncing Martin Luther King Day has had his concealed carry permit revoked after he threatened a rival radio station owner to a "shootout."

Well ... you can threaten someone "with" something, or you can challenge him/her/them "to" something, but you can't threaten your rival "to" a shootout. That notwithstanding, the local cops -- they're the ones who handle CC permits, though the story never bothers to tell us where "local" is -- apparently decided that whatever sort of violence Our Hero might have been implying, he ought not enjoy the privilege of walking around before naptime with a concealed firearm. Good so far?

Brett Reese, who has been airing an editorial four times daily on his station KELS-FM denouncing slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. as a degenerate embezzler, a "plastic god" and "an America-hating communist," is also facing retribution from the school board on which he serves.

The Mountain States Anti-Defamation League has asked Reese to stop broadcasting the editorial, which contains statements that appear verbatim on a website with links to a white supremacist group.

No reason to doubt any of that (per standard practice, Fox is relying on the work of actual professional journalists -- here, the Denver Post -- for the factual underpinning of its scare stories). But it still doesn't have anything to do with a conceal permit from the sheriff's department, does it?

The Denver Post reported Sunday that Reese's concealed carry permit was revoked by the Weld County sheriff and he was served with a restraining order after he threatened a rival radio station owner with a "shootout" if the station's ad sales team didn't stop calling businesses that underwrite Reese's non-commercial station.

Reese reportedly said he was receiving threats for airing the editorial and wanted to carry his gun to school board meetings for protection.

Getting the picture yet? It doesn't matter if it's the Fourth of July, Christmas and the Feast of Audie Murphy rolled into one. On the off chance you should find yourself sitting near this misbegotten loser in a diner somewhere in Colorado, it'd be really nice if he wasn't armed. How freaking tough is that to figure out?

Usually, when you write headlines, you actually want people to read the story beneath. Fox is the only news organization I can think of for which that's not so. The last possible thing Fox wants is for anyone to read the story; that would create a serious (and difficult to mitigate) risk of the peasants' finding out that everything they'd read for the past month was a flat-out, full-on, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits lie. And you never know what the peasants might do in a case like that.