All good news. While the biopsies are still pending, until Tuesday 4/9, when we learn whether the tumors are cancerous (I personally think not, due to slow growth of tumors and health of animal), we get to breathe easier about how well Lucy has done at the vet’s. With Much Love rescuing her on Wed 4/3 and proceeding with the much needed surgery on the big gash on her thigh on Thursday 4/4 and removing 9 cysts/tumors (some schedule changes allowed this to happen earlier than originally planned), Lucy has been on a fast road to recovery.
Best news yet, she got to go home with a foster Saturday 4/6, her name is Colleen. Hal, the potential foster has another dog. There is a quarantine period of 10 days post shelter life to protect the health of the existing animal in the household, so Much Love could not release Lucy to Hal. So Colleen, who has been the guiding angel through this whole process has stepped up to foster Lucy for the 10 days.
At this point, Much Love (Krissy Goodman) is guardian to Lucy, and they would be the best to let you know – they are actively looking for a potential foster/adopter — but Hal is still interested to foster and they will re-visit after the biopsy results are in, and after seeing how Lucy does at the foster home for the 10 days. Rest easy that Lucy will rehabilitate from surgery and the channel roaming/shelter life trauma since 3/20, in the comfort of LOVE and more love from Colleen, the foster home!!! Phew, Eldad! You saved Lucy’s life providing such generous funds for her medical care! and Phew, Collen, for giving her a comfy home to recuperate in!! It is possible Lucy will continue to need medical care, which may need further funding…
Much Love Rescue rocks. Ever since they entered the picture, everthing has gone so smoothly that it makes me wonder why it couldn’t have been this easy from the beginning. They are awesome. It is a miracle that Lucy’s life did not end at the shelter with her seeing the four walls of the concrete cell.
I got to hold her today at the Vet’s – I spent a good 15 minutes with her. See pics.
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
Sunday Long Read: Tax Havens, Tax Cheats & Other Criminals
Looks like we’re in for a chorus of wide-eyed whoever could have imagined — turns out that people who want to hide their funds may not always have acquired such funds in full compliance with the law. Sunday’s Washington Post has a long piece on “Piercing the Secrecy… ”
A New York hedge fund manager allegedly swindles $12 million from a prominent Baltimore family. An Indiana couple is accused of bilking hundreds of customers by charging for free trials of cosmetic products. A financial manager in Texas promises 23-percent returns but absconds with $33.5 million of his investors’ money in a classic Ponzi scheme.
All three cases have one thing in common: money that ended up in offshore accounts and trusts set up in tax havens around the world.
The existence of the trusts surfaced during a joint examination of the offshore world by The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a D.C-based nonprofit news organization. ICIJ obtained 2.5 million records of more than 120,000 companies and trusts created by two offshore companies, Commonwealth Trust Ltd. (CTL) in the British Virgin Islands and Portcullis TrustNet, which operates mostly in Asia and the Cook Islands, a South Pacific nation. The records were obtained by Gerard Ryle, ICIJ’s director, as a result of an investigation he conducted in Australia…
Today, there are between 50 and 60 offshore financial centers around the world holding untold billions of dollars at a time of historic U.S. deficits and forced budget cuts. Groups that monitor tax issues estimate that between $8 trillion and $32 trillion in private global wealth is parked offshore.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) has been holding hearings and conducting investigations into the offshore world for nearly three decades. In 2010, Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act requiring that U.S. taxpayers report foreign assets to the government and foreign institutions alert the IRS when Americans open accounts.
Sunday Long Read: Tax Havens, Tax Cheats & Other CriminalsPost + Comments (38)
Sunday Morning Open Thread
(Arlo & Janis via GoComics.com)
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Yeah, it’s too early for tomato plants in New England anyways. But whatever inconspicuous spores and molds are blossoming profusely right now have kicked my allergies into overdrive all week, and yet there isn’t so much as an open daffodil to console me for all the work I can now see needs to be done in the yard…
Who’s having better luck with their gardens, right now? Apart from that whole April-is-the-cruelest-month anomie, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Foreign Travel Is Always Risky
(Ted Rall via GoComics.com)
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Doing some housekeeping & this turned up. As my Intro to Anthropology professor told us, it is a fact universally acknowledged that The Tribe Over There is full of lowlife degenerates who eat taboo foods, have sex with their relatives, worship false idols & use entirely too much of the common resources. All else is commentary…
Apart from the universal verities, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Saturday Evening Open Thread: Foreign Travel Is Always RiskyPost + Comments (86)
Ready for Hillary?
