Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Cornyn & Frist updates

More on John Cornyn’s remarks yesterday from Nathan Newman, a voice of reason I like. He says, in effect, calm down:

I’m sorry, I just can’t join in the liberal feeding frenzy around John Cornyn’s remarks that some of those violently attacking judges were no doubt frustrated by their sense of political powerlessness due to judicial activism.

[...]

I think Cornyn is an ass for his particular analysis in this case, but that’s a political judgement. I’m all for hitting the opposition hard for any corruption, hypocrisy or other personal malfeasance, but don’t sign me up for any lynch mob tied to driving sociological analysis of violence from public discourse.

Instead of berating Cornyn for his remarks, let’s welcome him to a broader discussion of the sources of violence in our society. Maybe we can sign him up for jobs programs for the inner city as another worthy endeavor to stem the systematic causes of social violence.

Meanwhile, Frist is backtracking:

Frist, R-Tenn., declined to join with conservatives who have complained about the federal court system in relation to the Schiavo case. ‘I believe we have a fair and independent judiciary today,’ he said.

Via Kos.

IPTV

I didn’t really even know the acronym, IPTV, existed. But Thomas Hawk, who hates to point to the New York Times (I don’t), made this exception:

Although this is not new news, it was interesting in the article where Terry Denson, the vice president of programming and marketing at Verizon’s television group said that “for those who are seeking a bargain, we’ll be a bargain, make no doubt about it.” It might be kind of nice to see a good old-fashioned price war between the Bells, cable and satellite. It might get bloody for the companies but could be great for me, the little guy sitting at home watching tv who is tired of paying over $100 a month.

Given how I hate the cable company, I look forward to the price war too. Just one problem. How long do you think that will take to get to my rural area????

Our (un)popular president

Editor and Publisher:

It’s not uncommon to hear or read pundits referring to President George W. Bush as a “popular” leader or even a “very popular” one. Even some of his critics in the press refer to him this way. Perhaps they need to check the latest polls.

President Bush’s approval rating has plunged to the lowest level of any president since World War II at this point in his second term, the Gallup Organization reported today.

[...]

Here are the ratings for presidents as recorded by Gallup in the March following their re-election:

Truman, 1949: 57%.

Eisenhower, 1957: 65%.

Johnson, 1965: 69%.

Nixon, 1973: 57%.

Reagan, 1985: 56%.

Clinton, 1997: 59% .

Bush, 2005: 45%

Via Kos, who comments, “Can we quit with the ‘popular president’ schtick?”

Peter Jennings’ lung cancer

Yesterday in anchors away the only one expected to stay was Peter jennings. Today this bad news from Romenesko memos:

This morning, Peter Jennings told his senior staff at World News Tonight that yesterday afternoon he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I include below the full text of Peter’s note to the group of people with whom he works most closely. He will begin outpatient treatment next week here in New York. It’s both Peter’s and my expectation that he will anchor World News Tonight during the period of treatment to the extent he can do so comfortably; but, we should also expect him to be off the broadcast from time to time, depending on how he feels. Charlie Gibson, Elizabeth Vargas, and others will be substituting for Peter as necessary and when their other responsibilities permit.

A fan, I wish him well. The text of his email to colleagues is in the extended entry.

Read the rest of "Peter Jennings’ lung cancer" in the extended entry.

Satellite maps

New from Google:

Online search engine leader Google has unveiled a new feature that will enable its users to zoom in on homes and businesses using satellite images, an advance that may raise privacy concerns as well as intensify the competitive pressures on its rivals.

The satellite technology, which Google began offering late Monday at http://maps.google.com, is part of the package that the Mountain View-based company acquired when it bought digital map maker Keyhole Corp. for an undisclosed amount nearly six months ago.

My house:

For all the stir this may cause, it’s nothing new. Before we moved down here we looked at our house, via epodunk.com, a favorite site that’s a terrific resource. Pick your city, scroll down to “Photos and postcards” and click on “Aerial photo of...” It’s not in color but you can zoom in closer:

UPDATE: What Google does that ePodunk doesn’t is way too cool! Type in your name and the city, it adds pointers to your house. Type in “McDonalds” and anytown (!) to see what I mean.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Deadbeat daddy

Michael Kinsley yesterday:

It was the TV talker Chris Matthews, I believe, who first labeled Democrats and Republicans the “Mommy Party” and the “Daddy Party.” Archaic as these stereotypes may be, they do capture general attitudes about the two parties. But we live in the age of the one-parent family, and it is Mom more often than Dad who must play both roles.

