<![CDATA[Jezebel: ethanol subsidies]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/jezebel.com.png <![CDATA[Jezebel: ethanol subsidies]]> http://jezebel.com/tag/ethanolsubsidies http://jezebel.com/tag/ethanolsubsidies <![CDATA[Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Just Made Some Pakistani Farmer's Life $25 Million Better. Here's Hoping He Invested In Big Corn!]]> Behold 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And note the Ashlee Simpsonesque transformation of his nose. Maybe people with the initials KLS are just vainer than most. And while the Guantanamo diet was good for the love handles, waterboarding leaves you bloated with bags under the eyes? In any case, something, it's hard to know exactly what, motivated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to finally tell us what was up with Al Qaeda. Easier to know is why we finally found him: some Pakistani farmer type wanted to win $25 million. Will the same tactic work for the auto industry? John McCain wants to offer $300 million — Fun fact: just under one thousandth the cost of that recent farm bill — to the first person to invent a 30% more efficient car battery. Holy mindfuck, right? Like, on one hand, he's appealing to humanity's most rational Smithean impulses! While at the same time, betraying a sinister distrust in the ability of the market to solve everything! Megan and I read a shitload of newspapers over the weekend so we could share an informed combination of disillusionment, disenchantment, disgust and depression over Zimbabwe, the SEC, the corn industry etc. after the jump.

MOE: Morning Megan! Nice weekend? Good thing I already know the answer to that question because there are like ninety things we need to discuss this morning, and like, none of them is George Carlin! We should maybe start with how they abandoned that whole election idea in Zimbabwe after Mugabe made the truly salient point in a speech that "How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?" And Mugabe has so much more than a gun, and he's been wielding them liberally to assassinate pretty much everyone with the combination of courage, integrity, idealism and purposefulness to openly oppose him.

MOE:

One such target was Better Chokururama, a 31-year-old activist with an appetite for bravado and fisticuffs, nicknamed “Texas” for both the cowboy hats he favored and the moniker of a torture camp from which he once escaped. He was abducted on April 19, and his legs crushed by his captors with boulders.
He said in an interview afterward, as he lay with both legs in casts, that he had told his captors “that beating people would not change anything because the opposition had beaten the governing party, ZANU-PF, in the elections.”
“They laughed loudly,” he said, “then threw me out of the moving vehicle.”

MEGAN: Ah, Zimbabwe. Is it sad, or accurate that I wonder if his statement was coerced? Because he only just got back to the country, and I can't imagine that Better Chokururama (or the 86 people killed, or the 10,000 who've been injured or the 200,000 refugees) would prefer not to cast their vote for Morgan Tsvangirai right now than wait for... something. Mugabe's death or whatever, not that his hand-picked successor will likely be any different.
MEGAN: It almost makes me wish I'd watched the end of Last King of Scotland only when the white dude fucked Amin's wife I was like, ok, seriously, I don't really need to see how this ends, it ain't gonna be good.

MOE: I'm not reading you re whether the statement was coerced. "Beating people will not change anything" or "They threw me out of the moving vehicle." The rest of his story, which I omitted, has him getting captured again with some other activists whose bodies showed up a few days later. But there's some other news that I kind of want to get to starting with how the chairman of the chief financial regulatory agency was about as worthless during the whole Bear Stearns debacle as…the old CEO of Bear Stearns! He missed most of the conference calls for birthday parties and went on vacation with his family. Guess that's what you get for expecting someone to police people making nine figure pay packages on a six figure salary!
MEGAN: Well, I meant whether Morgan Tsvangirai was coerced to drop out of the race. He got back from exile to avoid being coerced and dropped out within hours. It seems suspicious to me.

MOE: Ugh, what the FUCK is a former Orange County congressman Reaganite lose doing fucking regulating our financial sector…Oh Morgan Tsvangirai's statement that the election was a violent illegitimate sham of a political process and that he didn't want to start a civil war?
MEGAN: And re: Chris Cox, that's what you get for hiring a guy stupid enough to be a conservative Republican in New Jersey who wasn't exactly known for being hte most go-to Congressman ever to run a regulatory agency when his political ideology is based around smaller government i.e., not regulating. The only good thing about Chris Cox at the SEC is that he's not in Congress anymore.
MEGAN: And by Jersey, I meant California, sorry.
MEGAN: Well, I mean, they already have a civil war. They also put another top party leader in prison and charged him with treason, not that anyone's seen him since.

MOE: Yeah a fucking Reaganite knownothing donothing, God I fucking can't stand those ideological free marketeers whose understanding of the financial sector begins and ends at best with some P.J. O'Rourke essay.
MEGAN: Do people really still read O'Rourke?
MEGAN: Also, he was a Congressman. I'll bet he thought the SEC gig was a step up with fewer actual responsibilities because he has more staff to hold his soft, white hand and do everything for him. Why would he miss a birthday party for regulating anything? He never did in Congress I'll bet you.

MOE: But in the wake of the internet bubble which was followed by the corporate malfeasance fest which was followed by the options backdating debacle how the fuck does someone like Cox get that job? And can Obama make hay out of this? Because I'd rather that than make um oil out of corn but that's neither here/there!
MOE: If anything it makes Obama look less hot to the Brazilians:

“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”

MEGAN: But it's the market! The market! Market failures will be regulated by the market and so regulation just damages the ability of the market to correct itself which it will do if you don't overregulate it and so Chris Cox is just doing his job by not regulating the market because regulating it would damage it!

MEGAN: Well, it's a tariff, not a tax, and it's not just on sugar-based ethanol it's on all imported ethanol but McCain's point remains valid. It's incredibly ineffecient and not environmentally sound policy to put tariffs on imported ethanol as a way of additionally subsidizing the construction of ethanol plants in the Midwest that can only be used for corn instead of whatever plant is cheapest. But that's US ag policy: those little family farmers that hardly exist anymore need your tax dollars, dammit, and if a few hundred million or more need to go to multinationals to make sure that a couple farmers won't sell out to them anyway, well, that's the trade-off we all accept to continue fetishizing the family farm.
MOE: Yeah and just to put a number on that…the last agriculture bill was $370 million, yes?

MEGAN: It was a lot, let's just go with that...
MOE: Because fucking agribusiness is so cash strapped right now the leading corn syrup supplier is only commanding a 31% premium over the market price of its shares Man, take a fucking look at this chart. If only I'd been pissed off about ethanol back when I was busy being pissed off about …oil!
MEGAN: Oh, well, ethanol was a better oxegenate for the environment than MTBE, and it seemed so environmentally friendly when the corn growers were all lobbying for it to be a corn-oxygenate back in the day. I mean, it's whole fucking purpose is to allow us to continue driving the exact same automobiles in the exact same way while marginally reducing emissions.
MOE: Anyway suffice it to say the corn industry hasmore than enough money left over to convince America the corn industry is good for America.

MEGAN: It is good, see, sweet delicious corn!
MEGAN: So yellow, so environment-y!
MOE: Ok check out this segue. So that last story was about the corn industry's public relations push to remind Americans that High Fructose Corn Syrup really isn't any worse for you than sugar…and guess what has HFCS in it? Ensure nutritional beverages…Al Qaeda logistics mastermind Abu Zubayda! Which is just one of the numerous fascinating facts we learned from yesterday's A1 Scott Shane story on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Did you read that? I highly recommend it.
9:30 AM
MEGAN: Ensure is so disgusting, it's supposed to be a supplement for old people and instead they're marketing it as a meal-replacement solution for healthy people and it's not. Talk about sick PR. But, no, I didn't read the story. I'm sure it's bad.
MOE: Okay, so let me guide you through the important parts of the story: I think the "little farmer guy" who turned in KLS in hopes of earning a quick $25 million and resettling himself and his family under a new identity in the US has to be my fave. Do you think there is some gated community tailored for, like, lottery winners and successful plaintiffs in massive malpractice suits where they could just sort of hide that guy away? Because that could be a fun movie starring Kal Penn.
MOE: But I guess mostly it's a profile of the lead interrogator Deuce Martinez, a wonky egghead analyst who skipped waterboarding classes and played "good cop"

MEGAN: I would snitch on anyone for $25 million, I'm just saying. Didn't we discuss a few weeks ago that the CrimeStoppers programs always end up paying out a ton more money when the economy sucks? I feel like we did.

MOE: Hahaha I really wish I remember what the fuck I read a few weeks ago but I'm just saying I don't think you could interrogate that out of me. Anyway, the whole thing was, well, KLS was waterboarded and subjected to other miscellaneous forms of torture a hundred times, but yeah aren't we sick of talking about the whole torture thing? More weird details! KLS wrote poetry to Deuce's wife! He was captured a few days after the informant sent a text message "I'm with KLS." He was originally transported to Thailand! (Or maybe that was Abu Zubayda) ... Thailand and the US are so close they didn't even have to tell the Thai PM. And Poland is "the 51st state." Really the whole "secret prisons" things seemed to be improving our relations with a lot of foreign countries before Dana Priest discovered them and Bush had them all flown back to Guantanamo.
MEGAN: The Poles just want to be part of the Visa Waiver Program and will do anything to get it. They're the only country in the EU at this point without it, if I recall correctly, but Congress keeps talking about and never passing a bill to let them into it and DHS has no idea.

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<![CDATA[Hillary And American Sexism…Really Guys? Still?]]> On Sunday, George Will wrote a column arguing that Hillary's loss is its own proof that sexism wasn't the reason she lost. Hmmm, illogical-sounding! And yet compelling nonetheless. Because thanks to TNR I had just read a collection of thirty-something thoughts culled from more than a dozen anonymous emails from Clinton campaign staffers and fundraisers and high-level supporters, and I don't remember "sexism" coming up once. So I hit Ctrl-F, just to make sure. Nope! None for "sexist" or "misogyny-" either! Women are still ticked off about how she was treated, about Sweetiegate and Whoregate, but at the end of the day, whatever, it is not why she lost. And Ahmadinejad is bad, but he is neither Hitler nor Krushchev, and energy independence would be nice, but the $370 billion farm bill that enriches agribusiness only by starving some billions of the world's poor only sounds like a good way to achieve it relative to a trillion dollar war. And so I find myself in the position today of agreeing with George Will and David Brooks and Bob Herbert all at once. Let's get serious, guys! I think we've been frivolous for so long it's finally gotten boring.

MOE: I gotta get coffee but apparently David Brooks does a 180 on Obama re the farm bill today
MEGAN: cool. i hate the farm bill
MOE: Well speak of the devil! Does David dig the 22-year-olds? Or do you think this young lady was applying for a job?
MEGAN: Do you, can you, apply for a job in white knee high boots? I mean, other than as an actual go-go dancer?
MOE: Kids today totes! She probably wanted to be his research assistant. Or maybe he was just encouraging her not to pursue the wrong way. So should we talk about Iran and Syria and North Korea…just how "serious" are these places anyway?
MOE: We should also maybe talk about oil.
MOE: I'm going to get coffee though I'm off my meds today.
MEGAN: The oil on my face from all the greasy fucking food I ate last night to make up for not eating all day (hello NY Jezzies!) or the black shit in the ground?
MOE: Vito Fossella abandoned his bid for re-election "in a bombshell announcement that brings the curtain down on one of the most storied careers in Staten Island political history," says the Staten Island Advance. They should enlist Method Man to run. I don't even think he has any secret love children.
MEGAN: "Storied career?" Dude, can we talk hyperbole? He wasn't even a Committee chairman. The only thing that's gonna be legendary about his career is how it ended, which is balls deep in his mistress with his illegitimate child in the other room and his wife and other kids sound asleep in New York.
8:35 AM
MOE: Yeah so I have coffee and my Acela ticket now and David Brooks is totally right, the Farm Bill is horseshit, and the only thing I would add to the statement "as the number of small, organized factions in a society grows, the political culture becomes more divisive, the economy becomes more rigid and the nation loses vitality" is that the organized factions don't have to be as small as agriculture. And speaking of which, $307 billion is an astonishing number.
MOE: The question is, I guess, whether McCain get Americans to see in agribusiness the same fatcatism they see in Countrywide Financial and Exxon and Jimmy Cayne.
8:45 AM
MEGAN: Well, I don't have coffee yet but if my nose does not deceive me, my friend whose house I'm at in NY has made me some for when I get done here and that's one of 100 reasons why he's awesome. Also, this farm bill is additionally a huge fuck you to the WTO and the developing countries that stymied progress in the Doha Round in order to achieve progress in terms of reduced subsidies. Fuck you, African nations. Fuck you Bangladesh. Kiss our collective asses, Brazil and Argentina. Enjoy that global food shortage thingie and that poverty thingie because we wanted more market access for our artificially cheap foodstuffs.
MOE: Hey, look, the EU is rethinking its own farm subsidies!Theirs are only $75 billion annually though. What if we proposed to just cut our bill down to Europe's level?
MEGAN: Actually, at the WTO, we wanted them to cut theirs more than we cut ours and vice versa. No, seriously.
MOE: That sounds like something we would do! And here's an unfortunate news analysis to which Drudge is linking that credits the increased use of ethanol to the breaking of our foreign oil addiction.
MEGAN: As though ethanol has to come from corn.
MOE: Total digression but GOP Senator Bob Corker rejected/denounced the Michelle Obama ads.
MEGAN: Same way he did the Harold Ford/white girl ads no doubt.
8:55 AM
MOE: Apparently ethanol consumes a third of the US corn output. Just one reason USDA economists are expecting a 5% increase in food prices this year…ugh, this topic is so obvious and boring though. Ethanol subsidies = BAD IDEA. There is just no good alternative case to be made there! While he tries to figure out how to articulate a plan for The Rest Of The World That Resents Us, just where is the harm in adopting the one position that happens to both be held by the Republican front runner and the world's poor??? I guess it's in alienating his Iowans. I wonder, though, how often something like "unwavering support for agribusiness welfare" came up during those caucuses.
9:05 AM
MOE: Especially when four out of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction!
MEGAN: Also, like, we could eliminate the ethanol tariff, which is really high and effectively keeps out ethanol imports from places like Brazil, where it is not made from corn.
MEGAN: We could also rejigger the current subsidies to reflect the chemical reality that one can make ethanol from things other than corn, and push investment in that direction rather than encouraging the construction of more corn-based ethanol facilities but, yeah, Obama's got to win Iowa, so...
MOE: Annoyingly, ethanol is nowhere to be mentioned in today's Bob Herbert "Let's Be Serious" column. But thanks for alerting us to this:

