Just cracked #2, this time Nobilo. Think I may spend some time on the porch making love to a cigar I picked up in the People’s Republic of Madison (and I will rape it with my mouth like David Letterman would). Please don’t email me about oral cancer, folks, because I know you mean well, but I’m gonna ignore you and at this point we’re just talking about another torpedo in a sinking ship.

I might have enough of a wild hair up my ass that this blog could become CrankyKaplan’s twitter feed. His last tweet had me laughing out loud:

“MAKING A FEW CALLS TO FIND A FAT VEGAN TO COME BLOW ME WHILE I SIT IN MY BACKYARD IN REAL-LOOKING BUSH COSTUME TO KILL THIS FUCKING RACCOON.”

Gonna be a long morning. God damned dogs don’t understand hangover and have to piss at 6 am no matter what.

John +4

TaMara writes:

Time to start the Farmer Stand editions of Thursday Night Menu. Most of the produce tonight can be found locally. So if you haven’t visited your local farm stand or farmer’s market, now’s your chance. I went to a local stand this past weekend and was surprised how small the tomato selection was. I shouldn’t have been, since my tomato plants, which are usually bent over with red fruit by now, are host to medium-sized green tomatoes which are slowly ripening.

I bought a few things and experimented with varieties of peppers I’d never even seen before. Some I really liked, some had surprisingly little flavor, though they smelled wonderful, it didn’t translate to the flesh.

Peach season is in full swing in Colorado, so we have sliced peaches tonight and hopefully if things slow down a bit for me, a week’s worth of peach inspired recipes all next week. My plan is to head to another farm stand this weekend and stock up on peachy goodness.

On the board tonight:

1. Basil Grilled Chicken
2. Marinated Potatoes
3. Yellow Summer Squash
4. Sliced Peaches

Shopping list and recipes, as ever, at the link.

Watching the dogs at my parent’s house- they’ve been in Montana for two weeks and my brother has been dogsitting, but he had obedience school for Boghan so I got the duties tonight. Three Jack Russell Terriers and one Lily is a lot of dogs.

Drinking a bottle of Matua Valley Sauvignon Blanc, and since you all answered my music questions (I think anyone who gets their panties in a bunch at people clapping in between movements should drink a double ovaltine, go to an early-bird special, and then drive their Oldsmobile off a cliff), here is a wine question. What is it about New Zealand and Australian sauvignon blancs that makes them (and I lack the terminology) brighter and cleaner and more grapefruity? I just adore them. Hands down, they are my favorite wine. Although I did love that South African Two Oceans, but I can’t get that now.

Finally starting to de-stress.

Even though I’ve got work to do, ever since John did his post asking about standards, all I’ve done is peruse this list of 1000 standards and the truly awesome blog Standard of the Day.

What I love is how goofy a song can be and still make a killer standard—if hearing a bunch of possibly smacked-up hepcats murder a tune from “Sleeping Beauty” or “Oklahoma” or “Finian’s Rainbow” doesn’t cheer you up at least a little, you’re in a bad way, my friend.

I was going to hold a contest for who can name the goofiest song that can be classified as a standard, but I don’t think anyone can beat “Rainbow Connection“.

In a world where you have to obsessively study everything in order to make the right decision, music is one of those things that I’ve never really studied, I’ve just enjoyed. I don’t know how to read music, I don’t know all the correct terms, and I’m not embarrassed when I’m discovering “classics that everyone should know” when I’m 40. I listen to music because I like it and enjoy it, and because it is one of the few things in life that for me, at least, is a simple matter of taste. I just spent two weeks researching a god damned oven, for chrissakes.

Having said that, two things came up today that I am curious about. The first is a running debate on Performance Today, where they are wondering whether the recent trend of clapping during symphonies is a good thing and should be encouraged. Why is this a big deal. Why did people, in the past, not clap?

Second, was listening to DUQ this afternoon, and a Boz Scaggs toon was played and referred to as a “jazz standard.” What makes something a “standard?”

Sorry to sound like complete unwashed barbarian, but I’m curious.

... but never jam gay marriage today? Well, we can all hope that’s changing:

Same sex marriage is legal again in California. Sort of.

Just a week after ruling that Proposition 8 – a 2008 voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage – was unconstitutional, a federal judge lifted his stay of his decision on Thursday, opening the door for untold numbers of gay couples to marry in the nation’s most populous state. But he delayed implementation of the order to lift the stay until Aug. 18.

Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, who invalidated Proposition 8 in last week’s decision, had issued a temporary stay to allow for arguments for and against resumption of same-sex ceremoniesas supporters of the ban pursued an appeal of his decision.