It has not escaped notice that the Daddy Party has been fiscally misbehaving. But it hasn’t really sunk in how completely Republicans have abandoned allegedly Republican values—if in fact they ever really had such values.

Our text today is the statistical tables of the 2005 Economic Report of the President. I did this exercise a while back with the 2004 tables and couldn’t quite believe the results. But the 2005 data confirm it: The party with the best record of serving Republican economic values is the Democrats. It isn’t even close.

Via the Carpetbagger who sums it up this way:

If this were a boxing match, it’d be stopped before anyone got hurt. Over the last 45 years, Dem presidents have been more successful than Republican presidents on the size of government, debt, gross domestic product, real per capita income (money in Americans’ pockets), inflation, unemployment, and stock market performance.

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) speaks

John at AMERICAblog has the transcript:

“I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.”

Some commentary from Ezra Klein:

The whole thing stinks of nothing so much as McCarthyism, with demagogues assaulting America’s foundational values while allied opportunists stand by and watch, not necessarily in agreement with the statements but aware of the political benefits they confer. Republicans, who’ve long advocated strict adherence to the constitution, sit meekly by while some of their numbers attempt to destroy the judicial independence the Founders worked so hard to grant. As a party, they should be ashamed. As individuals, they should be clamoring to expel the offenders. 

Via Oliver Willis, who offers up the Senator’s phone number. Tel: 202-224-2934, Fax: 202-228-2856

UPDATE: Think progress has the video.

Google video

Google will begin archiving personal video clips :

“We’re going to start taking video submissions from people” in the next few days, [Google co-founder Larry] Page told a crowd at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association show here. Later, in response to a reporter’s question, he called the move an “experiment in video blogging.”

The announcement comes as the Mountain View, Calif.-based company is ramping up ambitious video search plans. In January, it unveiled Google Video, an engine that lets people search the text of TV shows. The service scours programming from PBS, Fox News, C-SPAN, ABC and the NBA, among others, making broadcasts searchable the same day.

People can’t yet watch those videos directly from Google’s site. Rather, consumers can search on a term--such as “Indonesian tsunami"--to find the TV shows in which it was mentioned, a still image of the video and closed-captioned text of that particular segment of the program. Google said it expects to add video playback down the road, after ironing out the complexities of broadcasting rights and business models with various content owners.

I’ve been using it and finding it better than our academic LexisNexis, which holds transcripts for a day before making them available. But I just discovered that the links I used to the search results, which were good on the day or so after I posted them, are now bad.

Gore & Google

Don’t get me wrong, I like Al Gore, but this doesn’t sound promising to me:

A cable channel recently acquired by an investment group led by Al Gore is to relaunch Aug. 1 under the name Current, hoping to generate much of its content from viewers...they hope young people will use the channel as a forum to express their opinions on news and current events. Viewers will be invited to submit short films, documentaries and home videos to be aired on the channel. Mr. Gore’s group also has struck a deal with Google Inc. to use information from Google in its programming.

I like viewer generated content, but not America’s Funniest Home Videos. Which will it be? This is a mush of press release mumbo jumbo:

In an interview Friday, Mr. Gore said the goal of Current is to connect “the Internet generation with television in a brand new way.” Its Web site will be a key part of its service, listing topics on which it wants material, such as reviews of movies, CDs or videogames; items on social trends; and advocacy journalism. Current will pay $250 for videos it airs.

A segment called “Google Current” will report on what topics are generating the most interest on the Web, using Google as its source. Google doesn’t do its own reporting, but will rank the topics, based on which subjects generate the most search queries. A Google spokesman confirmed it struck an agreement with Mr. Gore’s group.

And it’ll have “hosts for different segments” too!

Current will provide a fair amount of its own programming, at least initially, said programming chief David Neuman, a veteran television executive who most recently was a consultant for Time Warner Inc.’s CNN. Mr. Neuman said the channel has hired hosts for different segments. While Current primarily will be a news and information channel, he described it as closer to MTV and VH1 than Fox News and MSNBC.

