Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

The words do not have to be perfect.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

This really is a full service blog.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

I really should read my own blog.

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Friday Recipe Exchange: Super Bowl Sunday Snacks

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tamara superbowl nachos

JeffreyW’s Awesome Nachos

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From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

I am still fighting this cold, I’m chasing after a 105 lb willful puppy, I’m buried by mortgage paperwork, and suddenly it’s time for the Super Bowl and the recipe exchange. So I had no choice but to pull out a classic recipe exchange, my favorite snacks, tortilla pinwheels. From 2012:

It’s that time again. Super Bowl Sunday, when you sit down to stuff your face with favorite snack foods, drink beer and watch the Super Bowl Commercials. I think there is some football in there somewhere.

You can’t go wrong with nachos – easy and easy to pile high with your favorites ingredients.

Here’s rather healthy (?) version: Black Bean and Corn Nachos, recipe here.

JeffreyW gets a little more creative with his pizzas, here , here, here and if you want to see them all, here (the man does love a good pizza).

And I think Chili is always a crowd-pleaser, so a variety can be found here.

And for the animal lovers, Bixby puts down his tug ball long enough to update on his life to date.

I’ll never turn down nachos, or pizza for that matter, but when I was thinking about favorite party foods, tortilla pinwheels came up pretty quickly. So many things you can do with them. Four variations follow.

Now it’s your turn, what are you planning on making this Sunday and more importantly what beer are you serving? Who has the best recipe for hot wings, a football must have food?

Tonight’s featured recipes, a variety of flavors, but don’t let that limit you:

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David Brooks Auditions For Graham Greene

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 The Quiet American  is a marvelous book, or rather, it is one in which Greene’s utter disdain for the reckless incompetence of power gets a near perfect expression.  Take this snippet from near the end of the work:

Pyle said, “It’s awful.” He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, “What’s that?” “Blood,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?” He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.” I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn’t count.

“You see what a drum of Diolacton can do,” I said, “in the wrong hands.” I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, “This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children-it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?” He said weakly, “There was to have been a parade.” “And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.” “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know!” I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. “You ought to be better informed.”

“I was out of town,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “They should have called it off.”

“And missed the fun?” I asked him. “Do you expect General The to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s press. You’ve put General The on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic deed-there are a few dozen less of her country people to worry about.”

A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, ‘What’s the good? he’ll always he innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. Ail you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’

He said, “The wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists…”

He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance…

Peter_Paul_Rubens_Massacre_of_the_Innocents

“Impregnable armoured by good intentions and ignorance.”  That is what will — or at least should be — engraved on David Brooks’ tombstone.  And I’m only giving him the props for his intent there out of whatever residual nil nisi bonum remains to me.

Why the vitriol, and memory of stupid wars, with the overwhelming weight of the violence reserved for far away others who don’t look like “us”?

Today’s column.

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Friday PM Open Thread

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I’ve never been to jail (except as a visitor to an incarcerated uncle and once to bail out a bone-headed friend who got busted for DUI). I hope to maintain my lifelong record of non-incarceration. Jail is so unpleasant.

But prison movies / television shows — now there’s a genre that just seems to inspire brilliance: Papillon. Shawshank Redemption. Cool Hand Luke. Oz. Orange is the New Black. Even campy shit like Prisoner: Cell Block H. What makes it work so well?

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Ben & Jerry’s Show What A Good Ally Looks Like

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If you want to know what a good ally looks like, look no further than Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben &  Jerry’s ice cream. The founders have spoken out publicly in support of #BlackLiveMatter and encouraged franchises to sell Hands Up United T-shirts:

“Some people might say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that,’” Cohen said to franchise owners. “‘We can’t sell those T-shirts in our shops; it’s controversial.’ But isn’t that exactly the point? If it weren’t controversial, we wouldn’t need to do it. At some point we have to ask ourselves: ‘What do we stand for? Whose side are you on?’” To his immense credit, Cohen didn’t equivocate or hide behind politically correct “All Lives Matter” rhetoric, though the corporation would do just that several days later when it distanced itself from the co-founder’s call to action.  … “You know, I think there will always be injustice, and we are outraged and saddened by it. But it’s in the act of working to end injustice that we find our hearts, our souls and our joy.”

Maybe the NYPD could benefit to learn from their business practices.

Team Blackness discussed another milestone in Obamacare, Huckabee’s further inability to understand women, and Comcast’s impressively horrific customer service.

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Credits not deductions

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Harold Pollack at Same Facts has a good long post on the political problems of capping 529 tax advantages for the affluent in order to change the tax system in a net revenue neutral manner that benefits people who earn under $100,000 per year.  He notes the following:

President Obama himself established a big 529 account for his own children. He’s probably as happy as I am to pocket the tax break. He’s definitely right that there’s no reason for the American taxpayer to subsidize our kids.

I hope the president builds on his proposals to shift the various tax subsidies down the income scale to really help middle-class and working parents who face punishing college bills.

The easiest way forward for any new tax preferences and renewal of expiring tax preferences is to shift away from deductions towards credits with caps.  I started working on my tax refund yesterday, and I know the child care credit is structured in a way that my current year self is getting less money in absolute and percentage terms of day care expense than my 2010 self did as my family is in much better financial shape now than we were in 2010.

Deductions in the tax code favor high income filers as a dollar that is deductible for someone making a million dollars a year saves forty cents in income taxes while that same dollar to someone making $20,000 a year and has a couple of kids is effectively tax free.  The deduction for the second case is worth almost nothing.  It does not change any incentives or add to the purchasing power of the family.  Credits structured to be fully refundable and are capped benefit poorer families.  If the arrangement is that childcare expenses up to $5,000 will get a 18% credit, a family making $20,000 a year and a family making $100,000 a year will see the same potential refund for that desired activity.  Odds are the richer family will spend the entire qualifying sum and get the entire credit, but it is fairer.

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