Best Easter food line of the day

I think Peeps cry out for a tartly acidic, simple white, so I’ll be celebrating the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior this Holy Sunday with Chateau Bonnet Entre-Deux-Mers ($14). Its simple crispness and subdued flavors of grapefruit and the French countryside are the perfect counterpoint to the entirely artificial experience of eating Peeps. The key is to take a bite of the Peep — preferably the head, which has the best balance of spray-on falvor elements and interior mush — and then sip the wine through the rapidly disintegrating cloud of artificially colored, emulsified sugar. It’s the perfect Easter combination.

From a discussion of Easter wine writing at Louisville Juice.

Line of the day

“A plurality of Republican voters, 47 percent, said they believed Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was born in another country; 22 percent said they did not know where he was born, and 32 percent said they believed he was born in the United States.”

Poll Finds Few Favorites as G.O.P. Fight for President Gels – NYTimes.com

So, put another way, two-thirds of Republican voters, based on this poll, are ignorant or stupid. Or perhaps, ignorant and stupid.

Best line of the day

Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made . . .

That’s why we have medical ethics. That’s why doctors have traditionally both been viewed as something special and been expected to behave according to higher standards than the average professional. There’s a reason we have TV series about heroic doctors, while we don’t have TV series about heroic middle managers or heroic economists.

The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but with our society’s values.

Paul Krugman

Best line of the day

“The Bonds case shows what happens when practically everybody lies—the judicial system is brought to its knees. It’s amazing to me that the jury managed to convict on one count. The amount of lying in that case—and I don’t mean only Bonds—is astonishing. It’s world class lying, as one prosecutor told me.”

James B. Stewart

Best line of the morning

“See, what I’ve done, and you all can try this yourselves, is to simply avoid reading the news as much as possible. I read old books and the only periodicals I even look at lately are NFL draft guides. I’ve read Nolan Nawrocki’s draft booklet like 400 times already. To me he’s the greatest novelist since Waugh. That does wonders for my general sanity, but then I’ll have something happen like last Friday, when I went into 30 Rock to do a hit on Cenk Uygur’s show and saw him talking about a poll that had Donald Trump leading the field of prospective Republican candidates. Donald Trump has 26% of the Republican vote right now? What the fuck? Things like that, honestly, I don’t even want to know, until I have no choice… ”

Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy

Best tweets of the day, so far

“Had a couple of drinks last night with an air traffic controller. Very nice guy. I had never been in a tower before. Cool.”

Twitter / Albert Brooks


“The REAL reason for the Civil War was Lincoln’s failure to produce a birth certificate.”

Twitter / Dexter Lake


“Part I of Atlas Shrugged trilogy in theaters today. It’s like Lord of the Rings if Frodo just sold the ring to Cash4Gold.”

Twitter / pourmecoffee

Best line of the day for April 15th

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.”

Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

And, as noted yesterday, this year you can procrastinate your taxes until Monday evening.

Or click here to access IRS Form 4868, Application for Automatic Extension of Time to File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return. You may apply for the extension electronically.

Best headline of the day

“Language at risk of dying out – the last two speakers aren’t talking.”

Guardian.co.uk

There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other’s company.

Best line of the day

“My own personal view on this is not so much that Tea Partiers are racists, but more that they’re tremendous pussies. They have no problem puffing out their chests and screaming bloody murder about Mexicans or single black Moms taking their tax money for emergency room care or school lunches. But when John and Christy Mack rob them to buy mansions on the Upper East side, you suddenly can’t find a Tea Partier within a thousand miles — can’t find one with the Hubble space telescope. For all their bluster and aggressiveness, billionaires make them go weak in the knees. Which makes it very hard to take them seriously.”

Matt Taibbi

Best paragraph of the day

“America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.”

Matt Taibbi