Not from McDonalds, interestingly enough, but more than a dozen other restaurants from as far away as Pennsylvania have granted Charles Ramsey a perpetual freebie for his action in freeing three young women missing for more than a decade.  One even created a new burger in his honor:

The hometown hamburger homages began with an 8-ounce Angus beef patty with a secret sauce devised by Chris Hodgson, chef at the downtown restaurant where Ramsey works as a dishwasher.

“He’s calm in the face of crazy and hectic things going on,” Hodgson told the Cleveland Plain Dealer after police rescued Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight from the house where they were allegedly held captive and raped for a decade. “He always steps up to do anything you ask.”

The “Ramsey Burger” started out as a temporary menu item, but has since become permanent and the idea has spread to other restaurants, according to the Plain Dealer.

He can eat for free on the boss’ dime, but he can also try some variety:

More than a dozen Northeast Ohio restaurants have pledged an offer of a burger anytime Ramsey wants to stop by and dig in. AMP 150 at the Marriott Cleveland Airport; Washington Place Bistro and Inn in Little Italy;Fahrenheit restaurant in Tremont; Market Garden Brewery, Bier Markt, Bar Cento and Nano Brew in Ohio City; Welshfield Inn in Troy Township; Hodgesand Pura Vida in downtown Cleveland; 87 West at Crocker Park in Westlake;Orchard House restaurant in Brunswick; Flour restaurant in Moreland Hills, and the Allegheny Grille in Foxburg, Pennsylvania, have joined in the offer.

The burger tribute was inspired by Ramsey, who stopped eating his meal of a Big Mac to intervene and aid the escape of Amanda Berry and her daughter, along with Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight.

Bon appetit, Mr. Ramsey.

This was one of the odder exchanges from today’s House Oversight Committee hearing.  Former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman smugly waved off any responsibility for abuses that occurred at his agency during his tenure.  In fact, he pronounced himself “very comfortable” with his job performance, which entailed inaccurately testifying before Congress that conservative targeting was “absolutely not” happening in early 2012 — then failing to correct the record several weeks later, when he says he discovered the truth.  Anyway, here’s Shulman responding…bizarrely to a question posed by Ohio Republican Mike Turner:

He just couldn’t bring himself to even express a personal opinion on whether a powerful agency improperly targeting groups of a particular political persuasion is an affront to American and democratic values.  He winced, he stuttered, he invoked words like “inappropriate,” but he couldn’t flat-out say it was wrong.  Most observers would’ve told him to say “yes, of course,” then move on.  But he didn’t, and here’s why:  First, it’s still the official IRS line that the targeting/”triage” practices were all about “efficiency” in the face of an avalanche of new applications.  That excuse doesn’t jibe with 2010 statistics (when the abusive methods began), nor with the admitted fact that no liberal or progressive groups were caught up in the agency’s political targeting net.  But “nonpartisan mistakes” is their story, and they’re sticking to it.  After all, how can a simple clerical error be un-American?  Second, all of Shulman’s answers were parsed and delivered in practiced legalese.  He almost never answered anything with simple assertions, opting for “recollections” and “as far as I can remembers.”  In his apparent painstaking efforts to avoid making any statement that might ensnare him in a perjury controversy, Shulman seemed unable to cleanly field simple questions about his opinion.  So he hedged and qualified and dissembled — and looked really guilty doing so.  Nevertheless, his former colleague Stephen Miller still takes the cake in the category of deer-in-the-headlights, noncommittal awkwardness.  He couldn’t render a firm judgment either way on whether the IRS asking an organization about the contents of its prayers crossed the line.  What a crew.

Star Trek’s food replicators had to start somewhere, no? NASA wants to develop a 3-D printer for pizza, which will require powdered food substances for raw materials. They won’t have an issue with expiration dates, either, but you have to wonder how good a pizza might taste when created with 30-year-old powders:

NASA has doled out a research grant to develop a prototype 3D printer for food, so astronauts may one day enjoy 3D-printed pizza on Mars.

Anjan Contractor, a senior mechanical engineer at Systems and Materials Research Corporation (SMRC), based in Austin, Texas, received a $125,000 grant from the space agency to build a prototype of his food synthesizer, as was first reported by Quartz.

NASA hopes the technology may one day be used to feed astronauts on longer space missions, such as the roughly 520 days required for a manned flight to Mars. Manned missions to destinations deeper in the solar system would require food that can last an even longer amount of time.

I wonder how well it will work on Romulan ale …

Who knew?  Here we thought Jorge Bergoglio was just a social-justice fan with a penchant for wearing robes, and it turns out that he’s Pope Francis.  USA Today seems shocked, shocked to discover that Catholics think the devil is an active agent in the world:

Is Pope Francis an exorcist? The question has bubbled up ever since Francis laid his hands on the head of a young man in a wheelchair after celebrating Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Square. The young man heaved deeply a half-dozen times, shook, then slumped in his wheelchair as Francis prayed over him. …

Fueling the speculation is Francis’ obsession with Satan, a frequent subject of his homilies, and an apparent surge in demand for exorcisms among the faithful despite the irreverent treatment the rite often receives from Hollywood.

Who can forget the green vomit and the spinning head of the possessed girl in the 1973 cult classic The Exorcist?

In his very first homily as pope on March 14, Francis warned cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel the day after he was elected that “he who doesn’t pray to the Lord prays to the devil.”

He has since mentioned the devil on a handful of occasions, most recently in a May 4 homily when in his morning Mass in the Vatican hotel chapel he spoke of the need for dialogue — except with Satan.

“With the prince of this world you can’t have dialogue: Let this be clear!” he warned.

I’m pretty sure that priests of any kind, bishops and Popes included, don’t walk around offering ad hoc exorcisms.  Knowing what goes into the preparation for the rare practice (and what exorcists believe to be at stake) would warn anyone off from a casual attempt at it.  The Catholic Church in fact warns that this should be undertaken after determining that there isn’t something else at work, such as psychological illness.

The laying on of hands has a much broader application in Christian tradition for healings as well as blessings.  It’s at least as likely that Pope Francis prayed for healing  or gave a blessing than performing an exorcism; in fact, it seems a lot more obvious a choice.

Finally, USA Today’s surprise that Catholics (and Christians in general) believe the devil to be an active agent speaks more to its own ignorance of faith than “a reflection of a Catholic Church weakened by secularization.”  Kirsten Powers reached the same conclusion:

The @ap should just change the title to this story to BREAKING:Pope Francis believes the Bible usatoday.com/story/news/wor…

— Kirsten Powers (@kirstenpowers10) May 22, 2013

Apparently. RT @wyattbearp: @kirstenpowers10 So it’s no longer okay for a Catholic leader to talk about the devil theses days?

— Kirsten Powers (@kirstenpowers10) May 22, 2013

Nope…just a Pope Francis fan RT @gwparr03: @kirstenpowers10 Kirsten, you a closet Catholic?

— Kirsten Powers (@kirstenpowers10) May 22, 2013

Update: AFP got the Vatican on record with a denial about the purported exorcism:

The Vatican on Tuesday denied that Pope Francis had performed an exorcism after an Italian religious television channel said footage of the pontiff blessing a boy in a wheelchair showed he had.

“The Holy Father did not intend to perform any exorcism,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement, after the claims by TV 2000, which is owned by the Italian bishops’ conference.

The more refined and well educated among us already knew that.

Among the thousands of file formats that exist in modern computing, the GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, has attained celebrity status in a sea of lesser-known BMPs, RIPs, FIGs and MIFFs. It was honored as a “word of the year” in 2012, and Tuesday night, its inventor, Steve Wilhite, will be accepting a lifetime achievement award at The Webby Awards…

He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format.

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. Wilhite said. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

End of story. And yet the battle rages: GIF as in “gift” or GIF as in “gin”? The latter is obviously correct. We’re dealing with an acronym here, in which case why not go with the more mellifluous pronounciation? Soft “G” makes the word sound impish and breezy. Hard “G” makes it sound like you’re grunting under your breath from some sort of spasm. C’mon, people.

Suggested compromise position: Pronounce it gee-eye-eff and call it a day.

I know that the President’s defenders have used recent job-approval polling to show that Americans don’t care about scandals in the administration, but except in the last few weeks of a presidential election, job-approval figures tend to be a lagging indicator.  Michael Catalini explains that it takes a couple of months into a serious administration scandal before job-approval or personal-approval numbers will begin to slip:

The break-in at the Watergate occurred in June 1972, five months before Nixon rode to a landslide reelection, but the scandal did not damage his approval ratings until after two aides were convicted of conspiracy in January 1973. Between January and August, his approval rating dropped from 67 percent to 31 percent after the resignation of his top staffers, attorney general and deputy attorney general. Over that time, his approval rating dropped by an average of 3 points a month, according to Gallup. Nixon’s approval rating never recovered, culminating in his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, when he left office with an approval rating of just 24 percent.

