No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for September, 2011

September 30, 2011

Mexico City – 2-year contracts are good for both cell phones and marriages

by @ 7:08. Filed under Miscellaneous.

I’m actually surprised that California isn’t the first one out of the gate with the latest effort to make marriage no more consequential than a cell-phone contract. From Reuters:

Mexico City lawmakers want to help newlyweds avoid the hassle of divorce by giving them an easy exit strategy: temporary marriage licenses.

Leftists in the city’s assembly — who have already riled conservatives by legalizing gay marriage — proposed a reform to the civil code this week that would allow couples to decide on the length of their commitment, opting out of a lifetime.

The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits.

Why 2 years? It’s because in Mexico City, the average marriage lasts as long as a cell-phone contract. There’s no word on what the early cancellation fee will be, or if it will be pro-rated if one makes it past the first year.

September 29, 2011

Researchers hate Eggs (or at least the runny kind)

by @ 21:13. Filed under Health.

(H/T – Hot Air Headlines)

The Daily Mail reports on a Harvard study that claims that eating as few as 3 eggs a week increases the risk for prostate cancer by 80%.

We’re all gonna die!!!!

Seriously, this came a few years after the British Heart Foundation dropped their recommendation to stop eating more than 3 eggs a week. It also comes immediately before a report from the NRE Institute that consuming a copious amount of well-cooked eggs actually improves your health.

In Abrahamson’s world, 1 > 4

by @ 11:26. Filed under Lawgivers-In-Black, Politics - Wisconsin.

(H/T – Kevin Binversie)

Wisconsin Supreme Court “Chief” Justice (only because she’s been around the longest) Shirley Abrahamson tried to seize total control of the Supreme Court Wednesday by declaring a majority of four justices not a quorum unless they’re meeting on a schedule set by her. Fortunately, the motion was tabled without a vote.

Justices Annette Ziegler and Patience Roggensack were far more “diplomatic” in their reactions to this power grab than I am (it helps that, unlike the two justices I don’t have to work with Abrahamson), but Roggensack said she was “blindsided” by it.

Kanavas out, Thompson sucking money back into donors’ wallets

by @ 8:31. Filed under Politics - National, Politics - Wisconsin.

Former state Senator Ted Kanavas announced he won’t be entering the race to be the GOP nominee for the soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat currently held by Herb “Nobody’s Senator” Kohl (who apparently decided owning an NBA team during a lockout that may well last the entire season before the election might be a political liability). I can say the decision is mildly disappointing, and the reason for the decision is more than mildly disappointing. Quoting from the linked press release (via WisPolitics):

It is evident that if former Governor Thompson enters the race, his entry would tie up many resources. Privately, many donors stated that they would refrain from supporting anyone out of respect for Thompson’s 45 year political legacy. Those factors ultimately led me to my decision.

News flash to those donors; the Democrats won’t reciprocate.

September 27, 2011

The opposite of PlaceboCare

by @ 19:30. Filed under Health Care Reform.

Those of you who have been paying attention to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI, and my Congressman) know the main parts of his ideas on health care. At the Hoover Institute today, he added a new twist – a full shift of the tax credits from the employer to the employees. You can read the speech or listen to it and a question-and-answer session…

I’ll give some highlights, along with the obligatory commentary:

Today, I will attempt to make the case for optimism. Specifically, I come bearing three pieces of good news.

The first piece of good news is this: The urgent need to repeal and replace the President’s health-care law, coupled with the urgent need to deal with the drivers of our debt, will present us with an unavoidable time for choosing, allowing us to confront health-care inflation head-on.

Ryan isn’t counting on the Supreme Court using the lack of severability in PlaceboCare to overturn the entirety of it by finding the individual insurance mandate unconstitutional, even though it is likely the Supreme Court will decide on that in the next 9 months (hmmm, what else in the health care field takes 9 months?). Instead, he’s not letting this crisis go to waste.

…And yet, across the federal landscape, choice and competition are undermined by poorly designed programs and tax policies.

In Medicare, the government reimburses all providers of care according to a one-size-fits-all formula, even if the quality of the care they provide is poor and the cost is high. This top-down delivery system exacerbates waste, because none of the primary stakeholders has a strong incentive to deliver the best-quality care for the lowest cost.

