Later On

But see, the GOP doesn’t believe that the government should take any actions against businesses that violate regulations—the solution, in GOP eyes, is to do away with the regulations. Then everything would work. Alec MacGillis reports on the real world in the Washington Post:

The Iowa egg producer that federal officials say is at the center of a salmonella outbreak and recalls of more than a half-billion eggs has repeatedly paid fines and settled complaints over health and safety violations and allegations ranging from maintaining a “sexually hostile work environment” to abusing the hens that lay the eggs.

In the past 20 years, according to the public record, the DeCoster family operation, one of the 10 largest egg producers in the country, has withstood a string of reprimands, penalties and complaints about its performance in several states.

In June, for instance, the family agreed to pay a $34,675 fine stemming from allegations of animal cruelty against hens in its 5 million-bird Maine facility. An animal rights group used a hidden camera to document hens suffocating in garbage cans, twirled by their necks , kicked into manure pits to drown and hanging by their feet over conveyer belts.

Hinda Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the company, declined to answer questions about its record. She said in an e-mail, “We are focused on doing the right thing with the recall and on our continued cooperation with FDA.”

DeCoster owns Wright County Egg in Iowa, which last week recalled 380 million eggs distributed nationwide. A federal investigation into 26 outbreaks of salmonella enteritidis, the second-leading cause of food-borne illness, found that 15 of the outbreaks pointed to Wright County Egg.

The DeCoster family also has close ties to Hillandale Farms of Iowa, which on Friday recalled 170 million eggs distributed to 14 states in the Midwest and West after scientists in Minnesota linked one salmonella outbreak to Hillandale. Wright County Egg and Hillandale share suppliers of young chickens and feed, and the DeCoster family put up the money for Hillandale’s founder to purchase Ohio Fresh Eggs, the largest operation in that state.

. . .

As the family’s holdings have expanded, so has the list of allegations against it:

– In 1996, DeCoster was fined $3.6 million for health and safety violations at the family’s Turner egg farm, which then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich termed “as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen.” Regulators found that workers had been forced to handle manure and dead chickens with their bare hands and to live in filthy trailers.

– In 1999, the company paid $5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit involving unpaid overtime for 3,000 workers.

– In 2001, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that DeCoster was a “repeat violator” of state environmental laws, citing violations involving the family’s hog-farming operations. The family was forbidden to expand its hog-farming interests in the state.

– Also in 2001, DeCoster Farms of Iowa settled, for $1.5 million, a complaint brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the company had subjected 11 undocumented female workers from Mexico to a “sexually hostile work environment,” including sexual assault and rape by supervisors.

– In 2002, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the family’s Maine Contract Farming branch $345,810 for an array of violations. The same year, DeCoster Egg Farms of Maine paid $3.2 million to settle a lawsuit filed in 1998 by Mexican workers alleging discrimination in housing and working conditions.

– In 2003, Jack DeCoster paid the federal government $2.1 million as part of a plea agreement after federal agents found more than 100 undocumented workers at his Iowa egg farms. It was the largest penalty ever against an Iowa employer. Three years later, agents found 30 workers suspected of being illegal immigrants at a DeCoster farm in Iowa. And in 2007, raids at other DeCoster Iowa farms uncovered 51 more suspected undocumented workers.

– In 2006, Ohio’s Agriculture Department revoked the permits of Ohio Fresh Eggs because its new co-owners, including Hillandale founder Orland Bethel, had failed to disclose that DeCoster had put up $126 million for the purchase, far more than their $10,000, and was heavily involved in managing the company. By playing down DeCoster’s role, the owners had avoided a background check into DeCoster’s “habitual violator” status in Iowa. An appeals panel overturned the revocation, saying the disclosure was adequate.

– In 2008, OSHA cited DeCoster’s Maine Contract Farming for violations that included forcing workers to retrieve eggs the previous winter from inside a building that had collapsed under ice and snow.

Bill Marler, a Seattle lawyer who specializes in food safety cases and has already filed one suit in the current outbreak and expects to file another Monday, said the recalls would deal a huge financial blow to the company. But he noted that several companies involved in other major recalls in recent years — for peanuts, spinach and other products — have seen their sales bounce back.

