Makin' Gumbo

Another Beer, Dragon Lady!

2012-02-07T23:20:00.000-08:00

For some reason, a bit mysterious since I had no allegiance to or interest in either entrant, I watched a good deal more of this Super Bowl than many in the recent past. Without a horse in the race, I typically find the hype more than I can bear, both wrt the "game" itself and the overall event and all it entails and signifies.

I found myself having to remind others that our routine muting of commercials should probably be suspended on this occasion. At the time, it was the history of amazing over-the-top commercials that motivated me. But in hindsight, perhaps I could have argued that our beloved guaranteed-profitable corporations, they who these days routinely buy politicians and corrupt any effort to regulate them or defend the Commons, were spending sums approaching the per-day bonuses of their CEOs on these ads and desperately need and deserve our breathless attention.

Anyway, we did greatly enjoy some of the ads, hopefully without having been too subliminally browbeaten into purchase of products we don't need. Dogs were a common popular aspect, with most outspoken voter (a cat owner) definitely a fan of the Doritos cat-burying.

Somehow I missed the start of a certain Chrysler ad. But, nerve-endings perhaps sharpened by recent re-enjoyment of Gran Torino, I could not mistake the Kowalski-er, Eastwood voice. I won't pretend that I found the narrative wholly to my liking, but I admit the portion I caught was pretty inspirational, beyond the charisma of that voice.

Apparently others picked up on that one too:

Nobody does hissy fits like Karl Rove; the master of hardball, dirty-trick politics is constantly outraged, outraged, at his opponents’ underhanded tactics. And the latest hissy-target is the Chrysler ad during the Super Bowl, starring Clint Eastwood.

Jon Cohn gets it: it’s actually a double-edged problem for the Republicans. They hate any reminder that they were dead wrong on the auto bailout; and they hate any thought that the Democrats are becoming the party of optimism. Hey, only Republicans are allowed to celebrate American success!

And behind the yelling lies, almost surely, a growing sense of panic:

Here's a bit of the Cohn post Paul Krugman linked to:

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By now, you’ve probably seen or heard about the ad, which Chrysler calls “Halftime in America.” It stars Clint Eastwood, narrating the story of Detroit's comeback and turning it into a metaphor for America. The message happens to dovetail with the story that President Obama has been telling, about his rescue of the auto industry and the country’s slow climb out of economic despair.

During a Fox News appearance on Monday morning, Rove suggested the similarities were not coincidental:
I was, frankly, offended by it. ... it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.
I have no idea whether Rove really believes Chrysler produced that ad in order to do President Obama a political favor. But the fact that he and other Republicans are so worked up could mean that they are scared—not of the advertisement itself, but of the themes it contains.

Those themes are optimism and national pride. As Salon’s Joan Walsh noted on the Ed Show Monday evening, Republicans have basically owned those themes since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan won an election with them. But lately President Obama has been the one making the case that it’s morning in America or, at least, just before dawn. He did it in the State of the Union and he’s done it in a series of major speeches since.

The message wouldn’t resonate if it had no basis in reality. But the latest economic indicators suggest the economy really is starting to grow, albeit slowly and tentatively. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the Midwest and Michigan, where the auto industry’s rebound has helped reduce unemployment to levels not seen since before Obama took office.

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If that old scuzz-ball Rove is angry the Universe suddenly seems a Better Place.

Republican Primaries: Six out of Seven?: Wrath, Greed, Pride, Lust, Envy, and Gluttony

2012-02-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

Weekly Sunday school and church attendance was pretty much expected around my house when I was growing up. Actually it went well beyond that: singing in the choir, organ lessons, social hours after church, potluck dinners, and a variety of other congregation-related activities. It was a bit much, increasingly so as I got older. But I have come to feel that I may have gotten off pretty easy compared to those with, say, a hard-core Catholic upbringing.

The Ten Commandments were familiar, but there was no drumbeat about Deadly Sins.

Not to worry if you've struggled to make it this far. We'll be switching gears soon. All of this is to properly frame the idea that it was drummed into me early on that gloating or anything resembling smugness were major social gaffes, the nearest equivalent I have from adolescence to a Deadly Sin. We didn't do that.

I still shy away from smug. It's as close to a personal superstition as I can think of.

But I confess the ongoing republican electoral spectacle is testing me sorely! Even on mute I can only tolerate brief between-the-fingers peaks at some of them. But the unreeling soap opera is almost irresistible in some respects. While I greatly lament the absence of Hunter Thompson and his gonzo journalism, it strikes me that the net result of filtering the hysterical hallucinogenic circus that is R politics these days through his addled pate might be the triggering of something akin to an extinction event.

That might be what the Earth truly needs, and there's plentiful evidence like disappearing glaciers and icecaps that our species may be in the latter stages of a dialogue with some Mephistophelean travel agent for a possible cruise to extinction.

I'm not ready. Maybe the Fates took HST out just in time.

In the meantime, I have recently savored instead a multitude of reports, including one Thompson-like over-the-top number from Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone and another involving the inimitable Mr. Moyers with his classic polish.

I'm leading here with Taibbi, article written prior to FL outcome but still quite timely. As is routine, I am excerpting only for both articles and strongly encourage you to savor the full original via the links: You won't be sorry.

They may be shit for choosing a good candidate for the presidency, but say this for the Republican primaries: They're fast turning into the most luridly entertaining political spectacle of our time. In an inherently conservative, bottomlessly moneyed, scrupulously stage-managed electoral system designed to preclude chance or weirdness from playing any part in determining our political future, the unthinkable is happening: real drama. This isn't part of some clever but inscrutable master plan, put on by the hidden hands who run this country, to fool or distract the masses. This is an unscripted fuck-up of heroic dimensions, radiating downward from the highest levels of our society, playing out in real time for all of us to watch. Our oligarchy has thrown a rod.

If you're not a conservative voter with a dog in this fight, watching Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and whoever else is running for the GOP nomination this week try to hold on to front-runner status has been great slapstick, like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift. No matter how many times you ring the bell, those poor animals are never going to figure out how to move that pallet of bananas – yet they keep trying, taking the sorry show from one state to the next, over and over, as if something is going to change.

The latest ape to fall off the heavy machinery is Romney, who in a single week before the South Carolina primary went from near-certain nominee to national punch line, in genuine peril of becoming one of America's all-time electoral catastrophes. The overwhelming expectation was that Romney would roll into South Carolina, kneel on the ball a few times, and run out the clock on the party's yearlong display of manic instability. Heading into South Carolina, he'd raised $32 million; none of his competitors appeared to have enough cash to keep the lights on for more than a few more weeks, let alone a whole campaign. This experienced national politician, who had run a superbly organized campaign for president in 2008, a man whose very trademark is inoffensiveness and caution, and who for the year has appeared dedicated to saying nothing in public more controversial than "God bless America," needed to hang on for only 10 or 11 more days after his decisive win in New Hampshire without completely wetting himself on television, and the nomination was his.

But he couldn't do it. Less than a week after New Hampshire, Romney committed a series of gaffes that revealed his crucial character flaw: He's a hypernervous control freak who flips out if you try digging around below the paper-thin veneer of his schlock patriotic presentation. The robotic Mormon financier looks like a walking OCD diagnosis, a trim coil of tightly wound energy with perfect coif and tie, seemingly living in permanent terror of a single hair falling out of place. For this type of anal-retentive personality, the messy chaos of South Carolina was a phobic horror. Faced with actual opposition, he lost his grip on everything. At a time when a quarter of the population has zero or negative net worth, when outrage against the financial elite is at an all-time high on both sides of the political aisle, Romney, it turns out, is so weirdly tone-deaf about his status as a one-percenter and bloodsucking corporate raider that any question in that direction sends his eyes pinwheeling. As his electably boring-mannequin act began to crumble, his carefully concealed true self – a deluded gazillionaire nitwit – was suddenly thrust naked onstage for all of America to gape at.

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But the Republican Party is not dominated by 22-year-old college students reading The Fountainhead for the first time and finally understanding what it is they've always hated about their ex-hippie parents. No, the party is dominated by middle-aged white suburbanites who hate Mexico, John King and the Golden Rule and are willing to flock to anyone who'll serve up the Fox News culture war in big portions and without shame or hesitation. Romney might have memorized a few I-hate-Obama sound bites, but voters simply don't believe him. Gingrich alone offers GOP voters the emotional payoff they want out of an election – an impassioned fight against the conspiracy, played out in thrillingly contrary three-hour debates on health care with the liberal Satan. Gingrich lives for confrontation: He was born for this sort of insurgent primary politics.

The only problem is, he's a bloviating, egomaniacal hog clinging to a third marriage who suffers from incurable diarrhea of the mouth and, according to polls, is one of the most intensely disliked politicians in America, making him an utterly absurd choice for the general election. If Gingrich ends up winning the nomination, Obama will essentially be running against the political version of Gilbert Gottfried or raw garlic – strong tastes that some like quite a lot, but many more can't stand to even be near. If that happens, every Democratic flack from Leon Panetta to Obama himself will have to wear restraints to keep from publicly crying out in joy.

All of which makes the goofball theater surrounding the GOP primaries seem even crazier. With a weak economy and a vulnerable president in the White House, the Republican Party had a real chance to reseize power, if it could only have grasped the gravity of the situation and put forward a plausible candidate. And a plausible candidate would have been better for everyone, not just Republicans, because the nation will suffer when Obama cruises to victory next fall on a sea of open-marriage jokes, instead of having to face a cogent argument against useless bailouts, endless wars and economic mismanagement.

But the GOP chose to snub any semblance of substance, floating one candidate after another – from Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain and Rick Perry – who could not hold on to the lead for more than a few hours before tripping and falling into the machinery. It now appears that whoever winds up winning the Republican nomination will be a reform-hating friend of the one percent who will happily gobble whatever hundreds of millions of dollars Wall Street has left over to donate to the GOP, after it's finished lavishing its election-year tribute on Barack Obama. The best we can hope for, it appears, is some truly high-quality reality-show drama. The campaign is a circus like we've never seen before. We may get worse candidates, but at least we're getting a better show.

I also enjoyed this Moyers and Winship piece (The Party People of Wall Street) on the continuing obliviousness (or should it be properly outed as full-on anti-democracy?) of what we might call the One Percent, Mitt Romney certainly one of their poster-boys. I can't help thinking of Heironymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights:

A week or so ago, we read in The New York Times about what in the Gilded Age of the Roman Empire was known as a bacchanal – a big blowout at which the imperial swells got together and whooped it up.

This one occurred here in Manhattan at the annual black-tie dinner and induction ceremony for Kappa Beta Phi. That’s the very exclusive Wall Street fraternity of billionaire bankers, and private equity and hedge fund predators. People like Wilbur Ross, the vulture capitalist; Robert Benmosche, the CEO of AIG, the insurance giant that received tens of billions in bailout money; and Alan “Ace” Greenberg, former chairman of Bear Stearns, the failed investment bank bought by JPMorgan Chase.

They got together at the St. Regis Hotel off Fifth Avenue to eat rack of lamb, drink and haze their newest members, who are made to dress in drag, sing and perform skits while braving the insults, wine-soaked napkins and petit fours – those fancy little frosted cakes — hurled at them by the old guard. In other words, a gilt-edged Animal House, food fight and all.

This year, the butt of many a joke were the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. In one of the sketches, the bond specialist James Lebenthal scolded a demonstrator with a face tattoo, “Go home, wash that off your face and get back to work.” And in another, a member — dressed like a protester – was told, “You’re pathetic, you liberal. You need a bath!”

Pretty hilarious stuff. The whole affair’s reminiscent of the wingdings the robber barons used to throw during America’s own Gilded Age a century and a half ago, when great wealth amassed at the top, far from the squalor and misery of working stiffs. Guests would arrive in the glittering mansions for costume balls that rivaled Versailles, reinforcing the sense of superiority and the virtue of a ruling class that depended on the toil and sweat of working people.

That’s consistent with the attitude expressed by several of these types after Occupy Wall Street sprung up; bankers told the Times on the record that they could understand the anger of the protesters camped on their doorstep; but privately, a hedge manager said, “Most… view [it] as ragtag group looking for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

So sayeth the winners in our winner-take all economy. The very guys who were celebrating at the St. Regis because they were too big to fail. Even when they fell flat on their faces, the government was there to dust them off, bail them out and send them back to fight the class war with nary a harsh word or punishment. Talk about a nanny welfare state.

None of this was by accident. The last three decades have witnessed a carefully calculated heist worthy of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in “The Sting” — but on a massive scale. It was an inside job, politically engineered by Wall Street and Washington working hand-in-hand, sticky fingers with sticky fingers, to turn the legend of Robin Hood on its head – giving to the rich and taking from everybody else. Don’t take our word for it – it’s all on the record.

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Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen!

2012-01-03T21:50:00.000-08:00

I couldn't resist exorcising (sic) curiosity a little as to the Iowa caucus results tonight. At the moment it appears a dead heat between Romney and Santorum, with Paul nipping at their heels. I guess that is about as interesting an outcome as I could have hoped for. Theoretically it might have been nice to have a very tight five-way tie or something, no one coming out happy and the scratching and yowling kicked up a few notches for our "entertainment."

But that would be pretty shallow stuff, on the level of People mag or the increasingly puerile "talk" shows. What a joke this "journalism" has become. Supposedly broke to the point of cutting back on almost all fronts, the primary outlets are yet squandering their resources in pursuit of salaciousness or something in Iowa. Mr. Sirota, always a good read, can help with this:

This revealing piece in the trade publication Capital New York tells that sad story. The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers’ editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington’s red-versus-blue fetish from news content — as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa’s small contest.

In truth, that last sentence should have quotation marks around “reporters” and “cover.” As any perusal of the news (er, “news”) from Iowa shows, most of what this army produces is candidate stenography, a recounting of the latest poll numbers, gossip or naked speculation — that is, most of what it produces is valueless and neither “reporting” or “coverage” in any dictionary-definition sense of those terms.

You'd be well-advised to check out the article in full lest you take the whole Hawkeye State Barnum-and-Bailey too seriously. The contrast with the consistently loathsome "reporting" on the exuberant and outside-the-box Occupy Wall Street activism is astounding.

For more on that, we turn to the esteemed Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, under the caption "Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins." Here again we have thoughtful writing, well worthy of however much you are able to invest in it. I want to believe that many of the elite few of you who encounter this obscure blog, whether through your own devices or by way of my angry-bird-like missives, know by now that Mr. Taibbi does not do short and shallow. There's larnin' to be found in an article like this, brief excerpt barely touching the surface:

The 2012 presidential race officially begins today with the caucuses in Iowa, and we all know what that means …
Nothing.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily engaged by last year’s royal wedding, people all over the world are normally fascinated by the presidential race: both dramas arouse the popular imagination as real-life versions of universal children’s fairy tales.

Instead of a tale about which maiden gets to marry the handsome prince, the campaign is an epic story, complete with a gleaming white castle at the end, about the battle to succeed to the king’s throne. Since the presidency is the most powerful office in the world, the tale has appeal for people all over the planet, from jungles to Siberian villages.

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.
Let’s put it this way. What feels more like a real news story – Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a liar for the ten millionth time, or this sizzling item that just hit the wires by way of the Montana Supreme Court:
HELENA — The Montana Supreme Court restored the state's century-old ban on direct spending by corporations on political candidates or committees in a ruling Friday that interest groups say bucks a high-profile U.S. Supreme Court decision granting political speech rights to corporations…
A group seeking to undo the Citizens United decision lauded the Montana high court, with its co-founder saying it was a "huge victory for democracy."
"With this ruling, the Montana Supreme Court now sets up the first test case for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its Citizens United decision, a decision which poses a direct and serious threat to our democracy," John Bonifaz, of Free Speech For People, said in a statement.
Now that is real politics -- real protest, real change. Exactly the opposite of the limp and sterile charade in Iowa. This caucus, let’s face it, marks the beginning of a long, rigidly-controlled, carefully choreographed process that is really designed to do two things: weed out dangerous minority opinions, and award power to the candidate who least offends the public while he goes about his primary job of energetically representing establishment interests.

If that sounds like a glib take on a free election system that allows the public to choose whichever candidate it likes best without any censorship or overt state interference, so be it. But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

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Most likely, it’ll be Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, meaning the voters’ choices in the midst of a massive global economic crisis brought on in large part by corruption in the financial services industry will be a private equity parasite who has been a lifelong champion of the Gordon Gekko Greed-is-Good ethos (Romney), versus a paper progressive who in 2008 took, by himself, more money from Wall Street than any two previous presidential candidates, and in the four years since has showered Wall Street with bailouts while failing to push even one successful corruption prosecution (Obama).

There are obvious, even significant differences between Obama and someone like Mitt Romney, particularly on social issues, but no matter how Obama markets himself this time around, a choice between these two will not in any way represent a choice between “change” and the status quo. This is a choice between two different versions of the status quo, and everyone knows it.

Indeed.

Please read the Whole Thing.

Occupy, Don't Ossify!

2011-11-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

I made a point of wandering by the Seattle Central Community College campus the other day, having heard that the Occupy Seattle troops had encamped there, their overnight presence at Westlake Mall an ongoing challenge to keeping something like working relationships with the PTB. And quite an encampment it is, replete with scores of small tents and mega-buzz. It was good to hear that the SCCC potentate had backed off of his small-minded grumbly threatening tone about folks camping on their property. I hear there are SCCC faculty offering instructional sessions to the Occupiers. I don't doubt that there were CC students commendably in the first ranks of the Occupiers at Westlake.

It is thrilling to me to see this activism. I am truly agog over this international Occupation.

I was stunned a while back when my generally-very-liberal hair-cutter remarked that the demonstrators just needed to "get a job." If only. Well yes, a job might be a great thing for the gazillions of Americans out of work and/or working for what amount to slave wages, barely covering child-care costs and often with abysmal or no health care benefits, while the fat-cats get their billion-dollar bonuses year in and out. That is not the point. We have arrived at a system that enriches the richest at the expense of all the rest of us thanks to casino politics where the vast majority of politicians are effectively owned by the corporate interests who pay for their whopping campaign bills and also control the "mainstream media" so the (dare I say) silent majority who settle for passively letting the tube infuse them or don't even bother with "news" don't have to be troubled with facing the absolute corruption that is our politics today. And the whining and sniveling from the uber-rich is astounding and needs more attention from those organizations supposedly in the business of edifying anyone still resigned to getting their "news" through classical media. This embodies such a blatant assumption of entitlement and victimhood at the same time that it is clear where the tea-dregs learned it. Oh you pitiful things.

It's a wonderful thing that the Occupy folks designated Wall Street as their target. Many of the primary WS players have featured huge CEO bonuses after accepting taxpayer bailouts to save them from their outrageous flim-flam packaging of certain-to-fail mortgages that they had collaborated in and in many cases fraudulently approved and then I gather sold-short against, further profiting while providing no value to anyone but themselves. These are definitely not creators of jobs. The corruption stinks to high heaven. The payoffs they have made to our congress-swine to eviscerate the regulations make a pig-pile seem sweet.

I was also delighted that Elizabeth Warren, the consumer-rights advocate running for Ted K's Massachusetts Senate seat, has received some serious props as a major inspiration for the Occupy movement.

Our 2011 Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop

2011-08-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

We greatly enjoyed participating in the Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop extravaganza late in June. Son-in-law Sean was the booster for this, but alas his foot surgery precluded his actual participation.

It was quite a gas (and would have been a guzzler had it not been for snazzy hybrid the youngsters are now sporting - I found paying for the gas quite tolerable). This whacky venture involves 50+ fabric stores spread all over Western Washington and all eager for our business. The way it works is that there are some custom fabrics developed just for the event and each shop designs a quilt block around those fabrics and offers each shopper at least most of the fabric for their block, as well as their own embellishments in the way of other fabrics and perhaps other refinements, the latter sometimes at a price.

You equip yourself with a "passport," to be stamped by each vendor you visit. If you visit 16 shops you are qualified to compete for prizes, some pretty consequential (multi-day quilting workshop, sewing machines, $100+ variety bags).

The "Hop" was a remarkable experience that will stick with me. This was well outside of my normal envelope in several ways. For one thing, as we played it, it was a multi-modal event in terms of transportation. Eric graciously took us to the train station early Thursday for Amtrak to Vancouver. In anticipation, I had printed out USGS topos of key route portions of interest to me, e.g., the stretch from Tacoma through Tenino. Between maps and my gps, there was no time for R-&-R. This stretch includes a tunnel that opens on shoreline a bit north of the Tacoma Narrows bridge(s), leading on through fascinating saltwater verge to Dupont, where apparently an amazing amount of explosive material was exported down through the years. From there it was on to the recently greatly-enhanced Nisqually Delta (no view of that alas) and the interesting and confusing transect of the mixed US Army-Tribal territory east of Lacey that eventually leads to the "East Olympia" station and Tenino, the place-name for fascinating patches of weird regularly-spaced mounds 15' or so high. Not to mention the site of a terrific rock festival (Charles Lloyd!) that I fortuitously got to attend back in '69 or so courtesy of failure of split-rivet causing outboard motor prop to fall off in Anacortes marina on the way to the San Juans. (A story for another day!).

It was not quite the full John Candy panoply - i.e., no planes (and mercifully no JC - okay, neither of 'em!) - but we did maneuver through three forms of transport before our Hop was over.

As it happened, my mother chanced to also be on this train, on her way to a J. S. Bach music festival in Eugene. We were in the first passenger car, she in the last. I wended back - a surprisingly long walk - pretty early on (Boeing Field - Auburn?) and we had a nice chat, but alas I did not repeat the visit. There was a good stretch paralleling I5 that was prime, but I was dozy and she had admitted to the same.

It was a little offputting to find train station in Vancouver chock-a-block with major recycling facility. And, as too often, these unfavored NIMBY eyesore-undersides of our "civilization" can tend to be unhappily planted right next to major water-bodies, in this case the Columbia River. We tried to look the other way, but that was made more challenging when we learned Mara was trapped no more than a few hundred yards away behind long immobile freight train. Eventually that train moved, only to have another train further delay her arrival. But eventually we were united.

As any routine peruser of my posts knows by now, I avoid the wide concrete whenever there is an option. The train helped with that, while paralleling route we have driven innumerable boring times. I rode this route at least once before, and Marg has done it several times, but there are always new observations possible. It was fun to actually this time notice the strange transitions where the rails end up briefly between the I-5 North and South lanes.

But shop location alone dictated some Big Highway time. Marg and I had already checked out the great shop in Castle Rock, which was probably the sixth stamp on our passports after Vancouver, Kelso, and Longview. And there were shops in Centralia and Chehalis, one previously visited, one not (the latter excellent, the former not so much), as well as Tumwater and Olympia, both winners. That kept us on the freeway a bit longer, not allowing for my original fantasy Tenino bypass, heading for several shops a way up the Nisqually watershed on the backside of Fort Lewis: e.g., Yelm, Eatonville, Graham, Orting. Some of that was entirely new territory to me. I found even the familiar parts unfamiliar as my prior transits had almost exclusively involved goal-oriented north-to-south travel with the Mt. Rainier vicinity as my mono-maniacal destination and these modest burgs as annoying slow spots in the road.

So there were also revelations available there for me. Aside from the occasional need for a meal or gasoline, I rarely have had occasion to even notice these Small Towns. Some are pretty ignorable, I admit. But some are pretty darn intriguing. Orting comes to mind. My impression is that this town, which I may never have even passed through before, may be built on several hundred feet of mudflows from a long-ago Rainier event (i.e., a lahar). It features a very scenic setting near the junction of two major Rainier-draining rivers (the Carbon and Puyallup), a Veteran's home, a great two-story fabric shop, and very friendly folks.

In general, on this strange event, I experienced some frustration that our collective mania did not allow for more than minimal photo-ops. I will have a few up here, but given all the visual splendors, outdoors and in, that we were privy to, my inner PicMan was and is sorely distressed.

My original naive concept was that we would bust our butts Friday and hightail it for home that night, to lick our wounds and/or savor our fabrics and fire up the sewing machines. Oh no! My ladies had their designs on Saturday shop-hopping as well, to the point that we almost wandered off-track late Friday in the interests of finding a domicile that would support our needs.

We found that in Silverdale, allowing for access to Kitsap County shops, but with the timing precluding shops in Tacoma, as we had to hightail it across the Tacoma Narrows. (It also meant for an eventual ferry ride, mode three, ka-ching.) We pulled into a nice mall shop in Port Orchard just a few minutes before closing time. The owner was quite accommodating, to the point of eventually having to rescue us when we found ourselves outside the shop but locked inside the mall.

I don't remember too much about our motel in Silverdale. I botched the freeway exit, making minor backtracking necessary.. I think we had a view of tideflats with scavenging GBH. The captive restaurant seemed a work-in-progress, with basically no wait-staff during the dinner hour and 2/3 of our chosen entrees unavailable.

Saturday found us visiting some great Kitsap County shops, the ones at Kingston and Pt. Gamble already familiar to Marg and me, from Port Angeles trip this Spring and Marg's junket with Mara's chum Jean-Babtiste in the aftermath of Mara and Sean's wedding. By this time we were fully committed. There was no mention of retreating home via the Kingston ferry. The wrinkle here was that we learned more-or-less on arrival that there was a Civil War reenactment underway at Pt. Gamble, a wonderfully reconstructed historical site. Intriguing conjunction, quilting and blunderbusses. The occasional astonishingly loud cannon-fire was very disconcerting, to say the least.

And our arrival in Port Townsend could hardly have been worse-timed. Long ferry wait, and no practical way to retreat and visit local fabric store. We consoled ourselves with a nice seafood lunch.

Time lost in Port T made for painful choices for the rest of the afternoon, given 8PM closure for the shops. I was reminded that Mara inherited a highly competitive spirit on both family sides. We foraged up Whidbey and Fidalgo Islands, did Mt. Vernon but not Stanwood, then Everett but not Arlington, figuratively screeching tires as we hooked up with Eric, who'd graciously agreed to feed us.

By this time we were totally in thrall I guess. Bellevue, Woodinville, Duvalle, time-out for memorial service in Federal Way, and another shop in Des Moines (!). Intense, bordering on obsessive?