If you’re using Medicare, good luck finding a doctor because of this.

In Medicaid, a flawed federal-state matching formula is blowing out state budgets. There is no limit on the federal government’s matching contributions to state spending, so state governments spend most of their energy devising ways to maximize how much they can get from the federal government, rather than focusing on delivering high quality, cost-effective coverage for their most vulnerable citizens.

A prime example is former governor Jim “Craps” Doyle’s (WEAC/HoChunk-For Sale) increase in the hospital bed tax. It was sold as allowing Wisconsin to suck more money out of the federal teat.

Beyond these two programs, our current tax code provides additional fuel for runway health care inflation. Under current law, employer-sponsored health insurance plans are entirely exempt from taxation, regardless of how much an individual contributes to their policy.

This tilts the compensation scale toward benefits, which are tax-free, and away from higher wages, which are taxable. It also provides ways for high-income earners to artificially reduce their tax-able income by purchasing high-cost health coverage – which in turn can fuel the overuse of health services.

There’s countless examples of people taking and hangong onto jobs they don’t really want, or not taking jobs they’re suited for, just because of the presence of or lack of employer-sponsored health insurance. Elsewhere in the speech, Ryan pointed out the current scheme of insurance decouples the amount visibly paid to the proviers from the actual cost.

Why the POR Economy is not recovering

by @ 11:01. Filed under Economy Held Hostage, Politics - National.

(H/T – Monty)

This is a few months old, but this piece from Rob Arnott relayed by John Mauldin explains why we’re headed into a double-dip recession (all emphasis in the original):

Consider a simple thought experiment. Let’s suppose the government wants to dazzle us with 5% growth next quarter (equivalent to 20% annualized growth!). If they borrow an additional 5% of GDP in new additional debt and spend it immediately, this magnificent GDP growth is achieved! We would all see it as phony growth, sabotaging our national balance sheet—right? Maybe not. We are already borrowing and spending 2% to 3% each quarter, equivalent to 10% to 12% of GDP, and yet few observers have decried this as artificial GDP growth because we’re not accustomed to looking at the underlying GDP before deficit spending!

From this perspective, real GDP seems unreal, at best. GDP that stems from new debt—mainly deficit spending—is phony: it is debt-financed consumption, not prosperity. Isn’t GDP, after excluding net new debt obligations, a more relevant measure? Deficit spending is supposed to trigger growth in the remainder of the economy, net of deficit-financed spending, which we can call our “Structural GDP.” If Structural GDP fails to grow as a consequence of our deficits, then deficit spending has failed in its sole and singular purpose.

By this measure, the economy is no better off than we were in 1998. Indeed, our soverign debt problem is even worse than it appears. From the conclusion:

Even our calculation of the national debt burden (debt/GDP) needs rethinking. Is the family that overextends correct in measuring their debt burden relative to their income plus any new debt that they have accumulated in the past year? Isn’t it more meaningful to compute debt relative to Structural GDP, net of new borrowing?! Our National Debt, poised to cross 100% of GDP this fall, is set to reach 112% of Structural GDP at that same time, even without considering off-balance-sheet debt. Will Rogers put it best: “When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

September 22, 2011

Fox Presidential Debate Live/Drunk blog

by @ 12:10. Filed under 2012 Presidential Contest.

Join us tonight for the Fox Presidential debate. You can join sober or drunk, your choice. My guess is that even if you join sober, you’re going to want to drink by the end of it. I’ll try to get this going about 15 minutes before the official go time.

September 12, 2011

CNN Teaparty Debate

by @ 15:22. Filed under Politics.

I know there’s football as well but there’s a debate tonight. I’ll be watching it (with football on the other channel). Join us as CNN runs up a whole new series of questions intended to embarrass Republican candidates!

September 11, 2011

9/11 Hot Read – Allahpundit remembers 9/11

by @ 7:27. Filed under History.

Editor’s note: 2 years ago, Allahpundit tweeted out his day 10 years ago. Back then, he lived in lower Manhattan, close to the World Trade Center, close enough that he heard the planes hit the twin towers. Once again, I’ll repost them because it still is as moving as when I saw them show up in my timeline live.