“This may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but there are lots of companies with massive recalls . . . that go on their merry way,” he said.

Continue reading.

In fairness, I should point out the United Kingdom, viewed by the GOP as rotten with socialism (where even the conservative party supports the National Health Service and works to improve it), found a free-market solution to the problem.

Excellent article (as usual) by Jonathan Cohn:

The next time you hear a conservative ranting about big government, ask him how he likes his eggs–plain or with a side of salmonella.

As you’ve probably heard by now, a massive egg recall is underway. A Midwest producer shipped tainted eggs to supermarkets across the country, causing more than 1,300 known infections–with more, possibly, to come. The company ran the kind of factory farming operation that, experts have long warned, made salmonella infection more likely. Its owner had previously paid millions in fines for violating labor and safety regulations. But nobody had inspected the plant and, as a result, nobody knew about the contamination until after people started getting sick.

Outbreaks of food-borne illness are nothing new in modern America. Last year it was tainted peanut butter. Before that it was leaf spinach, hamburger meat, and jalapeño peppers. A new set of federal egg safety rules just went into effect, while a bipartisan bill to strengthen the Food and Drug Administration has passed the House and seems headed for approval in the Senate. Experts seem confident these steps will improve safety substantially. But consumer advocates and sympathetic officials have advocated such changes for more than a decade. That egg regulation has been under discussion since 1999, when the Clinton Administration first proposed it.

Why the long delay? And are we really doing better now?

The answers are long and complicated, so, for the moment, let me focus on just one element: The new standards for egg production. Based on what several sources, including former FDA officials, tell TNR, the saga of these standards seems like a case study in how conservative politics and conservative politicians have weakened federal regulation, exposing the public to greater health risks.

This is not a story that begins with the administration of George W. Bush. It begins, instead, with the administration of Ronald Reagan. Convinced that excessive regulation was stifling American innovation and imposing unnecessary costs on the public, Reagan’s team changed the way government makes rules.

Prior to the 1980s, agencies like the FDA had authority to finalize regulations on their own. Reagan changed that, forcing agencies to submit all regulations to the Office of Management and Budget, which cast a more skeptical eye on anything that would require the government or business to spend more money. The regulatory process slowed down and, in many cases, the people in charge of it became more skittish.

Clinton didn’t share Reagan’s antipathy to regulation. Prodded by consumer advocates and more liberal Democrats, his administration announced its intention to impose new safety requirements on the egg industry. But that happened in 1999, a year before Clinton left office. When George W. Bush succeeded him, the administration’s posture reverted to its 1980s version.

Like Reagan, Bush was skeptical of government interference in the market. And, like Reagan, he appointed officials sympathetic to businesses that wanted to avoid the cost of complying with new federal rules. It was not until 2004, five years after Clinton had proposed the new egg rules, that the Bush Administration issued actual regulatory language. And by 2009, when Bush left office, the administration still had not finalized the rule.

William Hubbard, who was associate FDA commissioner from 1991 until 2005 and now advises the Alliance for a Stronger FDA, tells TNR that the delay was not accidental: . . .

Continue reading.

James Downie gives a timeline of Obama’s declining support for gay marriage as his ambition increased and he started selling out to get elected:

In the gay marriage debate, President Obama says that he supports civil unions for same-sex couples. But has this always been his view? A look back at his statements on gay marriage, from his days as a state senate candidate until his time in the White House, suggests that Obama’s public stance has shifted notably:

1996: In response to a questionnaire from Outlines newspaper (now part of Windy City Times), Obama, a candidate for the Illinois state senate seat representing the wealthy Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, writes, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." Eight years later, in a letter to Windy City Times, Obama would say that he opposed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996, calling it “an effort to demonize people for political advantage” that should be repealed.

1998: Responding to an Illinois State Legislative National Political Awareness Test: “Q: Do you believe that the Illinois government should recognize same-sex marriages? A: Undecided.”