Towards the end I suspect an observer might have remarked on semi-OCD behavior, from the standpoint of trying to fill in a second passport and increase our prize chances (as if). Mara managed to get her second passport stamped by some remarkable pick-up of those shops we'd missed in Tacoma on our transect Friday, desperately seeking Port Orchard and Silverdale. Marg and I ended up one or two shops shy of two completed passports. In the end no prizes were won by any of us anyway, but it was one heck of an interesting adventure.

A Quarter-Inch Essence

2011-08-14T00:49:00.000-07:00

We've been on a pretty fabric-intensive jam here over the last year or so. I have another post lolling in draft that starts out almost identically. If I can, as I hope, get a mini-post out here that sets the stage, maybe I can do some scrubbing on prior more lengthy draft with photographic ambitions, and get it posted "soon" too.

I re-delved into the sewing arts last Winter, making a table-runner for sister Ann for Christmas when I saw a couple go by and concluded I too could do that, and then a couple more for Mom and sister Mary. Before I knew it, I was angling for bigger fish. I invested in some fabric early this year, riffed on approach I had seen on PBS and eventually in print, leading with no little drama and printed-paper exercises and excellent suggestions from relations and accomplished pros, to my first mini-quilt.

Around about this time I was inveigled into attending a quilt expo at the Puyallup fairgrounds. Alas, that turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - comparatively limited actual creative work on display, very commercial, and quite crowded. One of the few times I brought out my camera I was harassed for it.

But we decided we couldn't resist attending the Stanwood Quilt Show. This was quite overwhelming. Astonishingly well-made quilts, with concepts and methods way beyond me. But then again, there were a number in the show that to my eye were not that far beyond what I have observed in my little Q circle. By this time I had done my first quilt front piecing but was clueless on next steps. I was very lucky to link up with a sympathetic pro with good suggestions as to some options for the border. Later on, I had great advice on binding fabric from another pro.

Next thing I knew we were going for the Western Washington Quilt Shop Hop, a multi-day fabric shop extravaganza in late June well beyond my previous imagined boundaries. Wow. Details to be found on another post!

And as if that wasn't enough, we also attended the 30th-or-so Quilt Show in Sisters, Oregon, a prestigious event that draws folks from all over the country and beyond, always held on the second Saturday in July every year. Yikes!! An amazing display of quilting talent and audience for this stuff. More Triple-A quilts than I could possibly count (or photograph!).

We continue to cherish our fabric work, a great creative outlet and wonderful respite.

Stay tuned for hopefully illustrated more-detailed posts on one or more of the above events.

Are We Down to Four Degrees of Separation?

2011-08-13T23:41:00.000-07:00

This is old news now (not sure why it didn't get posted in more timely fashion), but still with some amusement value.

My Marg has a redoubtable gang of women-friends acquired from a course of pre-school with our respective first-borns some 30 years ago. They play hostess to each other most months of the year for a dinner, at least in our household known as MNO (Mom's Night Out).

It is a great group of women and moms. Way-back-when, these MNO events meant I would likely be indulging in something like all-you-can-eat fish-and-chips at Skippers with Mara, a happy event. These days it is a quiet night at home.

But then, once in a blue moon, the circus comes to town. Marg was the hostess late this Spring.

I had suggested Salad Nicoise as the main course and found myself the salad assembler. We do this pretty much according to Julia: high-quality tuna, hard-boiled eggs, al dente green beans, potatoes, tomatoes, olives (none of those insipid canned blacks), capers, and etc. Oh my. In my opinion, a triumph of beauty and savour.

I wandered off as the ladies took their pleasure but at one point heard mention of Mitch Daniels. Having encountered his name and face on my alumni magazine cover a while back, I'd realized that despite my active pursuit of political insights, here was another major revelation in the form of a classmate who was a potential candidate for president.

I dutifully trotted out my freshman yearbook and assorted post-grad materials.

To my great consternation, it turns out that one of the MNO members was Daniel's senior prom date! Good golly.

And, of course, his candidacy was an early debacle! By comparison to some of the current leading "contenders" he seems like a bright light - were it not for a few skeletons. But my hope is for more of that much-vaunted transparency when it comes to those elbowing and brown-nosing for the nomination. We need all the help we can get, given how poorly the party seemingly in the majority has done.

Ripe Tomatoes in Seattle!

2011-08-10T21:52:00.000-07:00

I had my doubts, I confess. But giddy co-worker Todd prodded me yesterday to the effect that he had "a" ripe cherry tomato on my mother's birthday, 8/8, thus beating me despite my headstart on planting.

Somewhat reluctantly I went (on my knees) to my first plants last night and behold! Three fully red cherries!

It has not been what anyone would call a good year for warm-weather crops here in the PNW. But then, given what we can stand to learn of conditions in the rest of the country (I'm only talking wx here!), complaining would seem pretty cheesy. We have had decent snap and English pea harvests, lots of lettuce and other greens, and aggressively-planted beans could still come through. Hard green sets are apparent on almost all of the too-many tomato plants. Fava beans are productive. Tomatillos ditto.

But those love-apples are the real test of a NW gardener's prowess. I should probably not get so invested in such a low-payoff game, but it's hard to resist.

One more ripe today!

The Weekend Yang and Yin

2011-06-08T22:58:00.000-07:00

This may be the busiest time of the year for those of us actively dealing with yards and gardens, especially when it includes vegetables and aggressive management of existing plants.

There are always some things that might need serious adjusting (or removal), and this season was no exception. We took out a group of camellias that had never done much for us and had produced a lot of litter and other problems. M tagged our yard-work folks for that a couple weeks ago.

If only it was so easy.. In hindsight, I am ambivalent over who got the better deal. The trunks and rootballs fell to me. Axes, pry-bars, loppers, and all sorts of mean and nasty implements (apologies, Arlo G) were required.

But "we" got most of them out last weekend, and in celebration of our 34th anniversary, the last most-nasty-trunk, this weekend.

Meanwhile, I was also attempting to accommodate my more gentle side, cozying up to a sewing machine with a new project. Perhaps I have blundered (some have said so) in getting more than one such project in the queue, but I concluded that was inevitable, both from watching the more-seasoned sew-ers around me and from an analysis of the tasks involved and their psychic payback. Some of this is just dull work.

Anyway, my present fabric activity includes one now-quilted quilt in need of only binding (mercy, how many hurdles can there be!), a couple clandestine table runners with unspoken needs, another also off-the-record project that is just barely underway but also involves some new adventures and education, and another batik-intensive quilt-in-progress featured above, with major fabric work largely done, tedious small work on border maybe half done.

In this case though I was working off a pattern, so the border and binding are within reach. I'm still pondering the backing - maybe an equally-complex quilt?

Gardening with Adversity

2011-06-05T23:33:00.000-07:00

Discontent over cool, gray, dank weather here in the Pacific NW has become almost an epidemic. So the idea that we would find ourselves with an actual weekend with highs forecast for over 70 both days sent a real ripple through the zeitgeist. We had previously nudged 70 once a couple weeks ago, for the first time since October or something.

Mining that over-optimistic streak that I gather is almost a defining characteristic of our species, I have been raising eyebrows by planting out tomatoes (three last weekend, with waterwalls) and starting beans in pots in our shed. Meanwhile starts of peppers, tomatillos, squash, pumpkins and the like from school plant sale have been getting tough love, being left out most nights to toughen up, anticipating their graduation to the garden.

Perhaps sensing (or more of that hope thing) what was coming, I mercifully had taken care of most of a garden demo chore last weekend, namely digging out the lower trunks and stumps of four large camellias and an azalea that we had grown away from. This was no minor chore, involving shovel, lopper, pry-bar, axe, and eventually, trowel. Did I mention lower back? Several of the trunks cooperated reasonably well - I learned that the camellia has pretty brittle roots, though they can be enthusiastic as to the number of roots. Fortunately, I had only one left for this weekend, and some "quality" time Friday and Saturday night after dinner and another 90 minutes or so spread over today got the last one out as well. Naturally the last one was the worst. Still some root materials to clear, including one with a cross-section of at least 4"x6".

But in between, with generous weeding and other assistance from spouse, I was able to get six more tomatoes in, three with waterwalls, three not yet. Five tomatillos. The first dozen fava beans. Two sets of short sugar-snaps, joining the five prior, taller pea-plantings. A couple dozen sweet pea starts.

All in all, probably a bit more than I had hoped to achieve. Not to deny that I still have innumerable little seedlings entrusted to my care that need homes to be cleared for them. But we do this by increments.

No 70's forecast for the workweek from what I recall. It may be some time before we see much growth on some of these little ones.

A Kevin Bacon Moment

2011-06-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

My spouse has a regular gala dinner exchange with other mothers from a pre-school connection made a "while" ago. There are six or seven of them who take turns playing hostess to the others once a month (December and Summer months typically get a bye).

It was our (her) turn last month. Aside: I understand that there is one hubbie who routinely does all of the cooking when the event is scheduled at their platz. I'm sure I am not alone in resenting the unrealistic expectation that sets up for the rest of us frail males. And, lest I forget, there is a vegetarian in the group.

Rather than take on the whole beast, my normal approach has been to offer to help, e.g., often selecting cheese appetizers, a personal favorite. This time I went a bit beyond that, offering up concept, doing some of the procurement, and then basically assembling a Salad Nicoise, featuring of course green beans, olives, high-quality tuna in oil, hard-boiled eggs, potatoes, and a bunch of other good stuff. This is a personal favorite, ideally made several times over the course of the Spring and Summer.

They seemed to choke it down enthusiastically, but most vibrant feedback was over my Buttermilk Blue Cheese.

But in the course of that dinner, which I flitted in and out of (okay, "flit" might not work here, but you get my drift), never entirely clear in these events how far away I should be parked, there was an epiphany (hence the confusion on proximity!). I overheard mention of Governor Mitch Daniels. I had seen his face on my alumni magazine quite recently and thus was sensitized. He was not someone I was especially aware of, but there he was, in my face. A classmate, actually, though I did not remember that. I had begun a bit of due diligence on him, wary after a certain Supreme Court justice appointment a few years back about further blots on my alma mater.

So I shared photo-exhibits from freshman, senior, and 25th reunion with the group, to the great enjoyment of the Daniels-mentioner. More to the point, it turns out that this mom was the HS senior prom date of Sir Mitch, being asked on the rebound when his "regular date" for whatever reason couldn't/wouldn't attend.

Obviously much of the zing of this amazing conjunction, which happened back when MD was being highly touted as a probable Presidential candidate, is past. Apparently concerns about skeletons, though presumably neither his need to scramble for a prom date or inadvertent academic association with dfh's from the Other Washington, compelled him to decline such a run.

But we had great fun with it.

The Reading Backlog

2011-05-03T23:00:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of books I want to read. There are a multitude that I have accumulated here. Backlogged reading in the form of purchased books in the thousands. Mostly that is from historical practice, though I still add on when I find an intriguing number on the cheap. And, occasionally, there is something I know I need to possess for some reason.

But I have worked hard to get on a program where most of my reading is done via the Seattle Public Library, one of the preeminent libraries in the world in my impression. I feel bad that actual human librarians are probably employed in much lower numbers these days everywhere, including the SPL, than in the past, given the change to on-line operations. Librarians have always been in my highest esteem; through my school years, there was almost always one or more that I considered a great friend and confidante.

As of tonight, I learn that I have the following checked out:

Hillerman - Shapeshifter (cd): not sure I will get to this, borrowed for car trip
Jance - Dead to Rights: will be on this soon
Grodstein - Friend of the Family: hope to get around to this, read earlier by Marg
Gilman - The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax: I've read one in the series (at least) and we have listened to 2
Follett - Whiteout: I've had to turn down several huge Folletts recently, but have hopes here
Safina - The View from Lazy Point
Meredith - Without a Map
Harris - High on the Hog
Lee - Emily and Einstein
Wallace - Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
Lehane - Moonlight Mile
Hoagland - Sex and the River Styx
O'Farrell - The Hand That First Held Mine (for Marg)
Robbins - Skinny Legs and All
McMann - Wake (at least I am working on this one!)
James Cain - Omnibus (I read and cherished the primary Cain way back when. M. Pierce was my focus here.

I'm thinking, as I hope you might be, how does a mere human reader deal with all of this.

We'll see!

Garden Fever

2011-05-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

It's not been the greatest Spring, even here in the Pacific NW. But I gather we are the lucky ones, considering reports from elsewhere. I'm talking fine details of temperature, not wind-speeds over 100mph.

We have had a couple 60F+ days. But we have also had night frosts in the outlying areas as recently as last week, I hear. Mercifully not in our neighborhood, small consolation. I felt obliged to sequester basil, pepper, and tomato starts we picked up at school plant sale in our "potting shed" beneath the deck. This is at least enclosed, and presumably far more congenial for sensitive starts than the out-of-doors.

But we as always over-did it at plant sale, racking up several weekends of work neither of us really need, in my case in particular conflicting with breaking into and starting those seed-packets I just bought! Ah well. Prior work on that front involved getting four tee-pees worth of peas going, and chard, lettuce, mesclun, and sweet peas going in pots.

With tremendous weeding assistance from my partner, I planted out seedlings of lettuce, beets, Swiss chard, broccoli, and onions. Lots more to do, but that was a great start.

And, a great mercy, after upper-back heroics with the pole-pruner yesterday, I will do no more on the apples this Spring. Asian pear, while lower parts have been attended to, may need some more work on the superstructure, if only to keep her within reach. There are still a lot of those 3+-foot watersprouts way up high.

I'm Done With This Carpet

2011-04-28T23:12:00.000-07:00

We learned last year that the decision had been made to consolidate the three-and-a-half floors my office occupies into three-zed, with the idea of saving on rent in a pricey part of downtown. In some ways, and at a distance, with a particular perspective, it makes some sense. Working through it though it real life, this is a monster. Someone decided to replace all of the carpets. That means that even folks who are not moving, like me, have to vacate their offices. I'd love new carpet, but what will that require?

My deadline for having my office packed up was COB Tuesday. I'd earlier been pointed at Thursday, and fortunately had got started early. It was very stressful. My office was somewhat of a monument ("disaster area"?), with documents filling bookshelves and cascading onto the floor. I have tended to feel responsible for sustaining a resource/library for projects I have worked on, since management more-or-less gave up on a proper file system and any staff to manage it long ago. Actually, mirroring our republic, we are talking about abject abandonment of our infrastructure. It was painful, but I probably recycled a good ton of paper, in the category of multiple copies of reports, more or less all copies of versions prior to the final, and lots of backup material for projects long gone.

But as of Wednesday morn, I had new carpet (I like it) and 35+ boxes of "stuff" to deal with. The unpacking is of course also a royal pain. I am approaching half-way through that torture as of COB Thursday in terms of numbers of boxes, but there are some major Pandoras there yet.

Paging Hunter S. Thompson

2011-04-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

Fear and Loathing on the Re-election Trail would be my suggested title, were the bard-bastard still with us.

How can we not be concerned. The candidate of hope and change has basically managed, at least in the minds of many of us, to quell the first and negotiate away most the latter with himself prior to meeting up with the actual zealots, who have then feasted on whatever remains of the cadaver. With the passage of time it becomes more and more clear that one has to work for just the right angle to even con yourself that there was any meaningful daylight between any of the last multitude of Presidents. They all behave(d) as if they were owned by corporate America and generally consider the populace an amusing, possibly entertaining, but basically irrelevant bunch of rabble. Yokels, really, especially to Bill and Dubya, the dueling Good Olde Boys. What the Amurcan People won't put up with! Yukk! Yukk!

I will grudgingly acknowledge that the current situation is a bit of an improvement over the prior rounds that seemed like something out of Little Abner. But seemingly only in terms of the superficial aspects.

There are many more eloquent than I on this topic, and I could further delay posting to offer an omnibus, but will settle here for just one.

William Rivers Pitt:

[clip]

It wasn't even two and a half years ago. Can you believe it? Two and a half years ago, there was a detonation of optimism that echoed across the country once the returns were in on that November night. People took to the streets here in Boston, literally banging pots and pans together as they danced and shouted in celebration. The scene was repeated in city after city and town after town, and even the "mainstream" media gushed from election night to Inauguration Day about the spectacular moment in American history we were all witnessing together.

Hindsight, however, tells us today that much of that optimism was wildly misplaced. The long shadow of George W. Bush still hung low and dark over the land, as it does even now. That was part of it, of course, part of the sense of expiation and purgation so many felt once the deal went down; on that November night, the national nightmare of Mr. Bush's presidency was writing its final pages, and then came January, and he was gone. Despite all the failures and disappointments that have since come, those were two very good days.

And there have been disappointments. A great, great many of them. The words we heard were beautiful back then, soaring and sure, and many believed. How could they not? Here was this new president who could sing the birds down from the trees, who was introduced to the country in 2004 by way of a convention keynote address that blew the roof off the joint. Some years later, along the jagged, wending path of a brutal primary campaign, candidate Obama was carried to the nomination by the power of his words, and yes, many believed, even in spite of themselves.

But then he won it all, and two and a half years later, many of his most ardent supporters now hear his words and taste ashes in their mouths. You campaign in poetry, someone once said, but you govern in prose. The poetry was magnificent. The prose, in far too many ways, has been dreck, and those who believed now find themselves more demoralized than they can easily describe.

He and his fellow Democrats all but folded on health care, leaving us with less than half a loaf. He backtracked on Guantanamo, and doubled down on Afghanistan. He promised to erase Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, and broke his oath shamelessly, to his party's great lament in 2010. Wall Street stands unmolested at the center of his counsel, while Main Street withers on the vine. He is flipping missiles into Libya while flipping off the American people by racing to "compromise" with brigands and thieves on the matter of how many billions to cut. He has, to be sure, had his share of victories, but in so many critical ways, he has been the Nowhere Man, the absence of what was so seemingly present when he was elevated to his current station.

What galls the most, what infuriates and confounds, is the brazen clarity of the situation at hand. Mr. Obama has not been losing policy arguments to reasonable people. He has been losing policy arguments to people who are, in many instances, absolutely and unabashedly barking mad. He is losing policy arguments to people who sought elected office in government in order to denude and destroy that very government. Listen to them talk and the matter is plain: they got the job to destroy the job, and are so blinded by the fervor of their political catechism that they cannot be reasoned with under any circumstances. They are destroyers and usurpers, but Mr. Obama has time and again bared his neck to them, and we have all suffered with their sundry victories, and his sundry defeats.

They cannot be reasoned with, but can only be defeated, and after two and a half years, it is the President of the United States alone who appears to have not received the memo. Now he's running for re-election - not that anyone suspected he would do otherwise - and the machinery of campaign war is grinding to life in Chicago and Washington DC. Last time around, Mr. Obama's vast campaign war chest was filled with donations from millions of regular folks all across the country. The Obama campaign took money from the big boys, too; lots and lots of money. But what ultimately brought him to victory came from average Americans who could not afford to give but did. That, as much as anything else, was part of that sense of optimism felt by so many at the beginning.

So Beautiful or So What

2011-04-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to find a musical post on the Publicola site I routinely visit to savor slightly-smarmy reporting on Seattle politics. While I don't always see eye-to-eye with their columnists (no news there), it is fun to have access to actual reportage that does not have a certain shall-we-say Chamber of Commerce stench about it.

In this case the topic was one Paul Simon, he who will be visiting the Emerald City next week, with shows at two different venues just a couple days after the release of his new album So Beautiful or So What. Tour kickoff, I imagine.

I have cherished a lot of Paul Simon over the years. He's been pretty prolific though, and there is some I would file under less-than-great. Like the columnist (J. Felt), I am an unapologetic fan of the early post-Everly's ear-candy S&G stuff (Sounds of Silence etc.) and through Bookends. Yes, a little saccharine at times, and a different listen now than at the time. But it was so remarkable then that I'd swear I have permanent traces.

The solo work, post-S&G is also pretty remarkable, as a whole. Some may be a bit formulaic or otherwise a tad disappointing, but all-in-all, wow. Kodachrome. American Tune. Still Crazy. 50 Ways. Just for a few examples.

And, in contrast to Mr. Felt, I was absolutely bowled over by Graceland on first listening, to the point of several embarrassing episodes of fan-dome, and it continues to so move me since.

But Felt's admission at having fallen off the wagon, or at least not initially being synched with that astounding album just heightened for me his enthusiasm for Simon's new album.

Okay, I also want to note here that I also differ with Felt from the standpoint of still doing a large portion of my listening in "proper" album-list order, even if the medium is a compact disc. Of course I do exploit the wonder of scrambled or random-order listening (though, frankly, and sadly, my listening time is circumscribed more than I like by way of ebooks that have recently occluded a big portion of my music nirvana). But start-to-finish album is still my major listening mode.

Amazingly, you can listen to the new Simon on-line in the here and now. The album is indeed pretty damn remarkable. Honestly, the brain-change induced by Graceland and the new world instrumentation and rhythms that album flung at me upped the bar so much that this exceptional music is at a bit of a disadvantage.

But you should indeed give this a listen if you enjoy the music of Simon of any era. On first listening, I especially noted Questions for the Angels and the title tune. Gumbo, okra, and cayenne early in the latter's lyrics, all plucked some very personal notes and hooked me, in addition to the catchy rhythm and lyrics limning undeniable choices life offers us. And MLK's assassination gets a note, uncannily timely. Rolling the dice indeed.

In a rare spontaneous moment today, based on above, I flirted with and explored the idea of plunking down big bucks for a concert at a venue here by the name of the WAMU Theater. The name eventually stirred up some internal vengeful demon, questioning the persistence of a local formerly-loved financial institution whose most prominent recent byline involved the possible indictments of senior managers with 6- or 7-digit annual compensation and big bonuses just before the whole manure-pile went down, enriching the greedy hyper-rich and punishing the rest of us.

In the end, family dynamics will sadly not permit that dream of first live Simon attendance. Getting to see Sean and Mara.is more than ample compensation.

On Wisconsin!

2011-03-26T23:49:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I am finding I have to at times put some serious filters on incoming information on events in the world these days. I daren't glorify this information with the term "news," since so much of it is basically the elite media floating whatever crap they have been fed and have done no actual journalistic research on. Is it sensational? Will the gullible stay tuned? Do our advertisers seem to still be paying the bills?

On the other hand, I barely know a twitter from a tweater, and facebook has been chiding me recently for how infrequently I check in, never mind actually actively do any proper social networking. So I am less than tuned-in on that front, at times blurbed as an alternative to the increasingly monopolistic, corporatized, conservative-minded, and inept conventional media.

But I do what I hope you do - I go looking for information. I pretty routinely scan our few remaining actual paper-based media. And I more-or-less daily visit a handful of websites that I trust to keep me at least a micron shy of ignorant. Which is to sadly say, probably far more in tune with the real world than the median in our ignorant land.

Union-busting in Wisconsin was a big deal not that long ago. I was thrilled that the outrageous moves of the governor there met with a good deal of resistance from labor unions and plain folks from all over the country. That outbreak was possibly the best news I can recall since the election of 2008. I have not had a chance to properly delve into the details, but I have the sense there has been a judicial stay issued on the legislation the governor's thugs pushed through, probably violating state law, and then in the last day or so word that these same reprobates are defying the court. Quite fascinating.

In the meantime, I will probably be in the coals to Newcastle department here, but I found the side-issue of Op-ed in NYT and posts by UW-Madison history prof quite gripping. It didn't hurt that his name is just a vowel away from former Whitman College head who is also a historian.

Perhaps many of you have tumbled to this already, since rumor is it "went viral" via the social networks I am so not in tune with.

I found Professor Cronon immediately likeable, on the basis of his blog and op-ed writing (finally, someone more wordy than me!). He is not progressive enough for me to latch onto politically. But he is obviously knowledgeable, conscientious, fact-based, and concerned about the destruction of our country's basic principles that is at the heart of the recent republican thuggery.

In essence, Cronon has both called out the WI gov for his anti-worker vendetta and identified a clandestine organization ("ALEC") that apparently has been crafting hyper-conservative proposed laws to be coughed out like fur-balls by noxious elephantine state legislators as if they had the brains to think of them on their own.

Possibly ALEC is a never-mind. It might have been so had it not been for an egregious demand by the republican party in WI for a total violation of academic freedom, in the form of demand for the release of Cronon's emails. This is a good story with legs, but you will be doing some serious reading.

I originally became aware of this story via Talking Points Memo, one of those visit-every-time-you-can sites I alluded to earlier. Josh Marshall, the site major-domo, had some personal connections to offer as a history major himself:

This is a bizarre, ugly turn of events. And for me it's a little weird because of the people involved. I just found out about it from TPM Reader AS.

Bill Cronon -- or William Cronon, as I think of him -- is a Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. A few days ago he wrote an oped in the Times critical of Gov. Walker and his push to abolish collective bargaining rights for public employees in Wisconsin. About a week before that, he wrote a blog post -- the first in a new blog called Scholar as Citizen -- examining just who's behind this big anti-union push. He focused on a group called ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council).

Now, so far, nothing particularly controversial about any of this. But then it took a dark turn. Or perhaps better to say, then the story got into gear with everything else we've seen out of the Walker administration over the last three months.

Less than two days after Cronon published the blog post, the Wisconsin Republican Party filed a state open records request to gain access to Cronon's personal emails to get a look at what communications or discussions or sources or anything else went into writing it.

I encourage you to explore those links - to the blog and NYT op-ed. They speak to some very important issues in our politicals these days. This is a brave, informed person, doing determined research, who deserves our support. There is no way he appears to be as partisan or ideological as, say, I am. What he is, is a smart, lucid, research-savvy threat to the theocratist/corporationists, determined to defend the corporations and plutocrats who fund their campaigns to be elected to their outrageously overpaid and health-care-compensated sinecures.

Unsurprisingly, the repubs of WI are having a very serious case of the whinies. The poor things. Here's Cronon's response.

Smoooth Potatoes

2011-02-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

We greatly savored the opportunity to spend the last weekend with our daughter and son-in-law.

Food, the preparation and savoring of, has become a centerpiece of these happy reunions, and this one was no exception. I came equipped with some Cantal cheese in the interests of testing a recipe for the French mashed-potato concoction known as aligot, which I came upon in my reading of Peter Mayle's "French Lessons," this book a gift from my mother-in-law. Basically just potatoes, garlic, and cheese. But some of the smoothest, most succulent potatoes I've ever savored.

These became an accompaniment to Sean's pork-stuffed cabbage rolls, also a new venture. Mara has a major cameo here, she not being afflicted with knife-wounds as was hubby. It would have been nice to be equipped with the juniper berries the roll recipe called for, but these came out quite well even without. Yum all around, but plating hour was later than we would have liked.

Not one to sit on his haunches, on Sunday Sean concocted some filbert-crusted halibut steaks, making use of the results of his fishing expedition last September in BC. Based on his mention of risotto as possible side dish, I scurried through cookbooks, eventually settling on Cook's ("The New Best Recipe") mushroom recipe which required adaption based on the supplies available in the local store (i.e., no dried porcini) but seemed to be well-received with my improvisations.

It was a working weekend for Mara and Sean, as they had signed up to sell their Scentsy products at a venue in Kalama on Friday and Saturday. Marg helped out on Saturday, freeing up Sean, but it was still a bit wearing from what I could tell. By Monday, Sean was clearly well off his fettle, exhibiting all the signs of a flu sufferer (at least we hoped it was no more than that). He made a bee-line for the doctor while I was assigned responsibility for preparing chicken-noodle soup, that classic make-well dish.

I was right back at Cook's (pp 36-7). It was evident that extracting the chicken essence was the primary goal. I was scrupulous in attending to the recipe's instructions, the stress level up with patient visibly withering only a few yards away. I'm proud to say I carved that whole chicken up within sight of my butcher-in-law, in anticipation of throwing the whole mess into a couple quarts of water. Had he been hale, I know he would have offered some coaching. Alas I was so preoccupied that I have no visuals.

We also spent a lot of time on fabric issues over the course of the weekend. One Portland outlet has laid claim to being the largest fabric store on the West Coast, and I have no basis for disagreeing. It was pretty overwhelming. Even I had to purchase some fabric, sort of in self-defense. The others were less shy, given the generous sale that was underway. But from what my addled brain recalls, we visited at least three other fabric and craft outlets before the handcuffs came off.

Lookin' Out My Back Door at Desolation Row

2011-02-05T23:05:00.000-08:00

Okay, my back door is almost never open. And the view from there is pretty occluded in any case.

For that matter, there is ambiguity as to which is our front door! Go figure.

But I desperately need JF's upbeat perspective stretching back to a time when I had far more innocence to help me deal with the queasizness I continue to feel over our handling of the events in Egypt. Given our equivocal actions, it's hard to argue with this sentiment expressed by some of the demonstrators in Egypt:

We don't hate you because we hate your freedom; we hate you because you hate our freedom

How does it feel, to be on your own? Like a complete unknown.

As we stare into the vacuum of their eyes.

David Sirota has some frank talk for us:

In America, politicians are rarely compelled to turn rhetoric into action. Presidents make public commitments to support legislation while quietly instructing their congressional allies to kill the corresponding bills. Congresspeople then campaign on policy proposals only to make sure their respective presidents veto the initiatives.

We all know this game -- we know its rigged rules ensure plausible deniability and prevent follow through. But as the Mideast showed this week, just because those are our rules doesn't mean everyone plays by them.

That's what the Egyptian protests against U.S.-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak really represent for us: a poignant demand that we actually embody our democratic creed -- a demand whose response shows an American government desperate to avoid walking its talk.

Remember, President Obama told a Cairo audience in 2009 that America would unequivocally back Egyptians' democratic aspirations. Citing our nation's history being "born out of revolution against an empire," he said: "We will support (democracy) everywhere."

That declaration, while admirable, was hardly courageous because it was presented as a foreign-policy version of an American campaign promise -- that is, it was issued by a politician who never really expected to be asked for attendant action. In fact, the Obama administration was so certain it wouldn't have to embody its platitudes that it was actively slashing grants for democracy-building in Egypt while maintaining military aid to the Mubarak dictatorship.

As if deliberately bragging about this disconnect between pro-democratic rhetoric and undemocratic reality, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Arab television: "I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family."

Those "friends," of course, fired "USA"-labeled tear gas canisters at the very democratic protestors America promised to support. As the demonstrations persisted, Obama discarded the bromides of his Cairo speech and refused to press for Mubarak's immediate resignation. He then dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to both praise the despot as an "ally" and tell reporters to "not refer to him as a dictator."

Following suit, Clinton said that despite America's stated commitment to democracy, "we're not advocating any specific outcome." When asked whether the administration was at least backing away from her BFF Mubarak, Clinton was reduced to Rumsfeldian incoherence, insisting that "we do not want to send any message about backing forward or backing back."

This left Egypt's Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei to humiliate our equivocating leaders by stating the obvious: "The American government cannot ask the Egyptian people to believe that a dictator who has been in power for 30 years will be the one to implement democracy."

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Getting Into Arizona

2011-01-13T22:36:00.000-08:00

Given the classic media cluster-#$&*, there must be few other than those determinedly navel-gazing, demented, or otherwise (perhaps wisely) managing to shut out the rest of the world who have not had some 'Zona in their face these last few days.

I have certainly compiled a fascinating batch of links on the political aspects of that awful event and the aftermath, but you will probably be relieved to not find any of them in this post.

By mysterious coincidence, as you might have noticed from my previous post, I was already intent on the lower right quadrant of the state. I got there by way of recommendation by Ms. Pearl of the Book Lust series and specifically the great number Going Back to Bisbee. That book strongly resonated with me. I went on about some aspects in last post. I made a point of emailing that post to a few folks who I knew had a serious Jones for AZ. One, co-worker Jessica, drew my attention to the J. A. Jance series involving Sheriff Joanna Brady, set in Bisbee and Cochise County. I am already a Jance fan from the J. P. Beamount series, but had not for some reason tumbled to Brady. I have the first two waiting at Ms. Pearl's former home base, the Seattle Public Library, and am already savoring a more recent number in the series, by coincidence comped to spouse. Jance apparently grew up in Bisbee.

Even more coincidentally, I grabbed a couple books-on-disk at library on the occasion of recent road trip to visit daughter-and-son-in-law. The one we happened to engage with ("Server Down") involved Tucson (or "Tuscon," as a distressing number of recent on-line articles by folks with bad spelling, a total detachment, or both, have it). I did enjoy this book, apparently one of a series involving "Mad Dog", and featuring a frighteningly fast semi-domestic wolf with almost super-canine powers, but was left with questions. The story involved an elaborate on-line game that somehow takes on a life of its' own, with on-line game kills resulting in real-life homicides, and etc. So really this has to be classed more as a science fantasy-fiction/mystery or something.

Retrieving Arizona

2011-01-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

I came to Going Back to Bisbee (R. Shelton) once again by way of librarian Nancy Pearl (Book Lust to Go). This is a terrific memoir by current Tucson resident (UA faculty, if memory serves). It's one of those books rich in references and tantalizing links and offshoots that begs for further investigation. Many books elevate, enlighten, and entertain me, but those that also provide me with a wealth of other enticing leads, to books or otherwise, hold a special place in my heart, serving almost like a short-term special friend with inside knowledge to share. I believe I have created posts around several other books that met these personal criteria. Quammen's Dodo was in that category, as were titles on the epochal Mississippi and Johnstown Floods. Other examples escape me at the moment, hopefully my inner gremlins will not keep me awake on that score.

But back to Bisbee. If you don't know it, this is (so I hear - I've not been there!) quite an astonishing non-Ghost Town ghost town. Born in an earlier mining era, I believe it is pretty fully lived in these days, but it has weathered some remarkable economic swings. The author cut his teaching wings there a good while back, and crafts this memoir around a sentimental return.

But there are a multitude of wonderfully intertwined topics on the road to Bisbee. I found discourses on cholla and ocotillo, and the author's personal "system" for coining names and/or categories for living species a lot more fascinating than you might imagine. Had I not read this book, I might never had cottoned to the idea that the improbable Boojum Tree is also a member of the ocotillo family Fouquieria. (Said tree named after dreadful L. Carroll creature in The Hunting of the Snark - which I must now of course track down!).

Canines are prominent, not least because the author and family are apparently committed owners of big dogs. I don't want to own or be responsible for them, but I do find them fascinating. (I recently friended Giant George, the Guiness largest ever, on Facebook.) That gives some credibility to this:

The Navajo name for coyote translates "God's dog," and they give the coyote a place of prominence above that of the wolf, referring to the wolf as a big coyote, rather than the other way around. But the coyote's name comes to us from the Aztec coyotl.

The author's original intro to this smallish-on-the-map but huge in terms of terroire southeast corner of the Grand Canyon State was his military service at Fort Huachuca. I believe I first came upon that name when a co-worker at a former consultancy had a project there 25 years or so ago related to their electrical utilities. But the Fort has its' own fascinating history, going way back to the era when the Apache more or less controlled the area, holding off Mexico when that country claimed the land and for a good long spell when the US of A had similar pretensions with little means of defending them. That history also remarkably includes being the base for the original Buffalo Soldiers troops during WWII, something I only learned here.

But there is much more, involving land grants and battles, struggles over water (duhh!), and searches for the traces of important historical sites. The author captures the euphoric feeling I have experienced more than once in encountering a mind-blowing expanse of scenic wildness.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and strongly recommend it if any of the multiple threads I have briefly touched on resonate with you.

Crossways

2010-12-28T22:28:00.000-08:00

I may have mentioned my enjoyment of crossword puzzles here before, but my surmise is that I have not. The sole remaining paper in this corner of the country, the Seattle Times (the Post-Intelligencer still present in limited form on line), carries two such puzzles each day. On Sunday, Big Puzzle day, Merl Reagle's tends to be the easier and thus the one I start with. Up at the top of the page is the New York Times Puzzle, usually at least edited by Will Shortz, who you might be familiar with from his Sunday puzzle time on NPR (hmm - we need to get back to that!). That one is always more of a piece of work. I can usually solve the former in a couple hours of off-and-on, at times having to resort to despicable means. The latter is often left unfinished.

It is more-or-less routine that I check in with my ma-in-law on the Sunday puzzles. She tends to get a late start as she is very active in her church. I can be mostly done by the time she picks up the puzzle. Sometimes it is more fully collaborative.

Monday through Saturday we still have two puzzles, but they are smaller, typically 15 x 15 vs 21 x 21 or so for Sunday. Other primary change is that the Sunday puzzles tend to have some sort of theme or trickery to them. Sometimes it is punnery, highly annoying to at least one of my x-buds. But, not uncommonly, the theme, once figured out, does help with the solving. A recent puzzle had "oreo" (the cookie) hidden in multiple answers, and "hydroxide," encompassing name of competitor-cookie, so-clued, centered in the puzzle.

The other days of the week it is a bit different. The easy puzzle is a bit more nondescript. No Reagle, for one thing. The second puzzle, still with Shortz's imprimatur, is always a bit harder. And the non-Sunday puzzles get harder and harder as the week goes on. To the point where, late in the week, they typically are focused on much longer words than is the case early in the week or even on Sunday. I can often rip off both puzzles in an hour or so MTW, but beyond there it is a struggle.

I did cherish admission by work x-pal today that even he, Francophobe-wannabee that he is, came up with "avec," as opposite of "sans." He works hard when the occasion arises at defending his supposed conservative turf. I also relished his reaction when I had to help him with "tableaux" rather than "tableaus" as the answer to "dramatic scenes." I had that wrong myself the first time around. So did Grandma!

Lunar Occlusion and Early Morning Rain

2010-12-20T23:34:00.000-08:00

This is about as perfectly Christmas in the Northwest as I could imagine. We have the first full lunar eclipse on the date of the Winter Solstice in years racked up tonight. I checked a while back and there was a bit of a moon-glow through the moderate cloud-cover, giving encouraging signs. Just now I took dog out and experienced moderate rain while still able to observe that moon is down to a crescent.

Gordon Lightfoot crafted a great song on this score way back when (I'm listening to Ian and Sylvia's take). You can't jump a jet plane like you can a freight train.

I'd best be on my way. On that carousel of time.

From Watchtower to Nothing To Lose

2010-12-19T22:30:00.000-08:00

I don't listen to much radio. It wakes us in the AM, rarely a happy event, and can enliven time in the car. Our default music station is pretty solid (or is that stolid?) with our demographic, featuring relatively un-challenging new music and occasional classics. But, more recently, they seem to be on an oldie kick, with Brown-Eyed Girl, Evil Ways, and several other classics obviously on their repeat-play list.

Possibly as a result of this radio station renaissance, I awoke a while back to Hendrix' All Along the Watchtower, one of my favorite tunes of all time. Given the sinister business in the tune (the ominous opening always grips me), this may not be what everyone wants to wake up to, but it sure gets me going.

I thought you might appreciate my ensuing pleasure-hunt. We curious sorts had to work much harder in times past.

Wikipedia has excellent material on the original tune, the album from whence it came, and the multitude of covers. I love Bob's original as well, but in this case I was intent on Jimi's version, and was interested to learn that Dylan was so impressed with what Hendrix had come up with that his performances of the tune pretty promptly adopted much of Jimi's take.

“There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that,
And this is not our fate.
So let us not talk falsely now,
The hour is getting late.”

Hendrix alas did not survive long beyond his signature version of Watchtower. But I believe I read somewhere that Dylan was generous after this particular experience (and possibly before), more or less acknowledging Hendrix's amazing gifts, in offering up his own tunes-in-progress for consideration prior to Dylan's own recordings going out.

It has been brought to my attention since most of this post was composed that Neil Young has an enticing acoustic version of this number on record. We'll be checking that out soon.

In the course of my research, I came upon a footnote referencing a website entitled Reason to Rock. This website is quite an eye-opener. I am agog at the scholarship and intelligence behind this site, authored by another PNW resident. I'm embarrassed to be blogging on the same plane. Anyone interested in rock music is likely to find material of interest here. Major kudos.

That site circuitously led to my recent acquisition and reading of Greil Marcus' Like a Rolling Stone, a terrific account of the creation of the Dylan masterpiece of the same name. So I guess this is a bit of a retro jump-pass from John Wesley Harding back to Highway 61 Revisited. Strongly recommended reading, less daunting than some other Marcus I have read.

I know you know the tune. If you are within +-10 years of my age (i.e., on the verge of regretful adulthood), you likely know it by heart, in all its' intricate, remarkable imagery, as a result of having been there. For you others (are there some here?), you have likely acquired knowledge of this landmark tune much as our tissues have picked up mercury and PCBs. This is a far happier acquisition, not at all toxic, at least in the chemical sense.

The snakey, circuitous, Bo-Didley twistery of Rolling Stone is my metaphor for how I got here (both blog-wise and in vitro!).

Okay, fess up. How many of you are even in possession of any form of Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited? JW Harding? Need I suggest they get boosted on your playlist?

Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan. Yes, different tune (Thin Man), but same 61 disc.

Talk About Cheesy

2010-12-03T21:06:00.000-08:00

I stumbled on an intriguing recipe recently, always a happy occurrence. Entitled Baked Fontina, it appeared to be a close cousin to Fondue, an easy-enough dish we routinely enjoy putting together and savouring. This was easier, and involved cheese we had not previously used; cut cheese in chunks, drizzle with OO, season with thyme, rosemary, garlic, pepper, and salt, and broil for 6 to 8 minutes.

And it turned out to be just about that easy, to boot.

Delectable stuff, not quite as drippy/runny and easy to retrieve with your bread-bit as proper fondue is. But the payback is that this includes crusty browned cheese bits! Remember them?

Recommended. This is from Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa - How Easy Is That?

Turkey Essence

2010-12-01T22:05:00.000-08:00

As is our routine, we did the figurative over-the-river-and-through-the-woods thing for Thanksgiving, meeting up with my in-laws as well as my mother and sister at in-law grandma's house for the big meal. Okay, no sleigh-rides involved - though snow, ice, and slush were present. This was after having joined most of the same group in a dank AM walk followed by coffee-with-additives and coffeecake (indoors for the first time).

We enjoyed a pretty classic set of Turkey Day dishes, with enough left over for Friday. On that occasion, I was drafted to take care of the carcass. I have some experience at this, as an enthusiast for minimizing waste. Besides salvaging odd bits of flesh, there is the chance to make stock. I believe I served grandma's turkey carcass well - I was certainly greasy almost to the elbows by the end. I heard second-hand that she was happily making turkey soup over the weekend. Would that I could sample it!

In the meantime, we roasted a small turkey breast ourselves. That fed us two dinners and at least one lunch, coupled with roasted veggies. But this post is here because of the wonderful scent of simmering turkey remains out there in the kitchen. Stock!

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving.

The Last Indian War

2010-11-18T23:50:00.000-08:00

I thought I would be sharing this book title long ago. It is one of those I was blessed with as a result of encountering it in a bookstore somewhere along the road during our Excellent Trip this summer. I found The Last Indian War (E. West) right up there with the best historical accounts on any topic I have read over the years. If you read, and the subject sparks at all, this is highly recommended. In hindsight, I wish I had read it before our trip, but doubt I would have appreciated it as much. And I was not aware of it. I guess we just need to go back and repeat some vacation variation!

West does a terrific job of filling in the backstory for the "last war," clarifying the inherent conflict between the anglo-american conceit of single leader-organization and the more amorphous Native American approach to things.

While we have been led to think of this episode as one led by Chief Joseph (actually Joseph junior), the reality is that it was never the case that the Nez Perce had a single dominant leader. Throughout most of the "war," involving an astonishing travel/travail of native americans, Joseph was rarely a major figure. He was certainly important from the standpoint of being a leader of one of the NP bands not inculcated into the reservation at Lapwai. These non-reservation groups were at the heart of this unfortunate (to put it lightly) conflict between the long-term occupants of this portion of the Pacific Northwest and the authoritarian military. And, when it came down to it, he stood up and made a statement that will resonate forever. I find it all heart-breaking.

There's a lot to learn from this book. It certainly worked me over and continues to do so.

What About That Change?

2010-10-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

I have numerous "issues" with our President. Resignation to the idea that the unquestionable war-crimes committed by the prior administration must be covered up greatly disturbs me. War crimes are war crimes. I'm sorry - they must be pursued, regardless of the political inconvenience. It cannot only be that they are attended to when it is others and they are in a position of subjugation, as with the losers in WWII.

Basically Obama seems to be acknowledging that the defense/security/industrial complex Eisenhower cautioned us about in his departing speech (a good case has been made that they took down JFK) has taken over our government, leaving the President a pawn, more or less a figurehead except when he touts for something the complex wants.

But, aside from that, Obama's pursuit of even more executive branch power, failure to back off wire-tap, torture, and executive-privilege heresy that was so characteristic of the Shrub administration is absolutely appalling.

I have even more issues with most of our other elected democrats supposedly representing us back in that other Washington. The rate at which many of them are swilling lobbyist and other inflowing cash is appalling, even if not at the level of the repubes.

Frank Rich, under the caption "What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?," has some useful, if depressing, insights:

Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junkyard. And none of these good deeds, no matter how substantial, will go unpunished if the projected Democratic bloodbath materializes on Election Day. Some are even going unremembered. For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 percent of American taxpayers a tax cut.

The reasons for his failure to reap credit for any economic accomplishments are a catechism by now: the dark cloud cast by undiminished unemployment, the relentless disinformation campaign of his political opponents, and the White House’s surprising ineptitude at selling its own achievements. But the most relentless drag on a chief executive who promised change we can believe in is even more ominous. It’s the country’s fatalistic sense that the stacked economic order that gave us the Great Recession remains not just in place but more entrenched and powerful than ever.

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

The latest example is Angelo Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide and the godfather of subprime mortgages. On the eve of his trial 10 days ago, he settled Securities and Exchange Commission charges for $67.5 million, $20 million of which will be footed by what remains of Countrywide in its present iteration at Bank of America. Even if he paid the whole sum himself, it would still be a small fraction of the $521 million he collected in compensation as he pursued his gambling spree from 2000 until 2008.

A particularly egregious chunk of that take was the $140 million he pocketed by dumping Countrywide shares in 2006-7. It was a chapter right out of Kenneth Lay’s Enron playbook: Mozilo reassured shareholders that all was peachy even as his private e-mail was awash in panic over the “toxic” mortgages bringing Countrywide (and the country) to ruin. Lay, at least, was convicted by a jury and destined to decades in the slammer before his death.

The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensation $45 billion taxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits. during roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a

It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top.

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Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not. Voters are not only failing to give the White House credit for its economic successes but finding it guilty of transgressions it didn’t commit. The opposition is more than happy to pump up that confusion. When Mitch McConnell appeared on ABC’s “This Week” last month, he typically railed against the “extreme” government of “the last year and a half,” citing its takeover of banks as his first example. That this was utter fiction — the takeover took place two years ago, before Obama was president, with McConnell voting for it — went unchallenged by his questioner, Christiane Amanpour, and probably by many viewers inured to this big lie.

The real tragedy here, though, is not whatever happens in midterm elections. It’s the long-term prognosis for America. The obscene income inequality bequeathed by the three-decade rise of the financial industry has societal consequences graver than even the fundamental economic unfairness. When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we “lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase” for Wall Street riches, as the economist Robert H. Frank wrote in The Times last weekend. Worse, Frank added, the continued squeeze on the middle class leads to a wholesale decline in the quality of American life — from more bankruptcy filings and divorces to a collapse in public services, whether road repair or education, that taxpayers will no longer support.

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

You Have to Be Carefully Taught

2010-10-21T22:59:00.000-07:00

It seems to me there are any number of intrinsic merits to a vacation, e.g., putting a pause to life as usual, getting away from the slog, seeing new things, etc. One benefit I sometimes forget was quite conspicuous this year for me, namely coming upon intriguing book leads in local bookstores. I'd guess I have read at least 5 or 6 books with some sort of vacation locale influence since our July trip that were directly inspired by a few brief stints in bookstores in places like Thermopolis and West Yellowstone.

One of those books was my original intended subject here, but before we get to that I have a side issue. And that book may have to await a future blog, depending. Much as that vacation awaits further blogs, unfortunately. I have intentions and designs, believe me, but the execution is another matter. I spent numerous hours doing some limited cleanup on the vacation pics, as I may have noted before, and even got so far as to print out 150 or so of the suckers for some sort of hands-on keepsake. A selection of those images also now grace Facebook, though pics there as yet stop well short of Yellowstone.

I have a generally likable and entertaining co-worker who was raised in a town of population 1,500 or thereabouts in northeast Kansas. We have a lot of common enthusiasms in the way of things like preparing and consuming food (preferably with spice, smoke, and tang), gardening, and critters, both domestic and wild, but politics is not one of them. He only recently took down his office photo of McCain and Palin. (My treasured mockup, courtesy of Ma-in-Law, of Ford, Bush I, Reagan, and Nixon, thanking me personally for my dutiful support of the R party remains on display.) He is judicious around me, but prone to bait those of the liberal persuasion with any signs of weakness or lack of redeeming qualities of the sort I guess I feature and otherwise brag of his narrow-minded, right-wing, I've got mine, screw them mindset.

He was 18 years old or so before he encountered rice in a form other than Rice Krispies. His wife, who grew up in somewhat similar surroundings, to this day cannot eat rice. My friend had not encountered an avocado before they moved to Seattle back in the early '90's. He now considers avocados a food of the gods.

My dear friend Michael lives less than 50 miles from where my co-worker grew up. He recently expressed despair at living in the only slightly-blue enclave in a horrific state of red. He grew up, at least in my impression, in the environs of the biggest metropolis in the area, i.e., Kansas City (or its' burbs).

My guess is that when I was about the same age as my co-worker when he first came upon the miracle of rice as we know it as a component of a dinner meal I was reveling in the idea of alternatives to Cantonese Chinese foods in my neighborhood. Szechuan and Hunan were still a little down the pike, but a Mandarin restaurant blossomed I think while I was in highschool, only a couple miles from our home. And was promptly adopted and enjoyed by us. A restaurant meal was a celebration in our family, not something done spontaneously or lightly. But that intriguing source of new spicy/tangy, even hot, food was added to the pedestrian (Shakey's!) pizza parlor, more wide-ranging spaghetti house, and a more distant mexican restaurant as part of our family repertoire.

Otherwise, while a few African-Americans and Asians attended my highschool, it was a pretty solidly waspy area.

"You have to be carefully taught." I think that is from The King and I, and whether I have it right or not, I have that stored in a category that might be labeled "Teaching Bigotry." The insight for me here, though, is that if you grow up in an environment that does not even include anyone significantly different from you, no "ethnicity" even in the vicinity, there is a significant chance you will fail to mature to be a well-rounded global citizen with the ability to empathize with or even cope well with cultural and ethnic differences (not to mention diet!). Especially if your parents are incurious and make little or no effort to expand your horizons. Or serve you rice, for gosh sake. We can be carefully taught in so many ways.

I'm not saying I have achieved that, either. But I feel blessed that, while I did not have the advantage of a particularly multicultural neighborhood or educational system, at the very least I had the benefit of a far more varied and curious encounter with the trappings of other cultures than my coworker.

Growing up in a vibrant port city, fueled by international trade and populated by a mix of folks including escapees from the Mississippi Delta as well as Asians of multiple affiliations, is quite different from growing up in a small waspy Kansas plains town.

Mind you, I am not defending my co-worker, merely trying to better understand where he is coming from. And hoping that might help me in some unknown way to better deal with the obvious collective insanity on the right that we are seeing these days. Abetted, of course, by the Corporate Media, increasingly intolerant of any real reporting a la Izzy Stone.

My Feathered Fiends

2010-10-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

There was no way I could resist posting on 10/10/10. Not that I am into crypto-ephemera or anything, just that I savor the numerology. A couple years back Mom's birthday had a similar conjunction, and two years before it was my turn.

Possibly in unconscious celebration, I went for a run for the first time perhaps this year, certainly in months. I set out with low expectations, 20 minutes or so being my goal, especially given our setting, where hills almost immediately dictate ascents or descents, followed by the reverse. Aside from one weekend with a pack this Summer, pretty much all of my exercise these days revolves around walking or yardwork. So I was inclined towards the cautious, especially after the pain I experienced for days after that backpacking trip. But, with a little interspersed walking, I was intrigued to find I had more in me than I expected. I was out a full 40 minutes, hills and all. Pleasing. Now, we will just see what the muscle fallout might entail.

