Ridiculous puff piece

Today's Providence Journal (registration, as always, tediously required) features an absolutely nauseating puff piece about a 99 year old man who loves Patches Kennedy called, appropriately enough, "Love Stories". I know it was a slow news weekend, and that Rhode Island is a deep blue state, but this article appears to be little more than an unpaid political advertisement for our cretinous junior congressman. On the other hand, I was surprised to find this cogent editorial analyzing the orgy of greed surrounding the lead paint lawsuits in Rhode Island. To wit:

Advocates of suing paint makers now hope to get their hooks into the companies over the legacy of lead paint. The companies stopped selling the product for home use half a century ago -- well before the federal government banned it -- and the statute of limitations has long expired under product-liability laws. Such laws protect companies (which, remember, are people, not an alien species) from being destroyed by actions they took in the distant past, when knowledge of products' dangers and public willingness to accept risk were much different from now.

Speaking of unpaid advertisements, I have updated the Dictators of the World blog after over a month of silence. July is a month for vacations, after all ...