Seems Like A Prudent Move

From TPM:

A Costco in Salt Lake City, Utah reportedly removed all of its tomatoes ahead of a Sarah Palin book tour event, after a man was arrested for attempting to hit Palin with a tomato at an earlier event in Minnesota.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Costco management was "determined" to avoid another tomato-throwing incident, and resorted to removing all of the tomatoes from the store.

This extreme measure followed a December 7 incident in which a man tried to hit Palin with a tomato at a Mall Of America event, but missed and hit a police officer instead.

And while I am on the subject of the extreme right wing, I've gotten a kick lately out of how the GOP is really starting to worry about deficit spending, given that they were the ones who caused the huge deficit in the first place. Of course, if you tried to tell that to a right-winger, he'd turn around and blame Obama. Well, unfortunately for the Republicans, they really can't do that (from The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities):

Some critics charge that the new policies pursued by President Obama and the 111th Congress generated the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces. In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years.

The deficit for fiscal 2009 was $1.4 trillion and, at an estimated 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was the largest deficit relative to the size of the economy since the end of World War II. Under current policies, deficits will likely exceed $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011 and remain near that figure thereafter.

The events and policies that have pushed deficits to astronomical levels in the near term, however, were largely outside the new Administration’s control. If not for the tax cuts enacted during the Presidency of George W. Bush that Congress did not pay for, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began during that period, and the effects of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression (including the cost of steps necessary to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term.

While President Obama inherited a bad fiscal legacy, that does not diminish his responsibility to propose policies to address our fiscal imbalance and put the weight of his office behind them. Although policymakers should not tighten fiscal policy in the near term while the economy remains fragile, they and the nation at large must come to grips with the nation’s deficit problem. But we should all recognize how we got where we are today.

That last sentence is pretty good advice, but you know that two things are going to happen: (1) the GOP will blame Obama for everything, especially all the shit that they -- the Republicans -- caused, and (2) the Democrats will offer up a weak response, just like they always do.