Eight years ago, I remember opening my eyes at 8:46 a.m. in my downtown Manhattan apartment because…
…I thought a truck had crashed in the street outside
I remember pacing my apartment for the next 15 minutes thinking, stupidly, that a gas line might have been hit in the North Tower…
…and then I heard another explosion. I hope no one ever hears anything like it.
All I can say to describe it is: Imagine the sound of thousands of Americans screaming on a city street
It was unbelievable, almost literally
I remember being on the sidewalk and there was an FBI agent saying he was cordoning off the street…
…and then, the next day, when I went back for my cats, they told me I might see bodies lying in front of my apartment building (I didn’t)
We held a memorial service in October for my cousin’s husband, who was “missing” but not really…
He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. They found a piece of his ribcage in the rubble not too long afterwards.
This is the guy who conspired to murder him: http://is.gd/38h7y
Had a friend from the high school speech and debate team who disappeared from the 105th floor
Had another friend of a friend who worked on the 80th floor or so, married six weeks before the attack…
Speculation is that he was right in the plane’s path, and was killed instantly when it plowed through the building
Did a bit of legal work for a couple whose son worked in the upper floors. Was dating someone else up there at the time…
I was told that she managed to call her parents while they were trapped up there and that the call “was not good”
Never found out if it was cut off by the building collapsing or not
I remember opening my eyes at 8:46 a.m. thinking “I hope that was just a pothole.” Then I heard a guy outside my window say, “Oh shit”
Opened the window, looked to my left, saw huge smoke coming out of the WTC
Left at around 9:30, decided to walk uptown thinking that the buildings would never collapse and that…
…I’d be back in my apartment by the next night. I never went back. It was closed off until December.
I remember thinking when I was a few blocks away that the towers might collapse, and so I walked faster…
…although I sneered at myself later for thinking that might be true and for being a coward. Although not for long.
To this day, you can find photos of thousands of people congregated in the blocks surrounding the Towers, seemingly…
…waiting for them to fall that day
When I got to midtown, rumors were that Camp David and the Sears Tower had also been destroyed. I remember looking around…
…and thinking that we had to get out of Manhattan, as this might be some pretext to get us into the street and hit us with some germ
I callled my dad — and somehow miraculously got through — and told him I was alive, then headed for the 59th street bridge
To this day, the scariest memory is being on that bridge, looking at the Towers smoking in the distance,
and thinking maybe the plotters had wired the bridge too to explode beneath us while we were crossing it.
I remember talking to some guy on the bridge that we’d get revenge, but…
…you had to see the smoke coming from the Towers in the distance. It was like a volcano
I remember being down there two months later. There was a single piece of structure…
…maybe five stories tall of the lattice-work still standing. It looked like a limb of a corpse sticking up out of the ground.
They knocked it down soon after
At my office, which I had just joined, I was told that…
…some people had seen the jumpers diving out the windows to escape the flames that morning
There was a video online, posted maybe two years ago, shot from the hotel across the street,,,
…and it showed roughly 10-12 bodies flattened into panackes lying in the central plaza
Maybe it’s still online somewhere
You have to see it to understand, though. You get a sense of it from the Naudet brothers documentary hearing…
…the explosions as the bodies land in the plaza, but seeing it and hearing it are two different things
I remember after I got over the bridge into Queens, I heard a noise overheard…
…that I’d never heard before. It was an F-15, on patrol over New York. Very odd sound. A high-pitched wheeze.
I remember on Sept. 12, when I got on the train to go downtown and try to get my cats out of the apartment…
…the Village was utterly deserted. No one on the streets. Like “28 Days Later” if you’ve seen that
We made it to a checkpoint and the cop said go no further, until my mom intervened. Then he took pity…
…and agreed to let me downtown IF I agreed that any exposure to bodies lying in the streets was my own fault.
Didn’t see any bodies, but I did see soldiers, ATF, FBI, and so on. The ground was totally covered by white clay…
…which I knew was formed by WTC dust plus water from the FDNY. It look like a moonscape.
There was a firefighter at the intersection and I flagged him down and asked if I could borrow his flashlight, since…
…all buildings downtown had no power. He gave me a pen flashlight.
The doors to my building at Park Place were glass but had kicked in, presumably by the FDNY, to see if there were…
…survivors inside. When I got in there, all power was out. No elevators, no hall lights…