The Houston Chronicle did a long takeout on Sunday on the suicide in March 2007 of an Army recruiting sergeant, Nils Aron Andersson — just one day after his marriage to Carry Walton. Sgt. Andersson, 25, had spoken of the many horrors that he had encountered in Iraq and was deeply depressed. He shot himself while sitting in his pickup in a parking garage. Distraught, Ms. Walton bought a 9-millimeter handgun at a sporting goods store the next day and killed herself.

MEGAN: Hooray for a lack of a waiting period in Texas.
MOE: Before I try to summon the will to check out that uplifting story I'd like to draw attention to an obvious but important Page 1 story in the Journal about how the American auto industry's manipulation and systemic inflation of demand via aggressive rebating, employee discounts, predatory lending, large-scale offloading to employee fleets, over the past ten years has finally been deemed unsustainable! The American automakers who embraced waste as a business model for so long are now finally accepting that auto demand might never fall back to where it was…maybe because it was never really "demand" in the first place!
9:20 AM
MEGAN: Wait, but I liked 0% financing. Goddammit. Does it mention that what is also sustainable is negotiating with the UAW to determine production levels years in advance is also probably a bad idea? Because that's not exactly market forces, people.
MOE: Well right but market forces, at least the way we think of them, absolutely DO NOT GOVERN DEMAND in this country. It's one of my pet peeves. There's a very good Harper's reading this month further probing this.
9:25 AM
MEGAN: Well, but what are market forces and what is demand? I mean, they do to a degree, it's just not the absolute that our college professors and some on the ideological right think it is (or know it's not but try to tell us it is).
MOE: Right and the problem with the ideological left is that they just don't engage with the issue enough.
MEGAN: I think because it's too complex to really explain to people. I mean, hell, I TA'd economics in grad school for other grad students and getting them to understand microeconomics was like pulling teeth sometimes and they were all smart people. It was like this insane mental block for some of them to the point I truly wondered if I was, like, speaking German and not noticing or something.
9:30 AM
MOE: Well I don't even understand microeconomics. I think it's fucking stupid. Macro is where it's at.
MOE: hahah I being, of course, an authority on such matters.
MOE: I got a C
MEGAN: Micro is like a really simple way to start understanding how the stock market works at a very basic level. I assume you work up from there but I didn't because I wanted to get a real job. HAHAHAHA.
MOE: Hey here's Jonathan Chait saying we should ignore everything John McCain and Barack Obama say about foreign policy, which I'm sort of down for.
MOE: Did you happen to catch George Will on Sunday btw?
9:35 AM
MEGAN: I mean, why don't we just all accept that every policy proposal ever made by a candidate is prefaced by "In a perfect world, where I and I alone got to decide, we would do this...." and ends with "But it's not a perfect world, so what eventually happens will look nothing at all like this but it won't be my fault but vote for me because I had a good idea."
MOE: (Oh and speaking of economics not being a real job Floyd Norris slyly agrees with you:

According to the C.P.I. numbers, gasoline prices in April were 13.7 percent higher than the were in December. Or at least they were before the seasonal adjustments were factored in. With seasonal adjustments — the numbers that are prominently reported — gasoline prices were down 1.6 percent.
I have not troubled to try to figure out how this could be, but Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG, gathered data and constructed spreadsheets. He figures that the May number, seasonally adjusted, will be up 5 percent for the month. Presumably, those sounding comforting words about inflation now will have less to say then.
Only a Ph.D. in economics would think he needed to spend a couple of hours to prove that gasoline prices are not declining these days.

MEGAN: Dude, we get to "seasonally adjust" what things cost?
MOE: Well certain things always cost more in certain seasons and certain months are more consumptive than others so…I can hazard a guess as to why this was but the point was just that data ≠ reality in a lot of areas in economics, which is scary
MEGAN: Yeah, like everything other kind of reality, economics is just a subjective reality. Shadows on the wall, etc.
MOE: lol you ALWAYS FALL BACK ON THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
MOE: I'm on to you lady
MOE: You probably have a secret Nietzsche sig file of your own
MEGAN: Yes, but it's in the original m'fucking German.
9:45 AM
MEGAN: Because that's how I roll. Quoting dead white German guys. I'm sofa king cool.
MOE: I am bringing this back to George Will and baseball btw.

In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like — life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.

MEGAN: I love how George Will's theories on life are so similar to my own. He just forgot to add "never-ending" there at the end.
MOE:

When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.

MEGAN: Well, unless you get fired for Working While Black. Then it is actually not equality.
MOE: What I love is that it seems that Hillary's own staff would agree. Sexism: why, they don't blame it for sinking her campaign either! Indeed, because they are too busy blaming one another. But Geraldine Ferrarro's reality is different..
MEGAN: Geraldine Ferraro should be president of the society of women who are so damn angry that their candidate didn't win that they'll fuck over the rest of us out of spite.
MEGAN: Also, ahem, it seems like they're trying to blackmail the superdelegates and the remaining states and shit, which is not a good tactic.
MOE: Well that society shares a reality of its own. It's just not mine. Or George Will's. And any society that claims us and George Will as a member is not a particularly exclusive one
MEGAN: I mean, I'm happy to create my own reality, I just realize that I have to function in the collectively shared reality.
10:05 AM
MOE: And I'm out with this, because I didn't want it to go unnoticed:

Is Lebanon viable anymore?" he asked. "Is Lebanon really viable?"
"Frankly, 40 years of my life have been wasted. Fifteen years of civil war, 15 years of Syrian domination and now we've come to something worse," he said, growing angry. "I've lost 40 years of my life in this stupid country. It really is a stupid country. I have nothing good to say about it anymore. I'm disgusted by what's taken place."
He dragged on his cigar, as he sat in his stately villa in Zqaq al-Blatt, enveloped by a scourge of concrete cluttering the neighborhood. Light reflected faintly from stained-glass windows of red and blue, resting under graceful Levantine arches.
"I wish I was born in Syria. Or that I was born in Egypt. Can you imagine living in a country that has gone through 30 years of this? What kind of country is this?"
He shook his head, his anger giving way to dejection.
"There's something wrong here," he said, "something wrong."