2004: In an interview with Windy City Times, Obama mentions the religious dimension of the gay marriage debate, says he supports civil unions, and indicates that his stance is dictated in large part by political strategy:

Obama: I think that marriage, in the minds of a lot of voters, has a religious connotation. I know that’s true in the African-American community, for example. And if you asked people, ‘should gay and lesbian people have the same rights to transfer property, and visit hospitals, and et cetera,’ they would say, ‘absolutely.’ And then if you talk about, ‘should they get married?’, then suddenly…

WCT: There are more than 1,000 federal benefits that come with marriage. Looking back in the 1960s and inter-racial marriage, the polls showed people against that as well.

Obama: Since I’m a product of an interracial marriage, I’m very keenly aware of …

WCT: But you think, strategically, gay marriage isn’t going to happen so you won’t support it at this time?

Obama: What I’m saying is that strategically, I think we can get civil unions passed. I think we can get SB 101 [which would add “sexual orientation” to Illinois’s non-discrimination laws] passed. I think that to the extent that we can get the rights, I’m less concerned about the name.”

2006: In his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama, now a U.S. senator, explains his support for civil unions, again mentioning religion and noting the strategic problems that the push for gay marriage poses:

For many practicing Christians, the inability to compromise may apply to gay marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith without civil penalty. I believe that American society can choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights no such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount. …The heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians. (pp. 222-3)

July 2007: At the CNN/YouTube Democratic primary debate in Charleston, South Carolina, Obama discusses interracial versus gay marriage and says that it should be up to individual religions whether they recognize civil unions as marriages:

Anderson Cooper: Senator Obama, the laws banning interracial marriage in the United States were ruled unconstitutional in 1967. What is the difference between a ban on interracial marriage and a ban on gay marriage?

Obama: Well, I think that it is important to pick up on something that was said earlier by both Dennis [Kucinich] and by Bill [Richardson], and that is that we’ve got to make sure that everybody is equal under the law. And the civil unions that I proposed would be equivalent in terms of making sure that all the rights that are conferred by the state are equal for same-sex couples as well as for heterosexual couples.

Now, with respect to marriage, it’s my belief that it’s up to the individual denominations to make a decision as to whether they want to recognize marriage or not. But in terms of, you know, the rights of people to transfer property, to have hospital visitation, all those critical civil rights that are conferred by our government, those should be equal.

August 2007: At the Human Rights Campaign/Logo gay issues debate, also during the Democratic primaries, Obama emphasizes the religious importance of the term “marriage” and explains why civil unions aren’t discriminatory:

Q: If you were back in the Illinois legislature where you served and the issue of civil marriage came before you, how would you have voted on that?

A: My view is that we should try to disentangle what has historically been the issue of the word “marriage,” which has religious connotations to some people, from the civil rights that are given to couples, in terms of hospital visitation, in terms of whether or not they can transfer property or Social Security benefits and so forth. So it depends on how the bill would’ve come up. I would’ve supported and would continue to support a civil union that provides all the benefits that are available for a legally sanctioned marriage. And it is then, as I said, up to religious denominations to make a determination as to whether they want to recognize that as marriage or not.

Q: On the grounds of civil marriage, can you see to our community where [your stance of separating gay rights from the word “marriage”] comes across as sounding like “separate but equal”?

A: Look, when my parents got married in 1961, it would have been illegal for them to be married in a number of states in the South. So obviously, this is something that I understand intimately, it’s something that I care about. But if I were advising the civil rights movement back in 1961 about its approach to civil rights, I would have probably said it’s less important that we focus on an anti-miscegenation law than we focus on a voting rights law and a non-discrimination and employment law and all the legal rights that are conferred by the state. Now, it’s not for me to suggest that you shouldn’t be troubled by these issues. But my job as president is going to be to make sure that the legal rights that have consequences on a day to day basis for loving same sex couples all across the country.

2008: In an interview with MTV, Obama says he opposes Prop 8, but also gay marriage. Civil unions, the candidate says, are sufficient: …

Continue reading. It’s easy to have contempt for this sort of devolution of a sound position. And I do have contempt for it.

Take this RNC committeewoman as an example. I believe that she is simply staggeringly stupid, not insane, but in denying reality so clearly and obviously, I think an insanity defense could be mounted.

The first 8 minutes are not bad at all.

