Current events

I blame Michelle Obama:

Struggling in bankruptcy court, Hostess Brands is warning more than 18,500 employees nationwide that their jobs are in jeopardy if the company can’t emerge from Chapter 11 reorganization or find a buyer.

The company’s warning affects at least 856 employees in Indiana, most of them workers in Hostess commercial bakeries, retail stores or distributing the company’s iconic breads and treats including Twinkies.

Freedom marches on. Er, make that "tiptoes carefully, always looking both ways."

FORT LEE, N.J. (CBSNewYork) — Forget dangerous driving, pedestrians are the new threat to street safety — phone calls, texting, music and wandering into traffic. Now, one New Jersey town is cracking down on the practice.

[. . .]

It was bad enough that movie and TV producers have let themselves be shamed by the health nuts into keeping cigarettes out of their shows. Give 'em an inch, and they'll take -- well, half a foot, anyway:

The following two items in my juxtaposition of the day do not compute. This one on public opinion:

Haven't done a post lately about well-duh research into the obvious. Here's a marvelous candidate:

Those on the right may have the better arguments, but that doesn't always make them winning arguments.  There is a moral case for free enterprise, for example, and that case has to be made before all the facts and figures are thrown around:

The dinner conversation will turn to politics and the economy, and it will be your job to stick up for capitalism and free markets.

From the president's speech in Afghanistan:

My fellow Americans, we have traveled through more than a decade under the dark cloud of war. Yet here, in the pre-dawn darkness of Afghanistan, we can see the light of a new day on the horizon.

And there's this:

Is this supposed to be the flip side of "Obama's cool"?

But taking Mitt playfully by the shoulders, Ann Romney said Tuesday, "I still look at him as the boy that I met in high school when he was playing all the jokes and really just being crazy, pretty crazy. And so there's a wild and crazy man inside of there just waiting to come out!"

You remember that right-to-work law the General Assembly passed. It was going to create a paradise with full employment! It was going to create a hell of exploitation of the downtrodden!

Oh, not so much. Whatever effects there will be are likely to be small and difficult to measure. But don't let that get in the way of the heated rhetoric:

A very strange column in USA Today defending John Edwards as a "victim of the morality police":