So, the fat numbers are in, and the winners are: Americans. a billion gazillion pounds of excess flab hang about them, every state now has more than 15 percent of adults obese. It's ridiculous -- and not particularly surprising, really, when you look at what's for dinner around here. Or perhaps it's the stuff people are having between meals. So what? Well, the CDC has a solution:

We need intensive, comprehensive and ongoing efforts to address obesity

Yeah, right, Doctor Frieden. Let's spend lots and lots of taxpayer dollars "addressing" the fact that people are scarfing down empty calories and not exercising enough. Really? Do we really need to institutionalize this? How about we flip it on its head -- instead of encouraging people to eat less, how about we punish them for eating too much? What if their health insurance premium was directly linked to their BMI? How about we make it harder for them to drive everywhere by raising the cost of gas significantly? How about we do what New York and California have been considering: a tax on all the excess sugar going into our diet? Make that 128 Oz big gulp of Mountain Dew cost $9.95 and I'm sure people would have second thoughts... Maybe we stop subsidizing corn growers in the midwest so they're not compelled to crank out gillions of gallons of high-fructose corn syrup every year, which in turn needs an outlet in the marketplace. What if they started growing real fucking food for a change?

I think it's great to hear Doctor Dietz from the CDC declare that "We need to change our communities into places where healthy eating and active living are the easiest path." It's a no-brainer. But when our communities have zero dollars to do so, and our government continues to spend billions each year ensuring that precisely the opposite takes place, it's not going to happen fast enough. Just as with his tepid response to the need for a genuine stimulus package, Obama will no doubt dig deep into our wallets and come up with some billon-dollar plan that'll put some lipstick on this pig. But he won't touch the farmers, he won't touch the fast food industry, he won't touch gas prices, and he won't do anything significant about infrastructure or health care costs that might be a substantial enough incentive to really put people on a path towards health.

Dieting is *so* fucking easy: take in fewer calories than you need, and you'll lose weight. Burn more calories than you take in, and you'll lose weight. Fewer calories in means less food or leaner food. More calories burned means more activity or more intense activity. That's about all there is to it. But in order to justify their bloated budgets, dozens of government agencies will now set in motion elaborate schemes costing millions to plan and promote those four simple concepts -- but of course, they won't even be willing to spell it out so clearly, because they have to suck up to the meat packers, and the dairy boys, and the car lobby, and Nestle and Mars and ConAgra and all the others who are growing rich while we grow fat.

From the department of "Why Am I Paying Your Salary?":

The FBI spends time and money trying to get Wikipedia to remove the FBI logo from an entry. Really, now. The FBI deems it necessary to have a lawyer on staff who is either clueless enough or so poorly instructed about his priorities that he finds it necessary to send out a cease-and-desist letter to Wikipedia? That's nice. No wonder the 9/11 bombers could saunter along and take flying lessons to their heart's content -- the brain trust of the FBI apparently has a rather alternative approach to what constitues a threat...

Wankers. (And, no, this is a non-profit site where I get to rant and rave about random shit; the 1^st Amendment says I can do so, and it also says I can post your stupid logo here if I so desire. Bite me.)

AP runs a story highlighting the harsh realities of state budgets: everyone out there is slashing stuff, and pre-K is such an easy target. As several of the quoted experts point out, pre-K levels the playing field for poor kids and saves us all money in the long run by bringing kids up to speed who'd otherwise need special attention at great expense later.

But you can't spend what you don't have, and as states are being bled dry and the federal government has yet to see a weapons system it doesn't feel it must have, there's a real problem. And nothing puts it into harsher perspective than hearing a no doubt well-intentioned bureaucrat from the Dept. of Ed make the claim:

The key, said Jacqueline Jones with the U.S. Department of Education's early learning office, is making states believe that pre-k is part of the education package rather than something they do only during flush times.

Yes, Jacqueline, that's very nice. But while your bosses on The Hill are busy blowing billions of dollars on toys the Pentagon doesn't even want, the states don't have the luxury of spending money they don't have. I don't think the problem is states "believing" in pre-K, I think it's a question of hard budgetary realities. I believe the word we're looking for here is "unfunded mandate": if you insist that pre-K is a key part of education, then put your money where your mouth is. And if you can't get the money to fund eductation because it was all spent on depleted uranium land mines in Afghanistan or some equally worthy cause, then the time has perhaps come to question the priorities of our hippie-in-chief and his fellow peacenicks. With his approval rating dropping like a bunker buster on the job, maybe he should revisit his approach to hope & change.

Of course, that's assuming that anyone in the Administration or on The Hill actually genuinely sincerely really gives a shit about the educational prospects of the increasing number of increasingly marginalized poor kids in this country. While they shriek in horror in mock concern for the unborn, The Republicans have yet to see an actual kid that they cared about -- kids don't vote, they cost money, they have to be dragged to church, they listen to inappropriate music -- what's there to like about them? And since most of the current crop of Democrats are really just Republicans who don't have the courage to come out of the closet and switch parties, I think it's safe to say that the kids are shit out of luck on this one.

From the department of "fuck you, we're the law around here" come two nuggets that make you go, "say, what?!?"

First, the ACLU has been forced to sue the Hartford police department in an attempt to find out what exactly happened when the local law enforment wizards decided to go full metal jacket on a sick man in his own home. Oh, the fact that he was black in a screamingly white neighborhood might possible have something to do with it, but if the Hartford cops have their way, the public will be kept nicely in the dark. They're hiding behind vague pencil pusher rules about state investigations -- however, the state police claim the investigation is completed, but the state attorney general says she hasn't seen the final report. How very convenient for them all that they can play musical chairs and make the unpleasant facts go away... except, not. Thanks to the ACLU and the interest from a couple of our local papers, it's pretty clear that the Hartford cops can squirm all they want, but they're eventually going to have to come clean and face up to their racial profiling and/or ineptitude -- whichever applies.

And so help us, Jim Douglas' equally inept Commissioner of Ed, Armando Vilaseca, is trying some of the same deceptive tactics with regards to a much-anticipated list of district budget cuts for the coming year. Yes, he says, the list is public, but no, he says, the public can't have it. That's nice, real nice. Again, the ACLU is having to throw some weight around to make it clear to these inept clowns that as civil servants they are obliged to obey the law, and Vermont has a pretty solid public records law. Oh, and as a completely unrelated aside, who the hell can have any confidence in a Commissioner of Education that uses the word "inputted":

This has been such a huge, huge undertaking, and we’re sending it to schools and having them look at the information to make sure we inputted all the information from the districts correctly

Really, Armando? You satted in front of your little screen an inputted all the data, and now you're afraid you wronged something? For fuck's sake; no wonder our children's isn't learning...

Kudos to the Times/Argus, the Rutland Herald, the Valley News and not least the ACLU in Vermont who are fighting an uphill battle against teh stupid and arrogant civil servants whose salaries we pay, but whose services we probably really could do quite well without...

(h/t Jim @ GMD)