RECENT ITEM FROM CONWEBBLOG as is worthy of notice:

Warner Todd Huston uses a May 28 NewsBusters post to rant against "A Prairie Home Companion" host Garrison Keillor over his inability, as expressed in a recent newspaper column, to understand what is inherently patriotic about riding a motorcycle. Despite attacking Keillor's column as a "screed," Huston was in full screed mode himself, referencing "Lake Blowbegone" and calling Keillor a "pseudo-intellectual" who associates with "tea-drinking, pinky finger lifted, emasculated, lefties." (Of course, a "psudo-intellectual," unlike Huston, would know that putting a comma after "emasculated" is grammatically incorrect.)

If Huston want to do some, you know, actual research into Keillor, he might want to check out last Saturday's edition of "A Praire Home Companion," in which Keillor devotes the "News from Lake Wobegon" to Memorial Day and reads a moving Memorial Day sonnet--both done in ways that even Huston might approve.

Which begs the question of whether "real Americans" (as in poor, undereducated and easily-influenced specimens of the working classes pseudoconservatives claim to be defending) should be expected to drink store-brand coffee with a rather oily taste thanks to the roasting being a little too intense--except maybe in the South, where coffee is usually blended with chicory to pad out the taste.

Unless coffee-and-chicory blends are seen to be as effeminate as tea to the pseudoconservative mind.

Likewise with grain-based ersatz coffees like Postum, Cafix and Pero.

But then again, there was a time when a lot of "pure coffee" sold @ the grocer's was all too often roasted beans and peas, with chicory and rye added to mask any suspicion of bitterness. Such was the kind of adulteration which helped galvanise the cooperative movement from the Rochdale Pioneers on, a form of pressure upon companies to produce only pure and wholesome foodstuffs.