Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Bark louder, little dog.

The National Guard is not Batman.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

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Archives for 2014

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Going Native

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ndfg asters

From commentor NewDealFarmGrrl:

I didn’t have much of a veggie garden this year between my jobs and the cool rainy spring, but i have been working on converting much of my yard to native species. The more native prairie wildflowers i have around my vegetables, the fewer problems i have with garden pests.
ndfg bkydPanorama_year1

My first summer here was 2010 (above). That year I saw one male goldfinch, once. This year, with many more native plants (below), i had at least three nesting pairs around the yard. Various species of birds visit the garden and sit on rabbit fencing, peering in, then swooping down on a bug for their nestlings.
ndfg bkydPanorama_year5

ndfg dragonfly

ndfg veggieGarden2_cabbage
I’ve become a fan of tucking vegetable plants amongst perennials and natives, very few bugs or problems, other than getting things into the ground sooner rather than later! This year my big success was green bell peppers and eggplants. Minnesota is on the cool side for both; my strategy is to put black landscape cloth around the plants. It absorbs heat while suppressing weeds, seems to keep the peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants happy! I got my tomatoes in too late, the squirrels got most of them. For other garden areas, I mulch with chopped hay. My soil is very sandy, so it dries out quickly. The hay breaks down fairly quick, and adds humus to the soil along with compost from my compost bins.
ndfg ohHai

My cats lurv lurv lurv the bird feeders in my backyard because of all the interesting fluttery things that show up…

ndfg helenium

ndfg frontyard_June

(Next week: More wildlife!)
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I need to get a couple more potted roses dug into the ground, before it’s too late. But today, we’re going to the Topsfield Fair, because TRADITION.

What’s going on in your gardens, this week?

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Late Night Open Thread: Good Xtian Men

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You’d think Sullivan would’ve learned better, by now…

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Open Thread: “Be Careful What You Wish For”

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Straw in the whirlwind… the Teahadi stench is so strong the neighbors are beginning to notice. Andrew Romano, at Yahoo News:

… With one month to go before Election Day, the major storyline about the 2014 midterms seems to be that the GOP is up and the Democrats are down. Republicans will hold the House; they’re even favored to win the Senate.

But turn your attention to the gubernatorial contests, and a different picture emerges. Eight Republican incumbents are in danger of losing re-election; only three of their Democratic counterparts find themselves in the same situation.

This is remarkable. According to Louis Jacobson, the re-election rate for governors between 1998 and 2012 was 82 percent, meaning that incumbent governors were almost five times as likely to win as to lose. To put the GOP’s current predicament in perspective, the number of Republicans currently at risk — again, eight — is the same as the total number who were unseated during the entire 14-year period that Jacobson surveyed.

So what’s going on?

It’s the electoral version of “be careful what you wish for — you just might get it.” For the most part, the new coterie of conservative leaders who swept into statehouses across the country four years ago weren’t your standard-issue Republicans. They were bolder. More principled. Less willing to compromise.

Sam Brownback in Kansas. Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania. Paul LePage in Maine. Rick Scott in Florida. Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

Their goal was to practice what the tea party preached. “My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works,'” said Brownback. “We’ll have a real, live experiment.”

And that’s just what they did…

Brownback, Corbett, LePage, Scott and Walker promised that governing 2010 style would be an economic slam-dunk. The data, however, tell a different story. Four years later, most of these states are struggling…

The bottom line is that the class of 2010 governors promised revolutionary policies that would, in turn, spark revolutionary economic results. But while they delivered on the first half of that equation, they didn’t deliver on the second — and in many cases, it’s easier to argue that austerity hurt their states than to argue it helped…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Sometimes ‘Good Enough’ Is Good Enough

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Back when state-of-the-art communications technology was a xerox copier or a really affordable long-distance landline plan, my friends and I would joke about (Book of) “Kells Syndrome”: The longer a letter or voice-machine message or writing project sat unanswered, the more daunting crafting a “worthy” response became, to the point where only an impossible level of detail and craftsmanship seemed adequate. (The original Book of Kells doesn’t seem to have been finished, either.) Technology has improved mightily since then, but the Kells Syndrom remains, if you accept the arguments Melissa Dahl at NYMag describes as “The Alarming New Research on Perfectionism“:

…[P]erfectionism can be devastatingly destructive, leading to crippling anxiety or depression, and it may even be an overlooked risk factor for suicide, argues a new paper in Review of General Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association.

… We tend to see the Martha Stewarts and Steve Jobs and Tracy Flicks of the world as high-functioning, high-achieving people, even if they are a little intense, said lead author Gordon Flett, a psychologist at York University who has spent decades researching the potentially ruinous psychological impact of perfectionism… “[F]or many perfectionists, that “together” image is just an emotionally draining mask and underneath “they feel like imposters,” he said…

But the dangers of perfectionism, and particularly the link to suicide, have been overlooked at least partially because perfectionists are very skilled at hiding their pain. Admitting to suicidal thoughts or depression wouldn’t exactly fit in with the image they’re trying to project. Perfectionism might not only be driving suicidal impulses, it could also be simultaneously masking them.

Still, there’s a distinction between perfectionism and the pursuit of excellence, Greenspon said. Perfectionism is more than pushing yourself to do your best to achieve a goal; it’s a reflection of an inner self mired in anxiety. “Perfectionistic people typically believe that they can never be good enough, that mistakes are signs of personal flaws, and that the only route to acceptability as a person is to be perfect,” he said…

So… maybe this would be a good weekend to pick up that long-avoided project, do the best job you can within the constraints of time/temper/resources, and accept that sometimes half-arsed is better than never?
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Apart from such speculation, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Late Night Open Thread: The Future On The TV

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Our avatars, let us show you them! Not quite Ed Sullivan introducing America to the Beatles. Hatsune Miku:

The name of the character comes from merging the Japanese words for first (初 hatsu?), sound (音 ne?) and future (Miku (ミク?) sounds like a nanori reading of future, 未来, normally read as “mirai”[2]), referring to her position as the first of Crypton’s “Character Vocal Series”. According to Crypton, her name is meant to signify the “first sound from the future”.

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