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Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Ice cream? Yes we can!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’m a sucker for ice cream. A good French vanilla? Yummm. A nice scoop of coffee ice cream? Yes please. Sometimes in the summer I even make my own, in a hand-cranked ice cream maker.
My favorite indulgence, though, is a rich, smooth butter pecan. Downright sinful. And now Ben & Jerry’s has released a special variety of butter pecan timed for an upcoming occasion.
I’ll have to go get me some.
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Joe The Journalist, meet Christiane Amanpour
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.
The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.
Samuel J. Wurzelbacher says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting.
He tells WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants to let Israel’s “‘Average Joes’ share their story.”
Wurzelbacher gained attention during the final weeks of the campaign when he asked Barack Obama about his tax plan.
He later joined Republican John McCain on the campaign trail. At one stop, he agreed with a McCain supporter who asked if he believed a vote for Obama was a vote for the death of Israel.
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Obama may actually succeed in barring earmarks
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s 13 days and counting until President-elect Barack Obama sheds the “elect” qualifier and takes the reins of power that now sit slack in the hands of George W. Bush. I’ve said it before but it becomes more true as time passes — the circumstances under which Obama takes office will be the most dire that have faced any incoming president since FDR in 1933.
I really don’t think most of us comprehend yet just how bad the economy is getting. By March and April, I suspect, the true breadth of the problem will have started to sink in, and it won’t be pretty.
Yesterday, Obama promised again to bar earmarks from the big stimulus package he is trying to push through Congress quickly. I’m sure some of the committee chairs and appropriations members aren’t happy about being barred from the gravy train, but at a time like this they also don’t want to be identified as greedy powermongers holding up the process. They fear Obama “will make them famous and you will know their names,” to borrow a phrase.
As the AP put it:
“Obama said Americans will accept his proposed stimulus plan — expected to cost about $775 billion — only if they believe the money is being used wisely to boost the troubled economy and to make smart long-term investments in public projects.
He told reporters at his transition office that his package will set a “new higher standard of accountability, transparency and oversight. We are going to ban all earmarks, the process by which individual members insert projects without review.”
Details of the plan, which has yet to be drafted as a bill, will be available online, Obama said, “so the American people will know where their precious tax dollars are going and whether we are hitting our marks.”
….Long-running criticisms of budgetary “earmarks,” which some consider pork-barrel spending, are having an impact, however. Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the stimulus package is likely to emerge from Congress free of earmarks, even though he notes that some earmark projects have proven tremendously popular and effective over the years.”
That’s a start, but only a start.
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