Still in shorts (oh, and thanks wx-gods, for not raining on my run!), I got back to my rare project of a Fall vegetable planting. I started three types of pole peas, mixed lettuce, and mesclun a month ago, and they are vigorous now. I got some of the peas in the ground with pole-tripods yesterday and part of the lettuce set in deck planters. After run, I planted the remainder of the peas in two more locations.

Prior to run I had been enjoying birds on deck, but eventually realized the primary feeder there was empty. Given rare repeat nuthatch visits, and juncos actually up on the deck picking at dropped thistle seeds. Actually, I believe I even spotted a junco on the bird-feeder, quite a rarity. In any case, I was inspired to make sure we were properly stocked. But in the process of restocking the feeder, I had to stifle myself as I discovered the little #%^&* blokes (or some of their chums) had finished off almost all of my just-planted lettuce starts.

Oh bother.

Storm in Three!

2010-09-16T22:01:00.000-07:00

It was a delightful treat tonight to have the Seattle WNBA Storm win the championship in three straight games, pulling off a victory on the road in Atlanta. It has been very rare in my experience for a Seattle team to have the killer instinct and chutzpah to do anything like this. I thought they had a great chance to win the fourth game, but I admit I really expected them to go off-track a bit tonight with that heady 2-0 lead.

But the Storm showed up with some serious competitive attitude tonight. Besides the reliable marquees (Bird, Jackson [mvp], and Cash), Wright, Little, Abrosimova, Willingham, and Vesela all had major contributions. It was a remarkable (cliche) team effort.

And exceptional coaching was a big part.

Congratulations you superstars!

We have been fans from the start, originally I guess due to daughter Mara's involvement in HS basketball and then her actual employment by the nascent Storm. We've never been ticket-holders, but always fans. It is so great to see how well this team has done this year and how much they seem to enjoy and appreciate each other. And we might savor a possible bit of smack in the face of the NBA and their collusion in the stealing of the Sonics.

Atlanta you did yourselves proud. Storm, even prouder.

Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On

2010-09-06T23:37:00.000-07:00

That bit of vacation back in July seems like another lifetime, despite considerable time spent sorting through the digital imagery. It was a pretty pic-intensive trip for me, with something like 800 shots over the course of two weeks. I recently completed first pass through them, rotating here, adjusting light levels there, cropping from time-to-time. There are a number that are likely to show up here, on Facebook, or elsewhere in the future. But for the most part they need a story line.

So I will introduce a couple vacation shots here tonight in that spirit. Believe me, the idea of a Tectonic Travelogue never crossed our mind in planning this trip, in some ways a frilly fandango riff on the trip we made to Sun Valley a few years ago.

But in looking back over it, I was struck that we purposely skidded to a halt for pics at least twice at sites of dramatic land-form changes, traveled through multiple other venues famous on that score, and in general spent a good part of the trip not far from dramatic live geology. And, when you consider that our trip originated near the Cascade Mountains, home of numerous live and dormant volcanoes, passed through the Columbia Basin, site of remarkable historic lava flows, and then headed over to NW Wyoming, perhaps the frequency of exciting land-form drama is a bit more understandable.

I think it was just a couple years back that we learned of a major landslide in the American River valley, just east of Chinook Pass, the Cascade Crest divide just east of Mt. Rainier. The highway was closed for a good long while as I recall. We were detoured for a few miles off the former highway and chose to pull over for a picture. The scarp where material fell away is quite conspicuous, and the multi-hued result can be seen lower down.

After a couple wondrous days passing through basaltic and Ice-Age Floods territory (don't get me started, but this includes numerous mega-slides and other off-the-scale landscape features), we eventually after many fine adventures found ourselves making a somewhat time-pressed passage through the Valley of 1,000 Springs (or something like that) just west of the apex of Idaho, Mt. Borah. I had forgotten about the seismic event there a couple decades or so back, but we couldn't resist pulling off and getting dusty on the unpaved backroad to the memorial site.

While a little difficult to discern in the photo, this site is especially impressive because you actually observe a fracture of multiple feet where the valley floor has descended, leaving raw earth for I gather many miles in either direction. Not exactly your routine back-yard experience.

From there we transected Idaho, passing several apparent cinder cones and the vicinity of plenty of familiarly volcanic-like place names (Craters of the Moon a personal childhood favorite). I gather there is a semi-consensus that a major hot spot not that far below the earth's surface gets the credit for the major basaltic discharges in the Columbia Basin, those here in the upper Snake River area, and, these days, in Yellowstone, all thanks to the plate we northwesterners are riding gradually moving to the northwest and thus putting increasing distance between us and that hot spot.

Cutting to the chase, we toured some territory that was new to us in NW Wyoming, including Thermopolis, site of major hot springs, but eventually and inevitably made our way to YNP, the Hot Spot if there ever was one. I will not linger on that here, other than to note that the park reported record numbers of visitors this July. We noted lots of folks, but not obnoxiously so.

Racing for home after our too-short YNP visit, we traversed the Hebgen Dam/Earthquake Lake locale, where a catastrophic earthquake back in 1959 got lots of attention, including mine. I must have been in all of third grade, but given my parents' awe over the event, I couldn't help but be agog, probably poring over National Geographic features and such. I think we made a point of visiting on the major cross-country camper tour we did a few years later.

Marg and I had also done some tourism at Hebgen a few years ago with the kids, and had other fish to fry this time. But that too, is an amazing venue for anyone interested in the remarkable conjunction of nature at its' wildest and our human dreams.

Rollin' and Tumblin' indeed!

I Wasn't Born to Lose You

2010-09-03T23:56:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of his scheduled appearance for the first time at our beloved long-running Labor Day festival by the name of Bumbershoot, I was quite delighted to be serenaded this AM by radio play of Dylan's "I Want You." For me, musically, this guy is, if not Polaris, certainly one of the brightest lights. We don't get to hear him very often on the adult semi-contemporary station we favor. Not that I get in much radio either, being a mass-transit sort of guy - instead I get him on my iPod. Confession: I have never attended the 'Shoot. Too many people, for one thing.

But, given the at-least-hundreds of times I have savored this tune, it's remarkable how viscerally I still respond - especially when it comes up somewhat unexpectedly. As some of you no doubt remember, it was one of the features of that incredible album Blonde on Blonde.

In the meantime, I picked up the Seattle Weekly's 'Shoot Guide while slaloming through the vendors frantically setting up their stands today on the Seattle Center grounds and picked up on article "Myth 61 Revisited," by John Roderick:

No one played me Bob Dylan's music growing up, thank God. My parents were a little older and definitely not into nasal caterwauling and country warbling. That was a part of the '60's they hated, along with Southern cops and the war on Vietnam. So the first time I really heard Bob Dylan was high school, late '80's, after I was already marinated in music, opinionated, informed.

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I didn't get his music right off the bat - I was married to big, hooky choruses and long, indulgent guitar solos - so I had to struggle a little. I struggled at first even to stand it, mostly because I couldn't stand the kids in wool caps and army jackets who misused their big vocabulary words and swore that Dylan would change my life. I was pretty sure that if my life was going to change, it wasn't going to happen from looking down the barrel of some out-of-tune hillbilly music. But enough of my college friends insisted that Dylan was great that I kept trying. Despite the undeniable truth that some of Dylan's songs were untouchably great, I wasn't hip to what the big deal was. THIS guy? This is the famous Bob Dylan? This monotone sneering over the same endlessly repeating three chords, interminable verses, nonsensical words? Why is this guy such a legend?

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So not knowing Dylan before I was 20, not being told that he was the savior until I could judge for myself, saved me a lot of heartbreak later on.

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And, to his everlasting credit, Dylan never believed what people said about him. He kept doing his thing, caterwauling, kept doing things for the hell of it, the fun of it. That's why I like him, and I discovered it for myself.

[NB Eric and Mara: please reassure me that I did not ruin Dylan for you by overbearing enthusiasm!]

Perusing an account of the genesis of the seminal Stones album Beggar's Banquet the other day, I enjoyed reminder that both the Stones and the Beatles were quite in awe of Bob, attending his concerts (e.g., Royal Albert Hall, the famous one when he morphed to hard rock a la Newport) and wanting to run their numbers by him.

"Keys to the Rain" has it this way:

Dylan's most traditional pop song deftly balances some of his most romantic if muddled images and his most personal plea. The last song cut for ... Blonde on Blonde ... was finished in the Nashville hotel room where Dylan stayed while making the record. Dylan had taught Al Kooper the piano part, and Kooper played it over and over while the author worked out the final lyric. As an A-side single, "I Want You" hit No. 20 on the Billboard chart - not bad for a bit of chaotic pop surrealism portraying the happy, intoxicating infatuation of newfound love and including a cast of characters that could have jumped right off a Dali canvas: a guilty undertaker, a weeping mother, the Queen of Spades, a chambermaid, a dancing child with his Chinese suit, a lonesome organ grinder, and a drunken politician.

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The guilty undertaker sighs

The lonesome organ grinder cries

The silver saxophones say I should refuse you.

The cracked bells and washed-out horns

Blow into my face with scorn

But it's not that way

I wasn't born to lose you.

I want you, I want you

I want you so bad

Honey, I want you.

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For the record, umbrellas may be needed for the whimpy at Bumbershoot - showers are forecast!

Reading in the Dark

2010-08-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

I make considerable use of the library these days, dodging my love for and tendency to be acquisitive about actual physical books, since they seem to be filling up too much of the space around me. The library is wonderfully supportive, allowing for on-line placing of holds. I do regret the obvious deterioration in opportunity for actual librarians to work their magic on me and others. But I guess I am pretty self-directed when it comes to books, probably rarely in the past couple decades having interacted with a proper librarian in the way I once did. Librarians have always been at the top of my admiration-pyramid. I glommed on to a number of them over the years, intrigued that they actually unquestioningly supported my gluttony for more and more information. While I appreciate on-line access, I greatly regret the denigration of the role of these wonderfully resourceful folks.

On return from vacation recently, I was greatly amused at the collection awaiting me on hold at the library. I made a point of joshing with a couple co-workers that I had assembled these books to purposefully compensate for their happy-happy talk. In one case it was sarcasm, in another a response to our mutual cautious censorship of topics.

My books on hold were:

The Arsenic Century: How Victorians Were Poisoned At Home, Work, and Play;

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work; and

Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West 1846-1890
Just the sort of thing to bring balloons and cotton candy to mind, ehh? (Not to say I have had a chance to even start one of them.) The first was inspired by a review sent to me, the second recommended by co-worker, and I had it in hand once before but had too many things going at the time to even start it and had to return it. The last I came upon during our vacation and felt compelled to look at more closely.

I have already finished one book (non-fiction regarding Stanley Basin - Traplines) inspired by vacation, am working on another (fiction by regional author - C.J. Box's Nowhere to Run), and have at least one besides Slaughter in line. I have only limited prior experience of the territory (there's a similar term used in the wine-making industry that I can't quite seize on - "terroir"?) in question, though I did find myself similarly inspired when we traversed northern Wyoming a decade or so ago and ended up reading something regarding the Wagon-box Battle and, I believe, a classic novel set in the area - Shane?

It's not as if I am in need of reading suggestions. The queue is full for at least the next several decades. And that is if I find a sugar-librarian to pay my way to read full-time! I suspect more realistically that I am currently equipped with enough new reading (and there are repeats I have in mind, e.g., Ulysses and Alexandria Quartet) to last me for this and the next lifetime.

At the very least.

Sigh.

Long Away and Far Ago When People Counted

2010-07-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

Ah, vacation! We are recently returned from enjoying the luxury of leaving the turmoil behind for a couple weeks. Trading keyboard upper-body crimes for steering-wheel strains. We saw some remarkable scenery, largely thanks to our usual routine of minimizing use of wide expanses of pavement. I will include a couple teaser-photos here. With luck I will have more on our excellent adventure before long.

A recent routine has been savoring recorded books. I believe we worked our way through three on this trip, all fiction.

One big audio number was Carson McCullers' "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." I did not go looking for this, but when I came upon it I did feel a distinct urge, the title long familiar w/o any ken for the story line, and yet touching a heart-string in some way. Her first book. 1940.

As you know, if you experience books through your ears vs. your eyes, it is a quite different ride. A narrator with a quirk or accent that is off-putting can spoil the experience (I never quirk or accent when I read). But it's been rare for me to encounter that sort of thing. More often it is an enjoyable melding with the environment we are driving through, the viewing of scenery nuanced positively by the listening and vice versa, not necessarily in a way I could possibly describe or even remember down the road (so to speak). But it can be a great conjunction. And it was again so here.

This book proved quite remarkable (we're far from the first to notice that, of course), and with an uncanny resonance with our times. A primary difference between then and now is that in 1940 you could still actually profess democratic principles and an enthusiasm for the constitution, as well as loathing for the anti-constitutional and unpatriotic corruption and exploitation of the rich and the corporations without fear of big-time retribution from the fat-cats, media, and red-baiters. Hell, you could actually espouse communism without fearing a stay in jail. Now that's what I call Free Speech! A pretty engaging book, hopefully encountered previously by some of you. One could quibble about the length and side-tracks, but then I recall a number of prize-winning books more or less from this era with similar "issues." Not an afternoon's undertaking, but highly recommended. Amazingly timely, in fact.

As it happened, I picked up Jules Feiffer's memoir Backing Into Forwards while we were chewing on McCuller. There were a multitude of overlaps between these two books, the first a work of fiction set in the deep South, the other an account of growing up an outsider in what would someday be the Big Apple. Two locales with a natural abhorennce.

Feiffer grew up in the poverty-ridden outskirts of NYC to become one of the iconic cartoonists of our time, courtesy of his own painful yeomanry, eventually a long-standing unpaid run with the Village Voice, and finally wider, paid syndication, not to mention brilliant successes in other media (e.g., screenplay for movie Carnal Knowledge, plays like Little Murders, illustrations for Phantom Tollbooth). And some major pratfalls.

This is not by any means a classic saccharine people-mag, pool-side read. Feiffer refused to play by the rules of the authorities and others throughout his life, stumbled and sinned (if you will) numerous times, by his own admission, and through his memoir comes to seem remarkably salt-of-the-(progressive)-earth. He has a bit of the take-no-prisoners about him, but in a good way, e.g. railing against those who actually cooperated with that loathsome congress-swine from Wisconsin. His encounters with (other) famous people alone are enough to warrant tracking this down. Also highly recommended.

I regret how rarely I had occasion to savor Feiffer's cartoons in the original back when the VV was readily accessible.

Absurd Political Times Indeed

2010-07-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

Ennui? Malaise? Estrangement? My head is certainly in an unfamiliar state, not anything like what I would have expected in the aftermath of Palin/McShame's defeat. Very little in American politics is going at all as I would like. I have come to understand that while there may be one or two persons in each house of Congress who actually have enlightened progressive views, empathizing with the downtrodden, enthusiastic about the "created equal" business, and otherwise prone to work on behalf of the powerless, both parties are apparently almost entirely subservient whores to their corporate donors. Our "Hope" president is seeming more pathetic and ineffective by the day, despite terrific speaking skills and a knack for the sound-bite. The American People no longer have a representative government, from what I can tell. Of course a discouragingly large segment of that AP have been routinely acting against their own interests, promoting fear- and race-mongering candidates whose real agenda involves serving their fat-cat funders. And the "supreme court" is of course a Supreme Joke.

I'm relieved to find dizziness and bewilderment are not confined to me. David Michael Green (h/t cv) has this amazingly well limned, helping me dream that I am not absolutely out of step and out of touch. I'm giving you the whole business undiluted here. It by rights ought to be in wide circulation already, were it not for the corruption of the media touched on herein. I'd love to hear you came upon it or it was brought to your attention before now - please check in if you have. Please check in in any case. You're a big girl now (that's my inner John Sebastian there!):

Let's be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times.

Here's the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn't so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you'd really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn't clear - the US as Honduras, perhaps? - but it's unlikely to be pretty). Perhaps the only major exception to that rule was their 2005 failure to privatize the vast pool of public money sitting in the Social Security coffers, which they lust over lasciviously, like teenage boys inhaling online porn by the bucketful.

The product of these efforts has been precisely what one would expect. Corporations and economic elites have grown fantastically more wealthy than they already were thirty years ago. Their tax liabilities are now negligible and sometimes less than zero. Massive national debt, the product in part of those tax gifts to the rich, plus huge bills for interest on that debt (this alone is one of the largest items in the federal budget each year), is now owned by the mass public, who got nickels and dimes worth of tax cuts, in exchange for which they will now have to literally work years of their lives to pay down the taxes the rich escaped. Working people across the country get less and pay more for everything today. College is becoming increasingly out of the financial reach of average Americans. The minimum wage, which actually often isn't the minimum, is far from a sustainable salary for one person, let alone a family. As of 2004, the richest one percent of Americans possessed sixty percent of all wealth in the country, while the bottom forty percent accounted for a whopping two-tenths of a percent. Between 1979 and 2004, after-tax income for the top one percent of Americans rose by 176 percent, while for those in the bottom 20 percent that figure rose only six percent. And those figures are for six years ago, during what by current standards was flush times for working people. Now jobs are disappearing, with the inevitable effect of driving wages down further, not to mention all the obvious effects on prosperity, security, health, mental health and sheer longevity.

Meanwhile, just the approach to regulation alone has produced three monstrous attacks on American society as a direct result. First the recession-starting-to-become-a-depression and all its devastation, then the recent mining disaster, and now BP's WMD attack on the Gulf Coast states. What all of these have in common is a government regulatory apparatus that over time transitioned from a public service mission into deference to those supposed to be regulated, and then from deference for the corporate sphere into constituting a straight-out satellite office of the corporations themselves, literally having business supposed ‘regulatees' fill out their own monitoring forms in pencil, to be inked in later by the planted shills in government. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been wiped out by these actions and the public is paying for its own thrashing through bail-out funds. I'm sorry, but in what sense is this not treason?

Okay, so far so bad. Nothing particularly Alice-In-Wonderlandy or especially novel about rampant greed, is there? But what's really bizarre to the point of being becoming a fully hallucinogenic experience that really should come under the supervision of the Controlled Substances Act is the effect that this has had on politics. Could there ever be a moment when right-wing ‘economics' have been so thoroughly and manifestly repudiated? Could there ever be more overt examples of corporate greed gone nuclear? Could the repercussions of these policy decisions ever more clearly have wrecked the lives of economically insecure ordinary Americans?

No, no and no. All this is as obvious and predictable as sunrise. And yet... Here we find ourselves in this remarkable and remarkably absurd position where the folks who not only created this monster, who not only have worked assiduously to prevent any solutions to the destruction they've wrought, and who now also promise even more of the same - these very folks are poised to win resounding electoral victories in November. And the folks who will be voting for them will once again become victims of their predations. And the folks in Congress and the White House they'll be voting against - supposed socialist-fascists (whatever strange Janus-faced zoological beast that would look like if it actually existed) - are in fact just about the most pro-plutocrat government imaginable. But they're going to get stomped by voters for being socialists.

How on earth did this happen?

Well, to start with, it happened because it was intended to happen. As described above, this is the product of a broad, concerted and patient effort by the radical right to capture and control American government, and it has worked remarkably well, especially when one considers the sheer amount of deceit required to pull it off. It's like trying to sell a cocktail of Dirt Drink mixed with Sawdust Soda to a man dying of thirst. But it can be done, and we know that because the process is now all but complete. When even John McCain refers to Congress "the best government that money can buy" you know you're really hurting, pal. As for that Trotskyite socialist in the White House, well he's staffed his economic team directly out of Goldman Sachs' boardroom, he bails out mega-banks one hundred cents on the dollar without even requiring that they loan money, he wrote a health care bill that forces thirty or forty million Americans to buy a product from bloated thieving insurance companies whether they want it or not, and he has dramatically increased spending on an already astonishingly distended military, while remaining essentially silent about (meager but essential) unemployment benefits right now in the process of terminating for millions of Americans. Yeah, baby - that socialist. "Workers of the world unite" is definitely what they rap about at White House cabinet meetings. Geithner, Summers, Gates - all those revolutionary syndicalists can't talk it up enough. Then they sing "The Internationale".

Clearly, the political branches of the US government have been fully captured by monied elites. Perhaps scariest of all, however, is the newly emboldened ultra-radical majority on the Supreme Court (that description is not reckless hyperbole used for effect - look at what they've done in cases like Bush v. Gore, Ledbetter and Citizens United, and watch what they do in the coming years - it will be astonishing in its scope, radicalism and hypocrisy). After decades of histrionic lies about supposed objections to judicial activism (what they really hated was the impudent offense of an elite court handing down liberal decisions and siding with mere mortals in American society, period), they have now kicked out the jambs to expand the practical definition of the ‘activism' term beyond all recognition. Lori Blatt, former attorney in the Solicitor General's Office, put it best: "They are fearless. This is a business court. Now it's the era of the corporation and the interests of business." No case underscored this tendency better than Citizens United, of course, where the regressive majority was so blatantly activist that they literally told the stunned litigants to go home, come back in a month and reargue the case around a far, far bigger question than was at stake for the parties involved, and then sweepingly cast aside long existing law in order to blow blitzkrieg-size breaches in the barriers that had previously controlled corporate influence of elections. The only case that can rival this one for utterly transparent activism seeking a regressive outcome is Bush v. Gore, in which the right-wing bloc simultaneously violated three of their own cardinal tenets - judicial restraint, states' rights, and hostility to civil rights principles - in order to require vote counting be stopped (say what?!) and to crown the mentally deficient dauphin as king. It could hardly be clearer that the Roberts Court ominously completes the troika of the right-wing governmental coup.

But there are other reasons we're in this state, as well. Think about Barack Obama and the Democrats for a second, and then try applying Ms. Blatt's phrase, "They are fearless", to those folks. Now pick yourself up the floor. Change the underwear you just soiled from laughing so hard. Wring out the hanky you just soaked from sobbing so relentlessly. Part of why we're in this mess is that Democrats wouldn't know what guts looked like if they were all board-certified gastrointestinal surgeons. But, of course, to complain that "the people's party" lacks sufficient courage of their convictions assumes that they have any. The good news is that they do, as a matter of fact. The bad news, however, is that those convictions can be reduced neatly down to two: serving themselves and serving the nice folks who donate money to get them elected. It's a bit of a problem when the gang who are meant to protect us from the crimes of the GOP are nearly indistinguishable from Cheney's thugs, apart from stylistically. Democrats are happy to give you a little kiss on the cheek before they screw you. Republicans prefer to just get on with the assault.

Then there's the media in this country which is, of course, beyond hopeless. Watching Rachel Maddow the other month throwing a few medium-speed hardballs at Rand Paul only served to remind me just how rare it is for any of these pathetic hacks to actually do their job, as opposed to doing the cash-driven bidding of those in power, especially tough-guy Republicans who must get plenty of laughs out of how easy it is to bully the Washington press whores - er, sorry, I mean press corps. There's nothing quite so self-made as the disasters of Election 2000 and the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the absence of any sort of serious media scepticism in those cases simply illustrates how utterly worthless the press truly are. Except, of course, as excellent public relations specialists for plutocrats. These days it seems like the only outlet doing anything approaching serious journalism is Rolling Stone. As to what it says about American society and journalism that you have to wade through cover photos of Lady Gaga's full-on unclad posterior to find out the lies our government is telling us, well, I'll leave that to you.

But clearly the neutering of the obedient profit-motivated media has worked spectacularly. One of the key fronts in this class warfare conducted by the wealthy in America has been with respect to framing. For three decades now, all we've heard is how government is a screw-up and how heroically efficient are the captains of industry in the private sector. The way regressives trash our own government in a democracy would certainly have seemed traitorous in another day. Just imagine if you said the same things about the military, which seems to miraculously escape the right's attention as the biggest and most famously wasteful government bureaucracy of all. Moreover, looking back over Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, not just a small bit of the curtain has been pulled back from the notion of the military's supposed infallibility. It's been two-thirds of a century since the United States won a big war against a serious adversary, and even then the Russians did the heavy lifting, at least in Europe. Somehow we never hear much about big, incompetent government in that context, though.

But, hey, forgive my little flight into logical analysis there. We really cannot have that in these times. For a minute there, I forgot to forget. It won't happen again, Mr. O'Brien, I assure you. From now on, up is down, black is white, war is peace, government is bad and corporations are purveyors of Happy Meals (happy, that is, unless you happen to be a cow, like having small businesses around, have a problem with obesity, don't want your planet to catch fire, or object to the creation of massive great lakes full of animal waste). Yep, big business is good! That's why we need to apologize to BP for our government "shaking them down" and forcing them to be slightly-barely-kinda-nominally-sorta responsible for their ecological and economic epic disaster in the Gulf. Get it?

But the other sad truth is that, at the bottom of this roll call of nefarious predators - under every Cheney and Obama and Brian Williams and Lloyd Blankfein doing (his green) god's work, is a great big stinking pile of yahoos better known as "Us". We'll vote Republican this fall because we utterly lack the intellectual curiosity to investigate other options. We'll vote Republican because we're greedy and lazy and willing to step on anyone's throat to get our little slice of prosperity back. We'll vote Republican as if we weren't only two years ago just absolutely counting down every second until the previous government packed up and left town. You know, the er, uh, Republicans.

But I have just one question for my fellow Americans before they step into that voting booth. The truth is that what ails us now is exactly what y'all have been voting for over the last three decades. The truth is that if you vote Republican in November it will all only get worse. The truth is that you're living the regressive dream just now, right as we speak.

We've let corporations run wild. We've decimated the government whose function it was to regulate them in the public's interest. We've shifted a very large pile of your money into the hands of the richest one percent of us, and given you and your kids loads of government debt to pay off in exchange. We've shipped your job off to China or India. We've completely immunized all branches of your government from any form of influence other than from rapacious plutocrats.

So my question is, fellow Americans, now that we've all had a nice heaping helping of what regressive politics means for us real people down here below the stratosphere, "How's that recessioney, oily thing working out for ya?"

Eh?

Self-esteem in War-time

2010-06-29T23:11:00.000-07:00

Possible there is some tiny wiggle-room and on-the-other-handing available on this outing of General McChrystal. Personally, he should have known better than to reach into the toaster while standing in a puddle. Our Mr. Brooks certainly seems to find it a sign of yet more dystopian breakdown of his fantasy genteel society of yore (reporters literally embedded throughout our government, no worries that a little propaganda might show up in print; J. Miller, NYT, Exhibit A):

The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters. Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time. And at these moments they can’t help letting you know that things would be much better if only there weren’t so many morons all around.

