OK, I really don’t want to be an Obama bore and keep batting on about what a smooth fixer for Wall Street that Obama is but the link below to an extract from Billionaires & Ballot Bandits is pretty good. (My youngest son met Greg Palast in London a while ago)

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14493-billionaire-banker-bandit-likely-commerce-secretary

“A parade of media reports this week name Penny Pritzker as Obama’s prime choice for Secretary of Commerce. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration – because now they’ll have one of their own in the Cabinet.” Greg Palast

It’s difficult not to be cynical or sceptical when you read this stuff – I’d go for sceptical, cynicism destroys your soul.

If you buy the book in the UK you could try Hive.co.uk and pick it up from your local bookshop they get a cut (not much but it assuages the guilt and you haven’t used Amazon)

Hey,

We have UKIP on the rise, off a campaign by the right wing press, whose owners have their tax affairs based off shore, to get the UK out of “Europe.” And it turns out that we’ve been becoming more continental all along. At least the poor people have.

It seems horse-meat has been the staple diet of poor people in the UK for quite a while. As a connoisseur of a variety of frozen foods from the “whoopsed” section of our local supermarkets I can confirm that it’s not bad.

OK, I know that I haven’t been eating horse meat as such but rather horse meat slurry which is the stuff that explodes off the horse bones when they’re submitted to high pressure, then frozen in 50 Kg blocks and added to the “beef,” in the lasagne and shepherd’s pies that are sold in all our popular supermarkets.

At first the info’ that was leached out was that although the horse meat originated in France it was actually  from British horses that were sent over there for processing.  So although it couldn’t claim the Red Tractor symbol at least I could be semi-patriotic when tucking in knowing that only weeks before my, five min on 800wt, tea was only weeks before competing in a local gymkhana. Now we’re being told that the horses were from Romania. Where’s Nigel Farage when you need him?

My niece is in the PR biz and I’ll need to have a word since they’re getting the PR all wrong. Essentially what the current arguments boil down to is that British consumers have the right and expectation to an assurance when they eat these products that the god-awful pink slurry they contain has been blasted from the bones of old cows and not old horses.They need to refocus and try to swing it to horse-meat being, The Food of Champions,  restrict it to Subway and charge a premium.

No wonder my vegetarian friends are looking very smug right now.

I think we’ve still a couple of these in the freezer and since they were pretty tasty last week I can’t believe they’ll taste any different this week – I’m off for a treat.