Vortex Logic

Mr. Limbaugh compared the Nation's children to pets yesterday, according to Chris Matthews. The issue under discussion was Mrs. Obama's efforts to improve school lunch menus in the sense of including more vegetables and such. Hardly shocking I know. Apparently over 90% of school lunch programs have indeed raised their "healthy food" standards. Mr. Limbaugh's snipe: we give animals we want to tame free food.

There is a logic to this, it's just sick and irresponsible. Meanwhile, my own senator, Richard Burr, has come out with an attack on all the veterans organizations, because they are not offering blanket criticisms of the Obama administration concerning the VA hospital system. Here's what I say to that stupidity--also driven by the vortex logic which the Republican Party has adopted en masse: anything which hurts the Obama Administration is good. Vote for Senator Kay Hagan this fall. Otherwise, NC, you'll get another Richard Burr in the person of Tom Tillis.

In Wyoming they are considering a bill to halt the teaching of various areas of science, because Wyoming legislators sense a conflict between the huge coal industry there and issues of climate change. Their idea seems to be, "don't tell the kids, they'll turn on us." Hey cowboy, we've been there, done that, in NC. When I was a kid I was told by almost all the powers that be (aside from my dad, who was none the less and inveterate smoker of Lucky Strikes who had put himself through college by working a portion of his dad's tobacco crop) that tobacco was not bad for you, science be damned. That was because the tobacco industry kept NC afloat in the 1950s. Even into the '70s you could hear glowing ag news reports on NC stations about how we were expanding our tobacco exports hugely into the Chinese and Asian markets. This was entirely good news, because the story ended at that point and there was no medical news segment.

Al Gore has had a bumpy road since 2000. He's gotten fat, had some sort of affair, lost his nice wife Tipper. While he got a lot of cudos for his movie, it must feel a little lonely on his endless speaking tour. But you have to wonder just how complicit the Press was in Mr. Gore's loss in that fateful election, which brought us two almost endless wars and a lot more trouble. Apparently in the US you just can't mess with Texas, where oil is king and everyone has a concealed carry permit, and the ones what don't wear their gun outside their pants for all the honest world to feel. Last time we were in Austin was early April of 2003, a week into the Iraq War. Johnnie Mata was already home and in the ground in Pecos. Our host said "it'll be too hot here next week until October." A year or two later she moved to Asheville for the summer months. There's a nice cool breeze there, falling down the surrounding hills every evening, and our host can sit on her porch and play fiddle without the neck melting off.