I'm Adam Isacson. I live in Washington and work on Latin America at the Center for International Policy. I'm a dad, a husband, and I don't get enough sleep.
Following:
La Carreta, in the Miami airport. $7 gets you enough rice, beans and plantains to feed an entire Cuban fishing village.
These exiles may be Jeb Bush Republicans, but man, can they cook.
About to do a debate about US troops at Colombian bases. The organizers say 70 people will be there, even though it’s at 8:30 AM. Yikes.
From there I go straight to the airport. I’ll be spending the rest of the week in Bogotá.
But right now I’m on the bus.
Kellogg, the nation’s largest cereal maker, is being called to task by critics who object to the swine flu-conscious claim now bannered in bold lettering on the front of Cocoa Krispies cereal boxes: “Now helps support your child’s IMMUNITY.”
Of all claims on cereal boxes, “this one belongs in the hall of fame,” says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “By their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity.”
(From USA Today.) I don’t want to sound like Bill Maher, but there’s no way I’m giving my kid the Fruity Pebbles vaccine.
How long does it take to go from being a crack dealer in Bed-Stuy, to being the biggest name in hip-hop, to having the New Yorker run an article by some guy named Sasha saying that you’ve lost your edge? (And then having some policy wonk at his desk in Washington write about that?)
About 20 years, apparently.
Too cool for words. Finally, a use for Flash that I can get behind. (Via O’Reilly Radar)
“Piece of cake,” the three police officers might have thought when they spied the rental car with five American tourists driving down the main drag of Cancún’s hotel zone.
They pulled the car over and told the driver, Scott Fischbach, that he was going about a mile an hour over the speed limit, recalled his wife, Michelle L. Fischbach. One of the officers cupped his hands and asked Mr. Fischbach to blow into them. “This was their Breathalyzer,” Mrs. Fischbach said, recounting her astonishment on the last night of her vacation with her husband, his sister and brother-in-law and their daughter. “They tried very hard, but Scott doesn’t drink.”
The police took his driver’s license and told him they would take him to jail unless he came up with $300, she said. The patrol car escorted the family back to the hotel, where she says the group came up with the money. The officers declined to write a receipt.
What the police may not have expected, however, was that Mrs. Fischbach was a Minnesota state senator — or that she would complain so effectively.
From the New York Times. Most Mexican police are paid so poorly that they can’t survive without supplementing their salary with bribes. And their breathalyzers are really inaccurate.
The US is expected to emerge from its longest recession since the second world war today, when GDP for the third quarter of 2009 is published.
Wall Street analysts have predicted that the world’s biggest economy grew by between 2% and 4.8% in the last three months, on an annualised basis. This would be America’s first quarter of positive growth since the second three months of 2008, ending four quarters of contraction.
A surprisingly strong forecast. Where I’m sitting, I don’t even know anyone who knows someone who’s been doing better lately. To the contrary, this month I continue to hear about friends, relatives and acquaintances being laid off.
[F]ellow Republicans on the committee — turncoats! — made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, [Oklahoma Republican Senator James] Inhofe’s view that man-made global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” …
“The science is more definitive than ever? You keep saying that because you want to believe it so much,” he said bitterly. He offered to furnish a list of scientists who once believed in climate change but “who are solidly on the other side right now.” The science, he said, “already has shifted” against global-warming theory. “Science is not settled! Everyone knows it’s not settled!”
Inhofe called for more oil drilling. His aides tried to debunk the other senators’ points by passing around papers titled “Rapid Response.” Mid-hearing, Inhofe’s former spokesman, now in the private sector, sent out an e-mail — “Prominent Russian Scientist: ‘We should fear a deep temperature drop — not catastrophic global warming.’”
- From Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. The Senate Republican leadership made Inhofe their ranking member on the Environment Committee. If the Republicans ever take the Senate back, he will chair that committee.
From The Washington Post.
Transcripts of flustered sputtering are awesome.
Obama favorability
Fav Unfav
All 55 37
South 27 68
Rest of USA 67 24
From the last DailyKos/Research2000 poll. Only reinforcing my feeling that I need my passport with me when I go south of the Potomac.