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Of course it’s too soon, and yet: Barring a constitutional amendment, President Obama will be vacating the Oval Office in 2017, and I for one would really like another Democrat to take over when he’s done. And whatever might happen in a saner society, the 2016 race is already starting in this one. Dave Weigel (who took the pic, and a bunch more) on “an intrepid bunch“:
About 35 people showed up Tuesday night outside Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where Hillary Clinton was making her first public appearance since stepping down as Secretary of State. Coincidentally, it was also the first public appearance for the Ready for Hillary PAC, which you can and should read more about here. I asked a few of the group’s members what brought them out on a chilly April evening two years and eight months ahead of the Iowa caucuses….
Charlie Pierce with some background info for people who weren’t paying attention in the 1990s, or who may have chosen to put the whole tawdry goat rodeo out of their beautiful minds:
… There is nobody who more people want to run for president than Hillary Clinton. This does not merely include the people who want her to run because they think she’d make a good president, though I think she would, too. This includes people — inside the news business and out — for whom the carnival of nonsense surrounding the Clinton presidency — Impeachment? Over a blowjob? Honky, please. — was the formative political experience of their lives. Some of us had the civil rights movement. Some of us had Vietnam. Some of us had Watergate. Some of us even had the mock-turtle pageantry of the Reagan years. (Far too few of us had Iran-Contra, but that’s a different kettle of lye.) For an entire generation of the politically aware, the Great Penis Pursuit was the time when politics was the most exciting and the most fun. Many of these youngsters are now influential in the news business.
And Hillary Clinton was most assuredly a main character in that. She was the crafty lesbian whose heterosexual wiles snared poor Vince Foster, whom she then had to have killed because he knew what was in The Billing Records. She was the Oval Office dominatrix — thanks, Spy — who fired the poor career grifters in the White House travel office. She was the Hildebeast, the howling haunt of a million rightwing fever dreams, and a woman who scared the tingle right out of Chris Matthews’s leg…
What is largely lost, of course, is that the entire years was an extended exercise in hysteria, unreason, and weaponized malarkey. Whitewater was a joke. Kenneth Starr was a hack… With a few notable exceptions, the elite news industry was completely manipulated and completely cowed by a network of low-rent ratfkers, most of whom are still working the field today. (David Bossie, the founder of Citizens United, and an early anti-Clinton fanatic, now has had his ratfking blessed by the Supreme Court.) The Great Penis Pursuit was the precursor of the media malpractice that led to the inexcusable coverage of Al Gore’s campaign, the equally inexcusable coverage of the theft of the 2000 election, and the ultimately inexcusable coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. The credulity over Whitewater leads in a direct line to the credulity over WMD’s and Mohammad Atta’s sipping coffee in Prague…
Argument in favor of Hillary running: Republican David Frum, one of Dubya’s lead enablers/lampreys, is already warning against the idea.
Alex Pareene invents the Mark Penn Test, which I agree is a useful metric:
… The question for someone considering whether or not to support Clinton in 2016 is, will a Clinton 2016 campaign pass the Mark Penn Test? The Mark Penn Test, which I just invented, determines whether or not a person should be trusted with the presidency, based solely on one criterion: Whether or not they pay Mark Penn to do anything for their campaign. Paying Mark Penn means you’ve failed the Mark Penn Test.
Mark Penn is a pollster and political strategist and amoral P.R. creature who is generally wrong about everything. To find out how incompetent Mark Penn is at campaign strategy and how personally toxic he is in a campaign working environment go to your local library and check out literally any book about the 2008 presidential race. For the basics, check here and here. In short, he had no clue how the primaries actually worked and constantly pushed for the campaign to go as nasty and negative as possible, and everyone hated him and he was bad at his job and eventually he was fired…
Personal disclosure: I never thought Hillary would run for President at all, because I’d spent years watching Teddy Kennedy flinch at every sudden noise, and I remembered the hatred directed against the Clintons and the weirdly personal hatred directed at ‘the Hildebeast’ in particular. My original choice in 2008 was John Edwards, because he was the only one talking about “two Americas”, so you can see just how well I judged the permissible boundaries of modern American politicking. I will support whoever ends up as the Democratic candidate in 2016, but I’d kind of like to see a female president in my lifetime, and right now I don’t see a more likely candidate than Hillary Clinton on either end of the political spectrum.
