Good Morning on this gloomy Friday.  Yesterday was beautiful but that is gone for a while.  We have gotten enough rain that I had to punch some drain holes in the biggest of my garden containers.  The water had not reached a level that threatened the plants but it wasn't too far from it.  How would I know?  The containers I buried to provide a water supply for the deeper portions had about 3 inches in the bottom--and they weren't draining.

I mentioned a couple of days ago the minor play a new study on the salt content of restaurant meals was getting in the news.  It was a bit of a flash in the pan.  Not like the on-going sagas of Drew Peterson or the dysfunctional Cook County Commission or the results of your (least) favorite 'reality' show.  Here is another entry I gleaned from the web this morning.  Archcrone at The Crone Speaks writes about the responses of government and industry to food poisoning which have been anemic and ineffective at best.

Chris In Paris has this item this morning.  So, now the insurance industry needs a bailout because they couldn't possibly pass up the potential profits to be made by investing in all of those speculative investment vehicles, could they?  They haven't lost money because of some catastrophe involving their main business.  They lost because they invested heavily in derivatives that had an ephemeral value and a much larger risk that acknowledged.  This reminds me of a story (which also did not get much play in the news media) from a decade ago.  The malpractice insurance providers were pressing congress hard to produce legislation to limit the amounts juries could award victims of malpractice.  They claimed that those awards were forcing them to raise insurance rates which in turn were forcing doctors out of medicine.  Bull!!  A university professor looked at insurance rates and tried to determine which factors were most instrumental in raising the rates.  The ONLY factor which showed any positive correlation to the rates--losses in the stock market.  Every time the stock market lost ground the rates increased.  As they say--it doesn't take a rocket scientist.