Elizabeth Taylor, star of Cleopatra (which is currently the most expensive film (adjusted for inflation) ever made), passed away on March 23, 2011, at the age of 79.

Some of her most famous film roles also included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and as Wilma Flintstone’s mother in the Flintstones movie.

Other notable facts are that her parents were both American, but she was born in England, she had violet eyes, was the voice of Maggie Simpson’s first word, and was married 8 times!

I just ran to the post office, which gave me a chance to catch a few minutes of the Michael Medved Show.

One of the callers had a theory as to why Obama’s poll numbers are tanking, and it was just too good not to share.

Ready?  Obama’s numbers are in the toilet because the racist Republicans intentionally ran a team that they knew would lose (McCain/Palin), so they would later have the opportunity to make Obama look bad.

Plausible, I say.

I mean, more plausible than the explanation that the public is rejecting a man who has shown little to no leadership on anything, uses a teleprompter at an elementary school, thinks the correct response to the Mass. election is to attack banks, and thinks that the issue with the health care bill is that he hasn’t spent enough time explaining it to the public.  Obviously.

This story is over a week old, but needs to be discussed, especially as this is the #2,356 most Comcast hating website in the World.

Comcast, The Worst Company on Earth, bought NBC Universal from GE the other day.  Actually, they bought 51% of it in a complicated deal, but the bottom line is that Comcast now owns NBC, USA, Bravo, and some other stuff.

Where this all gets interesting is that Comcast is obviously in the content delivery business.  They currently pay NBC a ton of cash to make their networks available to their cable subscribers.  But now, they’ll own those networks.

So, as the owner of, say, USA, Comcast is now in the position to set the price of providing USA to customers.  That’s a bad thing if you’re one of Comcast’s competitors, like DirecTV.

I won’t claim to be an expert in the whole cable TV business, because I’m not, but it’s not hard to imagine how this could go badly, especially in the hands of the Worst Company on Earth.

Normally, a myriad of federal agencies would get involved and scrutinize this deal.  There’s the anti-trust angle, the broadcast angle, etc.  Those federal agencies are part of the executive branch of government, headed by the President.

So, what’s an evil company to do when they need a favor from the President?  Why, scratch his back, of course.

The day after Comcast announced it was buying NBC, their CEO announced his support for the President’s disastrous and unpopular health care program.  The letter can be found here.

Read more here and here.

So there you have it, Comcast, The Worst Company on Earth, is teaming up with the Worst Administration in Recent History, trading support on the health care bill for regulatory approval.

They always said this was the Most Transparent Administration Ever, but I guess I didn’t expect it to be this transparent.

Swine Flu, that is.

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

The official position is that this is a “pre-emptive move designed to make decisions easier when they need to be made.”

If you really want a scare, try reading some time about the vast powers the government gets during certain crises.  (Suspending Habeas Corpus, etc.)

But I’m not in the tinfoil hat mood today.  So I’ll take the government at its word that this is a normal administrative process, and that there’s nothing to fear.

I did, however, want to pose a question that The Wife^® and I were discussing today:

If the President of the United States were to contract H1N1, would the government disclose that information to the people?  What if it was a member of the first family, but not the President himself?  Would the Bush administration handle this differently than the Obama administration?

Discuss.

I guess this can happen:

It’s a half-red / half-green Golden Delicious off a farm in England.

Scientists and Fruit Experts are calling it a “million to one” “genetic mutation”.

I prefer to think it’s an apocalyptic sign, or a conspiracy of some type.

The Worst President Ever just can’t keep his mouth shut.

The other day he was hurling the race card around, then the next day he doubled down, this time, with a bizarre attack on Jay Leno as a bonus.

So what to do for an encore? Accuse the US of illegally supporting a coup against Hugo Chavez, of course.

“I think there is no doubt that in 2002, the United States had at the very least full knowledge about the coup, and could even have been directly involved,” Carter told Colombian paper, El Tiempo, on Sunday.

For added fun, the link to the story above is from the Iranian State Media. Just showing you how helpful Mr. Carter is to the cause.

Because a former US President spewing conspiracy theories that can be used by our enemies as propaganda is a really well thought out strategy.

The President is channeling his inner Orwell and planning a speech to our nation’s schoolchildren. Because there is nothing creepy or Soviet-like about our Dear Leader addressing the kiddies. It’s not enough that their teachers indoctrinate them, they need to hear straight from the source.

To support the speech, the Department of Education has made available a list of activities, such as “Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president,” to the nation’s teachers.

One would expect a creepy diktat from the Education Department to at least be grammatically correct. But no.

Jim Geraghty over at NRO has the details of the grammatical indiscretions.

ED quietly released a revised activity list later today. Perhaps is was in response to the “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your President” firestorm that it created among the right leaning blogs. Perhaps not.

Either way it reinforced to me that when we’re looking for budget savings, the Department of Education should be first on the list.

