Rejoice, American Public!

Today Congress passed a bill reining in some of the more heinous abuses of the credit card industry. Arbitrary interest rate raises will soon be a thing of the past.

And as a bonus, we'll all soon be able to carry guns at national parks.

Finally, I'll feel safe at Plimouth Plantation. Wave a blunderbuss at me, will you, Goodman Frothingham?

Overheard at Work Today

"You're goin' to Ireland? Why the Hell would anybody wanna go to Ireland? That place ain't safe since the IRS started fightin' the British again."

Jumping on the Bandwagon

File this post under everyone-else-is-writing-about-it-so-I-might-as-well-too. The most famous teenage mother in America is now the Candie Foundation's ambassador for teen pregnancy prevention. This almost tops Bill O'Reilly (who called a rape victim "moronic" for wearing a mini skirt) speaking at a fundraiser for a rape survivors' foundation.

Bristol Palin has retracted her slip on Fox News that abstinence for all teens was not a realistic expectation, and is now advocating abstinence as "the only one-hundred percent fool-proof way to prevent pregnancy."

Admittedly, casting Bristol Palin as an ambassador for chastity hearkens back to a time-honored tradition of learning from others' mistakes. In the rural South in the mid-twentieth century, inmates from state prisons were brought to public schools to tell children "how they went wrong" and urging them to stay out of trouble or else they too would end up in the state pen.

The problem with this is that Bristol Palin can't very well say that abstinence will "save you a lot of heartache" and simultaneously say that her son Trig (where does this family get these names?) is "a blessing...the love of my life...the best thing that ever happened to me...."

"Be a good chaste girl and you won't have a little blessing from Jesus like I did." Flawless logic, no?

Of course, the Candie Foundation itself is constructed on self-contradicting foundations. It's affiliated with the girls' jewelry and apparel maker Candies--one of whose spokepersons is Britney Spears, the most famous 1990s pioneer of the kinderslut look.

But let's not be too hard on Bristol. It's perhaps easier to be on the sanguine side about your own teen pregnancy when you belong to a wealthy family and you're getting paid to talk about your mistake (scroll down to the end, you'll find it).

No one will say what Candie's Foundation is paying Bristol, but considering how much money her mother has bilked other people out of, I think we can assume she's doing quite well.

The Week in Food

First, congratulations to the Washington Post for winning the James Beard Award for Best Food Section.

Guys, couldn't you just settle for chicken or pork? If you're craving protein and you're not the tofu type, stealing a giraffe from a game reserve is not the way to go.

If you want to really see how much sugar is in your Mocha Frappuccino versus your chocolate milkshake, check out Sugar Stacks.

"I never heard of liver pudding and Cheerwine before." Thank God for education.

Some people like cats, and some people like cat. Just a few days ago I learned of an unusual culinary festival in Peru.

Truthiness, Indeed

It was bad enough when viewers of All in the Family found Archie Bunker likeable.

According to a recent study, disturbing numbers of conservative viewers of the Colbert Report don't understand that it's satire.

America's Finest at Work, Part Whatever

I was just skimming the newest posts in my bloglines account where I learned the FAA has agreed to make its data on bird collisions with aircraft publicly available. Okay, fine, more government stats. But then this perked my interest:

"More than 82,000 birds and mammals collided with civilian aircraft between 1990 and 2007..."

Uh, mammals? It's not just birds? Planes hit animals that are (or should be) on the ground?

At first I thought every now and than a cow wandered across an airstrip in rural Iowa and got hit by a crop duster. But now I'm curious, so I go to the FAA website itself, where I learn that you can, among other searches, "locate strikes on U.S. map by species." I find a menu to select species. I just start choosing animals at random. For my first species selection I learn:

Number of Wildlife Strikes [between Jan. 1990 and Nov. 2008] of Selected Species in US and Canada (Canada Not Shown): 14.

In case you were wondering, the species I chose was 'alligator.' Yes, 14 planes managed to collide with alligators.

And it gets better. The FAA website also informs me that:

"The FAA National Wildlife Strike Database contains strike reports that are voluntarily reported to the FAA by pilots, airlines, airports and others. Current research indicates that only about 20% of strikes are reported."

So maybe 70 airplanes hit alligators during that time period.

The vast majority of species available for selection are, of course bird: boobies, buntings, terns, barred owls, black bitterns, blue jays, black-billed magpies, black vultures, black-bellied plovers. But we also have coyotes, skunks, black rats, burros, cats, cattle, coyotes, sheep, porcupines, and "odd-toed ungulates." (I can see how you would want to keep separate statistics for "even-toed ungulates." Imagine the confusion otherwise.)

So if hitting a bunch of birds was what caused the downing of US Airways Flight 1549, imagine what happens if you're in a plane that hits a rhinoceros (that's an odd-toed ungulate, by the way).

You better hope Sully's your pilot.

Once Again....

Government meddling has suppressed good-old American entrepreneurship. You have to hand it to the people of Hardin, Montana. They seemed to have learned the lessons of the past twenty years: no more dot-com/real-estate/stock-market bubbles for them. They planned long-term economic development and they wanted to help the president close Gitmo.

They wanted to take some of these detainees off the military's hands:

....a 460-bed detention facility sits empty in Hardin. Built by Two Rivers Authority, the city's economic development arm, the facility was meant to bring economic development to Hardin by creating more than 100 high-paying jobs.

While leaders continue to look for contracts to open the jail, which was completed in 2007, people in Hardin have approached Two Rivers executive director Greg Smith saying they have the answer: Get the contract to hold those prisoners from Guantanamo.

Source: BillingsGazette.com

But this brilliant to jump-start Billings' economy has been quashed--by no less than their very own Congressional delegation:

Rep. Denny Rehberg, a Republican, said the detainees are terrorists and "we should be doing everything possible to keep them out of our country, let alone our state."

I really can't wrap my head around this attitude: consensus in Lincoln, Montana seems to be that Ted Kaczynski was an exemplary neighbor.

Maybe Rehberg is feeling burned by Montana's abysmal failure to create a Unabomber tourism industry, and blowing a potential cash cow like having al-Qaeda members in your midst would just be another embarrassing business failure to soon.

I can't help but think Montana's Congressmen are totally wrong on this issue: considering the still-fuzzy legal status of Gitmo detainees, having them in that correctional facility could mean that a lot of the good people of Hardin would have jobs for life.