(Slow news day edition.)

• In case you wanted another reason to cuss Boeing’s current management (besides paying no taxes whilst living off the Pentagon teat), Glenn Hurowitz at the local eco-zine Grist chides ’em for falling behind Airbus in the race to make more eco-friendly aircraft. Then he cites this as just one more example of Boeing’s corporate ball-dropping:

Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings.

• Longtime readers know I almost never quote NPR here. (Heck, I almost never listen to that marathon snoozefest of self absorption.) But here’s a neat little item by them about “how much does it cost to make a hit song?” The song in question is a producer-driven Rihanna track. As one web-page commenter to the story noted, nowhere in the entire piece is the word “musician” uttered. Indeed, nowhere is it mentioned how any non-vocal sounds on the recording are created.
• If there were still going to be daytime soaps, here’s a new potential plot chiché for them: frozen fertilized embryos. Siblings conceived at the same time but born years apart.
• David Swanson thinks he knows how we actually could get Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court…
• …while Ezra Klein’s got a handy rhetorical device for following the federal debt-ceiling debate hoohah. Whenever a Republican is quoted blathering about “taxes,” replace the phrase with “blowing up the moon.”