So every few weeks I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk. Senators privately moan about other senators. Administration officials gripe about other administration officials. People in the White House complain about the idiots in Congress, and the idiots in Congress complain about the idiots in the White House — especially if they’re in the same party.

The system is basically set up to maximize kvetching. Government is filled with superconfident, highly competitive people who are grouped into small bands. These bands usually have one queen bee at the center — a president, senator, cabinet secretary or general — and a squad of advisers all around. These bands are perpetually jostling, elbowing and shoving each other to get control over policy.

Amid all this friction, the members of each band develop their own private language. These people often spend 16 hours a day together, and they bond by moaning and about the idiots on the outside.

It feels good to vent in this way. You demonstrate your own importance by showing your buddies that you are un-awed by the majority leader, the vice president or some other big name. You get to take a break from the formal pressures of the job by playing the blasphemous bad-boy rebel over a beer at night.

Military people are especially prone to these sorts of outbursts. In public, they pay lavish deference to civilian masters who issue orders from the comfort of home. Among themselves, they blow off steam, sometimes in the crudest possible terms.

Those of us in the press corps [Oh Bwana! You Big Man!] have to figure out how to treat this torrent of private kvetching. During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties.

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But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.

The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

Another scalp is on the wall. Government officials will erect even higher walls between themselves and the outside world. The honest and freewheeling will continue to flee public life, and the cautious and calculating will remain.

The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see.

You know, Brooksie, from where I sit you are not actually doing your "job," but merely sucking up to the power structure; and have more or less made such toadiness your life-work.

I don't know about the rest of you out there, but I fully embrace a "culture of exposure," having spent most of my life wondering where-the-hell this thing I thought we had, had gone.

Sure, it might prove embarrassing for many politicians and others in power who misbehave, e.g., taking huge donations from, say Large Corporations (Oil Companies? Pharmaceutical Giants? Mega-Banks?), or exploiting offshore tax-free investments, or insider tips on stocks, among so many advantages the rich and powerful have over the average citizen. How would exposing that be bad, other than for the miscreants? I'm sickened by the corruption of our elected officials, even-more-sanctioned by the corporate blank check recently granted by our sleazy "supreme" court.

Matt Taibbi, ace political columnist for (huzzah!) Rolling Stone, not unsurprisingly has a few words on this concept himself. I have excerpted at some pain; you should really follow the link if you are a truly patriotic American:

I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."

Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn't mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here's CBS's chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that's killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag. And the part that really gets me is Logan bitching about how Hastings was dishonest to use human warmth and charm to build up enough of a rapport with his sources that they felt comfortable running their mouths off in front of him. According to Logan, that's sneaky — and journalists aren't supposed to be sneaky:

"What I find is the most telling thing about what Michael Hastings said in your interview is that he talked about his manner as pretending to build an illusion of trust and, you know, he's laid out there what his game is… That is exactly the kind of damaging type of attitude that makes it difficult for reporters who are genuine about what they do, who don't — I don't go around in my personal life pretending to be one thing and then being something else. I mean, I find it egregious that anyone would do that in their professional life."

When I first heard her say that, I thought to myself, "That has to be a joke. It's sarcasm, right?" But then I went back and replayed the clip – no sarcasm! She meant it! If I'm hearing Logan correctly, what Hastings is supposed to have done in that situation is interrupt these drunken assholes and say, "Excuse me, fellas, I know we're all having fun and all, but you're saying things that may not be in your best interest! As a reporter, it is my duty to inform you that you may end up looking like insubordinate douche bags in front of two million Rolling Stone readers if you don't shut your mouths this very instant!" I mean, where did Logan go to journalism school – the Burson-Marsteller agency?

But Logan goes even further than that. See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn't even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an "element of trust" that you're supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he's got to be able to trust that you're not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?

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Recent Reading: Nam and Neuroscience

2010-05-31T22:17:00.000-07:00

As noted recently, my recent reading time has been somewhat compromised by devotion to grappling with vegetation and such. I was on a pretty good roll until May came along.

But one setback was my determination to read Matterhorn, reportedly a classic, possibly the classic novel based on the Viet Nam war. I encountered a review in the Times or somewhere recently, and the description and idea it was the work of a NW resident got my interest.

It was indeed a great read. I am not a big fan of war tales. I did read Pharaoh's Army recently, motivated largely by my appreciation for the other Tobias Wolff I have read (another local lad). This was different, besides being far longer. Gripping, gritty, and fascinating, one unusual aspect a blunt handling of the racial division in the Marines:

In 2009, Karl Marlantes was on the verge of publishing a novel he'd worked on for 30 years when a stroke of luck stopped the presses.

Yes, that's right: For the Woodinville author, it was a lucky break when his small West Coast publisher, El Leon Literary Arts, put on the brakes after selling a modest number of copies. Barnes & Noble had selected the book as part of its Discover New Writers program, and El Leon needed some time to find a partner to handle the demand.

So, a year and some editing changes later, "Matterhorn," a definitive novel of the Vietnam War, has finally arrived.

"Matterhorn," which takes its title from the site of a fierce battle that comes at the climax of the book, is written from the same ground's-eye perspective on Vietnam already provided by movies like Oliver Stone's "Platoon" and Michael Herr's book of front-line reporting, "Dispatches."

But it doesn't simply duplicate them. With unrivaled precision, Marlantes, a decorated combat veteran, has spun the fog and filth of war into an engrossing work of fiction.

The story's central figure is Marlantes' alter ego, a small-town Oregon boy and Ivy League grad named Waino Mellas. As a second lieutenant in the Marines, Mellas is serving a 90-day rotation as a rifle platoon commander — a policy that, he ironically observes, suits the ambitions of a young up-and-comer like himself but ratchets up the risk of fatal error by constantly putting newcomers in charge.

But who said anyone was watching out for the grunts? A continual theme in "Matterhorn" is the idea of incompetence from above that's met by cynicism and acceptance from below. As Mellas is told soon after he arrives, "Things have changed since Truman left. The buck's sent out here now."

This is not an easy book to read. Jungle rot turns hands and feet into a welter of open sores. Food is scarce or consists of canned goods so tasteless that the troops sprinkle them with Tang or lemonade powder.

At one point, the members of Mellas' Bravo Company cough and curse as a plane overhead mistakenly dusts them with Agent Orange. As for the truly heart-stopping moments, "Matterhorn" may be too graphic for some readers.

Through all the lost limbs and lost lives, what's most amazing is how the Marines on the ground remain true to their motto, "semper fi" (always faithful).

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I set aside my reading of Proust Was a Neurosurgeon in favor of Matterhorn, due to intense interest in library on latter and knowledge I could renew former. But this too was a great read, suggesting the numerous insights on human thinking and brain function discovered and revealed by artists of various sorts prior to their explication by scientists. Quite intriguing. I came upon this one via reviews I get daily via Powell's Books:

Publisher Comments
In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.

Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

Review
His book marks the arrival of an important new thinker, who finds in the science and the arts wonder and beauty, and with equal confidence says wise and fresh things about both.
(Los Angeles Times Book Review)

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Getting Dirty and Eating Hearty

2010-05-31T00:09:00.000-07:00

Yardwork continues to be pretty preoccupying around here, to the point of few posts and lost reading time, among other sacrifices. This is the season of trying to beat back the weeds while simultaneously sprouting, tending, and planting out in their own time the new, somewhat-fragile little darlings.

We have lots of that going. Probably a half-yard of weed debris has been contributed to the yard waste from efforts today and yesterday. Conditions were sub-optimal today, with high possibly 60 and drizzle pretty frequent. But I got three more tomatoes settled in protective waterwalls, in this case emphasizing cherry tomatoes (red, chocolate, and yellow pear). Also got some tall sweet peas planted at the base of one of spouse's increasingly numerous trellises. Got the last half-dozen shallots to earth in a planter on the deck. Garden time was limited yesterday as I spent some time with mom, including splitting a good share of a decent-sized hemlock they had taken down some time ago, remembering the old saw about firewood warming you twice. And I did finally make progress on project that had nagged at me, namely thinning/transplanting a too-dense row of mixed lettuce from a month back. These were wonderfully vigorous starts, but cheek-to-elbows. I got a score or so of them distributed in odd corners that might otherwise go to waste and was able to share a similar number with ma-in-law.

But that is mostly food-to-be. Peas and fava beans are blooming. At this point we have harvested merely a few leaves of lettuce and may soon have some kale to go with it. But our enjoyment of the consuming continues unabated. Poultry has been prominent lately, son-in-law Sean's gorgeous spatchcocked bird having been previously featured here. Son Eric treated us to a brined and quick-roasted bird last weekend. If you are not drooling you may want to consider taking your taste buds in for a checkup.

And I showed off some beans with home-smoked Tasso and New Mexico Hatch chilis I indulged in on a bachelor night in another recent post.

Encountering some stew meat that needed using, Marg was intrigued with a recipe that involved dried cherries. She is a bit more adventurous in combining ingredients with meat than I tend to be, but then one of Eric's default BBQ sauces also makes use of dried cherries. I'm more naturally inclined towards the piquant, zesty, tangy, and, frankly, Scoville-metered dishes. But we teamed up on this pretty well, she with the concept, me with the execution, and I have to admit it will likely grace our table again. I had lunch leftovers twice and the afterglow was quite acceptable.

My most recent contribution was a breakfast strata, a layered concoction involving toasted bread, a meat course made up of italian sausage, shallots, and mushrooms, and grated Gruyere. A double-tier of those ingredients, saturated with an egg/cream pudding, properly allowed to meld overnight and baked for an hour or so, proved pretty darn delectable. Obviously options are numerous, in fact this was my hybrid of two suggested recipes.

Belated Printemps

2010-05-27T22:41:00.000-07:00

This was the first year in a while when I did not have the chance to savor the arrival of Spring by getting in on the first appearance of Skunk Cabbage, one of my classic harbingers. Last year I posted on the subject in early April. I did squeeze in a visit to one of my standard SC monitoring venues a couple weeks ago, in the spirit of a make-up call, trying to cover for the fact that I'd dropped the ball and missed the early show.

So this is sort of a make-up post, featuring other Spring-like and otherwise fertile things (and some not-so-much), but with the general goal of marking the start down the slippery slope towards Summer, that season that at least for me has most changed from childhood. Of course it used to mean being unfettered, something I can't imagine now.

As for late Spring, dutiful attention to astral events seems to go with the season, especially if you are a gardener. I and the better half both noted the high zaniness factor at work in the last couple days, and lo there is a Full Moon this week. I did also observe one of those optical effects while gardening recently (taking rare look up rather than down), these things reputedly resulting from ice crystals way up there somewhere.

And talk about a sign of Spring. Here comes Else, daughter of Eric's chums Phil and Amy, born May 21 as I have it. She is quite the charmer, even without opening her eyes. Else is still in that state where she seems (my very limited experience) to tolerate everyone. Would that this could last. Perhaps that is partly her parent's wonderful generosity in sharing her. Their record has only a couple of what I gather must be at least several dozen visitors refraining from holding her! It wasn't quite the same when we were young parents. But probably that is partly because my most recent memory is from our premie, when visits and direct contact were tightly controlled.

I'm normally pretty locked into being in the office, other than my program of walking at lunch as much as I can. Making time to be outdoors is pretty important to me, but as a project manager, they tell me I am responsible for everything (obviously a cue-card allowing for the seemingly ENRON-envious managers above me to be non-accountable for anything), and thus prolonged absences are offensive to these folks.

But I was asked to spend a couple days last week in the open air, far from the wild setting I would have chosen, but at least not with managed air. Outside! I was dubbed as the buffer for regulatory rep while we sampled marine sediments at a site we are investigating for client. Given that the site is an active commercial marina, it was exciting to observe what appeared to be a trey-some family of ospreys, a bald eagle, a river otter, and harbor seals.

Flying solo last Friday, Marg being festive with her Mom's group, I indulged in some cranberry beans with our own home-smoked Tasso ham and Hatch chilies preserved last Fall. There's something subliminally satisfying about being able to employ these home ingredients.

Pioneering PNW Food Guru Angelo Pelligrini

2010-05-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

I had the rare chance to briefly audit NPR the other day. Greg Atkinson of the Times was speaking of Angelo Pelligrini, long-time Seattle resident with mega-credentials when it comes to growing and eating locally, stretching back to pre-paul era. I have lots of great food-associations with Mr. P, ranging from home-brewed wine to chantarelle-foraging.

Remarkably, Sunset Mag credits AG with the first North American-published recipe for pesto.

My folks were big fans, partly I suspect given their connection to the UW where AP also professed. With their encouragement I have enjoyed several of Pelligrini's books. I was delighted to find on reading one of those books a good while back that his garden was just a couple blocks from home of a close chum.

There was talk on the show of farinata, in varying forms of pancakes and soup. I was most intrigued with the wet version.

Head Down, Butt in the Air, Dirty Nails

2010-05-10T22:36:00.000-07:00

Does that ring a bell?

Get thee to a garden! It's gotten serious here, more chores than a yardless person can imagine.

Weeding and clearing are probably the most time-consuming and laborious activities around our platz of late. Oh, there has been plenty of that seed-starting and -tending, and we are increasingly into the planting. But the jungles in various parts of the yard (including weeds in the lawn) cry for attention.

In the meantime, it is essential to stop at least on occasion to savor. If you're like me, the lilac image alone is enough to get the nostrils working.

We've had some surprisingly cool nights (and days!) here lately, despite some earlier balmy times. We're trying to be conservative in planting things out, particularly sensitive veggies. No tomatoes in the ground yet, though Marg and I have acquired a nice collection and are eager to see what they can do this year. We ordered up some red plastic for the first time, hoping that might partly counteract our sea-going breezes that tend to limit our plants from flourishing as they should.

In the meantime, I soaked and started fava beans saved from last year and am amazed at a 90%+ germination rate. These are truly sturdy beans - as might be imagined since I gather we could have planted them last Fall if we were so inclined, along with garlic.

Our first fava batch is doing well in the garden here and I gather also at next-door neighbor's. I have a second even larger batch to contend with soon. Brassica's in background of picture courtesy of Mom are also doing well, along with kale, chard, and cauliflower starts from elementary school plant sale. I may have planted these a bit tight, but even with our pretty extensive veggie area that is almost a necessity. At Mom's suggestion (she does have an MS in Botany, mind you!), I am trying collars on the brassicas.

And I did my third planting of pre-soaked peas yesterday. My record is spotty again this year on germination. I stopped using pea-inocculant, annoyed at price, but I can't imagine that has anything to do with actual germination. Perhaps soaking time is sensitive? Maybe I am drowning the darlings. Anyway, the pole starts you see here are more numerous than in lower, cooler garden. I put out some more soaked peas there yesterday, gingerly working manure into soil first.

And here's some of the lineup just waiting for attention, namely sweet peas and more favas.

With luck, as the day winds down, you get to enjoy a nice bit of sunset while standing erect, almost like a Homo sapiens.

When You Lack Meadowlarks . . .

2010-05-04T22:31:00.000-07:00

I not infrequently enjoy passing through audio tracks of high quality when out on my walks at lunch, though there is always the risk of an ear-worm. The other day I had the rare occurrence of passing the same way twice, the sidewalk speakers courtesy of a deli-grocery just north of downtown. On the way out I got the early notes of Sympathy for the Devil; on return it was latter stages of When the Levee Breaks. Yeehaw!

And it was fun to share a little joshing with clerk in another venue when it occurred to me I was hearing ? and the Mysterians' "96 Tears." I guess this was not literally a one-hit wonder band, but at least for me, close to it, and that was the clerk's take, too.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today

2010-05-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

"Tricky Dick had it going his way" (just to finish bowdlerized rhyme-scheme)

Where were you on May 4, 1970? It was a somewhat momentous day in American history. Shortly thereafter, many of my cohort found ourselves concluding that our higher education should take a backseat to actions that might help to halt the Viet Nam war.

The ridiculous actions by the Ohio governor and resulting maybe-inevitable panicky murders by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State were the trigger for domestic demonstrations on a grand scale. The unrest that had been festering in the country for several years took flame. You'll find that classic Pulitzer-winning image of 14-year-old runaway at the first link.

I eventually managed transit down to DC, joining the general melee and eventually getting an inadvertent taste of teargas. I guess I got my number counted or something. I was not then or now prone to political demonstrations, though I strongly support (and even admire) those so-inclined. I am more politically motivated and attuned now than I was then, for that matter. Or I want to think so.

Match Point to Joan Walsh: Unfair and Unbalanced

2010-04-26T23:01:00.000-07:00

I know I have drawn your attention to Joan Walsh, editor at Salon.com, multiple times before. I need to do so again. My own gender tends to be way too invested in nastiness, things that end life violently, and vituperation in general for me. It's tough for those running on testosterone to be properly and appropriately confrontational, given that from what I gather the old testes-crack tends towards aggression, with proper management seemingly only an afterthought. Certainly the world we live in today gives abundant evidence of that imbalance.

I'm here to boost non-testescrack-derived in-your-face. I possess but have not been able to start the recent bio of Molly Ivins, of whom I was a long-time fan, and she is yet another admirable model for me of the distaff side of in-your-face. "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She" being a wonderful title all by itself.

Setting this up, Walsh was on-camera with the scurrilous slimy Scarborough and "Mika Brzezinski," whoever-the-hell she is and whatever crappola credentials she has been granted by the notoriously conservative-biased media (she's nobody to me - and now several ranks below that based on this "performance" - and a wonderful redemption that not every jackass is fired by testosterone).

Confronted with the concept that reasonable folks on the right and left should both be calling out their respective outrageous extremists, Joan could not come up with a whacko hateful sort like Beck and Limbaugh on the left. Imagine! And that's not to credit those two scumbags as actually marking the 95 UCL for right-wing-fascist-outrage. I would bet those two Fecal Specimens are at least at 95 for the populace though. The handling was truly disgraceful.

And where was the scolding of the right-wing demagogues? Never happened.

Olbermann at his most over-the-top is nowhere near the violence-invoking and racism of the aforementioned. I love Keith's showmanship, but he actually has gentlemanly qualities. Jon and Stephen are way too reasonable and sensible to fit this role. And Rachel Maddow, who I suspect is a real thorn-in-the-side for these clods, actually does not seem to have a mean bone in her body, alas. Yes, she is admirably liberal, and favors human rights over corporate rights, and does have a sharp tongue. She calls out the ridiculous hypocrisy on the right on a regular basis, something the formerly-admired print media do not do, instead uncritically parroting tripe from unidentified government sources.

Perhaps we need to nurture some truly left-wing zealots on the level of the idiot-beck and gonad-baugh? If we could get a few markers out there actually well beyond the 50-yard mark for once, it might make playing for even or working on bipartisan actually mean something for people rather than corporations. But to be comparable, it would have to be some hard-core marxists or something, I would speculate well beyond those that most sentient progressives want to be socializing with.

That's the only "fair and balanced" that would work here.

Here's Joan:

I'm traveling this week so blogging is light. But I'm compelled to comment on the way the right is hyping my Tuesday appearance on "Morning Joe."

First, thanks to my friends at Newsbusters. It's nice when my videos go viral. But Newsbusters and its devotees drew an awfully weird conclusion about my conversation with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough yesterday morning.

I'm the one who posed the question: Scarborough suggested that reasonable folks on the left (that's me) and the right (that's Joe) ought to denounce the extremists in their own camp. I asked him whom he thought I should denounce, because I don't think there's anyone on the left as consistently cruel, divisive and wrong as Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. But my question wasn't merely about media: The problem on the right includes extremists who've made death threats against Democrats like Patty Murray, Bart Stupak, Nancy Pelosi and, of course, President Obama. There's no one on the left posing the same threat to leaders on the right -- or if there is, I'd like to know about it. (The whack job who threatened the folks who made the movie "Babe," along with Obama and GOP whip Eric Cantor, doesn't count.)

Joe and Mika acted stunned that I couldn't name anyone equally extreme myself, and the goofballs on the right are interpreting it as they stumped me, kinda like Katie Couric stumped Sarah Palin when she was asked to name a newspaper she read, or Beck stumped Palin when asking her to name her favorite Founding Father ("all of them" wasn't the right answer).

Of course, that's stupid. I didn't name anyone not because I was stumped; it was because in my opinion, the violent rhetoric is coming from the right, not the left. It's not Nancy Pelosi who's telling her San Francisco constituents they need to be "armed and dangerous" to fight their political enemies; that's Michele Bachmann. There isn't anyone in liberal media as consistently vicious as Beck or Limbaugh. Now, the lads at Newsbusters are providing their own names, but I wouldn't compare anyone they mention to the two right-wing titans of hate.

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And here's the link to and excerpt of Crooks and Liars post Walsh alludes to later in her post:

Watch this video and tell me what Joan Walsh did to elicit an over the top, bizarro-world reaction from the right-wing blogosphere. Are they so desperate for anything that they'll eat the scraps off a toilet bowl?

Taxes, Taxophobia, Taxidermy

2010-04-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

Just to get it right out there, I'm seldom in the neighborhood of exuberant around April 15. It's an ignominious chore, this "doing" of the taxes. Yes, there are other, more frequent and routine ignos in this life, ever-so-many. But the IRS process is needlessly, absurdly, complex unless you are doing the most simple filing - or can rationalize having a professional do it for you. And with every passing year it gives more feeling of being this way largely to shake down the little guy (or Paul, as the case may be).

For the record, Exxon, among many large corporate others, reportedly paid no income tax at all this year..

But, stepping back, I can certainly relate to this post from a re-constructed tax-o-phobe, gleefully titled "Suck It, Tea Party, I Love Tax Day." It should be noted that the author has young children and is so brazen as to both care about their future and acknowledge the societal ("socialism!") features that government provides on behalf of children (e.g., clean water, safe food, public education, parks, playgrounds, roads, etc.). What a concept, eh? Such a contrast to the "Tea Party" folks, that motley crew. At the top, overpaid-and-rewarded Wall Street gamblers-with-the-funds-of-others and Health Care oligarchs, among others, many with multi-million dollar salaries and mega-bonuses even when their corporations were having to be bailed out by your taxes. At the bottom, the disenfranchised who have lost jobs and any hope mostly because of the recklessness of the former but know no better than to desperately revert to racism, seek scapegoats, and otherwise play stooge. What a conjunction - as others have said, not unlike the improbable conjoinings in the natal stages of Nazi Germany.

I can't do this post justice with limited excerpting - you need the whole thing:

Like a lot of Americans, I've spent a small but deeply unfortunate fraction of my recent life puzzling over the Tea Party's Tax Day Extravaganza of Irrational Grievance, or whatever they're calling it.

As a longtime resident of the Boston area, it's especially galling to see a bunch of angry old white people -- many of whom, we learned recently, are on the federal dole -- behave as if their democratically elected officials are foreign despots. It would probably behoove the Fourth Estate to draw a thick line between genuine victims of colonialism and sore losers.

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But my financial affairs have become more involved recently, for two reasons. First, somewhat improbably, I've started to earn more money. For another, in 2006 I got married and had a child, roughly in that order.

Strangely -- and it does feel genuinely strange to me -- these momentous events have totally upended my animus for Tax Day. Here, then, are the Five Reasons I Totally Love Tax Day (and Why You Should Too):

1. Tax Day Forced Me to Get My Fiscal Shit Together

2. Children, It Turns Out, Are Extremely Fragile

3. George W. Bush Is No Longer President

4. Anything the Tea Partiers Are Against, I'm For

5. I Believe in Playground Justice

Because I have two small children, I spend a lot of time at playgrounds these days. The rules on the playground are simple: you share. I tell my 3-year-old this all the time. "Can you share?" I say. And, "Big girls need to learn to share." And, "I'm serious, Josie, if you don't share we're going home."

This doesn't make me a socialist. It just makes me an adult, someone who recognizes that the pursuit of happiness in the midst of limited resources requires sacrifice.

Tax Day is our annual reminder of this fact. It reminds us that one of the prices of citizenship in these United States is the levying of taxes, to provide for all the stuff I've mentioned above, along with, you know, a common defense.

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Our frequently-excellent local columnist Danny Westneat had some good insights on this too, after attending a Tea-Party gathering, something I'm not sure I could take in, with or without sweetener (and maybe even sedation):

The tea partyers aren't crazy. Maybe they're just living in an alternate universe

I went to one of those tea-party tax protests last week and found it didn't fit the crudest media stereotypes

They were friendly, not a bunch of whack jobs in training for the militia, as they are sometimes portrayed

The ones I met didn't even seem all that angry.

But: I do wonder if the tea partyers and I live on the same planet.\

For instance, several speakers inspired the crowd with stories about how the most courageous and noble people left are the capitalists. Because they bravely walk the road of struggle against a powerful, socialistic bureaucracy.

And I'm thinking — didn't the capitalists just nearly destroy capitalism? Only to be saved by the socialists?

Didn't all that happen just a year and a half ago?

Then there's the matter of taxes.

"Born Free, Taxed to Death," read one tea-party sign. "Tax Slaves Unite," said another.

"Welcome to France," read a third.

That was a strong theme — the way our Marxist government incessantly gropes in our pockets for more of our hard-earned money.

A cry went up: "Taxes Suck!"

Yes they do. But here's something else about taxes, at least the federal kind. Did you know that total federal tax receipts, as a percentage of the size of the economy (gross domestic product), are now the lowest in 60 years?

You have to travel back to 1950 for a time when the feds sucked so little of the economy up in taxes. We now pay only 6.4 percent of GDP in individual income taxes, more than a third lower than 10 years ago.

Corporate income taxes are the lowest since 1936.

(To see this data, go to the U.S. Government Printing Office Web site of historic budget tables, www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/hist.html, and click on Table 2.3.)

These factoids won me no love at the Taxed Enough Already (TEA) rally.

But they're true. Multiple rounds of tax-cutting since 2000, spanning both Republican and Democratic presidents, have been so thorough that half of Americans now pay no individual income taxes.

Hurray! We're not France after all. We're Monaco.

OK, not exactly. Last year 14.8 percent of the U.S. economy went to all federal taxes (which includes Social Security and Medicare taxes). That's hardly nothing, but it's a lot less than a decade ago.

So what, exactly, are these protesters protesting?

Bryan Suits, a talk-radio host on conservative AM station 570 KVI, is, he says, "one of the angry taxpayers." He spoke at last week's rally. I told him I don't follow the tea-party logic, so he agreed to be a guide.

It's the spending, stupid, he said. Suits, to his credit, acknowledged taxes have gotten lower. What rankles him is the way the money is used. The bailouts. The huge stimulus package. The new entitlement program created by the health-care bill.

"If I paid only one dollar in federal taxes, I'd still be outraged by the bailout or the GM takeover," he said.

It's also the reckless and unsustainable deficits.

All right, now we're getting somewhere. I'm with Suits on that last part about the deficits, so much so I could just about sign up for the tea party.

Or I could if the tea party were serious.

The trouble is, they don't have much appetite for cutting Medicare, Social Security or military spending. They want even lower taxes. Put these views together and the math says the budget can't balance. Even if you eliminate 100 percent of everything else.

So what they fall back on are old gimmicks, such as a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

The tea party's focus on deficits is right on. But it needs to get real. It needs a Ross Perot-like figure to spell out an honest plan — one that's probably going to have both tax increases and spending cuts (as Bill Clinton pushed through).

Also, drop the red-scare rhetoric. And run as fast as you can from bumper-sticker simpletons like Sarah Palin.

Otherwise, this tea party's stuck in Wonderland.

And, going for the trifecta I guess, I have the great Joan Walsh of Salon, calling it what it is, i.e., racism:

Salon's Numerologist, David Jarman, nails it today: He combines the widely covered CBS/New York Times poll on the Tea Partiers -- no surprise, they're white, and they think President Obama is doing too much for black people; some surprise, they're wealthier than the average voter -- with a less-covered University of Washington poll that finds they also doubt the hard work, intelligence and trustworthiness of black people.

The Times poll was enlightening: Yes, they're white, older, male and Republican; 56 percent make over $50,000 a year and 12 percent make over $250,000. They're more likely to rely on Social Security and Medicare than the average voter -- and, no surprise, they tend to approve of those two programs. The Times goes on:

More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites -- compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

As my friend Digby points out, make that "way more likely: 52% of them think that as compared to only 28% of the general public." (Digby delves into much more detail about the poll, here.)

But Jarman also digs into a University of Washington poll released last week that looked at the views of Tea Party supporters in seven battleground states. Not only do they think too much is made of the problems facing black people, they have bigoted views about black people generally. Jarman explains:

People who think that "the

U.S.

government has done too much to support blacks" were 36 percent more likely to support the Tea Party than those who didn’t think so. Among whites who approve of the Tea Party, only 35 percent said they believe blacks are hard-working, only 45 percent believe blacks are intelligent, and just 41 percent believe that they’re trustworthy.

And Tea Party supporters don't like it when anyone notices the racists in their midst?

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Nastiness seems to be the upper bar for the behavior of repubes these days – but then that has actually been the case for years, perhaps largely because they have been too rarely challenged by our cowardly electees, who hightail it at the actual mention of a filibuster. Why not get those racist, bigoted, anti-American, unpatriots out there on the floor where CSPAN can help us get a good long look at 'em? Actually, the killing of the filibuster seems a wise move (if only). We will have to do all we can to brace those few vertebrate Dems we have over the months leading to the next election.

Still Eating After All These Years

2010-04-15T23:21:00.000-07:00

We are very fortunate to be able to at times be pretty self-indulgent when it comes to food - e.g., we cooked an outrageous (and so-priced) standing rib roast on behalf of our mothers on Easter. But it is pretty unusual for us to get into such pricey territory. Mostly we are about exploring more mainstream and economical fodder, and making it more or less from scratch. We will be slow-cooking a pork shoulder tomorrow that went for less than a dollar a pound.

Sean (son-in-law, keep up here!) and I somehow found ourselves unsupervised (baby shower?) a while back and thus had to assemble from-scratch tamales all by our lonesome. A little scary when one of us had never done this before and the other had only delved into masa one time. We had our hands so full that there is limited visual record. We learned by doing, and my impression is that the results were enjoyed.

I feel truly blessed to be surrounded by not just food-lovers, but more than a few lovers-of-making-food. It's a lot more fun when you're not doing it alone. It's a true bonanza to have both son and son-in-law quite prepared to instigate and implement intriguing food explorations. Frankly, when I was their age or just a bit shy, I was still resonating with Rice-a-Roni and similar boxed foods that you threw a pound of ground beef into. This is something quite terrifically else. And I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge also that spouse Marg and daughter Mara have been from early-on full-fledged members in this foodophilia.

Somehow in the crush of circumstances I failed to get a picture of the ultimate result, but I made French onion soup a couple weeks back to pretty good effect. Aside from a lot of onion-chopping, it isn't a major undertaking. I couldn't quite accept the dictate of all red onions, instead doing half yellow, but otherwise I scarcely strayed from basic recipe. I made the basic soup one night then re-heated and added toasts and lots of grated gruyere (actually, recipe was a tad skittish about such "strong-flavored" cheese - you have to know when to ignore the nay-sayers, right?) and broiled the next. And, though toast was alas in short supply, I was quite delighted with left-overs the next night.

It was probably only a week later that Eric dropped in to take charge of dinner yet again, as he used to routinely do when he sojourned here. I think this was an accompaniment to previously-mentioned Rib Roast. I photographed his double-cooked potatoes. Boiled until semi-done, then fried and seasoned with garlic for sure, s&p.

Marg put together a wonderful pork goulash recently that for me evoked a number of comfort foods, including choucroute, pork-chop spaghetti, and somehow cabbage-rolls. Sauerkraut is always for me a happy ingredient, though I know that is not the case with everyone. This was another keeper.

In the meantime, Sean and Mara purchased a wood-pellet Traeger griller-smoker. We had the good fortune to be there for its' most audacious launch, involving a leg of lamb and "spatchcocked" whole chicken (in brief, backbone, breastbone, and ribs removed, allowing for much faster and more even cook). The concept on this unit is quite different from the Weber Smoky Mountain I have. You set the temperature you want and pellets are fed into the fire chamber accordingly. It is probably more flexible than my smoker, as it can basically serve as a conventional BBQ in addition to doing what you need in the way of smoking meats. I might have an edge on cooking capacity (volume) and cost of fuel.

It will be fun to compare our experiences. We have not even fired up our smoker since last Fall, but I did stockpile some charcoal recently, and I have quite a variety of smoke sources available, mostly locally-collected.

But Sean certainly did a terrific job on his lamb and chicken. To swoon for, believe me. Your eye does not deceive you.

Is Classiness Overrated?

2010-03-25T23:21:00.000-07:00

Anticipating a hiatus in posting opportunities and remorseful at having failed to properly publicize one of the better Op-Ed pieces I have seen in quite some time, I am taking corrective steps.

We have all (okay, those paying attention) noticed a certain "head exploding" phenomenon amongst those feeling out of power of late. Hell, even my bus driver commented on it the other night, sending me home with a grin.

Unfortunately, perhaps inevitably given our national tendency to feel simultaneously exceptional, empowered, embittered, obligatorially-armed, entitled, and martyred, there are some who cannot settle for feeling sorry for themselves and whining in public, the sine qua non of most (R) politicians these days, it seems. The vitriol, name-calling, and coded invocations to violence and overt hatred are downright spooky. Well, no, I may have that wrong, as many of the (R) are actually seeming to endorse or goose up the name-calling and violence amongst the know-nothings who seem to be their "base" right now.

I find great irony and frustration in the idea that we now have seeming humans (they appear like us) throwing bricks through windows and otherwise engaging in mini-terrorism over health insurance reform while the eight-year pogrom with the bushinistas and their deadly reign of terror was remarkably peaceable on the domestic front.

Bob Herbert in the NYT was spot-on in his comments on this outrageous crap, under the mast "An Absence of Class":

Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday’s landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation’s consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.

A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town.”

Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, “I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot.”

In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.

At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.

It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.

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You owe it to yourself, your self-esteem, and your country to read the rest of this opinion.

Of Bush's Major "Accomplishments," Lying Might Be One of the Few That Isn't An International Crime

2010-03-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

On at least one primitive level I guess we might give the conniving, brazen, wholly dishonest, lie-infested, bush regime bastards some grudging credit for their outrageous willingness to just fling their dishonest shit out there and hope something would stick. Of course Reagan proved that non-sense and a veneration of stupidity are just the sort of "nourishing" pablum some of our fellow-citizens need. And when you can allow Pearl Harbor II to occur (having invoked it and then taken overt steps to hide from the compelling evidence it was coming) and thus invoke Fear, it turn's out it's light's out for the illiterate and otherwise dumbstruck, i.e. the Repubic base.

And, alas, for our country.

But I don't think we can stand still and appear to honor their traitorous anti-American behavior, including sacrificing the lives of so many of our brave military and deplorably innumerable innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Actual patriotic Americans, attuned to our history, must know that bush, cheney, rumsfeld, ashcroft, rove, rice, powell, and at least several score of their fellow-rodents (apologies, Rodentia, you may have redeeming traits I am as yet unaware of that make you far more admirable than they) actually committed War Crimes, under laws that we as a Nation have repeatedly signed off on and sanctioned.

There seems to be an increasingly desperate effort underway to try to rewrite history and somehow nullify what any actual working brain fully understands were war-crimes. We should be offering these folks up for the next Nuremberg hearings, without a doubt.

I find it truly disgusting that the turd rove, the ultimate lying sleazeball, (think of the lowest on the totem-pole in grade school, continually lying to get by because he has always gotten away with it and actually doing the work is hard) can get a straight interview these days without intense counter-questioning. His mere existence as a seeming important presence proves the irrelevancy of the mainstream press. They're too afraid of him or something to call him the shithead he was and is.

At least partly catalyzed I guess by recent book laughably titled "Courage and Consequences," by one K. Rove, there seems to be a focus on the fine point of whether "bush lied." This particular venture includes mocking that particular convenient construction that I suspect for a majority of literate Americans properly emblemizes eight nightmare years with sociopaths and worse somehow behind the wheel and with all the traffic laws suspended by and for them.

For such souls it requires little imagination to grok the idea that these folks are playing semantic games, on some level amounting to the idea that we will never be able to "prove" what bush "knew" when. Balancing on the pinhead of what "lie" means, the argument would be that any amount of dissembling, purposeful misleading, aggressive propagation of misinformation, planting of falsehoods by others never explicitly told by bush to do so and such is perfectly fine, never justifying the words "bush lied."

I suppose it is possible they went to the trouble and pain to protect against every possible instance, but when their entire zeitgeist involved a campaign of dishonesty, delight in intrigue, and stovepiping of cherry-picked or fantasized threats and lots of fear-mongering, that certainly seems like a stretch.

Regardless, the evidence is abundant that on the most basic level, "bush lied" is absolutely correct and does not go anywhere near far enough. It seems important that we do not forget that or allow the would-be rewriters of history to go unanswered.

Hence this fine piece on rove's attempt to do a Brothers Grimm on us, excerpted briefly here but well worth full read:

Joseph Goebbels, the leading propagandist of the Third Reich, believed in the power of the lie; the greater the lie, the greater the power. Goebbels would have loved Karl Rove's "Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight," a pastiche of lies, fabrications and distortions designed to rehabilitate the record of the Bush-Cheney years. There are too many lies to treat in this one column, but his greatest lie is that the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq if it had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. Its corollary is that the administration did not lie about the presence of such weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

In fact, the Bush administration mounted an intense six-month campaign to make sure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) produced "evidence" of WMD, and then made sure that such players as National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell parroted the administration's big lie to the American public and to the international community. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their acolytes Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Karl Rove desperately wanted to go to war against Iraq for reasons that have never been explained. As a result, they created and employed a strategic disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the American people of the need for war. Goebbels would have beamed.

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And David Corn is also excellent on this topic and likewise should be cherished in full:

Bring it on.

Conservative apologists for the George W. Bush crew are swinging hard these days to defend their man -- and themselves -- from the charge that W. and his gang misled the nation into war. They must worry that they are going to end up on the wrong side of history. After all, a 2008 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans believed that the Bush administration "deliberately misled the American public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." (This was a big change from a poll taken two months after the 2003 invasion that noted that 67 percent believed that Bush had played it straight.)

Still, my PoliticsDaily.com colleague, Peter Wehner, who worked in the W. White House, wants to mix it up over this. In a recent column, he took issue with a piece I had written decrying Iraq war triumphalism. Wehner disagreed on several fronts, but he zeroed in on what he derisively called the " 'Bush lied' mantra"-- meaning the assertion that his former boss bamboozled the public about Iraq's WMD capabilities. He scornfully wrote, "I fully understand that this remains an article of religious faith among many of those on the left. But there is no real evidence for it." And Karl Rove, who claims in his new book that Bush did not "lie us" into war, cheered on Wehner, tweeting on Tuesday, "Fantastic piece by fmr WH colleague Pete Wehner responding to @DavidCornDC on Iraq." Moreover, in a column this week, New York Times op-edder Ross Douthat, while assailing Matt Damon's "Green Zone," scoffed at "the comforts of a 'Bush lied, people died' reductionism." Accusing Bush of misrepresenting the case for war, Douthat huffs, is "glib" and "lame" scapegoating; the real explanation for what went wrong in Iraq, he asserts, is, well, more Shakespearean.

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Olio

2010-03-15T23:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I knew that term prior to renascence for me in the last few years of crossword-solving. As with so many terms in the cruciverbalist universe, it rarely seems to find its' way into the mainstream. I'm always pleased to remember it when working a puzzle, don't get me wrong, and I am always delighted to have my vocab expanded usefully, but this is one of those that seems to have lived on largely through role in word-play. Many of the words featured in Reading the OED were somewhat in that category too, possibly fascinating but a little tough to squeeze into conversation lest you seem at least a little Rhodes-ish or Ivy-ish and in the prima-donna school. And of course these days any dollop of such superiority (or possibly even literacy) will gain you a tatooed A or a spot in Quantanamo or worse.

But what about that olio, you say?

First of all, a music trivia for you, with a long set-up. I'm a sucker for song lyrics of all sorts. Scat-singing and doo-whop sounds can lead me to one form of ecstasy. But I am also keen on word-play and exotic word choices in musical lyrics. My love-affair with the exceptional music of singer/songwriter John Hiatt came about mostly as a result of my attending a great Pike Place Market performance by a band featuring brother-in-law Keith a couple decades back which involved the tune Falling Up. I was smitten by the remarkable word-play accompanied by excellent music. This is so seminal to me that it occurs to me that I may have shared it before. Apologies if so.

A great tune on its' wonderfully jerky musical merits alone, but a thrill ride for anyone, just an excerpt:

I'm gonna lower my standards and raise my price
I'm gonna take your lunch and your bad advice
Until my worse idea gets the big reward
Until I get out of this raggedy Ford
And into a shiny new two-seater
Dress my girlfriend up like a cheetah

I trust you get my drift on this exceptionally fine number. And musician non pareil.

But on that trivia question, focused on lyric erudition. Please get back to me in comments with details of R&R tune that uses the word "rectify."

And, completing the "olio" business, what do you make of a wolverine in California? This scary critter has always fascinated me. News that there might be a handful in the North Cascades was one thing, this is something else.

Time to Change Partners

2010-03-09T22:02:00.000-08:00

(As compared to "dance with the one who brung you.")

I know I am not alone in being baffled at the ineffectiveness of the Obama junta in making change happen. But many of those inner-circle appointments rankled from the start, including Wall Street sweethearts who were installed in critical roles. Perhaps like you, I wanted to hope that Obama had the upper hand and Rahm/Geithner/Summers/other swill/et al would be severely reined in and actually managed. The idea was to actually begin to overturn the financial debacle caused by the criminal deregulation over the last couple decades that led to the law-breaking corporatist sycophancy and such that was more-or-less a merit badge for the bush and clinton pogroms. This despite the fact that Geithner, Summers, et al, were principle in that same outrageous ongoing ripoff of our country. You'd have to be Truly Stupid not to be suspicious.

In brief, Meet the New Boss - we've been fooled again. At the least, Obama is a Total Stooge for still allowing Rahm to actually pretend to be a player in governance when all he has ever wanted is to be on the front page of magazines. Asshole is as asshole does might well be the definition of Rahm from what I see.

It ain't pretty and it ain't going to be easy. And in this case I'm merely referring to trying to overcome innate cynicism and find a glimmer of hope.

I started on draft of this post a good while ago, but, semi-miraculously, this dusty link still seems pertinent.

try this on for size

Reading: Unstill Life - Tree with Deer

2010-03-02T22:25:00.000-08:00

My recently-read books include The Crying Tree (Naseem Rakha) and Deer Hunting With Jesus (Joe Bageant), both of which I strongly commend to your attention.

"Tree" is a fictional account that centers on the murder of a child and the throes that it puts his family through. As the linked review reveals, a big part of the tale is how the mother eventually comes to forgive the convicted death-row prisoner and, remarkably, engages in an extended clandestine mail correspondence.

As you might imagine, it isn't that simple. But this is a continually-absorbing exploration of a compelling range of issues from stilted family relationships in a claustrophobic small town to the grieving process and on to capital punishment and all that entails.

Part of the original attraction for me was the idea that early-on the family moves from Indiana to Oregon, a locale close to my heart. The local color turned out to be almost too local, as it turns out we drove past the prison in question, a major set in the novel, just outside central Salem, Oregon, probably dozens of times while our daughter was attending Willamette University a few years back. It never failed to strike a somber note with me, lurking back there behind that razor-wire. And that was without any thought of lethal injections, something I guess I subconsciously thought Oregon had set aside (they may have).

Final evaluation: pretty dark, but with redemptive qualities, and a great read.

"Deer Hunting" is something else again, but there is some commonality, perhaps most fundamentally in the small town settings and narrow-minded mentality. Mr. Bageant's roots are in Winchester, VA, in the Shenandoah Valley. For me, that locale-name invokes breezy old folk tunes, fascinating historical sites, and potential for great Autumn color, though in reality I don't think my few visits to VA ever got me close. Frankly, my map-search was a revelation. Not where it should be! And although the geo-dislocation is no excuse, my naivete about the Winchester culture is embarrassing.

Bageant, who can also be found on-line, did a turn in Nam as I recall and somewhat magically found a way to move beyond the cultural mores of his homesite via years spent in a series of hippie communes stretching from Boulder to the Golden State. His eventual return to his roots seems to have been the catalyst of the book. (He does seem to spend a good fraction of the year now in Central America in an admirable service capacity that has the laudable benefit of limiting his immune system exposure to dumbness. We might want to chant for him or something.)

It's continually gripping how Bageant manages to be socially active in his home-community, populated as it seems to be largely with ignorant, incurious, biggoted wholly anti-empathetic folks. Doofuses seem to be some of the best of them. (There are more than a few good souls.)

I believe "Dispatches From the Culture War" is his subtitle, and it speaks volumes. This too is dark revelatory material for those of us so highly privileged as to not only have survived highschool but actually graduated college and retained literacy and an interest in and curiosity about the world, not to mention sufficient income to actually indulge those interests. It's easy to forget (or never know) that there are double-digit percentages of our fellow-citizens, probably lacking that GED, working such low-paying jobs that the need to make ends meet means any such curiosity is long-gone even for those that may still have basic reading skills.

Depressed enough?

I found a whole chapter in defense of gun-ownership to be a real come-uppance, but author had my trust by that time. While I suppose it should not be a true revelation, I found it compelling how much weight he gives to the influence of Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scot) immigrants, many coming here if my memory serves between 1700 and 1760, by the hundreds of thousands. Per Bageant, many of these folks (ancestors of a remarkable number of us, as he has it!) were nasty, mean-spirited, brawling sorts, reaching back to battles across Hadrians's Wall, having fighting and reiving (cattle-rustling) as a primary way of life, and then deportation to Ulster, Ireland to serve as a toxin against the disloyal Irish. Perhaps that is old news for you, but as for me, there is more research and learning needed there.

And I commend the chapter centered on Lynndie England, who grew up and gutted chickens for a spell not far west of Winchester in West VA prior to her enlistment in search of "a better life."

Both highly recommended. But if you are weak of heart, I suggest you keep Sound of Music or some comparable saccharine antidote close at hand.

Sea What You Can Eat

2010-02-16T22:34:00.000-08:00

I've been engaged in a bit of a pitched battle with picture-manipulation software here lately, holding up several projects that were slow out of the gate to begin with, given all the events of the last few months. Some but not all of you know that in the wake of my father's death, my father-in-law Albin also died late in January.

It was already an emotionally turbulent year prior to those two unfortunate watershed events. Ever-so-many of us will miss those two admirable paterfamilias.

After the fourth try or so (seems like tenth) I seem tonight to possibly have the working pieces together for a mostly sapien-free Christmas post. I'm featuring our Ballard version of what I take to be an Italian holiday tradition courtesy of the inimitable Ms. Jean B, namely the seven-seafood Eve dinner. Not only were she and Bob the hosts, they also (if I can overcome my innumeracy) I believe provided the majority of the seven.

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Of course, reconstructing the gala dinner's many dishes at this point is quite a challenge, given that I didn't dare spend too much time behind the camera and don't have anything like complete coverage. Okay, yes, there is that memory thing, too. Bob had some excellent oysters on the half-shell. Eric mastered yet another winning crab recipe, these sort of in the fritter category festooned with decorative seaweed. Donna had shrimp in her classic aspic. Jean did a remarkably colorful salmon with cream-sauce. And there was that calamari. I had smoked some cod seasoned in a Moroccan fashion and garnished with green olives.

I think there might also have been some pickled herring, a nod to the Scandihoovians in the crowd. Believe me, we got our iodine that night (among other RDA's)!

Somewhat remarkably, Christmas Day featured pretty glorious weather. The prior dinner notwithstanding, we also have a routine elaborate Christmas breakfast (eggs, links, scones and fresh fruit the main dishes). I am memorializing the morn here with classic West Seattle Olympic skyline panorama photos taken from the deck, with only absolutely essential photo rework here, apologies for warts and blemishes.

Hallucinating Hope

2010-02-10T23:43:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but I am finding it a more than full-time second job these days keeping that Hope thing properly virile. I don't find it all that reassuring to engage in hypotheticals like what if Palin/McCain had won or what if w had seized a third term. The reality as I see it is that we have had a year of democratic party control of the White House and both houses of congress, and I find appallingly little actual positive forward motion, aside from the aforementioned "think how bad it could have been."

Aside: how is it that the dying press can in good conscience feature headlines regarding the D's losing their "super-majority" or "filibuster-proof majority," as a result of the disappointing Mass. senatorial election? The democrats, far more of an open tent than that other racist-laden group, have never shown anything remotely resembling the regimented brown-shirt behavior the repubs are exhibiting these days. So sad to see journos like nyt and wp writing their own obits with this sort of pathetic swill.

If you are devoted to trying to keep up on the news, which these days imho means you are on-line with a vengeance, you can't help but conclude that the miraculous Obama campaign has not translated well when it comes to actual results. The man is amazingly eloquent and charismatic, probably more-so than anyone since JFK, and perhaps he even outdoes Jack. I am a sucker for that sort of thing.

Never mind that - we are in desperate need of results Big Time. And soon. That prior stinky entitled infestation courtesy of that fake cowboy awol psychopath left the stables wholly engorged with feces.

Despite the source, I found this analysis at the Financial Times (channeled here by Clemons), pretty dang compelling:

Financial Times Washington Bureau Chief Edward Luce has written a granularly informed insider account Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod. about those who hold the keys to the inner most sanctum of Obama Land --

It's a vital article -- a brave one -- that includes "dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington."

Most are unnamed because the consequences of retribution from this powerful foursome can be severe in an access-dependent town. John Podesta, president of the powerful, administration-tilting Center for American Progress, had the temerity and self-confidence to put his thoughts publicly on the record. But most others could not.

Mark Schmitt, executive editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect, wrote that "Luce has written what seems to me the best and most succinct rundown of what's gone wrong in the White House, with particular attention to the role of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel." But some of the big aggregators out there -- Mike Allen at Politico and ABC's The Note among others -- didn't give Luce's juicy and lengthy essay any love.

Why not? Allen is a good friend of mine and tries to keep a good balance between tough-hitting political stuff, but also goes out of his way to give strokes to those in the White House he can -- particularly "Axe" -- who is a regular in Mike's daily Playbook. I try to do the same, to be honest, and have a particular thing for Bill Burton's wit and was pleased to see Rahm Emanuel giving David Geffen rather than Rick Warren lots of hugs during the Inauguration eve fests.

But this Luce piece is unavoidably, accurately hard-hitting, and while many of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought on the administration, they fear that the "four horsepersons of the Obama White House" will shut down and cut off access to those who give the essay 'legs.'

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You devoted patrio-laureates, who I know will be processing the full Clemons and Schmitt articles, will also benefit from Digby's insights. In particular, I would note that she suggests Rahm is more trouble than he is worth. Absolutely. If he'd actually pulled off even one brazen pantsing of a republican senator, or a successful ridicule of a Shelby or some other junior high school prank, the sort of thing he is famous for, he might be tolerable. Pathetically, he's not even achieved the stature of Baby Rove. Begone, you pathetic swine, and do not further damage our increasingly frail republic!

Ok, before we go any further, I have to interrupt and point out that there is a missing explanation here: perhaps the problem is that everyone, apparently including the Obama team and this reporter, insisted on actually believing that the election signaled a fundamental shift in the political landscape so huge that the earth was knocked off its axis and everything was different. In other words, far too many people believed the hype, which I understand was very, very seductive, but it was foolish, nonetheless.

The problems were always huge, the system was always broken, the Republicans were always nuts. For some reason it was convenient to ignore all that pretend that we had had a rebirth all shiny and new and that if the worst happened, Obama could always just make a speech and everything would fall into place. Nobody's as good a politician as he was assumed to be --- and that assumption came from a presidential campaign that could have probably been won by anyone with a D after his name, which makes it even more facile. It was hubris, and we all know where that leads.

