The King of Pointland

A burrito as big as OH MY GOD

Once a week I have myself a Chipotle chicken burrito with black beans, rice, green salsa, cheese, and lettuce. My is it tasty. And my is it huge. So I started wondering: just how many calories are in this thing?

About a year ago, I wrote a letter to "Joe". When you go to the Chipotle web site, you learn that "Joe" is the guy who will try to answer your Chipotle-related questions. I asked "Joe" how many calories were in my Burrito. "Joe" chided me for putting his name in quotes, because, as it turns out, he really is a single person, and his name is "Joe." So now I call him Joe, and not "Joe". (These days Joe has a helper, David, who is affectionately called "Mo'Joe.")

Joe couldn't help me: "Unfortunately, sorry, we have never performed any analyses of our food to determine nutritional, including calorie, information at this time. If you have a specific allergy or food intolerance or the like, then I would be happy to help you with the ingredients." I did a little more digging but eventually gave up and continued stuffing my burrito-hole with Chipotle goodness.

Today, with the publication of this article, my blissful ignorance comes to end. According to the infographic, my burrito has 990 calories, 31 grams of fat (twelve of them saturated), and 126 grams of cholesterol. Good googley moogley. Here's the press release from CSPI's web site, and the article (PDF).

Now I have the information I need to make an informed choice as a consumer. What I've decided to do is refrain from eating the day before I go to Chipotle. It won't be easy, but it's worth it.

Democracy for Iraq

Before I forget, I think it's worth bringing attention to the way (most) Shiites are conducting themselves in Iraq. The U.S. wants the interim government that will take over at the end of June to be selected by caucuses. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and his followers want elections. They have protested peacefully for them. The U.S. has said there's no time to conduct elections properly, and al-Sistani has said, essentially, let's see what the U.N. says. In fact, "An influential Shiite Muslim cleric urged his followers Friday to refrain from the kind of mass protests witnessed in Iraq's two largest cities this month until a U.N. team determines whether nationwide elections are feasible."

It's interesting, isn't it: the U.S. starts an illegal war, ostensibly to give the Iraqis democracy; they are now demanding it ("Yes, yes to elections, no, no to appointment," the crowd chanted. ); and we're telling them they can't have it, because there isn't time, and we need to get out before our election. The U.N. has just agreed to assess the situation, so we'll see what happens.

If it turns out that elections can't be held by the time we want to get out, I have an idea: let the U.N. take over until elections can be held.

In any case, lets remember the behavior of those crazy Shiite zealots.

Howard Dean and the Media

I don't think it has anything to do with Sku11 4nd B0n3z, but Howard Kurtz raises an interesting question about a question they're asking New Hampshire voters.

Free Trade

I was hoping to get this recent article on Econotarian.org, but here you go:

A Smoother Road To Free Markets
Chile's Success Makes the Case For State Involvement in Economy

...

Salmon illustrates why this country is Latin America's most successful convert to globalization. While neighboring countries sputter, crash and protest against their stumbling economies, Chile is selling more fish, fruit, wine and other goods abroad than ever before, fueling the longest period of economic growth in the nation's history.

No other country in this part of the world has grown more since 1990, inspiring Wall Street, the White House, economists and other gurus of unregulated capitalism to praise this nation of 15 million people as a shining example of what developing countries can accomplish if they tear down their walled-off economies and faithfully follow Washington's blueprint for prosperity.

But the arc of Chile's salmon industry also illustrates how this country assembled Latin America's most dynamic economy by doing quite a bit more than simply stepping out of the way of the free market.

...

Dear God

From the Post:

In a videotape recorded before the attack, Riyashi said: "I have two children and love them very much. But my love to see God was stronger than my love for my children, and I'm sure that God will take care of them if I become a martyr."

Meanwhile, Andrew pointed me to this shocking interview with Israeli "revisionist" historian Benny Morris:

That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

Today is the Greatest

Chapter 44: I Send Al Franken an Email, and He Responds

Here's my email:

Date:	Fri, 26 Dec 2003 01:41:18 -0500
From:	David Eisner
To:	Al Franken
Subject:	White House Vandalism: I humbly suggest that you got it wrong

I generally enjoy "Lies ..".  It's funny, often hillarious, and exposes the,
well, lies, of the right.

However, I'm also a fairly skeptical person, so from time to time I've been
checking up on what you say in the book. You're usually dead on.
But not always.