Golly. I can’t wait. How about you?

UPDATE: More from AP. Current’s website. And Wired News.

Anchors away

Tom Bettag on Ted and Dan from Howard Kurtz, Leaving the Anchor Desk, Its Greatest Generation:

“Ted is known as a really stubborn, pigheaded guy,” says Tom Bettag, his longtime producer, who earlier worked as Rather’s producer. “Dan and Ted are people who have both told their bosses, ‘That’s not me and I’m not going to do it.’ . . . They did years and years of preparation so that when they stepped into the chair, they were fully formed and knew who they were. What really defines them is that they’re both real reporters.”

And praise for Nightline:

“Nightline" regularly tackled such difficult fare as racial tensions, AIDS and terrorism—in a time slot where viewers can flip to Letterman and Leno. Richard Hanley of Quinnipiac University’s School of Communications calls Koppel’s departure a “tragedy” for more reflective news coverage: “ ‘Nightline’ provided more of a sober take on things without being so dry you couldn’t watch it. On cable, people step on each other’s lines because that’s the format. It’s noise.”

And an audeince “more focused on arguing than reporting:”

“The audience has changed,” says Leroy Sievers, a former “Nightline” executive producer. “People don’t necessarily want to hear both sides of the story, which is what ‘Nightline’ did best. They want to hear, ‘You’re right! They’re wrong!’ ”

Anti-war words from the local left

The Otter Side has published the comments of a local Presbyterian minister, a leader of our own religious left community, at a local memorial service marking the second anniversary of the start of the War in Iraq. His words preceded the reading of the names of all Georgians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s an excerpt:

As we hear these names, remind those of us whose patriotism involves only the cost of bumper stickers and flags,
whose patriotism does not offer up OUR OWN sons and daughters,
but proudly offers the sons and daughters of others;
whose patriotism demands nothing from our wallets
nor limits our lifestyles in any way…
Who, in a two-tiered nation, live easily with war--
war that draws from us talk but not tears,
war that causes us no fears
nor any sleepless nights-

...

Help us to understand that war is not a movie or a game,
that for those who do not die there are often pieces of
their lives left behind-
and thoughts and scenes that will not die,
that plague their days and haunt their nights,
and about which they cannot speak
because we who only talk of war
could never understand.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

How to Turn Your Red State Blue

Christopher Hayes spent seven weeks canvassing undecided voters last fall. He saw a couple Mormon missionaries on bikes in the rain and now “can’t stop thinking about those Mormons on their bicycles. What are progressives doing to win conversions to our faith? Where are our young people on bikes approaching unfamiliar doors? How are we preaching the good news?”

So begins an excellent In These Times article from a couple weeks ago that I finally got around to reading today, How to Turn Your Red State Blue:

In all the ink spilled post-November about “What We Need To Do Now,” precious few answers to this question have been put forth. Commentators seem to think either (a) we don’t need to convert people because they already have fundamentally progressive values, or (b) converting voters is impossible, so the Democratic Party should just become more conservative. Both views are misleading and counterproductive; they divert attention from the crucial work of expanding the reach of progressivism.

I have rejected the latter outright (says Hayes, “In other words, when someone proves initially unreceptive to an evangelizer’s pitch, the young missionary doesn’t then say, ‘Well, would you be interested in converting if you didn’t have to believe in Jesus?’") but I come close to the “we’re all fundamentally progressive” notion when arguing again and again that we’re in a tie. Hayes doesn’t think so:

Over the past several decades, the Democratic Party’s traditional advantage in party identification has evaporated. Equal numbers of voters now consider themselves Democrats and Republicans. In 1977, upward of 45 percent of the population identified themselves as Democrats. Even more dramatic are the percentages of “liberals” and “conservatives” in the electorate. In exit polls from 2004, 34 percent of voters identified as conservative while only 21 percent identified as liberal.

Then there’s the fact that both the government’s policies and the electorate’s voting behavior have shifted dramatically to the right in the last 30 years. Common sense would suggest that the best explanation for this is that most voters are conservative and the Republicans are the conservative party...The right has fundamentally reconstituted the way Americans view government, politics, policy and the public sphere. We need to change it back...The operative question for building a long-term progressive majority is not how we stitch together 51 percent of the voters into the Democratic quilt, nor how we wake people up to their own elusive progressivism. It is how we make more progressives.