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<![CDATA[Dear Gitmo Residents, How About We Wake You Up When This Jeremiah Wright Crap Is Over?]]> Dear Osama Bin Laden's former driver Salim Hamdan: you had the right idea, sleeping through your court appearance this morning. Seven years you've resided in Guantanamo, yet somehow the Pyrrhic victories you score against the idiocracy do not cease. You won a Supreme Court case against one of the most loathed men in the most loathed presidency in US history; then the guards moved you into solitary confinement. Your empathetic lawyer was named one of the 100 most influential in America; then he got fired from the Navy. Outside your cell walls yesterday George W. Bush heaped new praise on ethanol subsidies and gas tax relief and the World Bank President wondered whether we were really opting to feed our cars before we fed our stomachs. (The answer to that is yes.) So yeah, we'll wake you when the world is just a little less absurd. Till then Megan and I will parse Jeremiah Wright and whether "pansy" is a gay slur and all that usual crap we do after the jump.

MEGAN: I have decided that drunkorexia is best practiced by professionals.
MOE: You gotta just remember it is beer that is your friend. Although apparently rising in cost these days. Are they showing this cop kicking dog video on your news channels? Because I bet they're not showing the Paula Abdul memory lapse clip...
MEGAN: They just spent 10 minutes discussing Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell and whatever on MSNBC. Apparently, there's nothing important in the world today.
MEGAN: I'll try out the beer thing next time. I went with my normal red wine this time.
MOE: Oh man that book. Carole King is the missing piece, although she doesn't seem to have much to do with the other two. Hey before I tire of the subject — oh wait, that happened two months ago — Obama joined Trinity for the gays.
MEGAN: Well, I mean, who doesn't like the gays? Um, well, I mean, except North Carolina Governor Mike Easley.
MOE: Oh good lord. I saw that quote. Tell me, when you saw that quote, did you think, "I am offended on behalf of homokind" or did you think, "New levels of rhetorical idiocy"? Because I think you know where I came down but I'm a certified insensitive person.
MEGAN: Well, I mean, personally I saw him, like, air punching out of the corner of my eye with the mute on and decided he was quite possibly insane. But, also, I guess I never thought about "pansy" as a gay slur but Aravosis is right, it is.
MOE: Yeah I thought it could also convey the proverbial 98 pound weakling? Butt sex totally optional?
MEGAN: I think it's both?
MEGAN: Butt sex: always totally optional, by the way, in my opinion.
MOE: Either way, gays, hear that? Obama became inextricably wound up with that crazy egotistical preacher who may sabotage his presidential ambitions for you people! Are you going to keep clinging to Hillary like PANSIES?

MEGAN: I keep having this conversation, I know, but I really, really don't understand the LGBT community's unabashed Hillary love. I really, really don't.

MEGAN: Anyways, so, by the way, the stupid do-not-fly list also grounds air marshalls. Can we now admit that this is a stupid clusterfuck of an idea and quit doing it now?
MOE: OH my God that is the most hilarious story ever. Who knew there were air marshals with the same names as terror suspects? What I love, too, is that the names are probably like "John Walker" and "Richard Reid" ...one thing I noticed when I used to be on the mailing list for those terror suspect lists was that they still had names of dudes who had, like, died before USS Cole.

MEGAN: Our government, protecting the skies from air marshalls! And Ted Kennedy, Congressman Darrell Issa, Congressman John Lewis, Congressman Don Young and Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren's husband.
MOE: And speaking of Not Flying for reasons other than general airline logistical ineptitude, Osama Bin Laden's super sweet son married to that sassy cougar is not allowed to come to the UK.
MEGAN: Aw! And we're still trying to put OBL's driver on trial, unsuccessfully.
MOE: Wow, and she totally wears the pants too.

"We have a nice house in Cairo, but we have no real place to call home. I need my family and I need medical attention in the UK. Our only chance to be together was to live in Britain. We have vowed never to be parted. Omar will never take another wife as long as I am alive."
Although I have to wonder what sort of medical attention she's seeking (cough eye job cough)
MEGAN: Or, um, in vitro maybe?
MEGAN: I love, also, that the assumption is that he could/would take another wife. Maybe that's why she wants to go back to Britain? Since he was still married to the first wife when they met and got married?

MEGAN: Whoa, MSNBC is reporting breaking news that Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm is undergoing emergency surgery.
MOE: I don't know much about Jennifer Granholm. I know GM reported some disappointing earnings or something, but how disappointing could they be in the context of all that previous disappointment?

