Some odds and ends. . .
- First, as a bit of a response to Nick's counterintuitivity, take a look at this heartwarming story. To summarize, Delta Airlines applied their standard customer service to Richard Roth and his family when the Roths attempted to take a trip to Buenos Aires last Christmas, which resulted in lost luggage, being stranded for days in airports and thousands of dollars in extra costs.
I utterly hate US domestic airlines, and held them in contempt long before President Bush turned every flight into a real-life GOP-politics-of-fear-style commercial. The root problem with these airlines is that they are free, by law, from having to compete with international carriers in domestic air travel. All US government-paid travel must take place on US carriers. And, of course, the privately owned airline industry is heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer - not just with airports, but in actual direct cash bailouts of badly managed corporations They don't need to be polite, they don't need to be efficient, because Americans have apparently decided that they're one of the industries that are just too big to fail - thereby guaranteeing a state of constant failure. I say we institute some real airline deregulation. Let international carriers do business wherever they want, let the Feds buy the cheapest tickets available, and shut down the wide-open pipeline of taxpayer dollars. Let them go out of business, and take the money we've been flushing down their cramped toilets and start building a national high-speed rail system. Or universal healthcare. Or maybe we can round up all the people responsible for the last seven years in DC and pay them off to go live somewhere else and leave us alone.
- SPAM sales are up, which Hormel attributes to people wanting to save money on their grocery bill. I've had Spam before, long ago. It was horrible, bad enough that 20 years or so later I can still recall the taste of it. So I'm not just hopping on the 'mock SPAM bandwagon. What I truly don't understand is why anyone would buy SPAM as a replacement meat-type product to save money if they aren't already in the habit of buying it. Yet according to Hormel, that's exactly what's happening. If money is tight, there are other protein sources that don't have so much saturated fat, aren't loaded with extra salt and, most importantly, aren't SPAM. Red beans and rice, anyone?
- Matt Stoller has a great post explaining why James Webb has no business being Obama's VP pick. I'm so aghast at the idea of Democrats buying into the same ticket-balancing, shoring-up-GOP-defined-weaknesses and electability nonsense that doomed us in 2004 that I haven't been able to move on to the other reasons Stoller lists, so kudos to him for doing the work. Obama needs to either pick someone who'll make a great President in 2016, or he needs to get back to the VP's essential worthlessness as an office and pick some nobody who won't screw up at funerals.