One way to spiff up a favorite vintage razor is to have it replated. I am having several of my razors replated with rhodium and will soon have photos. In the meantime, Dave of SafetyRazors.co.uk emailed me some photos of replating work he’s done for clients. This nickel replating greatly improved the appearance of this Gillette Tech:

Before

After

I will soon trot out photos of my own razors. If you have a favorite razor with some cosmetic damage, it’s certainly worth considering.

Scary chart from Kevin Drum (click to enlarge):

Drum’s post begins:

In what Matt Yglesias calls “the department of stuff people are wrong about,” the New York Times reports the following:

In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities — Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee — once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade.

With minor swings in sentiment, the latest results reflect what new buyers always seem to feel. At the boom’s peak in 2005, they said prices would go up. When the market was sliding in 2008, they still said prices would go up.

“People think it’s a law of nature,” said Mr. Shiller, who teaches at Yale.

That chart at the bottom of this post, constructed from Case-Shiller data, shows the reality: home prices have actually been pretty steady over time. In fact, if you look at a fifty-year period after World War II, home prices were absolutely steady. In 1947 the Case-Shiller index stood at 110, and in 1997, adjusted for inflation, it stood at 110 again.

So here’s the question: why do people think that home price appreciation is a law of nature, when it so clearly isn’t? Here are a few theories: . . .

Continue reading. E.D. Kain comments as well.

Plants are notoriously sedentary. Even those that move (the Venus fly trap, for example) move slowly and do not wander.

One exception: creeping devil, a cactus plant that crawls along the ground like a snake. At the Phoenix Botanical Garden, one of my favorite places, they keep them in a cage.

They are slower than snakes: they crawl by growing at the head and withering at the tail, crawling slowly along at an optimal rate (in a moist area) of 60 cm (2 feet) a year.

Take a look:

More info here (source of photo) and here in Wikipedia.

Baja California is home to some fascinating plants, including the boojum tree:

Click photos to enlarge.

Yesterday’s West Indian Extract of Limes aftershave hit the spot, so this morning I went all fresh lime. The QED Fresh Lime shaving soap, intensely lime, made an excellent lather with the Mühle travel razor, which (based on this morning’s experience) is now fully broken in and providing superb and ample lather.

Three passes with the Pils, still holding its original Swedish Gillette blade, left a smooth face ready for a splash of more lime.

Over the past week or so my stomach has felt queasy—not much, but constant and gradually increasing. Today, it hit me: the lemon juice I add to my iced tea: constant, daily, and a fair amount. I imagine it’s the constancy: we are told to eat a varied diet for a reason, I guess.

Two large glasses of iced white tea, no lemon, I feel noticeably better.

I’ve blogged several times about how a modern corporation is legally a person, clinically a sociopath, and increasingly owes allegiance to no government or system of government but works internationally and beyond government. Indeed, one can trace serious efforts by corporations to take control of more governments, much as they have in the developing world.

I have previously blogged about the question: Do we have a constructive alternative to the destructive idea of the modern corporation? The post came after I watched the documentary The Corporation, which IMO is a "must-see."

I do worry about the ultimate effect of large, modern corporations with their resources and their legally required sociopathic outlook. So I was heartened to see this article by John Richardson:

Why isn’t Obama fixing the economy? Why isn’t he creating any jobs? That’s all we hear about lately, the catechism of the Tea Parties. But isn’t job creation the task of capitalists? Isn’t business supposed to be our mighty engine of prosperity? So why don’t Tea Party types ever march on corporate headquarters and ask them to create some jobs?

There is a reason, actually, but first I want to tell you about a small but growing movement to change the way business does business. It’s the struggle to create a new category of company called the "benefit corporation," also known as a "B Corp."

Did you know that corporations are legally prevented from being decent and humane? Say a corporate leader discovers that he can make a higher profit by moving a factory to China and throwing thousands of Americans out of their jobs. If he decides to make profits secondary to the well-being of his workers and neighbors, his stockholders can sue him. That’s because corporate laws are written so that a company’s "fiduciary responsibility" is to the stockholders. Nothing else matters. If the choice was between the survival of the corporation and the survival of America itself, the law would compel him to pick the corporation.