…I had to feel my way to the hall and make my way up to my apartment on the third floor by feeling my way there…
…When I got there, the cats were alive. There was WTC dust inside the apartment, but…
…for whatever reason, I had closed the windows before I left to walk uptown that day, so dust was minimal. I loaded them…
…into the carrier and took them back to Queens. That was the last I could get into the apartment until December 2001,…
…and then it was only to get in, take whatever belongings were salvageable (i.e. not computer), and get out. I lived…
in that apartment from 7/2001 to 9/2001, but given the diseases longtime residents have had…
…I’m lucky I decided to move
My only other significant memory is being in the lobby of the apartment building on 9/11…
…and trying to console some woman who lived there who said her father worked on the lower floors of the WTC. I assume…
…he made it out alive, but she was hysterical as of 9:30 that a.m. Who could blame her?
I do remember feeling embarrassed afterwards that…
…I initially thought the smoke coming out of the North Tower was due to a fire or something, but…
…it’s hard to explain the shock of realizing you’re living through a historical event while you’re living through it.
For months afterwards, I tried to tell people how I thought maybe the Towers…
…were going to be hit by six or seven or eight planes in succession. Which sounds nuts, but once you’re in the moment…
…and crazy shit is happening, you don’t know how crazy that script is about to get.
When I left at 9:30, I thought more planes were coming.
I left because I thought, “Well, if these planes hit the building the right way, it could fall and land on mine.”\
I remember getting to 57th Street and asking some dude, “What happened?”
And he said, “They collapsed” and I couldn’t believe both of them had gone down. Even after the planes hit…
…I remembered that the Empire State Building had taken a hit from a military plane during WWII and still stood tall
So it was never a serious possibility that the WTC would collapse. I assumed…
…that the FDNY would get up there, put out the fire, and the WTC would be upright but with gigantic holes in it
It took an hour for the first tower to go down, 90 minutes for the second.
Even now, despite the smoke, I’m convinced most of the people trapped at the top were alive…
…and waiting, somehow, for a rescue. The couple whose legal case I worked for told me that…
…their son and his GF contacted her father very shortly before the collapse. Which makes sense. As much smoke as there was…
…if you have a five-story hole in the wall to let air in to breathe, you’re going to linger on.
So for many people, the choice probably quickly became: Hang on, endure the smoke, or jump
If you listen to the 911 calls, which I advise you not to do, some of the chose “hang on”
Although needless to say, if you ever saw the Towers…
…you know how dire things must have been up there to make anyone think the better solution was “jump”
They were ENORMOUS.
Another weird memory: Shortly after I got my apartment in lower Manhattan, on Park Place…
…I remember taking my brother to see “The Others,” which had just opened.
And afterwards I remember taking him up to the rooftop of my building to admire the Towers. According to Wikipedia…
“The Others” opened on August 10, 2001, so this must have been within 10 days or so afterwards. Very eerie.
And I remember we also went to Morton’s and Borders right inside the WTC complex to celebrate my new job
That Borders was gutted, needless to say, on 9/11. You could see the frame of the building in the WTC lobby after the attack
I was reading magazines in there the week or two before
One of the weirdest feelings, which I’m sure everyone can share, is that I remember distinctly feeling…
…in the month or two before the attack that “important” news no longer existed. It was all inane bullshit about…
…shark attacks and Gary Condit and overaged pitchers in the Little League World Series. To this day…
…I try never to grumble about a slow news day because the alternative is horrifyingly worse
After the attack, maybe a month after, I remember going to see “Zoolander” in Times Square and…
…coming up out of the subway tunnel having the distinct fear that…
…the sky would light up and a mushroom cloud would appear instantly above my head in my lost moment of consciousness. No joke. In fact…
..I ended up going to bed around 6:30 p.m. for maybe three months after 9/11.
Even when I ended up working downtown for years after that, with a luxurious view of upper Manhattan from the top floors…
…I always feared looking out the window because I was paranoid that at that precise moment, the flash would go off…
…and that’d be the last thing I see. And in fact, for a moment in 2003 when the power went out city-wide,
…I did think that was what was happening. The wages of 9/11.
I leave you with this, my very favorite film about the WTC. If you’re a New Yorker, have a hanky handy. No. 3 is golden http://is.gd/38qsT
One more note: If you’ve never seen a photo of the smoke coming from the Trade Center after the collapse, find one.
Watching it from the 59th bridge, it looked like a volcano. There was so much smoke, it was indescribable. Just *erupting* from the wreckage

