The real hunger games

I took a few days off last week and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games was one of the books I finished. The book's heroine, after all, is a fellow hillbilly and her home, District 12 would include what is now West Virginia.

It looks like House Republicans in DC want to play it for real. As Paul Krugman notes, they eliminated all funding for SNAP or food stamps from their version of the Farm Bill. Krugman gets in some zingers:

To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.”

It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy.

FUTURE FUND. The buzz continues.

HOW COME NOTHING THIS COOL HAPPENS TO ME? A friend sent me a link to an interesting story last week. It seems that a 19 foot python fell from the ceiling of a charity-run thrift shop in Australia.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED