Only morons and those beholden to the food and hospitality biz would oppose having restaurants of any sort disclose their calorie counts. I mean, come on. More speech, more info, more freedom!

But really, the solution to all these calorie and obesity problems is simpler than anything that a government agency could concoct. Cook your own meals. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner: 21 times a week, you gotta eat stuff straight out of your own kitchen. Eat that turkey sandwich with no mayo and no cheese seven days a week. Carrots and fruit: Binge city. Make sure that breakfast and lunch are merely fuel events, meals that don’t necessarily taste so good, but provide the energy to get you through the day. Dinner, under my rules, is allowed to taste a little better.

You say you have no time to cook? I say you’re lame and prone to excusism. Just grab something and make a meal. Nine times out of ten, it won’t be nearly as bad for you as anything you may purchase at a restaurant. Those places throw oil and salt and lard and butter around like…well, like, with reckless abandon.

Use your kitchen–that’s why you have it.

Or just reporting the reality of a really bad stretch for McCain and his party?

Plenty of views on this available at Politico’s “Arena.”

Here’s one view on this topic, from a captain of industry:

In 2000, as the Florida returns were rolling into NBC election coverage and indicating that Al Gore was headed to victory, Katie Couric’s cheery countenance was on high beams. Just minutes later, as the more conservative panhandle precincts finally began arriving and the score reversed, Her Perkiness suddenly contracted food poisoning.

Here’s another, from a Harvard prof:

Blaming someone else, anyone else, for one’s own failings is a hallmark of losers. The media’s interest is in getting attention, and they do that by finding something new to say. There has been a lot of digging to uncover hidden facts about all 4 candidates. But when a candidate makes gaffes, he has only himself and his campaign to blame for the coverage. Already I imagine that the McCain campaign staff are trying to find anyone other than themselves who “caused� McCain’s loss, so they will be off the hook.

And here is what I view as the most persuasive point about this whole question of media political bias, courtesy of former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.:

“The most common bias I find in our profession is the love of a good story…”

Food riots raged in developing countries. Wheat prices—like prices for just about everything else—went through the barn roof. Carbo-loading around the country—via bagels, pastas, and so on—was becoming dearer and dearer by the week.

Yet through it all, the Marvelous Market’s chocolate chip cookie (CCC) was holding steady at $1.49 per.

Chalk it up to good, aggressive management. Lisa Bourven, director of purchasing for the nine-store regional chain, says that last spring, she managed to negotiate some sweet deals with suppliers of ingredients for the CCC. “We were able to hold off on the chocolate chip cookie,” says Bourven.

Until this fall, that is.

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These are grim days for the Washington Post Co. As pointed out in the Washington Business Journal, the company’s outlook has been downgraded from “stable” to “negative” by Standard & Poor’s. Other lowlights:

*Newspaper and magazine publishing now account for only 26 percent of its sales. The company is mainly an education concern, what with the phenomenal growth of its education arm, Kaplan.

*The Post Co. reported losses of $2.7 million in the second quarter of this year–its first operating losses in 37 years.

*The company’s stock has done an absolute nosedive this year, losing around 60 percent of its value.

The company will soon announce its third quarter results. Anyone betting on a turnaround?

Then perhaps you may want to steer clear of Metro over the coming months. The transit agency has declared that it’ll be looking through the carryons of its riders as an anti-terrorism measure. Metro boss John Catoe, however, is saying that the move doesn’t come in response to any threats.

Instanalysis on the bag searches: You might be thinking, hey, these are going to be random searches and won’t likely affect me. But the point is that if they’re to have any terrorism-deterring value, they’re going to have to affect you, and me, and the next guy. Otherwise no one–especially a hardened terrorist–will pay them any heed.

In other Metro news, the transit agency has announced plans to circulate hand sanitizer to fight the flu.

Early voting=more participation=more inclusive system=stronger democracy. Right? No question about that. Well, professional CW debunker Marc Fisher has a question or two.

Conservative paper says that Dem nominee’s feelings about what should guide federal judges conflicts with the oath of those very judges. Heady stuff!

The Washington Times gets all enterprisey on Barack Obama’s electoral juggernaut.

Courtesy of Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell, get the inside scoop on how the Post ended up running this correction:

An old photograph was mistakenly published in the Oct. 20 Style section with a Reliable Source item about Saturday’s National Italian American Foundation gala. The photo of the late Jack Valenti with Mel Brooks and Alan Alda was from the 2006 gala.

That correction, in the great ass-covering newspaper tradition, doesn’t pointedly state why this mistake was such a big one: By running the 2006 photo, the Post stated, in effect, that Valenti was still alive.(He died in April 2007.) A good corrections editor, in this situation, would insist that the item in plain English reflect the full scope of the screwup.

Speaking of Sarah Palin and Web traffic, don’t miss this eye-opening look at the politics of PR.

Washingtonpost.com is among the many sites that’ve made a traffic killing off of the presidential race. September brought the second consecutive month of record-breaking traffic, with nearly 13 million unique users, up from just over 11 million in August.

Thank you, Sarah.

According to washingtonpost.com Editor Liz Spayd, 10 of the top 30 stories in September were about Palin. Spayd wouldn’t specify which of the Post’s many Palin stories drove all the hits. Though the paper’s dot-com operation claims that it’s tamping down some of its secrecy with respect to traffic information, it’ll go only so far. When asked whether those popular stories consisted of all the enterprise pieces the paper did or its opinion fare, Spayd responded that it was a mix of both.

Spayd said that other politics stuff was cooking as well–like the Trail, the Fix, and PostPartisan, a series of “quick takes” by the paper’s editorial boarders.

All of which queues up a question that many national news outlets are now facing: What on earth is the Post going to do when the race is over? Let Spayd take it away via e-mail: “Our traffic boost, no question, is powered by politics, but we’ve seen growth in other areas as well. It’s apt to taper off after the election, but we’re already gearing up for a new White House and administration, with new blogs and web ventures in the works. Stay tuned.”

How our favorite technology killed 25 people.

Former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston loves giving advice to other reporters. A longtime tax watchdog, Johnston, on this blog, has taken to helping his investigative brethren nail down Sarah Palin on several key points, including how she financed construction of her house. Johnston seizes on a statement made by husband Todd Palin that he “built” his house with his “contractor buddies.” Here’s the money question:

6. How many hours between the start and completion of construction did your husband spend in physical labor such as pounding nails and fitting pipes while he “built” your home?

This presidential election has seen the usual spike in complaints about the media’s one-sidedness in covering the candidates. Whenever, for example, a news outlet breaks news of a little scandal for one of the hopefuls, the stage is set for charges of bias and unfairness. Hey, go and write the same story about the other candidate, goes the cry.

That mentality showed up in a recent chat on washingtonpost.com. The topic was the $150,000 spent on Sarah Palin’s campaign outfits:

Washington: Will you be doing a story on how much Michelle Obama spends on clothes? I thought not … another Post hit job. So much for being a newspaper. Should be The Washington Post, not the Huffington Post. The Post’s coverage of this election has sunk to the level of NBC. The Post is supposed to be a newspaper — do both sides.

Melinda Henneberger: A lot has been written about Michelle Obama’s clothes, but the difference is that Michelle is not a candidate, and her wardrobe is not being purchased with campaign funds. If it were, you can rest assured that that story would be on Page One of every paper in the country.

Yeah, the problem is that in the real world, every misstep in one campaign doesn’t necessarily have an analogue in the other. Amazing how that works!

Presidential elections have a way of pushing us forward. Joe Biden said dumbly that an Obama administration would face an international crisis by the All-Star Break. Sarah Palin scolded Biden in a debate for dredging up the past and not looking forward.

Well, in my own spare time, I’ve been transporting myself to presidential elections four and eight years removed. The vehicle for this pursuit is Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman. If the title sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen some of this reporting before, either via the original, Pulitzer Prize-winning series that ran in mid-2007 in the Post, or a couple of follow-up excerpts that hit the paper recently.

Before the 2007 series showed up in the Post, I thought I knew a fair amount about Dick Cheney. I’d read all about his Iraq warmongering everywhere, from all kinds of blogs to Hubris, a great book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn on the selling of the war. Then I read the investigative pieces, by Gellman and Jo Becker, and realized how little I knew about Cheney.
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