The piece goes on to reveal that Obama is being badly served by his closest advisors, Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, who apparently dominate decision making in the White house and in the view of whoever is is talking, insulate the president from more diverse thinking and give him bad advice. The thesis is that they are political hacks who are preventing the president from making sound policy decisions. If the anecdotes are true, that may be the case, especially in a time when good politics depends so heavily on good policy.

It's fascinating, of course, because it's gossip and because some in the White House and others close to the administration have decided to try to dethrone these four. The courtiers are rebelling. That's usually not a good sign. It will be interesting to see if Obama reacts.

I would just point out two things. First, this is exactly the set-up which everyone admired so much about the first term Reagan White House. He was surrounded by three close aides, Deaver, Meese and Baker, who insulated his beautiful mind from outside influence. It's surprising how much the Obama administration modeled itself on Reagan. And it's vaguely disturbing, as well, since the political landscape is radically different even if the economy is equally stressed. Plus, Reagan was an elderly, white Republican, which alone makes it a different political universe.

The second point is that these stories always act as if the president is a simple child who has no agency in all this. The fact is that if there's one job he has above all others as chief executive, it's choosing the very best people to run the administration. If he's surrounding himself with political aides whose jobs it is to protect the Obama brand or whatever, it's his decision to do so.

What this really signals is that the Obama bubble has conclusively popped and people are now dealing with political realities. Believing that he was some kind of wizard whose very person was imbued with the power to change reality with a few well chosen words wasted a lot of time. But if its over, I'm very glad of it. Now maybe they can start looking at problems realistically and understand just how hard they have to fight to solve them.

And Rahm, by the way, is way more trouble than he's worth. Even Nixon's advisors were more subtle --- and far more lethal. You don't keep a nasty henchman who makes enemies of everyone and inspires loathing by his very presence if he can't even get the job done.

Alabama - the State That Elects Traitors

2010-02-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

It's very hard work to crab together something good to say about the party in the majority these days. Their sniveling ineffective politics and resort to the "R" word epithets are truly pathetic. The misguided fantasy, still being entertained in some quarters apparently, that bipartisanship is a useful waypost for governance at this time has been such an albatross that the laughable has gone out of it.

But never fear that the the party in the minority is so disciplined and peopled by such a reliable cadre of folks who remember to regularly check the batteries on their thinking caps that we can't count on yahoos cropping up on a regular basis. In this case it is the never-before-esteemed Senator Shelby from Alabama, who has apparently put all of Obama's nominations on hold until the Defense Department finds a way to assure that Airbus beats Boeing for a key contract that will pour money into Alabama. In essence, he's willing to hamstring and hold hostage (well, yes, I guess we could say blackmail) the federal government, formerly held by the repubs to be our sole safeguard against terra, terra, terra, until we the taxpayers, pay his state off. Talk about pork and corruption:

The key thing about the Shelby/hold story is that it provides the Democrats a second chance to revisit the vote blocking issue with the public. What recent polls have shown is that very few people actually have any idea how the senate rules work. So while political junkies on both sides of the aisle know that President Obama has been hung up on numerous pieces of legislation this year because Republicans are forcing a de facto 60 vote rule, very little of that has gotten through to the broader public. It's just: Dems tried; Dems failed; nothing happened. Back when we went through this drama in 2005 with the shoe on the other foot, the Republican message machine was very clear and persistent on "allowing an up or down vote." Simple, clear, a strong small-d democratic argument, and one that makes the out party work for the 60 vote standard as opposed to taking it as a given.

On the contrary, this issue never really became an issue all year in Democratic messaging. It was discussed at the level of obscure parliamentary terminology -- cloture, filibuster, etc. That's very different from 'they should at least let the senate vote on it'; but not a lot of people in the Democratic establishment in Washington seemed to get that. With a lot of anger and bluster it was just sort of taken as granted that the Republicans had set the goalpost at sixty. And all the action was on corralling the conservative Dems and trying to get one or two Republicans over the line.

Now, I'm not saying Health Care Reform would have sailed through if the messaging had been different. I'm not saying Republicans would have buckled. I am sure, however, that the public reaction and consequences for the GOP would have been different. Maybe not vastly different, but significantly different. (Note as an example that it really hasn't occurred to the Democrats to hit the airwaves with the fact that Senate Republicans now won't even allow a vote on the Jobs Bill.)

The Shelby blanket hold isn't unprecedented, though it's close. But doing this to shake the administration down for a couple of earmarks is pretty unheard of. And given the current electrical charge about 'earmarks' and 'pork' it gives the White House a golden opportunity not just to embarrass the Republicans over Shelby's obstructionism over an earmark, it gives them a second chance to engage the public on Republican refusal to even allow votes -- regardless of what one thinks of the substance -- on critical national issues. Not allowing votes here leads to a discussion or not allowing votes on the Jobs Bill. The headline writes itself: Republicans shut down senate so Shelby can get his earmarks. (Remember, he can't do this himself. He needs to be supported by his caucus.) The GOP leadership sees that it's toxic.

Alas, it seems the White House has already decided it doesn't want to take up the opportunity. Which is probably a good preview of 2010.

For MLK Day

2010-01-18T22:30:00.000-08:00

It's been a very long time since I had an employer enlightened enough to give me Martin Luther King Day off. It probably stretches back to when there was no such holiday. And I'm not sure how much credit to be giving to those employing agencies who do grant the holiday, though, either. I doubt it is a Free Will sort of thing.

It reminds me of the account I heard today of the curmudgeonly municipal employee who fought tooth and nail the unionization of the city's employees, her hyper-conservative principles totally offended by this labor stuff. Of course she willingly accepted all the improved benefits and perks like extra holidays won by the organizers.

Sounds a lot like the party of elephantiasis, doesn't it? It's a rare case when, as I heard happened this week in Texas, they refused one of those government "hand-outs," while all the while whining about the tax-and-spend libruls. Sadly the Texas episode involved educational funds. They're probably trying to restore their reputation. I gather there are some in Texas embarrassed that their literacy rate is in the double figures these days. Of course the collective intelligence of the state was probably halved when Molly Ivins died.

But I liked the sentiments in this post:

"I agree with Dante that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

--the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., introducing this seminal sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, April 30, 1967

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-- Dr. King, in his speech "A Time to Break Silence,"at Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967

We began Martin Luther King Day remembering MLK's tireless crusade to make a reality of the Declaration of Independence's insistence that it's a "self-evident truth" that "all men are created equal." Certainly this earned him more enemies of a die-hard hatred and dangerousness -- including, of course, our very own FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover -- than any one person should have to contend with.

As we end this day of remembrance, we mustn't forget that Dr. King's vision of social justice required him to take a stand that was enormously controversial even among his supporters: resolute opposition to the Vietnam war, which he understood guaranteed that money would not be available to undertake making the promise of real equal opportunity an actuality.

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) has made the same link between our misbegotten military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, which not only aren't enhancing but are undermining our national security and at the same time draining funds from the economy which are desperately needed for crucial elements of the progressive agenda. This week, honoring Dr. King, PDA is launching a venture called Brown Bag Lunch Vigils (BBLVs), an outgrowth of its "Healthcare NOT Warfare" campaign, to raise awareness among the public and our elected officials that the electorate is not being served by current U.S. policies."

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There is a great youtube of a seminal MLK anti-VN war speech at the start of the post that I heartily recommend.

And there is a good deal more on the MLK Brown Bag Vigils, which seem like an inspired idea.

Döppelgangers

2010-01-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

If you're feeling good about them, they might be dualities. Under other circumstances, they might be labeled bipolarisms (or did I just coin that?).

And maybe I shouldn't name them before we know what they are, huh?

I've got three diptychs (another possible term) for consideration here.

Maybe they're just interesting siblings - or echoes.

While taking out the garbage a couple weeks back . . . . Okay, recalibrating, it was December 31 and we were up with the Baxters at their Mt. Baker cabin - and the garbage bin was 1/2 mile away or so, over entertainingly ice/slush-encrusted roads. No Stockbridge, Mass. circumstance, this - we were on foot. Bob and I were conscripted for the chore since other guests were imminent and the potluck gala would no doubt produce a bit of garbage. Well, and possibly "they" just needed some time away from us.

We're not talking Alice's Restaurant quantities here, mind you. No filled former church pews or anything like that. But come to think of it, you can get danged near anything you want at Jean and Bob's 'stablishment. That's if you can get them to answer the page from the front gate and let you in! And there was that pole-dog lurking around the way-overdue-for-emptying garbage containers at the community center, but at least he was not foaming at the mouth.

But the transfer was otherwise uneventful, other than that Mr. Bob, nearly always outgoing, knows or will soon know everyone in the complex and their full life story, so the return was punctuated with repeated jovial encounters. When we crossed paths with one whose name was Dusan, a name rare in my experience but resonant, I intruded on the exchange. I was aware of a well-known world-class mountain-climbing Dusan from decades back. I might have met him briefly, perhaps not, but I did a couple climbs with a fellow who knew him. The new Dusan reminded me of what I had forgotten, that that Dusan fell to his death in the descent of a peak in BC's Fairweather Range, back in the 1970's, only a few years after my climbs with his acquaintance. The two Dusans, my new acquaintance and the dead climber, I gather had done a good bit of skiing together. Serious, competitive skiing, as in for national Olympic teams. The live Dusan is now living a less risky life from what I can tell, pursuing his amazing gift for creative woodwork, on the house-scale and decorative as well.

An enjoyable coincidental encounter. For all I know, the name "Dusan" is the "John" or "Bill" of Eastern Europe. I would not have stuck my nose into the exchange if I thought so, and would have missed a good connection.

A significant portion of my reading comes about from irresistible book mini-reviews in my inbox (yes, I'm an easy mark). That is how I first learned of "The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,"and myself became the initial virus-carrier for this book in my circle of relatives. This is a great tale, set in Seattle's International District, which in the pre-WWII era apparently included at least a separate Chinatown and Japantown, and possibly other asian quarters. To my ignorant eyes, our ID today does not feature any such demarkations, the ID now featuring a panoply of chinese, japanese, philippine, thai, and vietnamese influences most prominently - and I believe a new creole crawfish eatery.

Tellingly, my prized book copy is afloat on the sibling reading sea right now. I was greatly taken with this tale, with the Panama Hotel, of which I was not previously aware despite my ongoing peregrinations in the area, a center of attention. I have since tracked that building down, finding that it is nowhere near one of the googles would have it.

But it is, mercifully, not a close neighbor to the Bush Hotel. Nor nearly as photogenic either, as the latter continues to hang out there with name emblazoned, inviting (facetious) attention.

Any fan of historical fiction might enjoy this, and NW residents, especially of a certain age, particularly so.

But then my in-box yielded "When the Emperor Was Divine," covering some of the same territory but with more focus on the internees, in this case from Berkeley, CA. I was able to borrow this on CD from the Seattle Public on the occasion of the road trip rendezvous in snow country for New Years, and we greatly enjoyed it. This certainly resonated with Bitter and Sweet and was also very moving, tracking train travel across Nevada to eventual encampment in Utah, while the family patriarch was captive in NM.

This also gets my highly recommended rating - great listen, well-constructed and credible.

There's no way I could be the only one here who read The Road, since it is now appearing in a theater near you. I greatly enjoyed that bleak, dark tale, somewhat invoking Cold Mountain and Lost Nation, those also terrifically gripping (as long as you don't need your reading to always be Pippie Longstocking).

I have since come upon and read World Made By Hand (James Kunstler), with a generally similar premise but fascinatingly different take on the outcome of future disaster. Admittedly the premises in Road and World are not identical, to the limited extent they are even spelled out.

One of my current works-in-progress is Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built In Hell, her explication of the "return-to-Eden" effect that disasters sometimes have, in the way of releasing the inner angels of many victims of tragedy, leading to bottom-up people-based ad hoc systems for dealing with basic human needs that tend to crop up in the face of disasters. This book, I confess, is much more of a slog than the fiction I mentioned back there, but rewarding and very valuable in a different way. Solnit notes how in many cases the human response to disaster, including a wide range of chaotic circumstances under that term, natural disasters prominent but not exclusive, is far more upbeat than the standard wisdom would have it.

The powers-that-be tend to want to bring in the military and turn disaster sites into war zones, terrified of looters, crowds in panic, and any alteration in the power-structure. The debate is elite panic over the possibility that disaster and disruption will unfurl (their imagined or ideologized) dark side of humanity, riots, looting, destruction, rape and violence versus the concept (well documented by Solnit) that real people in these events tend to turn into people we wish we were related to, organizing food-exchanges, volunteer networks, and support groups in general, i.e., finding a way to true community cooperation. Oh does that latter sound like something the world needs now.

The common reality as Solnit has it is that the actual people involved in whatever disaster it is tend to find themselves drawn to a communalism and an authority-defying zeitgeist that evokes an earlier Paradise where perhaps we tended to care for each other and get beyond much of the tawdry stuff that poisons life these days. Woodstock has not been mentioned in the book, but what I have heard of that epochal event certainly seems to accord with the theory. Of course that sort of thing is a real threat to the established powers, so it rarely gets into circulation.

The "authorities" are strongly prone to throwing police powers into a disaster area on the assumption (or excuse) that people are by nature awful and will turn into criminals in the face of crisis. That was definitely the case, for example, in the response to Katrina, with local and state authorities apparently at one point directing the police and military to forego rescue operations in the interest of "controlling" the disenfranchised and shooting any "looters."

Solnit does a great job of dealing with this "looting" thing. It is obviously a flashpoint, as you might even admit yourself. I was shaken by the "news" (never demonstrated with evidence) that looting was a major deal in the Crescent City. I gather it was well-demonstrated that evidence of Afro-Americans taking materials from stores was labeled "looting" while the identical behavior by Anglo-Americans was called "requisitioning."

As Solnit points out, in the face of a crisis, and Katrina may be up there for #1 for our country, with so many people made homeless, many marginally financially stable to begin with, across large swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, "requisitioning" of food and other essentials from stores that are closed is what survival requires. If I were lost in the woods and desperate for nutrition and came on a locked cabin, would you begrudge me breaking in and consuming what I needed?

Yet the abundant evidence is that actual people in crises like this, including Katrina, tend to suspend whatever ideologies they might have and become natural allies in finding a way to get by.

I bring this up because it is remarkable how well that dichotomy tracks for me with the different approaches of The Road and World Made By Hand. I read the former a good while back, so my recall is not great. But I have the sense it was infused with a dark expectation regarding the nature of our species en masse. The latter, while certainly acknowledging the potential for evil in our species, is much more hopeful in tone, speaking to community and collaboration in the face of dire circumstances.

I would appreciate your insights, input, and critique on this. Great books. Do get back to me!

Family of Secrets

2010-01-10T00:27:00.000-08:00

I want to think/hope that more than a few of you are either already processing, or contemplating soon exploring Russ Baker's Bush family expose Family of Secrets. If not, why not?

The praise for this author (and book) is very persuasive, this being merely one snippet from the comments at Amazon:

“In an era dominated by corporate journalism and an ideological right-wing media, Russ Baker’s work stands out for its fierce independence, fact-based reporting, and concern for what matters most to our democracy…A lot of us look to Russ to tell us what we didn’t know.” —Bill Moyers, author and host, Bill Moyers’ Journal (PBS)

I suppose I might lend you my excuse for being late to the game, including 18 library books checked out, 12 holds that will come in any day now, and countless owned books that are also queued up.

One of the former is JFK and the Unspeakable, which I started a good while ago, had to relinquish, and am now fighting to find time to continue on. This is a dark account of how Kennedy got sideways with the warmongering hegemonists in our nation's "security" industry/cartel (including more than one named "bush") when he started down a path that involved too much pursuit of peace and disarmament. The denouement we know - but backfilling the details is an essential if potentially painful process, ably aided by books such as these. We're past the point where brandishing the "conspiracy nut" term should erase the blackboard yet again. That convenient cliche should be dustbinned with "fellow traveler" and the like. Thinking folks who actually care about Democracy and our democracy in particular need to be working over this material. From what I can tell, Family would be a great place to start.

But I'll go you one better if you've got the nerve. Okay, as long as we're at it, given the near-coincidence in time, let's finish that Jan and Dean - let's race all the way to Dean Man's Curve.

It's no place to play.

Down With Tyranny has a great series of posts on Family which should help pique your interest and stimulate out-of-the-box. And, for the truly lazy or incorrigible, those posts include what amounts to Cliff's notes:

I don't know which single book I liked most in 2009. The DWT Bookstore has pages of my faves-- the ones Ken and I are always referring to-- from Idiot America, Nixonland, Dateline Havana, Bloggers on the Bus and Turkmeniscam to The Progressive Revolution, The Eliminationists and, of course, Russ Baker's Family of Secrets, a 600 page thriller that digs more deeply into the Bush Family than anyone has ever done. The paperback is now in its third edition and I've been urging Russ to work with someone on doing a synopsis that we could use to turn people on who are intimidated by books with hundreds of pages. Yesterday he finally sent me something that can be used here at DWT. He starts with the questions many of us have asked over and over again: "How did the spectacularly unqualified George W. Bush come to be the President of the United States, and arguably the most powerful person in the world? What lay behind his improbable rise and disastrous policies? Was there more to his controversial reign than the pundits’ standard bromides?"

These are the questions that launched Russ Baker into five years of research. The answers, based on hundreds of interviews, including with persons close to the Bush family who had never talked with reporters, proved astounding.

Not only, Baker found, had we missed the very essence of W., but also of his father and grandfather and in fact the entire clan. Moreover, behind the secrets of the Bushes and their circle lay larger ones that cast decades of American history in a new and revealing light.

The Bushes have been portrayed as everything from incompetents to ideologues to outright crooks. Many of their transgressions are now well known-- from grandfather Prescott’s involvement with Nazi-era financiers to W.’s initiatives that weakened Americans’ constitutional rights at every turn.

But Baker’s research took him to far deeper levels of insight into the American power machine, as it unearthed material of the sort more commonly identified with shady foreign regimes or Hollywood thrillers than with the still-hallowed U.S. presidency.

Baker explained this in a post-publication interview: “As I discovered, there was an entire hidden stratum of truth underlying the rise of the Bushes-- a truth that, if not reckoned with, threatens to derail the reforms we all hope are on the horizon.”

The copious evidence Baker assembles points to one jarring conclusion: that the parade of faces in the Bush White House were in fact bit players in a long-playing “shadow government” establishment that continues to influence events regardless of who-- or what party-- occupies the White House. Power cliques in this country, it turns out, function much as they do elsewhere in the world. Here, however, they are better hidden, in part-- paradoxically-- because we think our society is so open that hidden centers of power could not exist.

There is a tendency in America to tar anyone who sees larger configurations and coalescences of interests, irrespective of the quality of their research, as "conspiracy nuts." Yet the revelations and lessons of Family of Secrets come at us on practically every page, and with sourcing and documentation that have stood up to scrutiny. Moreover, they offer us a glimpse into something deeply embedded in our body politic, and profoundly dangerous to our democratic traditions.

Below are brief summaries of the first seven chapters, hopefully enough to mkae you want to buy a copy of the whole thing.

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The second DWT post is here:

Last week we ran a synopsis of the first few chapters of Russ Baker's riveting book, Family of Secrets, the fullest story of the Bush dynasty that anyone has been able to piece together. We delved into the first 7 chapters and there have been so many requests for explanantions of the rest of the chapters, that we'll give away another 7 today-- and then the rest tomorrow. The book really is phenomenal and the paperback is inexpensive, so it makes essential reading-- and a great gift.

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Catch Me If You Can

2009-12-15T21:34:00.000-08:00

As you may have gathered, I tend to be a "half-full" sort. And, when it came down to it, I invested more in Obama than I have in any prior presidential candidate, in a variety of denominations.

Consequently, I continue to find many of his actions (and inactions) quite disturbing, to the point of quite painful. I'm very disappointed that, for example, Obama does not empathize sufficiently with the victims of torture sanctioned by the Bush administration to choose investigation of that administration's war-crimes vs. paranoical sequestering of all-things-executive.

The war-justifying words in his Nobel acceptance speech, besides invoking war-mongering by such as lbj and rmn in addition to his predecessor, to me made a mockery of the award.

And I have to agree with this quite-critical commentary from the ACLU, a group I admire and support:

During his 36-minute speech after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway Thursday, President Barack Obama explained to an audience of 1,000 how the United States has a "moral and strategic interest" in abiding by a code of conduct when waging war - even one that pits the US against a "vicious adversary that abides by no rules.

"That is what makes us different from those whom we fight," Obama said. "That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."

To many human rights advocates, however, Obama’s high-minded declaration rang hollow in light of fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees have allegedly been tortured and where the International Committee for the Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.

Obama has substituted words for action on issues surrounding torture since his first days in office nearly one year ago. Last June, on the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama said the US government "must stand against torture wherever it takes place" and that his administration "is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims.

But it’s clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by Bush administration officials. That’s the point the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made shortly after Obama’s acceptance speech. Officials from the civil rights organization issued a withering indictment of the Obama administration’s handling of clear-cut cases of war crimes they say were committed by former Bush officials who the Obama administration not only refuses to prosecute but has gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up.

Under the Convention Against Torture, the clear record that the Bush administration used waterboarding and other brutal techniques to extract information from detainees should have triggered the United States to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders. In the case of theUS's refusal to do so, other nations would be obligated to act under the principle of universality.

However, instead of living up to that treaty commitment, the Obama administration is resisting calls for government investigations and going to court to block lawsuits that demand release of torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture.

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And, on the health care reform front, I tend to agree with Mr. Dean ("Kill the Senate Bill"!) as to the appallingly-bowdlerized Senate bill, apparently customized on a day-to-day basis a la Rahm, to fit the whims of quintessential asshole-Joe. The constant treachery and stench of lie-berman may even be enough to ruin my love-affair with nutmeg on my nog. This shameless egomaniacal gas-bag needs to be elbowed off the stage, stat, and don't bother with the graces.

In a blow to the (health care reform) bill grinding through the Senate, Howard Dean bluntly called for the bill to be killed in a pre-recorded interview set to air later this afternoon, denouncing it as “the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate,” the reporter who conducted the interview tells me.

Dean said the removal of the Medicare buy-in made the bill not worth supporting, and urged Dem leaders to start over with the process of reconciliation in the interview, which is set to air at 5:50 PM today on Vermont Public Radio, political reporter Bob Kinzel confirms to me.

The gauntlet from Dean — whose voice on health care is well respsected among liberals — will energize those on the left who are mobilizing against the bill, and make it tougher for liberals to embrace the emerging proposal. In an excerpt Kinzel gave me, Dean says:

This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”

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President Obama gives every sign of being almost as in thrall to the Corporatocracy as Clinton was. But it was and is totally shameful to have supposed democrats cozying up once again to these sleazy competition-fighting, laborer-demeaning monopolies. My current thinking is that if Obama does not take a distinctly progressive turn, and damned soon, he will not get my vote in 2012. I will either not be voting at all or I will be voting for a third-party candidate. I bet that is true of many folks who came eventually to be O supporters.

My hope can only carry me so far until reality ravishes me again.

Inverting Half-Empty

2009-12-12T15:40:00.000-08:00

These days I expect I am far from alone in needing help not infrequently getting my "half full" perspective back. The omnipresence of Dark Things cannot be dodged without access to deep caverns or access to controlled substances or something in that vein. I found this post helpful, in reinvigorating my good news buds and giving me at least a bit of short-lived buzz ("Praise The Lord: We Got Biden (2008), Not Lieberman (2000) or Edwards (2004)"). I was a little suspicious going in, not sharing the author's POV so far as to have stopped mourning the stolen 2000 election. The horrors perpetrated on the world and our nation as a result of that crime are not in the forgettable or forgiveable category for me yet.

Still, M. J. Rosenberg's larger point is well taken - and it offers another chance to choose between half full and half empty. Dems have been making extremely poor choices on many things for ages. Recent stupidities are not something new - though perhaps shocking because for the first time in quite a while they supposedly have the power or numbers to accomplish things.

Short Ribs, Tagine Cooking, and Moo-Shu Pork

2009-12-10T21:09:00.000-08:00

We’re still enthusiastically playing with our food. Marg was hostess last Saturday to a “trunk sale” that involved friend Jules’ terrific custom jewelry and son-in-law Sean’s popular “Scentsy” flame-free room scents, and there were all sorts of tantalizing snacks (that-there is a delectable and gorgeous (savory) pesto cheese-cake – hoo-whee!).

But I’m here now about actual “meal” food. For starters, we purchased a portion of a (butchered) cow not long ago, and one of our first ventures involved a couple pounds of said cow’s short ribs. (I won’t pretend to no squeamishness here.) I don’t know that on my own I would have had the gumption to put all our chips on a recipe that invoked martini seasonings and gin, but collectively, that’s just what we did.

After braising, the beef spent several hours in the oven getting fall-off-the-bone tender, with seasonings including vermouth, gin, and juniper berries, among others. After removing bones and connective tissue, the beef appeared irresistible, the pot-scrapings made for an excellent sauce, and the scrumptious beef was garnished with a topping involving lemon zest, cocktail onions, olives, parsley, and more gin.

As I say, I had some doubts going in, but this was definitely a keeper of a recipe. Now, if only short ribs had not become such a trendy (i.e., pricey) item!

A while back we came into possession of a lovely golden tagine, the distinctive crockery cooker of North Africa – Morocco in particular. Partly in honor of family members paying a visit to Casablanca and the West Sahara a few weeks back, I dug out the tagine and wrestled through the break-in process. This required hours of soaking in water, or, according to some, a mix of water and milk. I went with the simple, given that concocting a way to soak two moderately large bits of seemingly fragile pottery was enough of a challenge. And the idea of milk infused into the porous crockery brought a certain funkiness to mind that was not appetizing.

There is plenty that is mysterious about this though. I gather the tagine was developed with the idea it was to be used over charcoal or wood fires. It would seem then that the vessel should be pretty impervious to heat, but I was unclear as to whether the stovetop was really workable. I went to the trouble of buying a metallic disk heat diffuser in hopes of avoiding hot spots or possible cracking of crockery. It worked out fine.