Update: I don’t know who Frederick Hess is, but he pretty much nails it, in my opinion:

I’m sure the intentions behind all of this were decent enough, and that this whole effort was intended as a pep talk dressed up with innocuous materials. The lesson plans were likely drawn up by a couple of low-level staffers and slapped up on the department website without a careful look. But this all points to some of the perils posed by the growing presidential inclination to serve as superintendent-in-chief, and it highlights the kind of hubris that has fueled concerns about the implications of the federal government’s growing reach.

Update II: Yet, Vodkapundit makes an equally good point:

The other thing I object to is a big portion (an entire portion?) of a school day being devoted to the President and His Works and Admonishments, for no reason other than he seems to think it should be. There’s no national emergency, this isn’t an inauguration or a joint address to Congress. It’s the President deciding, for reasons entirely his own, to take over the public school system for twenty minutes or an hour or a day.

I wasn’t really paying attention to these new-fangled blag thingies back when this story hit the big time. But a few years ago (during the 2004 election) CBS news ran a report that strongly implied that George Bush was a cowardly draft dodger, and had joined the National Guard to avoid having to go to Vietnam.

The story hinged on a set of documents that turned out to be fake. A group of conservative blogs proved that the documents, which were allegedly from the 1970s, were really created in Microsoft Word.

In the aftermath Dan Rather lost his job anchoring the CBS Evening News, the producer for the report was fired, and CBS hired an outside investigator to figure out what went wrong.

A few days ago, Bernard Goldberg wrote a story pointing out an interesting fact that was generally overlooked in the CBS investigator’s report, which came out a few years ago.

Mapes [the producer] had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

As for the “cowardly coward” claims, Goldberg states:

For the record: George W. Bush has always maintained that he joined the National Guard not to avoid service in Vietnam but because he wanted to be a fighter pilot. He has openly acknowledged that he did not want to be drafted and serve in the infantry, and says he signed up for the Guard knowing full well he would have to spend almost two years in flight training and another four years in part-time service.

Predictably, those on the left will not be swayed by annoying things like facts discovered by independent investigators. You can see that in the comments on Goldberg’s site. To them, George Bush = Hitler, the Cowardly Lion, and Satan himself.

However, I have always held that history will judge President George W. Bush more kindly (and fairly) as time goes on. Yes, he had his flaws. He certainly couldn’t string his sentences together. But a cowardly draft dodger he was not.

via Hot Air

For the ADD readers, I’ll boil it down: The Obama Administration cut a secret deal with drug companies – in exchange for $150 million in ads supporting the proposed legislation the drug companies received assurance that no price controls on drugs would be a part of the legislation.

The Hope and Change Government (a.k.a. the most transparent administration ever) went into a closed door meeting with the drug companies and struck a deal where they both win, and we (the people) lose.

So what nefarious right wing pseudo news source published the details of this conspiracy? The New York Times:

The drug industry has authorized its lobbyists to spend as much as $150 million on television commercials supporting President Obama’s health care overhaul, beginning over the August Congressional recess, people briefed on the plans said Saturday.

The unusually large scale of the industry’s commitment to the cause helps explain some of a contentious back-and-forth playing out in recent days between the odd-couple allies over a deal that the White House struck with the industry in June to secure its support. The terms of the deal were not fully disclosed. Both sides had announced that the drug industry would contribute $80 billion over 10 years to the cost of the health care overhaul without spelling out the details.

They told me that if I voted for John McCain the Bush-era practice of closed door meetings with lobbyists ending in secret deals would continue- and they were right.

Noted right wing hack Robert Reich over at Salon.com says this deal undermines democracy.

I’m a strong supporter of universal health insurance, and a fan of the Obama administration. But I’m appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm to buy their support.

Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House confirmed it has promised Big Pharma that any healthcare legislation will bar the government from using its huge purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices. That’s basically the same deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it’s proven a bonanza for the drug industry. A continuation will be an even larger bonanza, given all the boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade. And it will be a gold mine if the deal extends to Medicaid, which will be expanded under most versions of the healthcare bills now emerging from Congress, and to any public option that might be included. (We don’t know how far the deal extends beyond Medicare because its details haven’t been made public.)

Mark this down on your calendar as the day that Robert Reich and Michelle Malkin agree.

Miracle fruit (formally known as Synsepalum dulcificum) is a red berry native to West Africa. It contains a protein called miraculin that has the odd effect of making foods taste good.

[...] When miracle fruit is consumed, the miraculin in the berry binds to the taste buds on the tongue. A person has receptors on their taste buds that identify sweet, sour, bitter and savory tastes. Normally, if you were to eat a lemon, your sour receptors would start firing. [...] Under the influence of miraculin, however, the sweet receptors start signaling and suppress the sour tastes. The miraculin rewires the sweet receptors to temporarily identify acids as sugars.

[snip]

Then, for about an hour, the miraculin modifies sour foods to taste sweet. Sweet foods will taste about the same, if not overly sweet, and other flavors remain unaffected. Because miraculin is a protein, heat will destroy the effect, so the berry can’t be cooked, and heated foods won’t taste any differently. Eventually, saliva washes away the miraculin, and your tongue returns to normal.

Read on for more, including a neat conspiracy theory involving foul play at the FDA that explains why we don’t have this miracle fruit here in the US.

h/t Z.