Big Coffee Weighs In

The Starbucks CEO is on a crusade:

"We are better than this." That's the message Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wants Congress and America to hear, according to full page ads in the New York Times and USA Today, where Schultz invites "concerned Americans" to take part in a teleconference tonight, to address what he calls the "pervasive failure of leadership in Washington."

What's got him so hot under the collar? Schultz has made no secret lately of his disgust with what he deems an unacceptable level of partisanship and political wrangling in Congress.

Conservatives reading this will probably immediately smell a rat, one of the same variety that came from Sheriff Diptet after the Giffords shooting. In other words, those wingnut hostage-taking Republicans are off the rails and must be stopped! This cannot stand!

But would a coffee giant risk alienating the Tea Party, who no doubt drink coffee, too? Maybe. Perhaps they've done some market research, maybe with the help of jaded former GOP consultants, and discovered that such people prefer not to part with 2-3 bucks for a 'tall' cup of coffee they can get at Mickey D's, Waffle House, Krispy Kreme or Duncan Donuts for about half the price. Conservative folks tend to be conservative, after all. Starbucks currently has a big Halloween ad campaign running on the NY Times website that doesn't appear to be running on Fox News dot com.

Then again maybe he's truly scornful of both sides. His letter sounds positive. Of course that's a risk too since it might tend to tick off ALL his customers, so we'll have to wait and see how the national townhall telcon goes tonight. If he gets on there and advocates a new tax code without loopholes and definitive non-phony spending cuts, with some modest tax increases for the "rich" then perhaps he's for real. But if he says something like, "let's take those sons-of-bitches out!!!" followed by a Dean scream then we'll know for sure.

Memphis to Get Democrat Convention?!

That's right folks, direct from the First Lady:

In listing Charlotte's many virtues, Obama named southern charm, hospitality, diversity — "And of course, great barbecue."

Clearly--they picked Memphis and mistakenly sent the email to Charlotte, even though we weren't in the running! Score one for us--lots of drunks and hookers to help eat the BBQ!

Yeah, Charlotte actually got it. Politico was suggesting the First Lady's office used some kind of form letter to congratulate them but perhaps they just used a stereotype. Don't all redneck southern cities have great barbecue? They probably figured they couldn't go wrong.

But go wrong they did, especially when the mayor responds like this:

"We have good barbecue in Charlotte, but there's great barbecue [elsewhere] across the state," Foxx told POLITICO. "I have had great barbecue in Charlotte that's been brought in on a truck."

But he said Charlotte will not let down the Obamas.

"If barbecue is what the First Lady wants, she will have all the barbecue she needs," Foxx said. "We'll make sure of it."

Shipped in from Memphis, perhaps. But of course, nobody in her party will be able to eat it.

Tough Love Fantasies

In many ways the election of Barack Obama has been like the opening of a giant Pandora's Box. Years of pent-up liberal fantasies keep popping out, now suddenly possible, no matter how radical.

Check this one out, for instance. It's from the LA Times blog but represents the exact sentiment that scares the daylights out of so many people about government-controlled health care:

If you happen to be the 1-in-3 Americans who is neither obese nor overweight (and, thus, considered at risk of becoming obese), you might well conclude that the habits of the remaining two-thirds of Americans are costing you, big time. U.S. life expectancies are expected to slide backward, after years of marching upward. (But that's their statistical problem: Yours is how to make them stop costing you all that extra money because they are presumably making poor choices in their food consumption.)

This writer, probably skinny, wants to move beyond simply being grossed out over her neighbor's penchant for Krispy Kremes and Thickburgers to the point of actually controlling and punishing them for it. She's certainly not alone. How many self-identified lefties would have a big problem with the idea of the federal government operating as a giant set of brass knuckles to influence whatever cause du jour they happen to be pushing at the moment? Just don't listen to their phone calls or scan their email looking for terrorists and things are fine.

Decades ago ideas like this one would have been laughed off the pages:

Key among the "interventions" the report weighs is that of imposing an excise or sales tax on fattening foods. That, says the report, could be expected to lower consumption of those foods. But it would also generate revenues that could be used to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, and perhaps to fund campaigns intended to make healthy foods more widely available to, say, low-income Americans and to encourage exercise and healthy eating habits.

Now they are reported seriously. As if healthy foods are not already available to 'low-income Americans'? It's called choice, something the left apparently only believes when it applies to fetuses living or dying. Or perhaps grandma. If it wasn't so judgmental it would almost be racist.

But it's the central core of everything being pushed--control. Cap and trade, health care, immigration, wealth distribution, and targeted lifestyle taxes are all about centralized control under the cover of saving the world, saving money, saving lives. There's probably an old book out there somewhere that predicted this stuff. Oh well, in leftyland the ends have always justified the means. They now control the lights, gates and ticket booths. Or as McCain is apt to say, elections have consequences, my friends.

Limbaugh warned of this stuff years ago (which is why they excoriate him and others like him) but it doesn't take a guy operating on half a brain to see the writing on the wall these days.