The worst part is how the host treats the two guests (one, a journalist who’s saying facts; the other, a government official).

A new executive order from San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom makes it illegal to sell Coke, Pepsi and other sodas in vending machines:

Newsom’s directive, issued in April but whose practical impacts are starting to be felt now, bars calorically sweetened beverages from vending machines on city property.

That includes non-diet sodas, sports drinks and artificially sweetened water. Juice must be 100 percent fruit or vegetable juice with no added sweeteners. Diet sodas can be no more than 25 percent of the items offered, the directive says.

San Francisco certainly isn’t the first municipality to set nutritional standards for vending machines on public property. The state and at least four counties have adopted or have recommendations for similar policies. Santa Clara County’s policy, adopted in 2008, is not as restrictive as San Francisco’s, allowing up to half of vending machine content to be standard soda. It’s unclear how strict the other policies are.

Two Census Bureau managers from a Brooklyn field office were fired after their bosses found they faked household surveys to meet deadlines, the Daily News learned.

Instead of pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, the corner-cutting people-counters mined the phone book and Internet to make up answers to questionnaires, regional director Tony Farthing said.

The managers – turned in by whistleblower employees – were caught last week. Now, at least 10,000 surveys need to be done or redone, officials said.

I’m sure these guys had to pay fines for fraud…

Click above for video.

A woman claims she spotted a vampire on the road ahead of her and it made her back her car into a canal around 11 p.m. Sunday.

According to authorities, the woman was driving on a dirt road at K and 20 Roads near Fruita when she says she encountered the vampire. She says it scared her, and she threw her car into reverse, backing it into a canal.

She was not injured. Her husband arrived on the scene and took her home. Troopers do not suspect alcohol or drugs to be factors in this accident.

And the best part of the report:

They added that they found no evidence of a vampire.

Hurray! CNBC reports:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is repeating a pattern that appeared just before markets fell during the Great Depression, Daryl Guppy, CEO at Guppytraders.com, told CNBC Monday.

“Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it…there was a head and shoulders pattern that developed before the Depression in 1929, then with the recovery in 1930 we had another head and shoulders pattern that preceded a fall in the market, and in the current Dow situation we see an exact repeat of that environment,” Guppy said.

The Dow retreated 457.33 points, or 4.5 percent last week, to close at 9,686 Friday. Guppy said a Dow fall below 9,800 confirmed the head and shoulders pattern.

My feeling is that it’s good when it means that we put our interests above everyone else’s, but bad when it leads to unnecessary wars and economic sanctions. What do you guys think?

UPDATE: Netherlands beat Brazil by 2-1… I guess most readers were wrong.

FiveThirtyEight has Brazil with a 61.4% chance of winning, but the question is: what do the intelligent readers of this blog think it’ll be? Vote below:

Oh, and by the way, the game is starting at 10 a.m. EST.

Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.)

Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.

Soccer is collectivist. At this year’s World Cup, the French national team actually went on strike in the middle of the tournament on the eve of an elimination match. (Yes, capitalist sports have experienced labor disputes, but can you imagine a Major League Baseball team going on strike in the middle of the World Series?)

I love how these neocon Republicans pretend they’re for free-market capitalism when most of them voted for TARP and the expansion of literally state-run healthcare (Medicare).

The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times “called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles.” That’s 1.4 percent of the time.

I’m sure that now, in the Obama years, the mainstream media has now gone back to describing an action for what it really is… not!

Stop listening to Europe, stop listening to the conservatives, do what has worked in the past. What got us out of the Great Depression was production: massive industrial production to support the allies in World War Two.

We need production for this country now. We need to build rapid rail to catch up to those allies from World War Two. France has the TGV. China is building its rapid rail system. It’s time we joined the movement. We need to go back to the future and become a country that builds things. It’ll create jobs. It’ll catch us up to the rest of the world. It’ll cut our reliance on oil. It’ll give us hope you can believe in.

Look, Lincoln built the continental railroads even in the midst of the Civil War. Ike built the inter-state highway system in the supposedly do-nothing Fifties.

President Obama… Just do it!