Mmm... Chicken Good...

Happy President’s Day everyone! (I'm trying to make up for it's lack of real holiday cache with additional enthusiasm. Is it working?) Celebrate the good ones, malign the bad ones. Shop hard and prosper. Happy Family Day to our neighbors to the North. That's a new one for me, and I have to admit, it sounds fake. But I have it on good authority that it is an official, province-sponsored holiday. What can I say.

Tomorrow, Hawaii and Wisconsin will take their turns attempting to confound the political pundits and pollsters in what I like to call, the “Pineapple and Cheese Primaries.” (Elections are always more entertaining when you give them cute little nicknames.) Obama is expected to easily capture the state of his birth, but Wisconsin appears too close to call at this point. I guess I’m not surprised that a state known for beer, cheese and motorcycles would have trouble making up it’s mind. Depending on which poll you choose to believe either Clinton or Obama holds a narrow lead, but a lead that is well within the margin of error. So it could be another late night for dedicated followers of this Democratic primary process. If Obama wins he keeps the streak alive and continues to build momentum toward a showdown with Clinton in Texas and Ohio on March fourth. If Clinton wins it will be considered an upset, halting her February slide and putting her campaign back on track. It might be difficult to believe, but the next two weeks could determine the fate of the once inevitable campaign of Hillary Clinton.

The Senate Ethics Committee (I know, I know, but how often do you get to use the words senate and ethics in the same sentence) has found that Senator Larry Craig acted improperly during his incident at a Minneapolis airport bathroom last year. Well isn’t that something. Who would have thought that the act of soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom stall could be considered improper by anyone? Let alone the United States Senate. But at least now we can have some closure. Now that Craig has wears the scarlet ‘I’ we no longer have to worry about our children being solicited in bathrooms across the country. Our airports, train stations, subways and marinas are now safe from the scourge of senatorial gay sex. The only remaining unprotected place in the country is… Capitol Hill.

In an unprecedented show of intestinal fortitude, the House of Representatives called the President’s bluff and left town on vacation without re-authorizing the revised FISA legislation. Despite the claims that the sky would fall and the country would immediately be overrun by thousands of swarthy bearded men brandishing AK-47s if the House failed to capitulate to his whims, the elected representatives of the people finally refused to be a rubber stamp for whatever the President sent down the pipe and vowed to put a little more work into the surveillance legislation before sending it on to the Oval Office. The sticking point seems to be over whether or not to grant retroactive immunity to the telecom companies who assisted the government with their (possibly illegal) warrant-less wiretapping program. This would reportedly include all the major companies except of Qwest Communications, which had the good sense to at least ask a couple questions. Like waterboarding, this wiretapping business isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.

After posting a U.S. record 38.7 billion dollar net loss for 2007, the world’s (just barely) largest automobile manufacturer offered buyouts to every single one of its 74,000 blue-collar employees last week. In an effort to further cut costs and right the ship, General Motors unveiled a plan to give all its workers between $45,000 and $140,000 to either accept early retirement or to simply cut ties with the company altogether. The plan is to then replace those workers with new, lower cost employees. The average unionized GM worker earns an average base wage of $28.12 an hour. The new hires they the companies hope to replace them with will be paid between $14 and $16.23 and hour. If anyone needed proof that the days of high-paying, low-skilled labor in this country are over, here it is. And if this cost-cutting measure works for GM, you can guarantee Ford and Chrysler will follow close behind.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett offered to bail out bond insurance companies by using his Berkshire Hathaway investment firm to re-insure over 800 billion in municipal bonds. Now maybe I’m mistaken, but didn’t Warren Buffett give away his entire fortune not too long ago? How does he have that kind of money to pump into the economy? Isn’t that more than 5,000 times the total amount of the economic stimulus package just issued by Congress? Why don’t we just have this guy stimulated the economy on his own? Let the government waste it’s money on something else. I’m sure there is no shortage of unworthy projects.

A Jacksonville, Florida middle school teacher was suspended for ten days without pay this past week for duct taping a student to his desk. Apparently both the teacher and the student viewed the incident as a joke. The school board did not share their sense of humor. But seriously, what has this country come to that we can no longer duct-tape a seventh-grader to his desk for the amusement of the class? Come on. It’s not like they snuck off to have sex in the back of her car then eloped to Mexico to raise their love child. Wait, that sounds vaguely familiar….

Model turned violinist David Garrett (dubbed the David Beckham of classical music) tripped and fell down a flight of stairs two days after Christmas, smashing his million-dollar 1772 Guadagnini violin to pieces. This is only now becoming known because, well, if you totaled a million dollar violin, would you tell anybody? It is not yet known whether or not the instrument can be repaired, but in the mean time Garrett is playing a Stradivarius someone has loaned to him. Note to that fool; I hope your insurance is paid up.

A thirty-four year-old New York father was arrested over the weekend for the murder of his 14 year-old daughter. He reportedly became upset when he discovered she had been text-messaging a boy, strangling her and stuffing her body in the boiler of his apartment building. Cell phones are evil people. Evil.

In a desperate attempt to draw kids back to the library, some libraries in Michigan have begun holding video game tournaments featuring “Guitar Hero,” “Dance Dance Revolution,” and “Super Smash Bros.” In fact, the tournaments, in combination with over 1,800 video games available for loan account for the 12 percent increase in circulation at the Rochester Hills Public Library. No word as of yet on any increase in actual KNOWLEDGE, but one can only assume that given enough time, heat and pressure, kids would certainly be able to absorb the surrounding knowledge simply by sharing the same room. Ask any college student who’s fallen asleep on their textbook how well that works. I realize the public library system may be suffering from an epidemic of illiterate children with no attention spans, but I’m not sure getting them to stare blankly and a video screen and tap buttons on a controller for hours on end fulfills the mission of the library. Unless that mission has been revised to include scoring a million points and achieving guitar god status.

Finally, hidden camera footage taken at a meat processing plant in California has prompted the USDA to order a recall of 143 million pounds of beef dating back to 2006. Anyone notice a problem with this right away? Yes, since the recall includes beef sold two years ago, most of the meat in question has already been consumed. So that leaves one to wonder exactly what it is that they hope to recall. The moral of this story? Eat more chicken.