I settled on a recipe centered on chicken and chick-peas, with somewhat exotic seasonings including cinnamon, one I can rarely bring myself to add to a savory meat dish. Harissa and ras al-hanout, North African spice mixes we have been dabbling in for a while now, are more welcome. I browned some chicken thighs in the tagine, giving it its’ first trial, at moderately high stove temp, added chickpeas that had been soaked overnight, carrots, and various other additives, then tended the loaded tagine for an evening, planning to reheat for dinner the next night.

I thought it worked out well. I had gone easy on the cinnamon, but it was still detectable, and fine with me. I have my sights on a variation involving the preserved lemons that I gather are a hallmark of Moroccan cuisine, together with green olives. I have been shocked at what the market seems to demand for a couple preserved lemons a la Morocco. But my mouth waters at the thought. (And maybe a little more derring-do with the spices might be in order too!)

Meanwhile, we had some leftovers from some scrumptious porkchops Eric had assembled, and got some Moo Shu Pork queued up. Left to our boomer devices, I/we would have settled for flour tortillas or something as the packaging, I bet. E went for pancakes from scratch – and, in reality, ingredient list is short. It’s one more thing, mixing, waiting, rolling, and cooking, but what a great custom touch.

Likewise, using shredded Napa cabbage rather than pre-made coleslaw mix as we might have been tempted, was wise. The result, spooned onto a home-made pancake prepped with Hoisin sauce, was quite delectable!

Mr. Obama, You Disappoint Me Big Time

2009-12-03T21:36:00.000-08:00

I am absolutely appalled that our President is following through on his threat to bulk up our force in Afghanistan.

After all that wonderful campaign charisma, I find him reduced to being yet another desperately-insecure male grabbing for the"war president" moniker. How pathetic.

I can't help but perceive this as sheer cowardice, his highness afraid of being called a wimp by the bigots on the right (not to mention that he has never so far made any attempt to show any distance from the military-industrial complex DDE warned us about and which seems to actually be in charge of our country these days).

And, of course, he has been every bit as pitiful when it comes to standing up for actual health care reform. Yes, we are closer to some sort of change than was ever the case when Bill was the boss, but this seems pretty thin gruel given the consistently cowardly behavior of the democratic congresswimps. I give our President a C- for having made health care reform such a priority that we may actually get some pathetically watered-down change.

But can you think of a single instance where this president has actually forsworn the egregious over-reaching executive branch powers fomented by that war-crime-fomenting friend-shooting asshole Cheney? The truly criminal behavior of the last administration has lowered the bar so much that our once-golden new administration does not seem to feel they have to bother to behave themselves.

Mr. Obama, I am extremely disappointed. To put it mildly. I doubt you will have a second term, given your cowardly, ineffective attempts to schmooze with those bigots across the aisle. Any more of this crap and you won't even have my vote.

"We May Be Born With an Urge to Help "

2009-11-30T21:38:00.000-08:00

That's the headline on an intriguing NYT article.

I can't resist pointing out that, with the help of Beck and Limbaugh, et al, at least many on the right seem to have been readily able to sink far below those "tawdry" socialist urges. They will no doubt pick up on the clues even in this first passage as to this new sham being promulgated on the American People. Can you pick up on them, too?

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents.

But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human.

The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

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OK, what did you notice there? Your pattern-matching filter might have picked up on "evolutionary" and "teaching," not to mention several of those disturbing and confusing terms ending in "ist," which suggest that those nasty scientists had a hand in this - and you should have also caught several other clues to the plot here. With that sort of subversive influence on these youngsters it will be a miracle if they can avoid turning out to be humanists, counselors, or, deity-forbid, peace-advocates. Luckily, I suspect we have plenty of beck cultists currently home-"schooling" their children in a fashion that will produce plenty more war-mongering sadists.

If children are naturally helpful and sociable, what system of child-rearing best takes advantage of this surprising propensity? Dr. Tomasello says that the approach known as inductive parenting works best because it reinforces the child’s natural propensity to cooperate with others. Inductive parenting is simply communicating with children about the effect of their actions on others and emphasizing the logic of social cooperation.

“Children are altruistic by nature,” he writes, and though they are also naturally selfish, all parents need do is try to tip the balance toward social behavior.

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Those scientists are destroying our children!

Stupak-ifying

2009-11-15T22:22:00.000-08:00

The good news is that we appear to be closer than ever before to "something" in the way of reform of our abysmal health care system. Statistics on various matters (infant death, etc.) suggest that we are currently keeping company with nations with no proper health care at all - or possibly we are an empire going down.

But recent news may suggest faint hope (at least for those of us with a Pollanna-ish streak), despite the despicable backroom horse-trading and what amounts to medical industry bribery of congress. The latest word is that the pharmaceutical industry has been goosing the price of drugs at an obscene rate, presumably to assure that the supposed $80B they were going to "save" us (truly a pittance to them - and what a sordid non-accomplishment for this administration this is) will not cost them a dime in terms of profit.

The compromises along the way are enough to break your heart. No consideration of a single-payer plan. Appalling concession to the pharmaceutical industry (which we must hope will be overturned - Merck et. al. are home to enough multi-millionaires already, from what I hear).

And, most recently, this stupefyingly obnoxious Stupak amendment. I can't claim to be familiar with the arcane details. It seems to be the case that it forbids anyone receiving Federal Government funding for health insurance from signing up for an insurance program that could fund abortions. I.e., accepting assistance from the folks who bring us Medicare and Social Security means surrendering your right to choose how to deal with a pregnancy, wanted or otherwise.

That seems to have the makings of a firestorm to it. And it would be easy to become overwhelmed with the words addressing this very issue. I'm going to settle here, just to reassure you, with merely one link, from Digby's great Hullabaloo site.

Tristero has a great reminder that we dasn't cede the language-framing to those who would foreclose on women's rights:

From Think Progress:

Stupak is an attempt by the pro-life movement to use health reform as a vessel to ration access to reproductive health services.

No.

Stupak is an attempt by the pro-coathanger movement to use health reform as a vessel to ration access to reproductive health services.

As long as we provide the foes of women's reproductive rights the opportunity to cast themselves as being "for life," and do so voluntarily, we will continue to lose ground on a fundamentally moral issue in which we, supporters of unrestricted health care for women, hold the high ground.

Do you think "pro-coathanger" is needlessly confrontational, even if true? Ok, Digby's formulation, "coerced birth," is a more than reasonable substitute. Or if you insist, "anti abortion rights" is fine.

But an important note about that last one: the issue is one of rights, not whether we think a specific set of procedures agrees with our abstract moral code. We can't leave the word "rights" out of the phrase without rhetorically handing the opposition - which is headed by people that genuinely hate women, especially poor women - a powerful concession.

Words matter. And the rightwing would never, ever, make the mistake of calling us anything milder than "pro-abortion," despite the fact that is not our position, nor what this is about. It is about rights, rights to healthcare without restrictions for about half the people in this country.

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Chow Down!

2009-11-05T21:19:00.000-08:00

I had to make one of those regrettable sometimes-necessary gas-wasting only-a-couple-items grocery runs a while back. Mercifully, the store is less than two miles away - and I drove slowly. We needed sirloin and shallots for beef kebabs for Boys Night In. This may not be quite as fire-breathing as we should have attempted with the capsaicin-challenged out partying, but it still seemed a good exercise. And maybe a bit more practical in terms of future Cooking for Others. The recipe has origins in Morocco, part of a regional cuisine we will be exploring more in the near future via the tagine Marg purchased a while back. The beef is marinated in a mix of onion, parsley, paprika (we went with the smoky Hungarian I procured from World Spice), salt, cumin, pepper, and oil. Since it is not in the fully incendiary category, with care, it might be adaptable to the timid.

Per the recipe, these are meat-only 'babs, served with salt and cumin on the side and (tangy!)shallot relish and harissa atop the beef. The latter can be quite the spicy number - we're working from dry World Spice mix as a starter, and Eric had the inspiration that we also have some Ras el Hanout as a possible amendment, similarly-sourced spice mix with ethnic origins also in North Africa (as I recall, in the original it can include dried beetles!). We found some (actually mild) masochistic pleasure with both, leaving future presentation to a broader audience negotiable.

Meanwhile, other recent indulgences have included quite a range of dishes. Eric assembled some amazing basil-leaf-wraps a while back. These are seemingly simple, but do call for a bit of hands-on. I believe he made these first for his sister and brother-in-law on some occasion when we strayed from the flock. So he's now a "seasoned" pro on the recipe. Oh so delectable.

And Marg came upon a beef stew recipe involving squash, of all things, which she wanted to try. That would not have been my first choice of amendments, seeming on the brink of quirky even, but it was surprisingly scrumptious.

Left to our own devices again, Eric and I conspired a while back on a batch of Texas (Brazos) Red chili: beef and chilis being the only major ingredients (no beans or tomatoes). You had to be there. The chili powder was home-made from dried chilis and amendments, in fact the recipe I came upon for home-made chili powder was the source of the Brazos Chili recipe. I'm not sure most would even be able to connect the dots between this dish and the classic mid-American canned beans/ground beef/canned tomatoes/onion stew I grew up on. I still savor that too, but I find this Texas Red (Brazos, in this case) to be pretty dang special. A classic.

A Progressive Call to Action

2009-10-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

I've not yet viewed "Capitalism - A Love Story" (I hope I have that title right), but want to. I'm w/o question the biggest fan/exponent of Michael Moore's agitator-provocateur "documentary" movies at this address. I know he offends or annoys some folks whose politics are pretty consonant with mine. I don't agree with everything he has done or said, or every aspect of his movies (duhh! - or is that "doh"?), but I greatly admire him as one of the few with chutzpah comparable to rush, o'liar, beck, and a nauseatingly long list of right-wing neocon ideologues, sadly including more than a few congressionmen (women). But in MM's case, this intensity of belief is leavened with a live, working conscience, a respect for being truthful (lying is of course an annoyingly repetitious - broken record - theme of the aforementioned), and empathy for others (which characteristics are, if I dare say it, a brief definition of being progressive/liberal).

So, despite the hour, and the multitude of other things calling to me, I could not resist, once I saw it, clicking on a title like "Michael Moore's Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now" on CommonDreams (though doubtless also findable elsewhere, e.g. HuffPost, given MM's imprint).

And I'm glad I did. Michael sets the bar pretty high here, but justifiably so, given the amazing multiple Augean Stables left for our President by the last so-badly-behaved-not-house-trained tennant-swines, not to mention the long run of (briefly-interrupted) government-antagonistas bred by the reagan death-squads in the preceding couple decades.

Just in case you haven't grokked by now, I am not, to my shame, a proper civil disobedient a la H.D. Thoreau and income-tax-refusers, nor a proper agent provocateur, and certainly no taser-taking demonstrator (though I did manage a good whif of tear-gas in DC way back when), looking for my next lockup. Outright confrontation R not US, bowdlerizing from that giraffe. But, yes, indeed, I can both feel some satisfaction at things we have been doing around here (e.g., "We Demand" #2, "We Can Do" #5 and "We Should Do" #1, 1/2#2, and #5), and possibly others we should consider.

I will try to excerpt, but, as is pretty common, must recommend a click-over to the full original. This is good germinal material that deserves your attention:

Friends,

It's the #1 question I'm constantly asked after people see my movie: "OK -- so NOW what can I DO?!"

You want something to do? Well, you've come to the right place! 'Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:
1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

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FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It's time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party -- and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama's agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action -- and he won't feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it's to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I'll post it on my website.

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FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one -- the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

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CCCL?

2009-10-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

Climate-warming (i.e., warming-thwarting) activists (a motley group I generally support) have focused on this Saturday for some specific moves. Their meme is "350," a reference to the 350 parts-per-million carbon dioxide level that apparently represents a major threat to climate stability. I gather we are now at 390 ppm. I am excited at the international galvanizing apparently happening on this vital topic:

Let's say you occasionally despair for the future of the planet. In that case, the place you need to be this week is the website for 350.org.

Every few minutes, something new arrives at our headquarters, where young people hunched over laptops do their best to keep up with the pace. News that activists in Afghanistan—Afghanistan—have organized a rally for our big day of action on October 24. They'll assemble on a hillside 20 kilometers from Kabul to write a huge message in the sand: "Let Us Live: 350."

Or news that there's all of a sudden a 350 website in Farsi to help organize the rallies taking shape across Iran. Or maybe a short story exactly 350 words long from the great writer Barry Lopez. Or the news flash that the World Council of Churches has endorsed the 350 target, and is urging its 650 million members to ring their bells 350 times on October 24. Or...

But wait—what's 350? It's the most important number in the world, though no one knew it even 20 months ago. When Arctic ice melted so dramatically in the summer of 2007, scientists realized that global warming was no longer a future threat but a very present crisis. Within months our leading climatologists—especially the NASA team led by James Hansen—were giving us a stark new reality check. Above 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, they wrote, the atmosphere would begin to heat too much for us to have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

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So here's the good news. The planet's immune system is finally kicking in. When we started organizing 350.org 18 months ago, the task seemed a little ludicrous—we were a small band, mostly recent college graduates, with little money. How we were going to get the world behind an arcane piece of scientific data?

But it turns out that everywhere around the world there are people deeply worried about the planet's fate, and given even a small platform to stand on they're willing to shout their loudest. At this writing, activists have scheduled events in about 170 nations, which is pretty much all the nations there are. (Nothing in North Korea yet). There will be thousands and thousands of rallies: bike rides that cover 350 kilometers, climbers high on the melting slopes of Mount Everest, even the cabinet of the government of the Maldives holding an official underwater meeting to send a 350 resolution to the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen.

Some of these actions are so beautiful they make you weep: around the dwindling Dead Sea, Israeli activists will form a giant human 3 on their shore, and Palestinians a 5 on their beach, and in Jordan a huge 0. The message: even in places with deep divisions, people understand that the crisis that faces us now calls for real unity.

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Redneck, White, and Bigotted

2009-10-19T21:24:00.000-07:00

The pandemic of zany on the right just continues. Okay, that is probably being too kind, since much of this behavior is not comic but more on the fringe of certifiable in civilized company. Perhaps it is no wonder that the number of self-identified repubes has now dipped below 20% I believe I heard.

It's hard to fathom that the state of South Carolina allows any of their politicians out in public or especially near a microphone these days without large muscular handlers. (Okay, yes, that is a disturbing image, though, who knows, perhaps not far from the mark.) The "makeover" that state is going to need before nose-breathing folks with a post-elementary education and the ability to stand erect choose to move there goes beyond imagining. Do real people who I could get to know and become friends with actually elect representatives like this? The self-abasement is painful to observe.

Oh, South Carolina. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “there you go again.”

After a South Carolinian Democrat accused Senator Jim DeMint of failing to bring home enough federal funding for the poverty-stricken state, two county GOP leaders rushed to the Senator’s defense, crafting an op-ed for for a local paper yesterday in which they fell back on this antiquated, but still very offensive, analogy:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

The poor dears, bless their hearts. They just can’t help themselves, can they? Jews love money? No shit, Shylock! They also love charging usurious interest rates, diamonds, and global media empire-building! Wait, give me a few more minutes, and I’ll come up with more asinine stereotypes.

Every time the South Carolina GOP lets spill another racist or religious slur–and their well seems bottomless–they only serve to reinforce the negative stereotype the rest of the world harbors of Southern Republicans as inbred, chaw-spittin’, rusted out pickup-drivin’, “anybody not like them”-hatin’ crackers. I find it remarkable that the state manages to function at all, with so many pea-brained yokels in positions of power.

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But I admit to some misgivings about the original complaint from the Democrat, too. Not enough pork-barrel for you? (I'd love to be reassured that this was a genuine complaint at failure to attend to actual human needs.)

And I'll close with this, although the samples and examples go on and on these days. Here we have Oklahoma, with a good long rap-sheet when it comes to intolerance and bigotry, alas. This is US Senator Tom Coburn, with apt subtitle under his mug-shot of

Does it matter whether Dr. Tom is a pathological
liar or is just too stupid to know better?

And, just so you know, hidden in the "clip" below is mention of Jon Stewart. Not to be missed:

This has no doubt been reported but just reached my attention via this item from Al Kamen in today's Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

Waterboarding for kids?

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) must be feeling stressed these days over the travails of his pal, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.). For those who missed it, Coburn took to the Senate floor last week to decry federal deficits, which are not, for him, an abstraction.

"It is deeply personal with me," Coburn explained. "I have five grandchildren. I look in their eyes, and I see the potential of their lives and all of these other children who are out there. You know what? We are going to waterboard them. That is what we are going to do. We are going to waterboard them. We are going to flood them with debt. We are going to shackle their opportunities. We are going to limit their possibilities because we don't have the courage to make the difference for their future."

Wait a minute! It's just a dunk in the water.

The Constitution, of course, is notoriously sketchy about qualifications for the offices it established -- citizenship and age, and that's about it. And in the theoretical part of the brain, we all recognize that this is a good idea. The qualifications of candidates for public office should be judged by the voters, we always remind ourselves.

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Now we have our good friend Dr. Tom Coburn achieving the special feat of annihilating reason on two urgent and seemingly unrelated issues, the economy and U.S. government practice of torture. Sometimes I think it might be nice if an orator in such circumstances might be required to declare whether he knows better, and thus speaks for the Party of Liars, or truly doesn't, and thus speaks for the Party of Morons. There have been times in our history when the press felt some responsibility for at least sorting out fact from fiction, but those times seem safely past.

So we still depend on this imperfect instrument of letting voters set their own standards. A certain number of the liars and morons have indeed been shown the door in the last two national elections, but not necessarily on that particular ground. And I'm afraid the evidence continues to indicate an alarmingly high level of tolerance for the Dr. Toms and Joe Wilsons.

Sigh.

Noir-ly

2009-10-15T21:57:00.001-07:00

At my instigation, we watched the classic movie Kiss of Death (1947) recently. As these things go, there is often a significant lag between the impulse and the viewing, leaving me wondering at my motive in selecting this particular vehicle. Looking back, it was quite likely the fact that this is Richard Widmark’s debut that attracted me to it. I have had his wonderfully dark characters stop in a number of times recently (Pickup on South Street is one that comes to mind, as well as Don’t Bother to Knock). And Kiss is the one that has Widmark gleefully thrusting a wheelchair-bound woman down the stairs (to her death, presumably). Somewhat of a noir icon, I would guess, that particular scene. Of course, the movie doesn’t come out as some might want. Ben Hecht did the screenplay, and my impression is that a true noir aficionado would need to know no more than that.

D. Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film) has this to say about Tommy Udo, Widmark’s Kiss character:

The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen. The glee in the performance may even have shocked Widmark himself.

You need to watch this.

Since then, I have had occasion to disturb myself further by reading Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, the inspiration for Hitchcock’s 1951 movie of the same name (which backpedalled a good deal from the original).

This is my first encounter with Highsmith – I’d not heard of her until recently. It won’t be my last. I came upon this one due to a great, expansive review of of a compendium of her Mr. Ripley series, regarding an amiable murderer. She also authored The Price of Salt, purportedly one of the first well-selling novels with an explicit lesbian theme.

She is an intriguing author who seems to deserve more attention than she got in this country while alive. I gather she was much more admired in Europe, where she spent much of her life (though born in Texas). She seems to have an uncanny innate understanding of the internal psychological disputes we all struggle with. Her Charles Bruno in Strangers could give Widmark quite a run for his money in terms of psychopathy. Interestingly, I found the detective who finally cracked the case and broke down the protagonist in the book almost as disturbingly intrusive and sociopathic (though supposedly with a legalistic goal) as Bruno. I have little doubt that I was in the author’s sway – she’s way ahead of me.

For one with a great enthusiasm, limned here before, for connections, this tale of dual traded murders, dreamed up with the idea that no connections or motives could possibly be found, is compelling stuff.

Go on, I dare ya, check out our dark side.

What Do You Call a Revolving Zombie?

2009-10-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

I can't con myself that it is a pain-free (or risk-free) program to continue to attempt to monitor the ongoing health care reform proceedings. Despite the fact that ridiculous absurdities and over-the-top hysterics from opponents are quite frequent and do bear a distinct resemblance to some of the most outrageous behavior exhibited by the McSlime campaign (only a year ago - ohmigosh), this is different. For one thing, the show has a cast of hundreds instead of scores. For another, the corporate interests and lobbyists do not seem to be bothering to divide their money, time, and slime evenly between the true opposition positions, e.g., killing reform and say, a proper first-world country single-payer system (or at least a program with a truly robust 50-states public option).

But background briefings from those with a broader perspective and more context than I have can be helpful. For one thing, they can reinforce the need for strong and consistent speaking out and pushback by those who believe in reform. I.e., apparently a healthy majority of Americans.

Here's Moyers and Winship:

On Tuesday, Oct. 13, the Senate Finance Committee finally is scheduled to vote on its version of healthcare insurance reform. And therein lies yet another story in the endless saga of money and politics.

In most polls, the majority of Americans favor a nonprofit alternative -- like Medicare -- that would give the private health industry some competition. So if so many of us, including President Obama himself, want that public option, how come we're not getting one?

Because the medicine that could cure our healthcare nightmare has been poisoned from Day One -- fatally adulterated, thanks to the infamous, Washington revolving door. Movers and shakers rotate between government and the private sector at a speed so dizzying they forget for whom they're supposed to be working.

If you've been watching the Senate Finance Committee's markup sessions, maybe you've noticed a woman sitting behind Committee Chairman Max Baucus. Her name is Liz Fowler.

Fowler used to work for WellPoint, the largest health insurer in the country. She was its vice-president of public policy. Baucus' office failed to mention this in the press release announcing her appointment as senior counsel in February 2008, even though it went on at length about her expertise in "healthcare policy."

Now she's working for the very committee with the most power to give her old company and the entire industry exactly what they want -- higher profits -- and no competition from alternative nonprofit coverage that could lower costs and premiums.

A veteran of the revolving door, Fowler had a previous stint working for Sen. Baucus -- before her time at WellPoint. But wait, there's more. The person who was Baucus' top health advisor before he brought back Liz Fowler? Her name is Michelle Easton. And why did she leave the staff of the committee? To go to work -- surprise -- at a firm representing the same company for which Liz Fowler worked -- WellPoint. As a lobbyist.

You can't tell the players without a scorecard in the old Washington shell game. Lobbyist out, lobbyist in. It's why they always win. They've been plowing this ground for years, but with the broad legislative agenda of the Obama White House -- healthcare, energy, financial reform, the Employee Free Choice Act and more -- the soil has never been so fertile.

The healthcare industry alone has six lobbyists for every member of Congress and more than 500 of them are former congressional staff members, according to the Public Accountability Initiative's LittleSis database.

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And, on a related note, Sirota draws our attention to the proliferating plethora of un-dead critters sprouting up in the entertainment field as well as on Wall Street:

What's with all the zombies lately?

That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to preeminence in books like "World War Z," video games like "Left 4 Dead" and blockbuster films like "Zombieland." Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study titled "Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knockoffs like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").

Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.

It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.

Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.

On Wall Street, we have zombie executives -- those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisors whose zombie economic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks.

On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies -- for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy -- all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.

Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.

"Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.

In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.

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I don't know what I have in the way of a punch-line. An Everlasting Dizzy?

Don't Get Perconel With a Hatch Chili!

2009-09-30T22:09:00.000-07:00

I was intrigued by a display of attractive multi-hued chili peppers in a local grocery late last week, something a bit out of character or even a little outre way out here in the (formerly) soggy northwest, far from chili-dom. I noted the name but otherwise decided it was not urgent business. But a couple days later I ran across a similar display in another branch of this chain. Hmmm!

In passing, I shared this with co-worker food-confabulist political-poltergeist that the domestic crew have come to tease me as having recently morphed into my BFF. I have been careful over the years (a shared 17 or so with same employer) to tiptoe around his sensitivities or more specifically his delight in throwing out caustic right-wing barbs. He's a gun-toting (in the National Parks before it was legal!), motorcycling, government-fearing posse all to hisself when it comes to outward politics. It's tough to overcome a deprived childhood and a child-less marriage.

Despite his wholly misguided politics, he is somehow a devoted vegetable gardener (exploiting the now-illegal pesticides he has archived), amusingly devoted cat-lover, and an enthusiastic meat-smoker and food afficionado with a self-admitted decidedly limited Kansas-based set of food preferences. But he does do spicy food amazingly well, all things considered.

And he has a lot more hours logged on food websites than I do, so "Hatch chilis" actually meant something to him. These are apparently quite the gourmet item, a subset of New Mexico green chilis raised in small area around Hatch, NM. We mutually puzzled over how or what these chilis would be used for, in my case having only the coincidental connection that they were being promoted (lacklusterly) locally, in his case limited as he'd never imagined encountering them.

I took time Friday to re-visit store, despite crises enveloping me at work (or maybe to escape same?), only to find that said chilis had been tossed due to spoilage. But in the course of the weekend, amusingly, we both found other supplies, and purchased extra on each other's behalf! Interestingly his were all green and came in two separate heat levels, while mine were multi-colored with no news on capsaicin levels.

With provendor in hand, more on-line research suggested to me that roasting these puppies and preserving was the way to go.

I went the oven-broiler route, though slower oven-roast would no doubt work too, and BBQ and/or smoker are other options. I cut mine in half to simplify seed and membrane removal, a little wary of possible heat. But removal of relatively tough skin was made more difficult as a result. I found it quite a chore to peel the little darlings.

It turns out that my catch is not really all that hot, though I guess medium-spicy. I packaged the peeled peppers 1/2 cup each and vacuum-sealed them for freezing. I foresee use in an authentic chili when the winter is upon us. Or some enchiladas. We'll just have to see. Co-worker expended most of his catch into a potato-chili soup recipe he had been dying to try and was swooning over that today (while admitting it did have some serious tang to it).

And, by the way, in the spirit of learning something every day, there was a lesson here. Though one any food-savvy dolt might not need my help with. When working intimately with the pepper family, in particular the membranes and seeds, not only is it important to observe the normal food-work guidelines of washing after a visit to the loo, it is highly recommended that you do a vigorous scrub before contact with genitals also. Speaking only hypothetically, hours of discomfort could burn this lesson in well.

In the meantime, I tracked down another couple pounds or so of Hatch beauties and have them cooling in the kitchen now.

PS Title is a nod to a book I wore out in younger days, authored by quirky author H. Allen Smith ("Don't Get Perconel With a Chicken"), who was also famed for being one of the progenitors of chili-cooking competitions in the Lone Star State.