That seems a little screwy, doesn’t it? That’s what Jay Coen Gilbert concluded after his own ride through the corporate world. As a college student, Gilbert started a sports-apparel company called And One, which was worth $250 million when he sold it thirteen years later. When he and his partners sat down to plot their next move, they dreamed big.

"We wanted to figure out how we could harness the power of markets to solve social and environmental problems," Gilbert told me. "Our assumption was government and nonprofits are hugely necessary but insufficient to the task — business is three-quarters of the GDP. So we figured that trying to figure out how to remove some of the impediments that prevent business from being part of the solution would be a pretty useful thing."

To find practical solutions that would work in the real business world, they started talking to the leaders of civic-minded business like Shore Bank, Puravida Coffee, and Seventh Generation. "Out of 200 of those conversations, they told us there was infrastructure missing that would be pretty useful. One piece was around standards. The second was around legal corporate structure."

By standards, Gilbert means that there was no objective way to tell if a company was really doing good in the community, which is why the world is rife with companies that make noisy contributions to charity or clean energy without making any meaningful structural changes.

"So the first question was, what the heck should those standards be?"

Their solution was B Lab, a company that administers an ingenious rating system that includes 180 factors, from how green the corporate buildings are to how well the employees are treated and even how much transparency appears in the corporate report.

Since the summer of 2007, funded by their own money along with contributions from places like the Rockefeller Foundation and USAID, they’ve been signing up and certifying companies that agree, voluntarily, to respect a "triple bottom line" that includes community and worker benefits along with profits. There are now 330 companies on their roster, mostly small mom-and-pop type businesses but also some of significant size, like Dansko or Method Home Products.

This may seem like small change, yet another example of feckless do-gooderism, but this time it’s the cynics who are naïve. As Gilbert points, there are already 40,000 business associated with progressive groups like the Social Venture Network and Balle, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. Fully 11 percent of all United States assets under financial management — that’s $2.71 trillion — are controlled by the "socially responsible investing" industry that includes mutual funds like the Calvert Investments. One of the less-heralded American innovations, launched 250 years ago by Quakers who didn’t want their assets invested in businesses that profited from slavery, the SRI industry is powerful evidence that — before the pernicious idea that "greed is good" took hold in American minds — Americans wanted to do good while doing well. It required a massive propaganda effort from conservative think tanks and Republican politicians to invert our values to the point where decency and even patriotism became an irrelevant distraction.

But since the economic crash of 2008, the B Corp momentum has intensified dramatically. "It’s accelerating on a couple of fronts," Gilbert says. "We certified twice as many B Corps in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of ’09. That’s ripples in the pond — 330 ripples."

In order for those ripples to have impact, B Lab has been fighting to change America’s corporate laws. On Wednesday, I’m going to write about their recent victory in Vermont — and try to answer the vexing question of why any sane business would want to hobble the clarity of the bottom line with all this namby-pamby social do-goodism (also, the secret underlying psycho-mystical reason why we ask so little of our corporations). Here’s a taste from Will Patten of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility:

"I often say, I think it would be hard for a mean-spirited company to prosper in Vermont. We believe there’s a better way to create sustained profits and wealth. So it’s a huge paradigm shift, going from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism, but it isn’t a revolutionary radical idea here-it’s a way of doing business based on Vermont values."

After the break, some of my previous posts on this general topic:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve never had a pawpaw. I’m tempted to give them a go. More info here.

Fox News, which promotes the protests, is owned in part by Saudi billionaire. The Saudis (19 of whom crashed into the World Trade Center) are the origin not only of Osama bin Laden but also of Wahhabism, the reactionary branch of Islam embraced by the terrorists and extremists. So Fox News has some ‘splaining to do.

Scott Shane reports in the NY Times:

Some counterterrorism experts say the anti-Muslim sentiment that has saturated the airwaves and blogs in the debate over plans for an Islamic center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan is playing into the hands of extremists by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.

Opposition to the center by prominent politicians and other public figures in the United States has been covered extensively by the news media in Muslim countries. At a time of concern about radicalization of young Muslims in the West, it risks adding new fuel to Al Qaeda’s claim that Islam is under attack by the West and must be defended with violence, some specialists on Islamic militancy say.