For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the photo AP was talking about, here’s one from the United States Coast Guard (hosted on Flickr):

September 7, 2011

Clueless – Milwaukee County Executive edition

by @ 10:18. Filed under Politics - Milwaukee County.

Charlie Sykes received a letter from County Board Supervisor Joe Sanfelippo on the dysfunctional budgeting process that is happening under County Executive Chris Abele:

Charlie:

I heard you talking about Abele on your show today and how he will say one thing and do another. There is another problem with his leadership at the county; he has none.

Everyday I get complaints from department heads that tell me they are getting no direction whatsoever from the County Executive or his staff. Last week I had a meeting with the leadership at the War Memorial. They stated that by now, they usually would have met with the Exec’s staff to go over line by line their budget requests for the next year. That is just standard operating procedure. Abele will be presenting his budget to the board on September 29th. He or anyone from his staff has yet to return a phone call let alone meet regarding the War Memorial budget request.

I have heard that there are department heads that have yet to meet him at all. …

One of the issues he spoke of during his campaign was fixing the problems at the Mental Health Hospital. I have met with his Chief of Staff twice to discuss ideas for reform and there seems to be no interest in doing anything.

There is a real vacuum of leadership right now at the county. Even the career staffers who disliked Walker with a passion said at least when Scott was there they had a clear direction to follow. That is lacking. His inexperience at running anything is showing through and the board is smelling blood in the water. They feel they can lead him around by the nose.

This is going to be an interesting budget season. Taxpayers beware!

Joe

I wonder if the voters in Milwaukee County realized they were electing Cher Horowitz back in April…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXPCJyRYFuY[/youtube]

September 6, 2011

An Open Letter to National Conservative Groups from Wisconsin’s Conservative Bloggers

by @ 6:00. Filed under Politics - Wisconsin.

This morning, several bloggers released a letter to the heads of the Club for Growth and Senate Conservatives Fund asking them to reconsider their early endorsement of former Congressman Mark Neumann in the Republican primary for the US Senate seat being vacated by Herb Kohl:

To: Chris Chocola, Club for Growth
The Honorable Jim DeMint, junior Senator from the Great State of South Carolina

It is with great disappointment that we have learned of the efforts of some conservatives on the national level to try to dictate to Wisconsin conservatives their choice for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Democratic Senator Herb Kohl. This is a tremendous opportunity for Wisconsinites to elect a second conservative senator worthy of holding the office, and one that Wisconsin conservatives will take very seriously. This is not only a choice of ideology but of character, and it is our responsibility to bring Mark Neumann’s lack of character to your attention.

While we do not question Neumann’s past contributions to conservatism while he was a Congressman, his actions during last year’s campaign are completely unbecoming of a conservative candidate.

We respectfully request the national conservative groups and individuals to take a second look at their endorsement of Neumann. We ask that since many of them missed the opportunity to come to Wisconsin during the recent battles over collective bargaining for state employees and the recall elections, they come to Wisconsin now to talk to true Wisconsin conservatives to find out what they think of Neumann before attempting to foist their choice upon Wisconsin.

We do not write this under direction or duress from any candidate, potential candidate, or candidate’s campaign. We write this under the knowledge that as the primary for United State Senate commences in earnest, we will likely go our separate ways and support any number of candidates. That is our right as Americans.

If the past election in Wisconsin has shown national conservatives anything, it is to trust in the faith of Badger State conservative activists. We had the foresight to supply the movement with current leaders and rock stars like Janesville Congressman Paul Ryan, Ashland Congressman Sean Duffy, Green Bay Congressman Reid Ribble, Governor Scott Walker, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, and even Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.
That is just in the past two years, and we assure you, there are plenty more where they came from.