Friday Recipe Exchange: Blood Oranges
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From our Food Goddess, TaMara:
Tonight’s recipe exchange is going to be a quick one. It’s been a stressful week – the little company I work with is downsizing (you can read about it here) and I’m busy helping them restructure. The weekend cannot come soon enough. Time to get out and ride and maybe do some gardening.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, it’s Blood Orange season and I thought I’d take advantage. I know we just did oranges, but that’s actually one of the reasons for tonight’s theme. I received an email question about using blood oranges instead of Clementine’s in the Orange Bread recipe. That reminded me to go looking for blood oranges. Usually I have a difficult time finding them, but a new Sprouts Market opened in my neighborhood and they have a great fresh produce section where I’ve been able to find all kinds of fun stuff. Including some beautiful and flavorful blood oranges.
If you haven’t ever had them, they are sweeter than navel oranges, a little bit of a raspberry flavor, I guess, to them. A nice mix of sweet and tart flavors. Here’s a bit of an explanation over at Sunkist. Really anything you do with oranges, you can do with blood oranges and get a really pretty display in the process.
So with that, I have three recipes for you and, sorry, no photos, it took all the energy I had left just to put together the recipes.
First up: Blood Orange Salad (click here)
Next: Blood Orange Coleslaw (click here)
What’s going on in your kitchen this weekend? Anything fun? Anyone firing up the grill yet?
And finally tonight’s featured recipe:
Blood Orange Glaze and Salsa
Open Thread: “The Bitcoin Boom”
This week’s high-tech pet rock, or sercon economic tool? Maria Bustillos, in the New Yorker, on “the future of Bitcoin“:
On March 16th, the Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, who’d been in office for about a month, announced a strategy to solve the country’s banking crisis. This plan, which would be funded in part by confiscating money directly from every single bank account in Cyprus—even the very smallest—met with instantaneous and violent opposition from the country’s citizens…
The following Monday, the price of the decentralized electronic currency bitcoin rose from forty-five to fifty-five dollars on the major exchanges, and by Wednesday it had nipped up to sixty-five dollars. The financial media generally agreed that the two dramas are related. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, it appears that Spaniards are liable to have been particularly active buyers of bitcoins that week, having taken the debacle in Cyprus as the likely sign of a forthcoming governmental plunder of their own savings. The evidence coming out of Spain is circumstantial—a spike in Google searches for “bitcoin,” and another on mobile-app downloads of Bitcoin-related software were widely reported—but the pieces appear to fit. Subsequent developments (including the announcement of an eleventh-hour bailout deal for Cyprus) have so far failed to stabilize the euro or cool the bitcoin fever, with the price over a hundred and three at the time of writing…
The weakness in existing currencies stems from lack of faith in institutions—particularly central banks, which are often in league with commercial and investment banks. When a government bails out a failed bank or insurance company—in essence, by printing money—the net effect is that the currency as a whole is debased, in favor of a few and at the literal expense of everyone else, which amounts to a fair description of today’s global financial system. Hence the sudden appeal of bitcoins, which appear, for the moment, at least, to be immune to the machinations of inept or crooked bankers and politicians.
* * *In many ways, bitcoins function essentially like any other currency, and are accepted as payment by a growing number of merchants, both online and in the real world. But they are generated at a predetermined rate by an open-source computer program, which was set in motion in January of 2009. This program produced each one of the nearly eleven million bitcoins in circulation (with a total value just over a billion dollars at the current rate of exchange), and it runs on a massive peer-to-peer network of some twenty thousand independent nodes, which are generally very powerful (and expensive) G.P.U. or ASIC computer systems optimized to compete for new bitcoins….
For those more interested in the consumerist details, NYMag’s Kevin Roose actually went out and bought a bitcoin (which involved, among many other elaborately explicated steps, a trip to CVS).