The Morning Blog

I'm sure you're all aware that a huge earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. The Girlfriend alerted me to it late last night when she was listening to the radio.

As with the New Zealand quake, I'm not going to do a lot of commentary about it; there's just not much I can say about a natural disaster other than that the damage and loss of life is simply staggering.

I do understand that there are a lot of Godzilla related jokes making the rounds on Twitter...Really guys? You were up all night and the most original thing you could put together about a Japanese disaster were Godzilla jokes?

Good Lord...

Libya, quite naturally, had ignored the quake and gone on being terrible. I have to agree with the author's analysis of Obama's position. While I really, really, really want Qaddafi gone, I just don't see how Libya is of vital importance to the US, at least not significant enough to commit ourselves to yet another military action in yet another terrible part of the globe.

Nice follow up point from this article analyzing the American position:

Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”

Colombia's President has put multi-national companies on notice following the kidnapping of 23 workers by FARC: Companies giving into ransom demands can expect to be kicked out of the country. It's sort of a Catch-22, I think. On the one hand, the government wants to dry up funding for the rebel forces and this is certainly one way to do it. On the other hand, companies want to do business. Paying paying protection money to the rebels may be a realistic cost of doing so. But if they can't do business, they can't pay taxes and the government won't have revenue to fund their counter-insurgency program.

I have the feeling Biden woke up this morning and said "What the hell do you mean I have to go to Moldova!?!?" At least they gave him something to snack on when he showed up.

Pretty interesting article here about an Idaho rancher who was revealed to be a hitman from Boston on the lam. His neighbors in Idaho seem to love him. They've promised to look after his dogs and fishing boat, even if he did try to murder someone outside of an IHOP back in Boston.

Peter King's witch hunt is done for the time being. If I may, I'd like to take a moment to respond to one of his more ridiculous assertions, namely that 85% of the leaders of mosques in this country are radicals:

Given that there are millions of Muslims in the United States and accepting for the sake of argument that King's ridiculous, outlandish, unverified figure regarding radicalism is correct, one would assume that there would be hundreds if not thousands of acts of terrorism and sabotage within our borders yearly. Inasmuch as that clearly is not the case one is left with one of two conclusions: A) Muslims, who are typically depicted as being extremely devout, choose to completely ignore their religious leaders or B) There simply isn't a problem. The bottom line is that with the exception of this current silliness, the Muslim story in the United States is one of total success. They're an extraordinarily well assimilated immigrant group. You don't see waves of violence being perpetrated by radical American Muslims because with the exception of statistical outliers, they simply don't seem to exist.

Muslims do however, work as congressional aides on both sides of the aisle. More here.

Screw the labor unions in Wisconsin. What's happening to my football season!?!?!

Mom Bait: Head Start cuts. I think that as the Republicans are taking cuts out of the federal budget, they're reaching the point where they're really biting off more than they can chew politically. The thing with Head Start is that it's not just about the kids...It's also very much about the parents. For a lot of people, Head Start is the only child care program available while they work or go to school. Sooner or later, Republicans will have to explain why making it more difficult for people to be employed and educated made sense in their budget.

Oh my...Libertarianism Happens to People: After receiving an FDA monopoly to sell and manufacture a popular pregnancy drug that prevents preterm labor, the cost has risen from $10 to $1,500 per dose. In some cases, that means the cost of giving birth safely could rise by $30,000 over the course of a pregnancy. Simply unfathomable, particularly since individual, specialist pharmacies have been producing it and selling it for next to nothing for years.

Naturally, it's all the fault of satanic bankers.

Very interesting article concerning robot nurses. Scientists studied peoples reactions to being touched by the robots. They found that people generally had no problem with the contact. However, the patients impression of what the robot was attempting to do affected their reaction: if they perceived that the robot was attempting to clean them, they were fine with it. If they perceived that the robot was trying to comfort them, they felt much less comfortable. I think that's understandable. It is after all a robot and my gut instinct would be that its attempts at comforting would ring false. What's interesting though is that this mirrors studies done with human nurses as well.

The director of "Grindhouse" has filed suit to prevent further "blood-curdling screams".

What with all the calls being made for Americans to...well, to just stop being such fatties for crying out loud!...I thought I'd invite you on a brief hike.

If nothing else, it'll be healthier than this.