MEGAN: Well, and disappointing enough to cause the governor to need surgery?
MEGAN: Granholm, btw, can never be President because she's Canadian-born, and she's a Hillary supporter. Obama doesn't get all the female governors.
MEGAN: It's for a bowel obstruction.
MOE: We should do a video on that. A companion piece to Tracie's colonic video. That story about Osama Bin Laden's driver Salim Hamdan...is it about the fact that he chose to show up to court in prison clothes? Or how his exchanges with the judge at the military tribunal were somehow friendly and human and good-naturedly resigned after seven years of pointless interminable detention? I couldn't quite tell but it's interesting.
MOE:

Looking down across the makeshift courtroom on Tuesday, Judge Allred told Mr. Hamdan he wanted to give him a fair trial. He coaxed his famous defendant, who was once Osama bin Laden's driver, to stick with the process.

"Mr. Hamdan," Judge Allred said, "I think you should have great faith in American law. You have already been to the Supreme Court."

"The Supreme Court of the United States," he continued, "said to the president, 'You can't do that to Mr. Hamdan.' You were the winner. Your name is printed in our law books."

The detainee, a handsome man with curly brown hair and a quick grin, was noncommittal. Mr. Hamdan, in his seventh year of captivity, noted that despite the judge's literal words, he had not been to the Supreme Court himself. The lawyers, he said, had not taken him with them.


MEGAN: It was, I sort of liked the story.
MEGAN: And then the judge and the detainee laughed! And then he continued boycotting.
MOE: Yeah it's like some Russian play I read once or imagined reading or something.

MEGAN: Only it's sadly real, and that dude is going to spend the rest of his life in captivity whether he participates or not.
MOE: I had this theory that they're too sleep deprived to figure out how to kill themselves, or even muster the will.
MEGAN: plus, they're totally guarded against doing that.
MOE: Did Bush actually reiterate his support of ethanol subsidies in the face of massive opposition from the reality based community yesterday? Because that is also bad. Will the food crisis actually make this into an issue? It seems like the media is trying.k
MOE: Faustian bargains sigh.

No place demonstrates the competing demands on corn better than Iowa, one of the two biggest corn-exporting states. Iowa is home to 28 ethanol plants, which consume more than a quarter of its corn crop; two dozen others are under construction or in planning stages.

MEGAN: Everyone loves them the ethanol subsidies! Plus, we don't have a food shortage here, what do we care?
MOE: Oh forget what I said about sleep deprivation...Hamdan slept in!
MEGAN: I wish I had slept in! Luckily, that's what naps are made for.]]>
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<![CDATA[If You Can't Afford Rice In Haiti, You Eat Dirt]]> Global food prices are so high Haitians are feeding themselves dirt — or more specifically, mud cookies made with salt and vegetable shortening. AP reporter Jonathan Katz sampled one: it had "a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered." To be sure, this isn't some innovation borne simply of the desperation of the time; Haiti has long been the poorest country in the Western hemisphere (Here's a decent primer as to why), and the immune system strengthening power of dirt cookies, or "pica" have long made them such a staple of the impoverished woman's prenatal diet in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean that some women actually get cravings for them during pregnancy (which, as you can imagine, is not one of those urges the childbirth authorities of the U.S. encourage acting upon.)

But it's a scary reminder of how prohibitively expensive basic needs have become in the Third World, thanks to famine, oil prices and our fucking ethanol subsidies (which I'll remind you again, only McCain seems to oppose.) Two cups of rice at the market in Haiti cost sixty cents these days, which is awfully high, but Haiti is an island and a net importer of food. Bangladesh is suffering a similar fate, though the government has stepped in to lower the cost of basic food commodities.

And with that I suppose I should tell you that if you just started jonesing for a Mississippi mud pie with a side order of Rocky Road, um, you're a terrible person but you are not alone.

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt
Kevin Sites In The Hot Zone: Haitian Mud Pies [Yahoo]
Related: Why Is Haiti So Poor?
Bangladesh Steps Up Food Aid For Poor
Next Power Antibiotic Born From Haitian Dirt [Boston]
Pica and Pregnancy
Earlier: Will The 'End Of Cheap Food' Make Us Thin Again?

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