Just bits and pieces after a three-day weekend.

Don’t forget…The House Judiciary Committee is holding a public hearing at 2 p.m. on two bills that would make the news media privilege (otherwise known as the reporters shield law) permanent (HB 194 and HB1376). It’s a long agenda, so those planning to testify might be trapped there for a while. Written testimony, even if late, would be useful.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the suggestion that Donald Trump might run for president.

Luckily, a friend sent me this informative link: “How Many Times Has Donald Trump Filed For Bankruptcy?”

Another reader pointed me to this story from Reuters describing how China is using its status as a holder of huge dollar reserves to muscle U.S. policy.

And former neighbor Bob caught this yin & yang moment in an email with the subject line, “carrot and stick approach to suppressing revolution”:

to keep the people happy
“The younger Mr. Qaddafi . . . offered a package of reforms . . . a new flag, (and) national anthem”

and to further reassure the crowd the younger Mr. Qaddafi said
“We will fight until the last man, until the last woman, until the last bullet,”

Qaddafi’s Grip on Power Seems to Ebb as Forces Retreat
N.Y.T . DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR
Published: February 21, 2011

The NY Times reports: “Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter“. Then I noticed this story: “Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins“. I can’t help bouncing between those two stories.

And from California Watch, a story on reports of malnutrition in the parts of the state. But…the reports are suspect.

Redding, near Mount Shasta, and Victorville, in the Mojave Desert, have little in common but an unusual statistic: In each city, a hospital has reported alarming rates of a Third World nutritional disorder among its Medicare patients.

Kwashiorkor – a Ghanaian word for “weaning sickness” – almost exclusively afflicts impoverished children in developing countries, especially during famines, experts say.

But in 2009, Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding reported that 16.1 percent of its Medicare patients 65 and older suffered from kwashiorkor, according to a California Watch analysis of state health data. That’s 70 times the state average of 0.2 percent. At Desert Valley Hospital in Victorville, the kwashiorkor rate among Medicare patients also was high: 9.1 percent, or about 39 times the state average.

And so it goes on this Tuesday morning.