Discussing claims that members of the Clinton staff had vandalized the
White House before leaving it to its new occupants in January 2001,
you say (pp. 153-154): Of course, none of this horrible vandalism
actually occurred. But Georgia firebrand congressman Bob Barr had not
been clued in on the ruse. Outraged, he demanded an immediate
investigation by Congress's General Accounting Office. Fourteen
months later, this, the final investigation of the Clinton administration,
yielded a 217-page report that found no damage to the White House
nor to the Executive Office Building. "There is no record of damage
that may have been deliberately caused by employees of the
Clinton administration."

In fact, the report did find that damage occured. The quote,
pulled from the Background section, refers to a response
given in an earlier part of the investigation: On April 18, 2001, the
director of the Office of Administration (OA),1 an EOP unit, wrote us a
letter indicating that the White House had no record of damage that
"may have been deliberately caused by employees of the prior
[a]dministration" and that "... repair records do not contain information
that would allow someone to determine the cause of damage that is
being repaired."

But the report goes on: In late May and early June 2001, these allegations
resurfaced in the news media and on June 4, you asked us to investigate
the matter further.

This second, and much more intensive investigation, detailed in the report,
concluded:  Damage, theft, vandalism, and pranks occurred in the White House
complex during the 2001 presidential transition. Incidents such as the
removal of keys from computer keyboards; the theft of various items; the
leaving of certain voice mail messages, signs, and written messages;
and the placing of glue on desk drawers clearly were intentional acts.

The report also states that other allegations could be neither
confirmed nor denied.

To be sure, some of the allegations were exaggerated. But to say
that the report found "no damage to the White House" is simply wrong.
And, to be honest, you would probably call it a lie.

You can find the complete GAO report (GAO-02-360) here:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02360.pdf

-David Eisner
 Hyattsville, MD

Here is Al Franken's response:

Date:	Fri, 26 Dec 2003 03:12:21 -0500
From:	Al Franken
To:	David Eisner
Subject:	Re: White House Vandalism: I humbly suggest that you got it wrong

Thanks. Actually, you are not the first to point this out and we will be changing it for further printings, if it hasn't been already. The report we cited was the preliminary report. You will remember, however, that Ari Fleischer said that the vandalism was going to be carefully chronicalled and it turned out that it wasn't at all.

But thanks again.

Al

So there you go.

Spam

I've started getting spam in the comments. Deleting 20 spams one at a time gets old fast, so I've added a spam blacklist plugin. It should be transparent, but if a comment of yours gets blocked, please let me know.

Hot Diggity

I got some half-price calendar action at Vertigo Books tonight. If you paid $12 for a calendar you could have purchased for $6 one day later, then you, it would seem, are a sucker.

And now it's time to see what day it will be tomorrow. Later.

It's Scientific

Andrew posted a link to this thought-provoking speech by Michael Crichton. I don't agree with everything Crichton says, but we do have to be careful.

What's interesting, though, is that three recent Easterblog entries touch on topics in Crichton's speech:

• ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND GLOBAL-WARMING REFORM (see also PRESUMED GUILTY UNTIL WE IGNORE HIS INNOCENCE)
• ARE WE ALONE?
• NONSENSE IS IN NO DANGER OF EXTINCTION

Debatable

This afternoon I watched the Democratic presidential candidates debate in Iowa. Sharpton and Clark were no-shows, but the rest were there. I found it to be moderately informative. Dean did OK, Lieberman confirmed that his positions are the closest to Bush's, and Kucinich continues to be the furthest left. The transcript is here.

Some of you are interested in the candidates' positions on trade. Check out the first page, about half-way down, for a good back-and-forth on the issue. I for one am glad Gephardt took care of that giant sucking sound from Jordan.

I recently read Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. I'll have more to say about in the future, but among (many) other things, Franken takes Bush and others to task for abusing statistics to misrepresent his tax cuts. For example, when discussing who benefited, the amount of the average tax cut is often cited. This figure is arrived at by dividing the total size of the tax cut by the number of individuals or families affected. Because of the disparity in income distribution, this can be misleading. If everybody got a 1 cent tax cut, and I got the rest, the average individual tax cut would be the same. Or, as Franken puts it, "You and Bill Gates probably have an average net worth of $32 billion."

