I don't mind if the lazy food handlers let the microbes attack the lettuce or the spinach. Even an occasional attack on meat is acceptable. But this is just too much:
A salmonella outbreak has prompted a national recall of two brands of peanut butter. The Indiana Department of Health confirms more than a dozen cases in Indiana.
I think the bill requiring a doctor to tell a woman considering abortion that life begins at conception is wrong, for a lot of reasons, the main one being that legislators have no business declaring legal certainty over something about which there is no medical, philosophical or ethical certainty. But one of those reasons is not improper religious interference:
Jonah Goldberg, writing about Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, pinpoints something that has also occurred to me lately:
Blogs aren't going to replace newspapers or anything else as primary providers of basic news. People who won't spend 15 minutes with the paper and can barely pay attention to five minutes of the local-news broadcast aren't going to invest all the time it would take to scour blogs and put the bits and pieces together into some kind of mental comprehensive report.
Guess Indiana isn't the only place that can't quite get a handle on daylight-saving time:
Daylight saving time arrives a little earlier — March 11 — and stays a little later — Nov. 4 — this year. And it's bringing a problem along with it that could affect everything from stock trades to airline schedules to your BlackBerry.
Two different TV stations are saying Hoosiers are confused about what a "snow emergency" is, so I guess it must be so. I tend to think we're smarter than that, but just in case: If they say it's an emergency, and you have a choice, STAY HOME, OK? Glad to help.
Ah, if only the wandering astronaut had learned this startling and little-known information, that experts say "many employers are caught by surprise by the ripple effects of intra-office relationships, which can demoralize staff and spread envy and resentment." The office romance -- a big pain, but you can't stop them. The combination of attraction, common interests and sheer proximity is too powerful. Maybe a little education would help?
Wow. Al Franken is funny again:
U.S. comedian Al Franken said Wednesday he plans to run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota next year in a serious attempt to improve the lot of middle-class families.
Calling himself a "comedian by trade," and not a "typical politician," Franken made the announcement on the last day of his talk show on Air America Radio.
Supply and demand interact; that's basic economics. But let a natural disaster strike, causing demand for certain things to go up, which tends to push up the price, and they call it price gouging and bring in the attorney general's profit police.
Pretty clearly the sweep by the Dixie Chicks was not to reward their musicianship. It was meant as a poke in the eye to President Bush. And the continued boycott of them by country music radio is about making a statement of values by those people. Pick your politics, and make your choice.
Indianapolis blog Advance Indiana manages to equate the banning of same-sex marriage both with the Klan's early stranglehold on Indiana politics and the Nazis ugly march through the middle of the 20th century. It reserves its special scorn for David Long:
Well, here we go:
Smoking in passenger vehicles with children under age 13 would be against state law under legislation endorsed by an Indiana House Committee on Tuesday.
The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill 8-1 and sent it to the full, Democrat-controlled House, where its author, Democratic Rep. Charlie Brown of Gary, predicted it would pass. He said he was not sure how it would fare in the Republican-ruled Senate.
If you want to keep track of the blizzard without leaving the house, check this out. News-Sentinel staffer Ryan Lengerich is out there with a camera and a laptop, blogging up, er, a storm.
Via Doug at Masson's Blog: Indiana Senate Bill 94 would make changes to a lot of terms dealing with disabilities.
If the mayor of San Francisco can apologize for having an affair, a TV star can apologize for anti-gay slurs and a presidential candidate can apologize for foot-in-mouth disease, can one of Indiana's own do less?
Gadzooks. Seems like just about everything we do is destroying the planet:
The Valentine's Day bouquet — the gift that every woman in Britain will be waiting for next week — has become the latest bête noire among environmental campaigners.
Latest Government figures show that the flowers that make up the average bunch have flown 33,800 miles to reach Britain.
I just want to go on record that I am not claiming to be the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby. By the end of the week, I may be the only one left:
Prince Frederic von Anhalt, the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, said today he plans to file a paternity challenge in court this week to gain custody of Anna Nicole Smith's infant daughter.
In hindsight, I screwed up. I stayed home last week in my drafty, poorly insulated house during the most consecutive days of near-zero temperatures since 1982. And I'm back out here driving around during what may become the snowiest week of the last two winters. Oh, well.
See if you can follow the reasoning on this one. A proposal in the General Assembly to create drug-free zones, by making it a Class A felony to sell illegal drugs within 1,000 feet of a church, would be unfair to city-dwelling users of illegal drugs. When added to current drug-free-zone laws -- protecting such places as schools, parks and housing developments, this would create such overlapping zones that someone could be guilty of a Class A felony just for possessing illegal drugs in a private residence.
Let's see. We'll create a tax-friendly environment that will lure companies to Indiana, which will create jobs for Hoosiers, and everybody will live happily ever after. But Pat Bauer is having none of that:
