December 21st 2008
Sunday Scan: Pre-Christmas Edition
How You Gonna Grow The Middle Class, Joe?
R
ecent news reports tell us that Joe Biden’s big job in the Obama administration will be to increase the size of his much-loved middle class. Just one question, Joe:
How much are you going to do that by lifting the poor up to the middle class, and how much are you going to do it by taxing the wealthy down to it?
Just wondering …
Peanut Nutty
R
ecently a school bus in an unnamed U.S. school district has hastily evacuated, then fully decontaminated. Why? Sarin gas? Smallpox pores? No, a peanut was seen on the floor. What hope do we have that our children will get a sensible education if education is in the hands of people who evacuate and decontaminate school buses because of a peanut?
As I usually do when confronted with a story I like, I turn to Stats Blog, where I found another example:
At this time of year many municipal elementary schools in the United States, including the one attended by my children, raise money by selling wrapping paper and candy. This year parents in our school were told that they could no longer pick up their purchases from their children’s classrooms. Instead they had to pick up their orders from a loading dock at specified times, to avoid a danger to the children.
The danger? Some of the orders contained sealed tins of festive nuts. Out of an overabundance of caution the school decided not to allow any of the items on the premises.
Sealed containers! In the hands of adults! What are they afraid of, that a child with a peanut allergy and utterly no self-control will beat a teacher paralyzed by fear of physically restraining a child, rip the tin open, and commit suicide by nut?
“This allergy is just nuts,” by Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of medical sociology, Harvard Medical School, in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, which is excerpted above. Christakis goes on to say:
About 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, and even more - 6.9 million - are allergic to seafood. However, all told, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 hospitalisations a year (out of more than 30 million hospitalisations nationwide). And only 150 people (children and adults) die each year from all food allergies combined.
That’s about the same as the number of people in the U.S. killed by lightening each year. Should we ban thunderstorms?
Cheney Bites Biden
I
f there’s any clear take-away from the Bush administration, it’s this: Mess with Dick Cheney at your own risk. They guy is sharp and not the least bit afraid to state his mind, in part because he decided in 2000 this was it for his political career, and he’s planning no campaign ahead.
His bite showed today in his interview with Fox News, when he took on Joe Biden:
“[Biden] also said that all the powers and responsibilities of the executive branch are laid out in Article I of the Constitution,” Cheney said in a interview that was conducted on Friday. “Well, they’re not. Article I of the Constitution is the one on the legislative branch.”
“Joe’s been chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a member of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate for 36 years, teaches constitutional law back in Delaware, and can’t keep straight which article of the Constitution provides for the legislature and which provides for the executive. So I think I’d write that off as campaign rhetoric. I don’t take it seriously.”
Heh. Article II must be standing proud today. You can read Fox’s story on the interview here.
Yeah, But It’s Definitely Not Art
B
ruce Elliot admits to having a crush on Sarah Palin. The Chi-town lib and husband of the owner of a local bar popular with comedians and self-affected bohemians, says of the once VP-nominee:
I’ve been following her religiously. I find her bizarrely fascinating, even though I pretty much despise everything she stands for.
So he painted this painting, which now hangs in the wife’s bar:
Like the headline say, definitely not art. And don’t get me started pondering the bit in the ChiTrib about how his daughter posed as Palin’s body double. Potentially very, very sick, even in the name of art, which it’s not. Elliot’s got every right to paint it and hang it, of course. So you gotta wonder why he dislikes someone who, like Palin, stands for American principles of freedom. (source) Elliot is scoring more points with me with his new nude painting - of Gov. Rod Blagojevich
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Posted in Art, Biden, Cheney, Climate change, Economic Policy, Education, Palin, Uncategorized | 1 Comment » | 
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Comments
December 21st, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Greetings:Re: Peanut NuttyRecently, a guy wanted to open a gun shop in the town where I live. A group of “mommies” and “teachers” went before the City Council to prevent the licensing of the business. They asserted that the gun shop would be a danger to their children.I told them that I agreed with them and that I was sick and tired of having to step over the bodies of dead children every time I went to a gun shop. They weren’t at all pleased with input.I was particularly concerned about the “teachers”. The were supposed to be educated, intelligent people, yet they were capable of presenting their assertion without one bit of factual support. You see, they knew. And they were wrong.