So two weeks ago, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey were on ABC News's This Week discussing Bush's economic policies. At one point, Lindsey plays the averages game, but with a twist:

LAWRENCE LINDSEY: What the secretary did not say was that it's actually those average working families that got the tax cut. Senator Lieberman pointed out in New Hampshire, the average working family in New Hampshire benefited $2700 a year from this tax cut. That's a bigger rise in their take-home pay than they got in any year during the 1990s which was supposed to be such a good time. So in fact, that is the reason for the tax cut. Yes, when we had the bubble burst, when we had the crash, we were in for some tough times. The president knew it. That's why he proposed the tax cut. It is that tax cut that's kept working families with their paychecks growing because of they now take home more of what they earn. And that's what's kept the economy growing and now we've got a self-sustaining economy.

ROBERT REICH: Larry, I've heard again and again, the $2700 average, was the average amount that the average family took back. But when you hear this administration talk about averages, watch your wallet. The basketball player Shaquille O'Neal and I have an average height of six feet. That doesn't tell you very much about what is happening to the average person. People at the top did extremely well, but people, average people did not do well at all. That is, the little guy did not do well at all.

LAWRENCE LINDSEY: I was quoting Senator Lieberman. I'm quoting a Democrat, Bob.

Note that Lindsey didn't refute Reich's argument.

During the debate, Lieberman pulled the same trick again. Earlier, Dean had been asked about his position on Bush's tax cuts:

NORRIS: I have a follow-up for Governor Dean.

A hallmark of your campaign has been the pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts across the board. Does this include tax cuts that are intended to provide some measure of relief for the middle class, the child tax credit or the lifting of the marriage penalty?

And specifically, what kind of tax relief are you proposing for middle class and working-class families?

DEAN: Well, we've got to look at the big picture. If you make over $1 million, you've got a $112,000 tax cut. Sixty percent of us got a $304 tax cut.

And the question I have for Americans is, did your college tuition go up more than $304 because the president cut Pell Grants in order to finance his tax cuts for his millionaire friends? How about your property taxes, did they go up more than $304 because the president wouldn't fund special ed, wouldn't fund No Child Left Behind, wouldn't fund COPS and -- how about your health care payments? Did they go up more than $304 because the president cut thousands of people all over America off health care because he wouldn't fund the states' share that they needed to continue to insure people, and that was shifted to insurance and the health care premiums?

Middle-class people did not see a tax cut. There was no middle-class tax cut. There was a Bush tax increase with tuitions, with property taxes, with health care premiums, and most middle-class people in this country are worse off because of President Bush's so- called tax cut than they are better off.

Without doing some digging it's hard to know just how the numbers work out, but it seems like a reasonable point.

The next time Lieberman gets asked a question, though, he responds so:

ANGER: Senator Lieberman, many health-care workers are paid so little that they cannot afford insurance for their own families. How can you address this problem without adding to the already-steep cost of health care?

LIEBERMAN: Yes, I'll tell you one way we could do it -- and I want to respond to Howard Dean's outrageous statement on middle-class tax cuts -- that is to protect the middle-class tax cuts that he wants to repeal and that a lot of us Democrats fought for in Congress over the last three years.

I don't know which is worse, that he wants to repeal the tax cuts, or that he won't admit that they ever existed.

You ask the average middle-class person -- here in Iowa, average family of four saved $1,800 a year under those tax cuts. They need that money to help pay for their insurance. ...

I know what you're thinking: "Anger" is the coolest last name ever. And you're right. But what about Lieberman's response?

I suspect that they're both correct. It's quite possible that 60% of "us" (I doubt Dean is one of them) got a $304 tax cut. And it's probably true that the average Iowa family of four saved $1,800. But you can't represent any sufficiently complex policy decision with a single number like this. The question is: do most people have the time or the inclination to research what's really going on? I doubt it.

So Far

Having returned from my first shopping trip of '04, I can tell you that this year's funniest generic name for a name-brand breakfast cereal is Giant's version of Crispix, called "Crispy Hexagons." I recommend that their Cheerios knock-off be rechristened "Toroidal Oat Cereal."

On another note entirely, this is from today's Post:

Death Unexplained

The death of 34-year-old singer-songwriter Elliott Smith will remain an open case for the time being. Smith was found in the kitchen of his Los Angeles apartment Oct.21, dead of knife wounds to the chest. In a statement this week, the Los Angeles County coroner's office said it was unable to say conclusively whether the wounds were self-inflicted, so an official cause of death has not been filed.

Police had initially declared his death a suicide; Smith had a history of depression and drug abuse. But because toxicology tests found no trace of drugs in Smith's system, and with the coroner's inconclusive report, authorities say they will have to reexamine the suicide theory.