Ronald Reagan’s approval rating dipped from 63 percent in October of 1986 to 47 percent in December 1986, a month after Reagan organized the special commission to investigate whether arms were traded for hostages as part of the Iran-Contra affair. His ratings rebounded slightly as Vice President George H.W. Bush began campaigning for the presidency in the summer of 1988, reaching 53 percent, according to Gallup.

The Drudge Report and Newsweek reported on Bill Clinton’s affair in January 1998. Clinton’s job approval actually jumped to 69 percent in a Jan. 30 Gallup survey, up from 59 percent in a poll from earlier in the month. Clinton’s approval rating never dropped below 60 percent throughout 1998, and jumped 10 points from 63 percent to 73 percent in December, the highest approval of his presidency.

But while Clinton’s job approval remained high throughout 1998, his personal favorability took a dive in the wake of the scandal. Gallup found his favorability dropped by five points in August, after he gave a nationally televised speech admitting he had an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky. Clinton’s favorability dropped from 60 percent a week before the speech to 55 percent a week after the address. A month later, it had fallen to 51 percent but later rebounded.

Barack Obama faces three major scandals all at once, so perhaps we might expect an amplified impact.  Still, I think it will take a while for those to show up consistently in job-approval ratings, assuming any or all of the scandals will maintain their own impact.  Don’t be fooled by a lack of immediate movement.

Update: Breitbart’s John Nolte notes that some polls already show some erosion:

But Monday was a lifetime and countless revelations ago, and today,four newer polls all show Obama’s approval rating sinking below 50%.

Fox News has Obama upside down with 45% approving of the president and 51% disapproving. Rasmussen shows a similar trend with 46% – 53%; as does The Economist, 45% – 51%.  Gallup sits at 49% – 44%.

Be sure to read it all.

“I’m actually an atheist.”

Oops!

To further expand on the apparent wagon-circling taking place with this meeting of the ideologically-aligned commentators and the West Wing, the question has to be asked: Just where is Barack Obama getting this advice?  The DoJ snooping on the AP and James Rosen has even normally sympathetic journalists angry.  Now he’s going to bypass the White House press corps, which has been fed a steady stream of nonsense by Jay Carney to the point where reporters have to construct timelines to keep the White House’s “evolution” on what it knew about the IRS scandal straight.

If they think that sending out the ideologues to bypass the WH briefing room will make it easier for them to sell their message, the communications team is either desperate, delusional, or a little bit of both.

Just a little heads up that tomorrow’s progressive damage-control groupthink is likely to be group-ier than usual:

Spotted: @joshtpm @capehartj @ezraklein & other lefty columnists headed into the West Wing as a group. POTUS coffee? Carney meeting? Anyone?

— Ari Shapiro (@arishapiro) May 21, 2013

Giggle, giggle:

“Benghazi is a laughable joke.  Benghazi is a laughable joke … the blaming of the president for that is a ridiculous joke.”

Yeah. Hilarious:

What a sharp, compassionate take from the former DNC Chair and presidential candidate.  Throughout the segment, Dean analyzed the Benghazi massacre through a purely partisan prism, arguing that it has “no traction” (essentially, no one cares — perhaps with a few marginal exceptions) and that Republicans’ persistence in investigating what happened is evidence of “overreach.”  Since he brought up the crude metric of public opinion, I’ll just point out that two new national polls demonstrate: (a) an 87/14 super-majority of Americans view the Benghazi talking points as an important issue, (b) a 59/36 majority now believes the attack could have been prevented, (c) a 57/32 majority thinks the administration is still covering something up, and (d) a 59/37 majority approves of Republicans’ handling of the controversy.  All that aside, no amount of polling can or should alter the moral correctness of seeking the truth about a terrorist attack that claimed four American lives.  Dean was also asked about the IRS and DOJ affairs.  His verdict: “To call all these things scandals is a little on the silly side.”  He instead harped on the House’s latest attempt to repeal Obamacare — which probably sounds better than ever to many Americans.