Bananas

I can't believe I actually read my way through an entire article about bananas. It's actually really interesting. And if you like bananas, it appears you're screwed. Price is going up, and somewhere between 5 to 20 years, the variety of banana we all eat may go extinct (though I wouldn't mind if it means we could get those cool, itty bitty, extremely tasty South American ones here, finally). Read the rest of this post...

US Air to charge for water

Ridiculous. The last time I was stuck flying American Airlines from Europe I was floored when they charge $5 for wine. If they charged me cost or close to it, I could live with that, but I could buy an entire bottle of something drinkable for that price, let alone buying a mini bottle that was like sandpaper to the throat.

US Air, though, is the airline that filed for bankruptcy twice in the last few years despite being part of the industry-wide bailout. As if that wasn't enough, they continued to pay their executives seven figures even during this troubled period, as if they were somehow competent. (They weren't, surprise, surprise.) So now that they're down to charging $2 for stinking water. Yes water. I'm surprised that's even legal but there's probably plenty of bad corporate handouts left from the GOP Congress years. Read the rest of this post...

NYT kinda sorta asks FL GOP Gov. Charlie Crist if he's gay

That was actually kind of ballsy of the NYT:

Your personal life is not that of a typical Republican candidate. For starters, I hear you’re not a property owner. It is true. I do not own property. I just never found a need for it. Now I have the Governor’s Mansion, and I rent a condo in St. Petersburg.

You were married nearly 30 years ago, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Do you prefer living alone? I got married and divorced because it didn’t work out. I haven’t found the right one since. It’s really that simple.

You can’t find one woman in all of Florida? Maybe I have. Stay tuned.

Whatever. If John McCain makes Charlie Crist his VP, the religious right will lose it. Crist, a heartbeat away from the presidency? What a historic gay, I mean day, that would be. Read the rest of this post...

McCain: "I do not support Roe v. Wade. It should be overturned."

A daily dose of McBush, courtesy of Jed. It's a forceful reminder from the GOP nominee about his very, very, very right wing views on a woman's right to choose.

Read the rest of this post...

The $50 billion gamble - is this what Florida wants?

And $50 billion plus is only Florida. Who wouldn't want to vacation with photos like this all over the web? (The beach photo is from Alaska. Florida would be much more shocking to the world.)

Leatherman has seen what offshore drilling can do to a beach. Texas beaches, for instance, "tend to be the trash can of the gulf." Waste from the western gulf's wells — everything from empty oil drums to tar balls — washes up there.

Allowing drilling in the eastern gulf — a move now touted by President Bush, GOP presidential candidate John McCain and Gov. Charlie Crist — carries risks for the environment as well as for Florida's economy.

Over the past 40 years, oil companies have drilled thousands of wells across the western and central gulf, and there are now about 3,800 offshore structures there. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have been willing to overlook the trash and tar in exchange for cash and jobs.

Read the rest of this post...

US cities' property value to fall $1.46 trillion in 2008

Yet another knock-on effect of the years of bad economic policy by the Republicans. This means either cutbacks in services offered by US cities, higher taxes or higher costs. The Republican policies such as the Gramm Leach Bliley Act were based on bad theory so now in the real world, everyone is going to be paying the price. Democrats are making a mistake if they fail to tie the policy to the results, every single day. Read the rest of this post...

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Check out the poem of the week. It's "Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World" by Sherman Alexie, a Native American poet. We're told the poem is "funny, unpretentious and bluntly human" -- and it is.

It's a beautiful day in D.C. and I'm heading out for a run. Read the rest of this post...

Obama unveils official-looking seal

Interesting idea.

Read the rest of this post...

California to post 'global warming score' on new cars

Congressman Dingell is not going to like this at all. For everyone else who cares about the environment, this is good news.

The California Air Resources Board said Thursday the window sticker will give consumers the information they need to choose a cleaner-burning car or light truck.

"This label will arm consumers with the information they need to choose a vehicle that saves gas, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps fight smog all at once," board chairman Mary Nichols said in a statement. "Consumer choice is an especially powerful tool in our fight against climate change. We look forward to seeing these stickers on 2009 model cars as they start hitting the showrooms in the coming months."

Read the rest of this post...

Another mega-bank mega-merger?

The Republican-style "free market" at work again. Americans everywhere are begging and screaming for the market to deliver a mega bank that will combine Wacovia and their 120,000 employees and JPMorgan Chase's 180,000. This is the banks looking for a new way to build mega-loans that have dried up since Wall Street was on the edge of a collapse so large, we had to bail them out. So now someone hopes to take two large banks that we couldn't afford to fail and create one that would have an ever larger negative impact if it failed and would be even more costly to bail out. Well, that and they get to fire tens of thousands of people after the merger.

Ain't this Republican free market stuff great? Read the rest of this post...

When anti-gays think everyone could choose to be gay, it makes me wonder just what's going on inside their head

I'm going on Howie Kurtz's Sunday morning show on CNN, and the other guest is going to be far-right radio jock Dennis Prager. The topic is gay marriage, and why the media hasn't made a big deal out of the decision in California. I googled Prager, and gay marriage, and came upon an article he wrote last month. Putting aside for a moment that the great defender of marriage, Mr. Prager, has two divorces under his belt, what I found really interesting was this paragraph:

Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity -- especially females -- can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction -- until now, accomplished through marriage.

Oh really? See, I've had a theory for a while. The only people who think that most of humanity could go gay or straight are people who themselves could go gay or straight - and they just assume that everyone else is just like them. People who are predominantly straight don't need society to "direct" them to the heterosexual side of things - it's what they prefer anyway. If you need someone to coax you not to have sex with a man, you've got bigger issues than what's happening in some court in California. Read the rest of this post...