600 CALORIES, NOT 1,500? WELL, CLOSE ENOUGH TO BE A WINGNUT "FACT"

Thanks, Zandar, for filling in while I was gone -- and practically the first thing I see on my return is utter bollocks about what Michelle Obama ate on Saturday night. Drudge presents it this way:

Um, no.

We know from this article in the Vail Daily that Michelle Obama and the kids are in Vail Colorado on a ski vacation. On Saturday night, according to the Daily, they ate at Kelly Liken's restaurant; Michelle had "pickled pumpkin salad with arugula and a braised ancho-chile short rib with hominy wild mushrooms and sauteed kale."

Drudge pulled a random recipe for ancho chile short ribs off the Food.com site and declared that the calorie count of what Michelle ate must be the one listed with this recipe -- 1575.8 calories per serving. Problem is, this recipe is from a woman in California named Barb Gertz.

This is Barb Gertz:

This -- as people who watched her on Top Chef know -- is Kelly Liken:

Not really much of a resemblance.

Kelly Liken's ribs, unlike Barb Gertz's, are bison, not beef. Oh, and as a follow-up article in the Vail Daily makes clear, they're not 1500+ calories a serving:

A braised short rib is a relatively lean cut of beef, braised with most of the fat cooked off. The 5-ounce serving runs about 600 calories, Liken said -- a far cry from the 1,500 calories and 141 grams of fat it's accused of.

"A proper 5-ounce portion of protein is what nutritionists say we should have," said Kelly Liken, who launched the highly successful restaurant.

Let's not forget that the 5-ounce rib is served with local kale, nurtured and grown by students at Eagle's Brush Creek Elementary School.

"Kale is one of nature's super foods," Liken said. "There are more nutrients in the 3 ounces of kale we serve than you'll get in a massive green salad."

A skier will burn off about 6,000 calories during the course of a day.

"It's a hearty meal for sure, a great meal after a day of skiing, well-balanced and nutritious," Liken said.

By contrast, Barb Gertz's recipe seems to use 5 pounds of meat for 6 servings. You do the math.

All this led to a sexist, faux-anti-elitist rant from Rush Limbaugh -- a fat man who loves pricey Kobe beef. And it's all based on "facts" spun out of nothing. But that's standard operating procedure on the right, no?