Read the rest of "How to Turn Your Red State Blue" in the extended entry.

Goodbye to All That

In a post a couple weeks back, acknowledging the second anniversary of the war in Iraq, I defended “the good old-time venerable big-time inclusive protest march” and recalled fondly the AIDS activist group ACT-UP. Kevin Mattson writing in The American Prospect Online this week, says a hearty Goodbye to All That:

An enduring movement was being built during the ‘60s—but it was on the right. Historians of the decade used to focus on left-wing organizations, writing books about sds, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, typically culminating in the tumult of 1968 and thus telling a story of factionalism and decline. Today, however, historians are growing more interested in documenting the right and telling a tale not of decline but of ascendance. James Miller, who wrote a marvelous book about sds, explained to the magazine Lingua Franca a few years back that “in terms of the political history of this country, the New Left just isn’t an important story.” Focusing on the left, he explained with a certain irony about his own historical work, evades “the extraordinary success of the forces that ï¬Â�rst supported [Barry] Goldwater, then [Ronald] Reagan as governor of California, and then [George] Wallace. I can’t help but see that absence in the historiography as integral to the mythologization of the Sixties.” Miller echoes the argument of M. Stanton Evans, a leading conservative intellectual and popular writer, who wrote, “Historians may well record the decade of the 1960s as the era in which conservatism, as a viable political force, ï¬Â�nally came into its own.”

Read the rest of "Goodbye to All That" in the extended entry.

AIDS today

A friend in New York who has AIDS forwarded this NYTimes article to me:

Although the city health department’s recent warning about a rare, possibly more virulent strain of H.I.V. has caused a stir among gay men, many AIDS activists hold out little hope the news will prompt substantial or lasting changes in behavior...There is a growing sense that the traditional sloganeering about condoms and club drugs is about as effective as birth-control campaigns that rely on abstinence. The only hope for changing behavior, public health experts and psychologists say, is to recognize and address the underlying factors that propel men into risky situations. Loneliness, alienation and self-hatred, they say, are the real culprits that need to be addressed.

I lived in New York through the first, worst days of AIDS. I lost many friends and a life-partner. My experience tells me it was true then, and remains true today:

“People are not taking risks because they’re stupid, or because they wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to take a risk today,’ “ Dr. Halkitis [a psychologist at New York University who studies the relationship between drug use and sex] said. “They do it because the sexual risk fulfills a need, or somehow makes them feel better about themselves.”

He and others say any successful fight against H.I.V. must deal with depression, substance abuse and low self-esteem, problems that studies have shown affect gay men at disproportionately higher rates.

“Many people might argue that as a community, we suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder because we’re so ostracized by society,” Dr. Halkitis said. “Being rejected by family, by our churches, and these days by our government most certainly has an impact.”

The only long term solution is to normalize gay in every way. That means inclusion in those institutions at the core of our civic life: marriage, religion and the military.

Punch out the president (& pals)

It’s a paper doll book:

Ever wonder what it would have been like to party with George W. during his freewheeling frat days at Yale? Ever notice the eerie similarities between Vice President Cheney and Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil? Ever wonder what it would be like to cast Donald Rumsfeld in the role of a chickenhawk-like superhero?

Well, wonder no more! With the Punch Out the President (and Pals) paper doll set, you can experience these playtime scenarios and many, many more! Punch Out the President includes four honest-to-goodness (okay, perhaps that’s not the most appropriate phrase in this case) eight-inch-tall, perforated paper dolls including George W., Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the ever-animated Attorney General John Ashcroft. (Be warned, readers of faint heart, the dolls-Cheney included-come clad only in their skivvies!)

Via World O’Crap who also promises a “Name Mary Cheney’s Memoir” contest.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Outing is a political act

Sean at White Peril on hypocrisy as a justification for outing:

The word that gets me is hypocrisy, an extremely useful term that unfortunately is extremely easy to use as a catch-all. Hypocrisy is acting in a way that clearly and directly goes against your professed beliefs. Someone who advocates a law against homosexual conduct and still indulges in it is a hypocrite.

Just about everything else is a grey area, though. Opposing pro-gay legislation for “homophobic reasons”? Who gets to decide what’s homophobic? Does a politician just have to be “probably” homophobic the way she has to be “probably” homosexual? I’m afraid I still don’t think this is sufficient justification for revealing things about people’s private lives.

I realize that for me hypocrisy is the trigger, but the justification is political. Outing is a legitimate and reasonable political response to the current political climate. It’s a deliberate, open, and peaceful act of nonviolent resistance, an act in some ways similar to civil disobedience. (And not, as Mike Rogers suggests, merely reporting.)

Hypocritical opposition to pro-gay legislation is trigger enough, no additional “homophobic reasons” required. As to the invasion of privacy issue, here I’ll quote Chris Crane in last week’s editorial, with whom I otherwise disagree:

Sexual orientation, in and of itself, is not a private thing. No heterosexual views being straight as a secret, and millions of gay men, lesbians and bisexuals don’t either.

Finally, if you believe as I do that closet cases are dangerous, you might even come to see outing as a civic good.

UPDATE: Sean makes minced meat out of my civil disobedience analogy. I respond to him there.

Post-packing

On this week’s New York Times Best Seller List Jon Stewart’s America (the Book) barely edges ahead of Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America. The latter, says Dahlia Lithwick writing in Slate, “has been reviewed virtually no place and written up by almost no one...It’s selling, it seems, almost entirely due to endorsements by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News.”

She notes that no serious scholar is paying attention to the book because its arguments are lightweight, well worn and tired. But that’s not why we need to pay attention to this book:

The book is silly. But the maddening question here is why Levin, Limbaugh, and-as of yesterday, Tom DeLay-have stopped threatening just “liberal activist” judges and have started threatening the judiciary as a whole. Levin, recall, is excoriating a court composed of seven Republican appointees. He’s trashing the body that’s done more to restore the primacy of states’ rights, re-inject religion into public life, and limit the rights of criminal defendants than any court in decades. He seems not to have noticed
that the Rehnquist court is a pretty reliably conservative entity.

The days when the goal was to pack the court could be gone:

Levin pays some lip service to the idea that the federal bench needs to be stacked with right-wing ideologues in his penultimate chapter. But he betrays early on his fear that even the staunchest conservative jurist is all-too-often “seduced by the liberal establishment once they move inside the Beltway.” Thus, his real fixes for the problem of judicial overreaching go further than manipulating the appointments process. He wants to cut all judges off at the knees: He’d like to give force to the impeachment rules, put legislative limits on the kinds of constitutional questions courts may review, and institute judicial term limits. He’d also amend the Constitution to give congress a veto over the court’s decisions. Each of which imperils the notion of an independent judiciary and of three separate, co-equal branches of government. But the Levins of the world are not interested in a co-equal judiciary. They seem to want to see it burn.

Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King certainly does. And we would do well to pay attention.

I can understand completely why the serious legal thinkers of this world have no interest in engaging with Levin on his legal scholarship. Jeff Rosen probably had to swallow hard-twice-before even referencing Men in Black in his op-ed on judge-bashing last weekend. But ignoring this book won’t keep it from tearing up the best-seller list; and it’s unwise to write off everyone who reads it as a Swift Boat lunatic. In the past weeks, we have seen a quiet sea change with death threats to-and actual attacks on-judges becoming disturbingly common. To refuse to acknowledge the call-to-arms behind Men in Black, as the press and most of the legal academy has done, can feel like intellectual integrity. But it also represents a failure to take part in a national conversation that may have very serious long-term consequences for the courts.

GMail enhancements

This should make The Last Minute happy:

Google says it will dramatically ramp up the storage available with its Gmail Web-based e-mail service, raising the bar for rivals in the sharply competitive business for the second time in a year.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Web giant on Friday plans to double the free storage on Gmail from 1GB to 2GB, said Georges Harik, Gmail product management director. After that, Google will add a yet-to-be-determined amount of extra storage daily, with no plans to stop.

New features too:

Not only is Google in the process of increasing storage capacity, they’ve also introduced some other features to improve overall service. One of the major improvements include rich layout control, which Google describes as:

“Fonts, bullets and highlighting, oh my! Gmail now offers rich text formatting. And over 60 colors of the rainbow. Discover a land of more than just black and white.”

Gmail users can vote on the most wanted Gmail features.

The price of power(lessness)

How do we stop this?

A new report by the Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that the costs of the Pentagon’s arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion. But the Pentagon generally understates the time and money spent on weapons programs by 20 to 50 percent, the new report said.

A survey of 26 major weapons systems showed cost overruns of $42.7 billion, or 41.9 percent, in their research and development phase…

The watchdog agency, in scores of reports produced since the end of the cold war, has consistently explained why so many weapons cost so much more than promised.

“Performance shortfalls, schedule delays and cost increases,” the office has said, are “the logical consequences” of the weapons-buying culture.

Via Plutonium Page at Daily Kos.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Wing nuts

My niece is nuts for Wing. That’s her dressed as Wing for a Halloween costume party last year.

She writes: “Wing appeared on South Park!! Did you SEE it?! I have it downloaded.”

No, since I cancelled cable, I missed it. I’ll go download it now.
But I did hear about it via Xeni at BoingBoing:

Her voice sounds like the cry of a shy hamster in whose rectum a hot poker has just been inserted. The New Zealand-based performer’s squeaky, ear-shredding rendition of “Dancing Queen” (Link: MP3) was featured in a South Park episode last week. I really need to get out on the internet more often, I don’t know how I missed this—Jesus, I just figured they’d made the character up...Her new album of ABBA covers is magnificent: Link.

I started a Wing group on [thefacebook]. My niece will be so proud. Waldo, are you reading still? Here’s the collection of Wing songs.

Weekend diversions

It’s been a rough week. All over. Diversion is the order of the day. These two great ones come from Alas, a blog.

The first is a visual treat, The Zoomquilt. Try the Flash version, not the html.

I shared the second today in my April Fools guest post, drive-through madness, at It’s A Pundit:

I can’t vouch for its veracity, listen only for its audacity! Read the transcript while you listen. It’s sure to be worth your while.

Apparently it’s been around for a while.

Smoking ban in Georgia

Well, not an outright ban. Significant restrictions. The legislature passed the bill but will the governor sign it? You know I hope so; I’ll believe it when I see it.

Gratitude

As I try to build traffic here on my blog, I am grateful for each marker along the way:

• James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, whose How to start a blog post helped shape mine, included me recently in a Beltway Traffic Jam. Thank you James.

• This week I was included in a New Blog Showcase. Thank you Mookie.

• Blake Rhodes at icerocket.com tells me I’m included in their Ice Rocket Blog Search. I haven’t found myself but I’m glad to be there.

• No gratitude list would be complete without acknowledging Basil, of Basil’s Blog. He was my first Trackback and has continued with many more, has offered technical support and is a regular commenter. Thanks Basil.

• While I was authoring this post, Basil apparently got me invited to guest blog over at It’s A Pundit. My guest post is here. Already commented on and declared undetermined here.

Thank you all. I have to believe, “if you build it, they will come.” These are the good old blogger days!

Applebee’s

Believe it or not, this is what passes for haute cuisine in our town:

The most accurate way to describe the food at Applebee’s Neighborhood Bar & Grill is “well-slathered.” Nearly every dish comes drenched in sauce, usually either a deep-red ketchup derivative or a ranch dressing variant. Applebee’s trademark Riblets, for example, are bathed in enough tangy BBQ sauce to make a diner forget that he’s chowing on extraneous pig parts.

Applebee’s cuisine is considered so-so even by chain-restaurant standards. In the latest customer survey by the trade magazine Restaurants and Institutions, Applebee’s food scored below that of Chili’s, O’Charley’s, and the Cheesecake Factory, though it did top the deep-fried grub at T.G.I. Friday’s, Bennigan’s, and Hooters. But despite its middling food, Applebee’s is by far the largest casual-dining chain in the United States, with annual sales of around $3.6 billion-over $1 billion more than Chili’s, its closest competitor.

Started in Atlanta by 2 brothers in 1980, and spread by targeting “underserved areas-primarily exurban and rural strip malls” (yeah, that’s us) there’s probably one coming to your town:

America’s appetite for cheap, filling sit-down meals surprised even Applebee’s. Franchises have opened at a rate of more than 100 per year, and...the latest projection is for Applebee’s to top out at 3,000 restaurants, about 1,300 more than it has today.