Sunday morning roundup

Maybe one of the reasons California is such a mess is that its finance director is delusional:

“Government doesn’t provide services to rich people,” Mike Genest, the state’s finance director, said on a conference call with reporters on Friday. “It doesn’t even really provide services to the middle class.”

I guess rich and middle-class people in CA don't use roads or public schools. The last time I checked, though, there were plenty of wealthy celebrities using the prisons.

Here's another example of class issues being turned upside down:

And a recent U.C.L.A. study of 32 working families found that the subjects viewed cooking from scratch as a kind of rarefied hobby.

How does that work? Cooking for oneself and/or one's family is one of the most cost-effective "hobbies" out there. The article goes on to say how this happened and how silly it really is:

For most of the last century, Americans have been told repeatedly that cooking is a time-consuming drag. Companies like Kraft and General Foods promoted mix-and-eat macaroni and cheese, rice with mix-in flavor pouches and instant pudding. Pillsbury, the flour maker, became Pillsbury the biscuit, pie and cookie dough maker: baking just by turning on the oven. According to a 2008 NPD study, of all supper entrees “cooked” at home, just 58 percent were prepared with raw ingredients.

The twist, of course, is that convenience foods save neither money nor time. As Marion Nestle pointed out in her 2006 book “What to Eat,” prewashed romaine hearts cost at least $1.50 a pound more than romaine heads. And the 2006 U.C.L.A. study found that families saved little or no cooking time when they built their meals around frozen entrees and jarred pasta sauce.

Coincidentally, Frank Rich, too, invokes the pre-packaged food industry in his excellent column, albeit metaphorically, by way of the "trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the [Republican] party." Thankfully, however, he acknowledges that said doughboys and their cohorts do not have a lock on foolishness detrimental to the country, as inspired by political posturing:

Once again Cheney and his cohort were using lies and fear to try to gain political advantage — this time to rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency rather than to drum up a new war. Once again Democrats in Congress were cowed. And once again too much of the so-called liberal news media parroted the right’s scare tactics, putting America’s real security interests at risk by failing to challenge any Washington politician carrying a big stick.