Thank you,

Owen Robinson
Blogger, Boots and Sabers, since 2003
West Bend, WI

Kevin Binversie
Blogger, Lakeshore Laments, since 2003
St. Francis, WI

James Wigderson,
Blogger, Wigderson Library & Pub, since 2005
Waukesha, WI

Steve Eggleston
Blogger, No Runny Eggs, since 2005
Oak Creek, WI

Patrick Dorwin
Blogger, Badger Blogger, since 2004
Milwaukee, WI

Tim Gray
Blogger, UseYourGrayMatter.com, since 2010
La Crosse, WI

Ben Froland
Blogger, BenFroland.com, since 2009
Neenah, WI

In my case, my beef with Neumann is strictly about the conduct of his gubernatorial campaign, and specifcally with respect to CFG and SCF, his repudiation of the First Amendment while campaigning outside the Democrat Party of Wisconsin convention in 2010. Meanwhile, my beef with CFG and SCF is their early endorsement, especially with the likelyhood of several other candidates besides Neumann and Thompson that would be deserving of at least a look by those groups.

September 5, 2011

APP Palmetto Freedom Forum liveblog

by @ 12:44. Filed under 2012 Presidential Contest.

This effort from American Principles Project, starting at 2 pm Central, promises to be a rather unique experience. They invited all the GOP candidates, both actual and potential, who had at least a 5% average in a recent version of RealClearPolitics’ average of polls to appear one at a time before Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and APP founder Robert George. Since the potential candidates who qualified, Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani, didn’t respond to the invite, and Texas governor Rick Perry had to go back to Texas last-minute to deal with the wildfires in his state, that means we’ll get Rep. Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rep. Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney.

The forum will be on both CNN and Townhall with the latter also carrying a post-forum show.

Do try to be on your best behavior this time around; I’ll try not to swear even when dealing with Paul. Besides, we’ve got a full-throated drunkblog of MSNBC’s Wednesday debate ready to go. The “old” liveblog method of often-paraphrased questions in italics, in-line answers in plain text and in-line comments in parentheses will apply for as long as I can keep up. As always, CoverItLive will be handling the hosting, which means that you shouldn’t need to refresh to get the latest.

September 4, 2011

Tech notes – September 2011 edition

by @ 14:00. Filed under The Blog.

There’s a couple of them:

– If you’re using Internet Explorer 9, you’ll notice the Twitter widgets are inoperative. That is a Twitter fuck-up; they changed something in the serving Javascript without checking to see if it worked in IE9. While they have the bug fixed as it relates to the actual Twitter service, they won’t be fixing the widgets until Monday at the earliest. Sorry about that; in the interim, you can follow Shoebox here and me here (or you could use another browser).

– For those blogs that still have the dead-10-months-ago Blogrolling.com blogrolls on them, some enterprising cybersquatter bought the domain and started forcing a page change to a spammish ad page through the Javascript that used to serve the blogrolls. If you still have one of those widgets on there, GET IT OFF YOUR BLOG!

Live-blogging schedule – Monday and Wednesday Presidential debates

by @ 12:55. Filed under 2012 Presidential Contest.

Due to scheduling conflicts, we won’t be bringing you Obama’s speech on Thursday. However, we do have two opportunities for you to jump on a live-blog this week:

  • Monday at 2 pm (Central), CNN and Townhall.com will have a rather unique debate/forum from South Carolina put on by the American Principles Project. Instead of reporters asking cattle-call questions, they’re going to have the APP founder, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) grill those candidates who have gained some traction one at a time.
  • Wednesday at 7 pm, MSNBC will have what promises to be a train wreck, and an opportunity to drink heavily.

Stop on in for one or both. There may or may not be salty language on Monday, but I will guarantee salty language on Wednesday (known by TEMS chatizens as F-Bomb Wednesday).

September 1, 2011

New NRE Poll – What should NBC do with the NFL pregame and the Obama jobs speech

by @ 14:21. Filed under Media, NRE Polls, Politics - National, Sports.

