Right Wing Nation

You may or may not recall that aging latte liberal who was trying to buy designer frozen Thai dinners with foodstams (of course, it was Wegman’s, where else?) I was at Wegman’s yesterday and wanted something to eat fast that I could just nuke for a few minutes, and picked up one of those Thai dinners (except now, they’re $8.99).

Let’s just say it was a mistake, and leave it at that. For less than twice the money, I could have driven down to the Thai place downtown and had a pretty good curry. Today’s the same, but just in case, I picked up a Stouffer’s lasagna.

Actually, I’d rather have a cheeseburger or three, but I am not going to drive back into town today. Am. Not. No. Way. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

Ann Althouse has an update about Google shutting down Democrats’ anti-Obama blogs. According to her cited article:

On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

That may or may not be BS (I suspect it is, but that’s not really where I’m going). But Ann adds:

But Kovacevich — unless he’s lying — revealed something about the technique. Google monitors email. (Sidenote: You might want to worry about how Google monitors email.)

Gmail has a spam filter, and in order for it to work, it has to scan incoming messages. I suppose you could call that “monitoring email,” but It seems a bit paranoid to me, especially given the huge volume of messages that Gmail handles. Sure, Google is sleazy, but there’s a difference between that and unworkable.

Then, Matt Johnston stumbles here:

Reports that Obama’s female staffers earn, on average, less than his male staffers is complete RUBBISH and should be viewed as nothing more than conservative rabble rousing, and that is hard for me to say as a conservative.

Essentially, what these reporters are doing is comparing female salaries to male salaries, without taking into account the job that is being done.

Uh, Matt, that’s the point. Obama is spouting the “women make 75 cents to every dollar men make!” myth in order to push his latest idiotic idea of “wage fairness.” That pseudo-statistic is exactly what you describe: take the total income females make, without respect to job, and compare it to the total income males make. See how that works? The bloggers are merely applying his own math-challenged methods to what he pays. Fair is fair.

A medical physiologist asks:

French-fries are junk-food, but roast potatoes are not; bread is a basic food-stuff, but biscuits are junk; wine comprises “empty calories”, but fruit juices are health foods; the sugar in cake is detrimental to health, but the sugar in honey and grapes is not. White bread is not “nutritious”, but cauliflower is, though it consists of 90% water, 5% starch, a minute amount of protein, and only traces of vitamins and minerals (other than potassium). What then is “junk” food?

And concludes:

“Junk-food”, we must therefore conclude, is any consumable prepared outside the home which children find delicious.

But not necessarily children. For example, serve 3 lbs of spinach in a bowl as spinach, and it’s wholesome. Use those same 3 lbs of spinach to make cream of spinach soup, or even creamed spinach (one of life’s greatest pleasures, provided one doesn’t overdo the nutmeg), and it’s no longer wholesome.

Or mashed potatoes. Make dull, uninteresting potatoes with nothing more than a bit of milk and salt, and they’re wholesome. Add butter (the more the better, of course) or gruyère, and they’re suddenly an indulgence, or “empty calories.”

I think the physiologist is correct about the palate, and just hasn’t noticed that it’s not necessarily children’s palates. If it tastes really delicious, it’s not wholesome. It’s culinary puritanism.