The Daily Grill

Zzz-mail

President Obama yesterday announced a two-year pay freeze for civilian federal employees yesterday. ALL federal civvies. That's going to motivate people. If you thought those lines at the post office moved slowly during the holidays before, you might want to think about bringing a sleeping bag and pup tent this year.

Backscatter Blowback

To say the Transportation Security Administration has taken some heat from their new draconian full body backscatter X-ray screening at the nation's airports putting it mildly. John Pistole, chief of the TSA, has gotten toasty enough from the flames that he's "rethinking current policy", according to an article in today's NYTimes.

Frankly, after making us put everything into plastic bins and taking off our shoes, I'm not sure what options they have left. It's down to racial profiling, random body cavity searches or issuing all TSA personnel their own pair of X-Ray Specs.

Personally, I find the latter to be less intrusive and chances are Middle Eastern terrorists have never seen them and don't know that it's just a gimmick from an old comic book ad...

Duck n' Cover Redux

It's beginning to look more and more like the Republican'ts are determined to turn America into some kind of fabulous Wayback Machine. And not just back to the good ol' days of Bush 2.

First we had the formation of the Tea Party. Now it looks like we're heading for a modern day revival of the Cold War: Senate GOP leader Jon Kyl (rhymes with "kill", apparently), has moved to block a vote in the Democrap-controlled Senate so that a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia will fail to pass. Dubbed the "New Start" initiative, the treaty would have called for a reduction in nukes on both sides as well as jump-starting mutual inspections, which came to a stop last year.

In the latest example of Bizarro politics, it seems what's good for America is what used to be bad for America.

Slow Burn

The cigarette manufacturers — Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco, R.J. Reynolds, and the like — find themselves fighting against ever-toughening anti-smoking regulations around the world. Here in the U.S., they will soon require warning messages on each pack of smokes that take up 50% of the real estate and include graphics of the harmful effects smoking can cause. In Australia there's a movement to restrict packs to only appear in white or brown with no graphics that might make the coffin nails appealing to buyers.

Three of the 18 potential new warning graphics the FDA are considering

This week there is a conference in Uruguay with health officials from 178 nations who are looking to draft a global anti-smoking treaty. (Ironically, Phillip Morris is suing host county Uruguay for have anti-smoking regulations that are too excessive.)

As insidious and addicting as smoking is, one can certainly understand the fix that the smoking giants find themselves in. Smoking is on the decline around the world and it's not so much because of the success of anti-smoking messages. It's because cigarettes is the only industry on Earth that, when successful, is killing off its best customers.

Shuffling The Deck

With the midterm elections behind us, the Democraps have lost the power of the House of Representatives. The bad news is that the Republican'ts can now stalemate anything coming out of the Demo-controlled Senate. The good news is that Nancy Pelosi is no longer Shrieker of the House. The mediocre news is that our government, regardless of who is in office, remains a bloated lump of ineffectiveness that seems unable to get the country headed in the right direction.