Egg Recall Expands To More Than Half A Billion Nationwide
WASHINGTON — More than a half-billion eggs have been recalled in the nationwide...
OK it was a big white sorta, you know, egg-shaped one...
Seriously. How can you do this? Do all the King's men know?
I'm using a Safari extension called HelveticaTheWorld that turns all the fonts on all the web sites I look at to Helvetica (except fonts in images, of course, but you knew that). This makes my eyes happy. But - just pointing out here - it also means that if there are any major typographical sins committed on this blog, I don't see them. (Another Safari extension - ScribeFire, for blogging - preserves the original font in quotes from other web pages, it appears, so the probability of typographical transgression is fairly high.)
If it gets too ugly let me know. Otherwise, deal with it.
Op-Ed Columnist - Campaigns in Troubled Waters - NYTimes.com
Besides not being a career politician, Scott’s [that would be Rick Scott, running for governor of Florida] big selling point is that he would “run this state like you run a business.” The biggest business he ran himself was Columbia/HCA, a mammoth health care company. The board of directors tossed him out in 1997 after the company pleaded guilty to overbilling state and federal health programs and paid $1.7 billion to settle the case.
Taking his argument literally, we would have to assume that Scott is promising that if he’s elected governor, he’ll build Florida into a state so energetic that it will wind up involved in the biggest fraud scandal in the history of state governments.
Friday Throwdown: A mosque near ground zero - BostonHerald.com
A plan to build a mosque and Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Ground Zero, has polarized people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Anything written about that so-called ground zero so-called mosque is pretty useless, but wait...polarized people on all sides of the spectrum? What the hell does that mean? Whoever wrote it was just trying to fill up the space before the period, as far as I can see. Granted, I do the same thing some time, but I don't get paid for it. Anyway this is just the internet, where you can write all the dumb things you want.
From the Associated Press:
VINEYARD HAVEN, Mass. – Finally, President Barack Obama can relax on vacation...
From the New York Times:
There is a lot of grim economic news out there, including Thursday’s report that initial claims for unemployment insurance rose to half a million people last week...
UNDERNEWS: OBAMA LIES ABOUT REMOVING COMBAT TROOPS FROM IRAQ
NPR - NBC News, the Associated Press and CNN, among other news outlets, are reporting that the last U.S. combat troops were leaving Iraq Wednesday evening with the rolling into Kuwait of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash.
But as we at NPR and others have reported previously, going forward there will still be U.S. combat troops in Iraq and they will sometimes find themselves shooting at the enemy and being shot at.
That would qualify as combat by most definitions.
So how is it possible to report that the last combat troops are leaving Iraq when there will still be combat troops there?
US spending $16,000 for imam's Mideast tour - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – American taxpayers will pay the imam behind plans for a mosque near the Manhattan site of the Sept. 11 attacks $3,000 in fees for a three-nation outreach trip to the Middle East that will cost roughly $16,000, the State Department said Wednesday.
No, not that part - that was just the intro. The priceless part is here, in paragraph six:
At each stop he is expected to discuss Muslim life in America and promote religious tolerance...
Really. No kidding. Religious tolerance. That's what it says.
OK, not your pain exactly. The pain of some people in Ohio with a back yard and and a kitchen and that stuff.
Obama says economy coming back slowly but surely - Yahoo! News
COLUMBUS, Ohio – President Barack Obama used the homey backdrop of a middle-class Ohio family's backyard Wednesday to try to show voters he shares their concerns about the economy, health care and Social Security.
Alaska Is Leery of Washington but Feasts on Its Dollars - NYTimes.com
Alaskans tend to live with their contradictions in these recessionary times. No place benefits more from federal largess than this state, where the Republican governor decries “intrusive” Obama administration policies, officials sue to overturn the health care legislation and Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, voted against the stimulus bill.
Op-Ed Columnist - Really Unusually Uncertain - NYTimes.com
It’s like this: things are getting better, except where they aren’t. The bailouts are working, except where they’re not. Things will slowly get better, unless they slowly get worse. We should know soon, unless we don’t.
[Noted by our Midwest bureau]
For the second year in a row, the quarterback who spends his summers on the verge of retirement was driven to Vikings headquarters on the Tuesday following the team's first preseason game. Just like last August, news helicopters followed his vehicle from a local airport and dozens of fans and media gathered at the entrance to Winter Park to greet him....
Nothing the Vikings haven't seen before.
Gov’t starts talks about new mortgage system | Raw Story
Housing conference likely to focus on continued government role in mortgage market...
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will address the conference but is not expected to offer an exit strategy Tuesday. The administration has said it won't offer its plan until next year.
Don't worry, we have a plan.
AP Exclusive: Terrorist tapes found under CIA desk | Raw Story
The CIA has tapes of 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison. Discovered under a desk, the recordings could provide an unparalleled look at how foreign governments aided the U.S. in holding and questioning suspected terrorists.
Emphasis mine.
Woman hits Senate Armed Services chairman with pie - Yahoo! News
BIG RAPIDS, Mich. – A woman identified as an anti-war protester hit U.S. Sen. Carl Levin in the face with an apple pie during the Armed Services Committee chairman's meeting with constituents in northern Michigan, authorities said Monday.
What ever happened to chocolate cream?
Reid: Build mosque elsewhere - Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON – The Senate's top Democrat on Monday came out against plans to build a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, moving away from President Barack Obama on the controversial election-year issue.
Also the AP is a jerk for this graph...
"The First Amendment protects freedom of religion," said Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman. "Senator Reid respects that, but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else."
...which makes it clear Reid is not moving away from Obama but instead parroting Obama's line word for word.
Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future
Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.
Emphasis mine. So what. The sad thing is, I can actually imagine this happening.
Mosque gets all the press, but area near Ground Zero full of bars, porn, liquor stores, salons
Opponents of a proposed lower Manhattan mosque and community center speak in hushed tones about the sanctity of the "shadow of Ground Zero."
Tell that to the patrons of the Pussycat Lounge, a strip club where a photo of a nearly naked woman marks its location just two blocks from where the World Trade Center stood.
Or the Thunder Lingerie and peep show next door, where the marquee sports an American flag above a window display of sex toys and something called a "power pump."
Ross Douthat, the columnist the New York Times hired to prove it is not biased against fools, pines for the good old days when immigrants (great waves of them!) were greeted on these sylvan shores with cudgels and tough love and serious hazing...
Op-Ed Columnist - Islam and the Two Americas - NYTimes.com
During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.
The amusing thing - amusing once one gets past the total idiocy of Douthat's column (the link above) is that it was written, presumably, in New York, one of the most ethnically organized cities I've ever been in. When I lived there, admittedly a long time ago, in local elections each party ran a three-man (yes, man) ticket for the three most powerful offices in the city: mayor, Manhattan borough president, and attorney general (I think) (something something) - and the conventional political wisdom was the ticket must include a Jew, and Italian, and an Irishman:
True, these guys had no hyphens.
Come to think of it, what kind of name is Douthat? It sounds foreign to me.
Just before I went out for a little stroll a while ago I thought of something I wanted to get done when I came back so I decided to leave myself a little note, just a reminder, and when I got home from my walk I did remember the thing I wanted to do but there was no note. So now I guess I am going to have to leave myself notes to remind myself to write reminders. Bummer.
Obamas take a boat ride during Gulf Coast vacation - Yahoo! News
PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla. – Catching a glimpse of porpoises, President Barack Obama and his family went boating Sunday as part of a weekend trip to the Gulf of Mexico that was designed to showcase the region's attractions as well as the president's concern for those affected by the BP oil spill.
...taking a vacation? No, that can't be right. Can it?
