He did! Sadly, I was two rooms away and didn't get there in time.

I'm pretending this is because he ate too fast, and not something more.

I can't eat rice, so I'm experimenting with couscous instead, which is pretty yummy, actually. Does anybody here use quinoa instead? It seems way pricier at the market, so I'm not sure if I should try it....

ita - you have all my ~~~ma~~~.

CNN has live video of it snowing in NOLA.

Fun!

I love quinoa! The Miracle Grain!

Daliah Lithwick's summaries of the oral arguments in front of the Supremes always make me laugh (even when, like this one, I want to cry): [link]

Scalia then points out that the ability of the attorney general and FBI director to do their jobs should not be dependent on the discretion of a district court judge. He pronounces district court judge the way you or I might say serial wife-beater. Not to be outdone, Alito will later wonder, in horror, "How many district judges are there in the country? Over 600? One of those district judges has a very aggressive idea about what discovery should be. What's the protection there?"

That's right. This case is about the Supreme Court justices protecting Americans from out-of-control district court judges and their out-of-control discovery rules.

Oh man, whenever I read recent court rulings (bong hits 4 jesus dude as well as others re: equal protection, student rights, etc.) I just want to throw up when reading the opinions of Scalia, Alito and Thomas.

Quinoa is the super food of the future! I'm all about it.

Between that Dahlia Lithwick piece and Gail Collins en fuego this AM at the Times, I think the funniest people in (real, not fake) journalism right now are women.

How much doom is in store for us? The First New Foreign Crisis

It's quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama's transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse... a lot worse. As in -- double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. That's one reason why the Obama administration seems to be open to listening to every economist with an idea and is stocking the staff with the leading lights of the field. In one sense, the general level of concern among Obama advisers and transition staffers is reassuring; they get the magnitude of the problems, and they're not going to assume that, just because the bottom has never dropped out before -- certainly not in the lifetimes of most people doing policy these days, the bottom will never drop out.

Where the discussion isn't going, at least in public, (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won't have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.