In case you’ve been in a cave the last 24 hours, President Obama tried and failed to upstage a long-scheduled GOP Presidential debate by scheduling a speech before a joint session of Congress for 7 pm (all times Central as that’s where I am) September 7, which “just happened” to be the precise date and time said debate is to start over on MSNBC. After House Speaker John Boehner, citing logistical issues with House votes scheduled for 5:30 pm 9/7 and a claimed 3-hour requirement for a security sweep to “sanitize” the House chamber, suggested the following day, the White House jumped at that.

The new date of September 8, however, poses, at least potentially, a different conflict – one with the start of the NFL season, with the 13-time (and defending) World Champion Green Bay Packers hosting the New Orleans Saints. NBC, which is to carry the game starting at 7:30 pm, also has a 1-hour pregame scheduled for 6:30 pm. As of roughly a half-hour ago, CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller reported that, while the start time of the speech had not been finalized, it would be done before the 7:30 pm kickoff. Earlier reports had widely speculated that the speech would begin at 6:30 pm.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, before it became clear (or at least as clear as the White House gets) that the speech would be done before kickoff, that Steve Wexler, vice president of radio and TV operations for Journal Broadcast Group, had Milwaukee’s NBC affiliate, WTMJ-TV, request that, in the event there was a conflict between the game itself and the speech, NBC make both feeds available to the NBC affiliates and that they be allowed to choose which feed to air where, and that WTMJ, if given the choice, would air the game on the main channel and the debate on a digital subchannel.

There hasn’t been any discussion regarding a potential pre-game conflict, which opens up the door for an NRE Poll. Do note that I am NOT asking what you would rather watch, or even what feed you would like seen on what part of the broadcast spectrum controlled by your local NBC affiliate. With that in mind, have at it.

What should NBC do with the NFL opener pre-game and the Obama jobs speech?

Up to 1 answer(s) was/were allowed

  • Bin the speech, tell the White House that they're just one network of many and that their cable news channel MSNBC is covering it anyway. (63%, 38 Vote(s))
  • Offer both to the local affiliates, let all of them choose what to air on what channel. (33%, 20 Vote(s))
  • Bin the pre-game and tell the NFL that they're just not that important. (3%, 2 Vote(s))
  • Offer both to the local affiliates, let the affiliates in the Packers and Saints markets choose what to air on what channel, force the rest to air the speech on the main channel. (0%, 0 Vote(s))

Total Voters: 60

Loading ... Loading ...

Thursday Fun Read – WSJ’s “How to Measure a Storm’s Fury One Breakfast at a Time”

by @ 9:03. Filed under Business, Weather.

The Wall Street Journal has your post-Irene feel-good story of the day – how the Waffle House recovers so quickly from a disaster like a hurricane. In fact, FEMA director Craig Fugate uses Waffle House as a gauge on how bad a disaster is.

I’ll give you how the Weldon, North Carolina Waffle House dealt with Irene as a tease to get you over to WSJ.com to read the entire thing:

The company began tracking Irene 10 days ago, moving ice and eggs to staging sites outside the potential damage zone.

On Friday, the company’s mobile command center—an RV named EM-50 after Bill Murray’s urban-assault vehicle in the 1981 movie “Stripes”—headed north from the Norcross, Ga., headquarters.

Power went off at the Waffle House just off Interstate 95 in Weldon on Saturday evening as Irene churned through. The restaurant kept serving until it got too dark for the grill cook to see when the food was cooked, then it shut down.

It reopened the next day at dawn. The overhead lights and walk-in freezer weren’t working, but the gas grill was. The cooks boiled water on the grill, then poured it through the coffee machine, over beans ground before the power went out. The district manager, Chris Barnes, handed employees copies of an emergency grill-only menu. The fare included ham-and-egg sandwiches for $3.15 and quarter-pound hamburgers for $2.70. Servers nudged customers to order sausage instead of bacon, because four sausage patties fit on the grill for every two slices of bacon.

By 9 a.m., cars were lining up to get into the parking lot. At 10 a.m., the power came back on, the ceramic waffle irons were plugged in and waffles were added to the menu.

[No Runny Eggs is proudly powered by WordPress.]