Author: Greg Saunders

Are you guys really drinking this “Vitamin Water” shit? If you are, please stop. Despite the marketing that would suggest that you’re drinking regular bottled water that’s been “enhanced”, it’s really just Kool-Aid with a multivitamin in it. Take a look at the ingredient list for “Charge” :

Vapor distilled, deionized water and/or reverse osmosis water, crystalline fructose, citric acid, monopotassium phosphate (electrolyte), ascorbic acid (vitamin C), natural flavor, dipotassium phosphate (electrolyte), magnesium lactate (electrolyte), gum acacia, calcium lactate (electrolyte), niacin (B3), ester gum, pantothenic acid (B5), pyridoxine hydrochloride (B6), b-carotene (color) cyanocobalamin (B12)

Just like any other soft drink, the first two ingredients are water and sugar. Here’s what the trade group “The Sugar Association” says about “crystalline fructose” :

Crystalline fructose is produced by allowing the fructose to crystallize from a fructose-enriched corn syrup.

Now if that corn syrup were of the “high fructose” variety instead of being “fructose-enriched”, would it stop being a health drink?

Even more revealing is how Glaceau (and parent company Coca-Cola) use the oldest trick in the book to blur the drink’s nutritional value :

Serving size: 8 fl oz, Servings per container: 2.5; Amount per serving: Calories: 50;

Which, assuming you aren’t one of the few who only drinks 8oz of the 20oz bottle, gives you a calorie count of 125 (barely more than Coca-Cola’s 140 calories per can).

On their website, Glaceau’s slogan is “hydrate responsibly”. Good idea. You can start by avoiding this over-hyped sugar water.

During the first Democratic debate, Mike Gravel mentioned that of his fellow Democratic candidates, “some of these people frighten me”. Well, you know what frightens me? This video released by his campaign (via TPM Cafe):

Oh my god…Presidential candidate Mike Gravel is trying to penetrate my brain. My mind is slowly beginning to melt….



It’s starting to hurt now….



The tiny pieces of my brain still left can only concentrate on one thing….



“Psst…hey buddy, wanna vote for Mike Gravel?”

Steve Benen writing at Crooks & Liars links to this weak Dennis Miller monologue noting that conservative blogs consider it “the most devastating take-down in the history of political monologues”. Really?? Let’s ignore the irony that the conservatives who shunned John Kerry for his verbosity are in love with a “comedy” rant that takes two and a half minutes to say “Harry Reid is a pussy”. The real sad part here is that this “devastating take-down” is lame. If you want to see what a real stinging rebuke looks like, check out Matt Taibbi’s profile of Rudy Giuliani :

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.
. . .
Like Bush’s, Rudy’s career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you’d want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He’s traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the “WTC cough.” This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy’s 9/11 hero image — the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city’s Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.
. . .
Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows — but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president — as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

Now that’s a take-down.

Compare and contrast : Rudy Giuliani’s “Twelve Commitments to the American People” and his three commitments to American women. Considering that Rudy is a twice-divorced serial adulterer, I’m not so sure a “commitment” is something he’s able to live up to. Then again, since he’s running for the nomination of the party that prefers leaders that act presidential to ones that can be presidential, maybe Republican voters will be dumb enough to fall for his laundry list of conservative rhetoric so vague that it makes a fortune cookie look verbose by comparison.

I can’t help but be amused by the firestorm kicked up over the comments by Democratic strategist and “rural liaison” Dave “Mudcat” Saunders (thankfully, no relation). To his credit, he’s savvy enough to realize that the best way to get free publicity and respect among the punditocracy is to pick a fight with the liberal blogosphere. So that’s what he did with a post entitled “Go Ahead And Shoot At Me” in which he argues against the “stereotyping of my people and culture” by stereotyping the people he doesn’t agree with. Taking a lesson from his co-blogger Joe Klein, “Mudcat” hides his criticism behind a vague label (the “Metropolitan Wing”) so he can insult a broad swath of his peers without ever having to name names. That way, if he’s confronted for his actions, he can always pull the “I wasn’t talking about you” trick.

But this isn’t about some Dixie-whistling Mr. Smith taking on the intellectual elitists who have taken over his party. You don’t get to write your first blog post at Time.com by being an outsider. It’s about currying favor with the beltway insiders who pay his bills (like the campaigns of Mark Warner, John Edwards, Bob Graham, and Jim Webb). By provoking a firestorm with the netroots, “Mudcat” not only insulates himself from opinionated brutes like us, but he further cements his reputation as the go-to guy to save the Democratic party from coastal elitists, bile-spewing atheists, and any other GOP stereotype of liberals that he can muster. Any criticism of his broad attack on his fellow liberals is just another example of the “arrogance and intolerance” that he’s up against.

Like John McCain’s straight-talking “Maverick”, Dave Saunders’ “Mudcat” persona is the schtick he uses to get work from campaign managers who are stupid enough to believe you can pay a guy to help you simulate a fondness for “the Heartland”. “Mudcat” is a poor-man’s Carville, Bob Shrum with an accent, and he’s just plain boring. The precision with which “Mudcat” was able to inspire controversy within the liberal blogosphere is impressive, even if it does end up feeling choreographed and predictable. Congrats, “Mudcat”, you’ve made all the right enemies, but to end this on a conciliatory note, let me welcome you to the blogosphere by echoing your wish that bloggers who “believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell”. Now, what did you mean by “pseudo-intellectual arrogance” again?