The midmorning meeting came a day after Obama, pre-empting the Republicans, announced he was proposing to freeze the salaries of some 2 million federal workers for the next two years.

Below is a short diversion from this type of Obama stuff.

Because you know he’s not listening to Howard Dean when he says:

“— you're not going to placate the conservatives,” Dean said (Times Argus AP pay-walled). “They're out to get you and they've placed that as their highest interest.”  

The red bees of Red Hook

An urban bee keeper, in Red Hook section of Brooklyn has found her bees have a strange problem. The forager bees were arriving back at the hive with mysterious stripes of red color.

Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.  

A fellow beekeeper sent samples of the red substance that the bees were producing to an apiculturalist who works for New York State, and that expert, acting as a kind of forensic foodie, found the samples riddled with Red Dye No. 40, the same dye used in the maraschino cherry juice. “…an entire season that should have been devoted to honey yielded instead a red concoction that tasted metallic and then overly sweet.”  

One food author explains terroir ,the taste of place used by the French to describe the way that local conditions such as soil and climate manifest themselves in the flavor of wine and food is a fast rising buzzword that Amercia is catching up with .  

What a strange example of Americanized terroir, the red overly sweet metallic tasting honey given by the bees that frequent the vats at the nearby maraschino cherry (red dye 40) processing plant nearby.