From the monthly archives: April 2010

Bay Area County Outlaws Happy Meals

by Gherald on 28 April 2010
Happy Meal toys and other promotions that come with high-calorie children’s meals will soon be banned in parts of Santa Clara County, reports the LA Times:
“This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children’s love of toys” to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. “This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.”

Voting against the measure was Supervisor Donald Gage, who said parents should be responsible for their children.

“If you can’t control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers,” he said.

My former three-year-old self is convinced these supervisors are being mean, and demands fries with his Looney Toons action figures.

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Public Employee of the Year Awards

by Gherald on 27 April 2010

Take it away, SNL.


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Iranian Cleric Blames Quake on Promiscuous Women

by Gherald on 26 April 2010

BBC:

Women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes, an Iranian cleric says.

Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran, said women should stick to strict codes of modesty to protect themselves.

“Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes,” he explained.

Tens of thousands of people have died in Iran earthquakes in the last decade.

Mr Sediqi was delivering a televised sermon at the Tehran University campus mosque last Friday on the need for a “general repentance” by Iranians when he warned of a “prevalence of degeneracy”.

“What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble? There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion and to adapt our lives to Islam’s moral codes,” he said.

Correspondents say many young Iranians sometimes push the boundaries of how they can dress, showing hair under their headscarves or wearing tight-fitting clothes.

Remind me again how religion is a force for good in the world.

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Republicans Are Making Common Cause With GUY FAWKES!? Seriously??

by Metavirus on 24 April 2010

This strikes me as pretty much the one of the most ridiculous pieces of poorly-informed garbage ever to emerge from the radical new GOP:

The Republican Governors Association has embraced the symbolism of Fawkes, launching a rather striking website, RememberNovember.com [ed. note: warning: really creeepy!], with a video that showcases far more Hollywood savvy than one can usually expect from Republicans. Again, the Fawkes tale has been twisted a bit. This time, President Obama plays the role of King James, the Democratic leadership is Parliament, and the Republican Party represents the aggrieved Catholic mass.

The politics and substance aside, this strikes me as a remarkable bit of political messaging, not just for its cinematic quality. The RGA, under the control of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, is clearly stepping out of the stodgy, safe territory it normally inhabits. It is aiming to tap into the vast well of anti-government fury now coursing through the nation. Who would have guessed that Barbour would embrace the symbolic value of the same would-be mass murderer as the Wachowski brothers?

The first point to make here is that this is a major, establishment Republican body taking up the imagery of a violent, anti-government almost-terrorist in its campaign to gain political power.

As Josh Marshall noted:

I find this completely bewildering. The Republican Governors Association is embracing the mantle of a 17th century radical who tried but failed to pull off a mass casualty terrorist attack to kill the King of England and all of Parliament…. Nothing shocks me anymore. But this shocks me.
How the fuck can “serious”, “important” people seriously do something like this in this day and age!?
9/11 changed everything? Yeah, my ass.

The second point here is that someone at the GOP might have considered the contemporary screen adaptation of the story of Guy Fawkes, V for Vendetta.

In this movie, England has come under the bootheel of a fascist, far-right government.

Guy Fawkes is represented by the mysterious “V”, a “terrorist”/”freedom fighter” who devotes his life to freeing England from the oppressive far-right government.

The movie even makes a delicious parody of our own Rush Limbaugh. Louis Prothero is the chief government propagandist in the film who launches into radio and television screeds against undesireables and those people he casts as enemies of the state.

The depths of the GOP’s depravity right now are really starting to scare the shit out of me.

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Away on Vacation Next Week

by Metavirus on 23 April 2010

I am going to get some much-needed R&R starting Saturday and will be out all of next week. I will definitely post periodically but I hope Gherald and Rupert can help keep you entertained in my absence. Aloha!

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Market Optimism: Intrade Odds of Republican-controlled House Above 50%

by Gherald on 22 April 2010



I would not take this bet either way; there are too many unknowns as yet.

But I’ll go on record as welcoming divided government. Politicians working to keep other politicians in check is one the few ways they can actually do some good.

Plus, these days with the MSM being such stenographical access-whores in for fifteen-minute scoops, it will be especially welcome.

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More Proof Conservatives are to Blame for Everything

by Rupert Psmith on 21 April 2010


Via Ezra Klein, a very interesting academic paper by J. Lawrence Broz, political science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Broz finds some striking correlations between financial collapses and the politics of the governments that bring them. Fancy that? And conservatives have been telling us for decades that it’s just a natural cycle. Cycle? Yes. Natural? Not so much.

Financial cycles of boom and bust are as old as finance itself — a fact that has led some observers to infer that human nature may be a fundamental cause of financial cycles. But “politics” also influences financial cycles by way of government policies and regulations. I argue that policies and regulations vary predictably with the partisan character of the government, creating a partisan-policy financial cycle in which conservative, pro-market governments preside over financial booms while left-wing governments are elected to office after crashes.

This is something I think most people who have been around awhile feel instinctively, so it’s nice to see research backing it up.

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