Because the old thread is long and growing tired. Pancakes for breakfast! Who’s got a great recipe / cooking technique / reminiscence?
Very Late Night/Early Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (83)
This post is in: Open Threads
Because the old thread is long and growing tired. Pancakes for breakfast! Who’s got a great recipe / cooking technique / reminiscence?
Very Late Night/Early Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (83)
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Assholes, Clown Shoes, Rumormongering
Latoya Peterson at Jezebel has the best concise explanation I’ve seen of the Great FOX News ACORN Scandal. She finds five key questions, and answers them, with an efficiency I can only wish the “established, professional” Media Village Idiots would use more often: What does ACORN do? Why did they come up in the 2008 …
This post is in: Open Threads
Until John gets around to posting pet pictures, and/or Bad Horse Filly’s “Menu for the Weekend.” *** Update *** Thanks, Anne Laurie. I forgot, yet again. The menu: Seared Ginger Tuna Rice Mint-Papaya-Pineapple Salsa Tossed Salad Sliced Apples w/Caramel dipping sauce And the cute:
This post is in: Dog Blogging
Cathleen Schine, whose novel The New Yorkers was a perceptive window into the difference between a person and a-person-who-lives-with-a-dog, reviews INSIDE OF A DOG: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know for the New York Times: Dogs are, says Horowitz, “creatures of the nose.” To help us grasp the magnitude of the difference between the human …
New Dog Book I’m Looking Forward to ReadingPost + Comments (45)
*(Cats are willing to deal with people, at least their personal people, but dogs have a much more human-like “need” to work out an explicit vocabulary with the animals they live with. In my experience, a cat can share a household for years with a person or even another cat without acknowledging the other’s existence; a dog living with a person or a cat who is “not a dog person” will never give up trying to make a connection, even after multiple attempts prove that any interactions are going to be unpleasant or painful.)
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Assholes
Today Alex Pareene is my hero: On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as “great” as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed… And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, …
Best Possible Comment on Glenn Beck’s “9/12”Post + Comments (160)
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics
“I have not the least expectation that the plan will be adopted. In South Carolina there is less enterprise, less public spirit, than in any other state; and that, Heaven knows, reduces it low enough.” Theodosia Burr* was writing (to her father) about prison reform, not health care reform, and there were fewer states in …
Late Night / Early Morning Open ThreadPost + Comments (41)
In a consensus-driven organization, on the other hand, everybody must have a chance to give an opinion… even when their opinion is stupid, crazy, laughable, and wrong. Being a successful community organizer means knowing that the local Mr. Tinfoil or Ms. Crystal-Bunny will show up at every godsdamned meeting and waste everybody else’s time ranting about black helicopters or the necessity for regular high colonics. A large part of the job of being a successful community organizer is ensuring that the resident nutball gets a respectful hearing without being permitted to permanently derail the meeting. Because, sad as it may seem, the rest of us skittish flaky primates want to know (even when we don’t articulate it) that “our guy” will take our ideas seriously, even when we’re not sure our ideas are worth taking seriously. When Obama stands up before Congress and explains that his health care reform proposals will involve neither death panels or government-paid abortions (unfortunately, IMO), he is reassuring the 80% of his audience who have no strong feelings about either topic that he will, at another time, be open to their opinions, however formless and/or gormless. This is important, even when it means that the meetings keep running into overtime and that us sane people have to listen to an awful lot of extremely random crap.
After eight years of the Cheney Regency’s “My way or the Gitmo highway” authoritarianism, anything less forceful than sloganeering and explicit threats seems like pretty weak sauce to those of us who’ve been paying attention. The question, of course, is whether President Obama’s target audience — the vast quivering voting-eligible majority that isn’t ideologically wed to either Invisible-Hand-of-the-Marketplace-Uber-Alles or Medicare-for-All-Americans-Immediately — considers his speech, and his administration’s work over the next few weeks and months, as sensible compromise or timid obfuscation. Perhaps we’d get better proposals and a more useful final bill if President Obama would channel his Inner Authoritarian a little more, but his gift for seeking consensus seems to be why Obama is President and certain other people are not. Maybe all the histronics are simply a necessary part of the process of committing democracy.
*Nancy Isenberg, FALLEN FOUNDER: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007) ISBN 978-0-14-311371-3
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads
Our new foster papillon “Gloria” got turfed from her last home because she made the dog-logical mistake of attacking their tiny, elderly Queen Bee girl dog. In the three-days-and-counting she’s been here with us, Gloria has given our elderly, imperious (and much larger, tho still smaller than Gloria) Princess Buta-Hime-Sama a very wide berth, even …