Thank god for blogs: now I know why I woke up at 5:30 this morning.
In other Minnesota news, Bob Collins discovers that the job market for non-nurses really sucks. $6.93/hr for working in a packing plant? That’s obscene but the unspoken threat there is very clear: take shit wages or we give your job to an undocumented worker from Guatemala.
To our south, Cedar Rapidsians are wondering why McCain (and other elected officials) keep avoiding their mold-infused community as they continue to slowly clean up the muck from this summer’s flooding. Up north, Minnesotans wonder why the feds are stonewalling an investigation into the death of a local doctor who was killed while clearing a fallen tree from a roadway by a speeding Border Patrol agent.
Romenesko takes note of a ridiculous Nancy Barnes memo advising Strib reporters to put themselves in the candidates’ shoes. Not entirely ridiculous: thinking like your subject is key to several different hermeneutic approaches to text interpretation. Somehow, however, I don’t think Barnes is a hermeneut.
ln Congressional news, Michele Bachmann and John Kline voted against offshore drilling because their delicate sensibilities required that they go ALL OR FUCKING NOTHING on the right of Big Oil to drill twenty yards off Miami Beach. Bill Scher has some good analysis of how Republicans keep taking their marching orders from Big Oil.
Brian Lambert on local radio coverage of the RNC protesters. In other news, the Irish are pissed at how we treated their reporters.
Norm Coleman makes it into The Onion (print edition only so you have to click this link to read the joke).
A bit late to this widely distributed story about the PETA video of animal abuse at a corporate bacon bin operation in Iowa.
The disturbing, graphic video shows workers hitting sows with metal rods, slamming piglets on a concrete floor and bragging about jamming rods up into sows’ hindquarters.
The pork industry and a Hormel spokesperson say animal abuse is unacceptable and not the norm.
On the video, provided by PETA to the Associated Press, a supervisor tells an undercover PETA investigator that when he gets upset or a pig won’t move, “I grab one of these rods and jam it in her.”
Some key points that may elude non-farmers:
No sane farmer would ever use an iron rod on a farm animal as that would be like setting your money on fire.
Very few farmers hire “workers” except at harvest time. Workers are needed for corporate farming arrangements because of the scope of the livestock operation. Family farms do not mistreat animals or hire workers.
Pigs are very stubborn, and most farmers use canvas “slappers” to get their attention. The slappers raise a cloud of dust but nothing less than a hard slap gets the attention of a pig. They are frustrating critters to work with, but iron rods are something no one would ever use on an animal they owned and hoped to realize a profit from.
Livestock operations that mistreat animals are losing propositions. Iron rods? You have no idea how contemptuous I am of anyone who would use an iron rod on a farm animal. Corporate farming is at the root of all agri-evil. Corporate farming gives us this kind of animal abuse, e. coli and other forms of food poisoning. Corporate farming also represents the vertical consolidation of the agricultural sector, and that kind of monopoly-building nonsense will further lower the quality of our food.
The family farm and unionized packing plant employees are your last safeguard against dying of diarrhea thanks to filth factories like Postville’s Agriprocessors meat packing plant. [And if you're still eating kosher, you'll die long before I do. Roadkill is healthier for you.]
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More on the shitpile:
Steven Pearlstein on our Category 4 Financial Storm
Tom Toles on the rescue effort
Harold Meyerson on just desserts
Tristero on the jaw-dropping little things (like brokerages serving keg beer at weekly meetings)
This will not resolve fairly because there is zero chance that either Obama or McCain would put the worst offenders to death.
Again, if we can’t get rid of the death penalty, could we make the theft or loss of over $1 million a capital crime?
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Buddy Vick is still without power, so here are some book reviews for his jonesin’ readers:
Paul Demko interviews Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew
Scott Horton interviews Barton Gellman, author of Angler
Linguist says txting popular among good spellers (you have to know the rules before you can intelligibly break them)
Hmm, as long as I’m doing book links, here are some music links for accompaniment:
Taylor’s mini-review on Metallica’s Death Magnetic
Video proof that maybe Taylor’s taste in music isn’t like yours (or anyone else’s)
Bernard Chazelle on Charlie “Bird” Parker [not long but very good]
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Everything else:
I’ll say this just one more time: douche is French, bag is English, therefore douche bag must be spelled as two separate words. If you prefer one word, you have to say douchebaguette. [Try not to think about that one very hard; you'll be glad you didn't.]
Republicans to auction off NASA patents
NATO troops accidentally kill Afghan district governor and two bodyguards
2 soldiers in Iraq murdered by another American soldier
Convicted GOP vote cager says Michigan foreclosure scam will backfire
Brazil backs Bolivia against (U.S. financed?) separatists
Flying robots watched over Pope during Lourdes visit
Nostalgia piece on the Edsel that doesn’t mention the real reason why the Edsel failed to gain marketshare until you’re over half way through the article:
Automotive writers roundly trashed the Edsel, going so far as to compare the oval-shaped vertical grille to the female sex organ — racy stuff for 1957.
It was actually a pretty good car, but when you read the WIRED story you hear the same anti-vagina rhetoric: “butt ugly,” “classic barfly standard that everyone is good looking at closing time,” etc. The WIRED author, btw, is the suggestively named Tony Long.
Try to find time to read Neiwert’s update on USAG Troy Eid and the Obama tweaker/assassins.
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douchebaguette?!?
Wicked! I’m tempted to give you a cigar for that one-but I won’t say where tis been. . .
My uncle had an Edsel. It was a pretty good car, tho a monster. The grill, like a lot of later American styling points, was a direct steal from an old European marque, the Alfa-Romeo, which has had a similar grill shape since the 1920’s. It wasn’t just too sexy, it was too foreign.
Wait…they built a bridge? Looks like a lot of Hot Wheels track.
What are we gonna do without our daily local bride pr0n?
Hi! Most of my feeds and subscriptions for valuable information come from the USA via Google ie: I belive I am open to all opinions and that I enjoy discussion. Perhaps I have a problem, but my perception of your site has burst my bubble about the USA now being a free thinking place. All I have read so far is complaints and observations about things that have happened and nothing about what is NOW. YOU are the land of the WEcansolveit! what has the fact that someone (who probably needs medication) thinks an Alfa Romeo rad grill looks like a vagina got to do with reality. In case you get into the obvious I have gay friends but like Alfa Romeos and vaginas (preferably attached to women). I thought the Dukes of Hazard were an unfortunate media accident; perhaps not.