“I know people in this debate don’t intend it, but there are consequences for these kinds of remarks,” said Brian Fishman, who studies terrorism for the New America Foundation here.

He said that Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric hiding in Yemen who has been linked to several terrorist plots, has been arguing for months in Web speeches and in a new Qaeda magazine that American Muslims face a dark future of ever-worsening discrimination and vilification.

“When the rhetoric is so inflammatory that it serves the interests of a jihadi recruiter like Awlaki, politicians need to be called on it,” Mr. Fishman said.

Evan F. Kohlmann, who tracks militant Web sites at the security consulting firm Flashpoint Global Partners, said supporters of Al Qaeda have seized on the controversy “with glee.” On radical Web forums, he said, the dispute over the Islamic center, which would include space for worship, is lumped together with fringe developments like a Florida pastor’s call for making Sept. 11 “Burn a Koran Day.”

“It’s seen as proof of what Awlaki and others have been saying, that the U.S. is hypocritical and that most Americans are enemies of Islam,” Mr. Kohlmann said. He called the anti-Islam statements spawned by the dispute “disturbing and sad” and said they were feeding anti-American sentiment that could provoke violence…

Continue reading.

This refers to the law that made it illegal to record (audio or video) a police officer going about his public duties. Becky Schlikerman and Kristen Mack report in the Chicago Tribune:

It’s not unusual or illegal for police officers to flip on a camera as they get out of their squad car to talk to a driver they’ve pulled over.

But in Illinois, a civilian trying to make an audio recording of police in action is breaking the law.

"It’s an unfair and destructive double standard," said Adam Schwartz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

On Wednesday, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit in Chicago challenging the Illinois Eavesdropping Act, which makes it criminal to record not only private but also public conversations made without consent of all parties.

With cell phones that record audio and video in almost every pocket, the ability to capture public conversations, including those involving the police, is only a click away. That raises the odds any police action could wind up being recorded for posterity.

Opponents of the act say that could be a good thing and certainly shouldn’t lead to criminal charges.

The ACLU argues that the act violates the First Amendment and has been used to thwart people who simply want to monitor police activity.

The head of the Chicago police union counters that such recordings could inhibit officers from doing their jobs. [How? Has that been a problem? Examples, please. – LG]

In its lawsuit, the ACLU pointed to six Illinois residents who have faced felony charges after being accused of violating the state’s eavesdropping law for recording police making arrests in public venues.

Adrian and Fanon Perteet were passengers in a car at a DeKalb McDonald’s drive-through in November when police moved in. Officers suspected that the car’s driver was under the influence, according to the brothers.

Fanon Perteet, 23, said he was scared. Past experiences with police had left him suspicious of the officer’s motives, he said. So he pulled out his cell phone and turned on the video camera, which also records sound.

"I felt obligated to record so nothing happened," said Perteet, an event planner.

When the officers realized they were being taped, Perteet was arrested and taken to a squad car. Adrian Perteet, 21, a student at Northern Illinois University, then took out his cell phone and started recording his brother’s arrest…

Continue reading. Afraid of the Chicago police??? Why on earth…

Or should that be ‘Round Midnight? Probably.

It really is going to be hot today—of course, we all wilt at around 78 º F, so it’s relative. Right now in the living room it’s 79.2 º F.

So the idea of a cold soup occurred to me, and I thought of a buttermilk-apple cold soup. I can’t find a recipe, so I’ll just wing it: buttermilk, apple, pinch cinnamon, pinch salt, a little lemon juice, blend, and chill.

What was weird was that Safeway not only had no buttermilk but doesn’t eve4n seem to carry buttermilk anymore. Can that be possible? Surely not.

UPDATE: Not bad. What I actually did:

1/2 apple, stem removed
1/4 sweet onion
about 1 c buttermilk
pinch of salt

Blend, chill, eat. I tasted it and it’s not bad at all. Onions seem to go with apples in general—though of course I find that onions go with lots of things.

Right-wing billionaire zealots. Jane Mayer’s profile at the link begins:

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.” . . .

Continue reading.