On Thursday, however, Judge Walker declined to extend that stay, ruling, “The evidence presented at trial and the position of the representatives of the State of California show that an injunction against enforcement of Proposition 8 is in the public’s interest. Accordingly, the court concludes that the public interest counsels against entry of the stay proponents seek.”
[...]

Both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown had asked the court to lift the stay. “Doing so is consistent with California’s long history of treating all people and their relationships with equal dignity and respect,” Mr. Schwarzenegger’s lawyers wrote in a brief filed Friday.

Via commentor El Cid, the latest incarnation of our great Real American™ tradition of insisting that what we want to be true must be true… and death to anyone who disagrees. “Sovereign citizens spin history, reject government”:

As many as 300,000 people identify as sovereign citizens, the Southern Poverty Law Center found in a study to be published Thursday that was obtained by The Associated Press. Hate group monitors say their numbers have increased thanks to the recession, the foreclosure crisis, the growth of the Internet and the election of Barack Obama in 2008…

At the heart of their belief system: The government creates a secret identity for each citizen at birth, a “straw man,” that controls an account at the U.S. Treasury used as collateral for foreign debt. File enough documents at the right offices and the money in those accounts can be used to pay off debt or make purchases worth thousands of dollars.

The movement is based on a form of “legal fundamentalism,” said Michael Barkun, a retired Syracuse University political science professor who researches anti-government and hate groups.

“These people really seem to feel that filing certain kinds of legal papers that are connected to their theories will somehow also magically have the power to alter relationships and grant things that otherwise would be unobtainable,” he said.
[...]

Continue reading Wishing WILL Make It So, Or Else

If you’ve renewed your driver’s license, you’ve probably encountered this 1993 law:

After years of deliberate neglect, the Justice Department is finally beginning to enforce the federal law requiring states to provide voter registration at welfare and food stamp offices. The effort not only promises to bring hundreds of thousands of hard-to-reach voters into the electorate, but it could also reduce the impact of advocacy organizations whose role in registering voters caused such a furor in 2008.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, better known as the motor-voter law, is well-known for making it possible to register to vote at state motor vehicle offices. However, the law also required states to allow registration at offices that administer food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, disability assistance and child health programs. States were enthusiastic about the motor-vehicle section of the law, and millions of new voters got on the rolls while getting a driver’s license. But registration at public assistance offices proved far less popular.

In part, that was because of additional paperwork at those offices, but in many states, Republican officials did not want to provide easy entry to the voting rolls for low-income people whom they considered more likely to vote Democratic. The Bush administration devoted its attention to seeking out tiny examples of voter fraud and purging people from the rolls in swing states.

The DOJ is going to enforce every section of the law, instead of just the popular sections.

There’s the standard major-media gratuitous slam on A.C.O.R.N., who “caused such a furor” in 2008. The way I remember it, Republican operatives carefully planned and executed a hit on A.C.O.R.N. beginning in 2008 and major media, including the NYTimes, went along with it like sheep, but whatever.

But the best reason to applaud the Justice Department’s new posture is that it will bring more voters into public life. When advocacy groups sued Ohio and Missouri to force their public assistance offices into complying, huge groups of new voters surged onto the rolls — more than 100,000 in Ohio, and more than 200,000 in Missouri. Nationwide enforcement by the Justice Department could add millions more. The more people who have access to the ballot, the better the country will be.

That’s a coy use of “advocacy groups” by the NYTimes. Who were these noble “advocacy groups” who sued to enforce the federal law that state Republican election officials and the Bush DOJ simply decided not to follow?

Both complaints were brought by A.C.O.R.N.

In the complaints, A.C.O.R.N submits that they were allocating scarce resources registering voters outside welfare offices. They were doing that because they could not persuade state election officials to follow the law, inside welfare offices. They finally sued, and won.

Here

[updated]

DougJ makes a good point but I think he misses mine: parental satisfaction is not a very good indicator of education quality. I think that’s the take-away message from a survey which finds that most Americans approve of their own school but disapprove of the public school system at large. There’s a disconnect there that’s not at all different from this:

Parents are not professional educator and, moreover, the public is just bad at judging things like this. For example, poll after poll shows that Americans think that crime has gone up over the past few years, when it fact it has gone down.

People think crime is high everywhere except where they live – people think schools are failing all over the country except for their own school. Take this Gallup poll, for instance. Notice that people rate crime in the area where they live as mostly not at all serious (61%), but in the United States as a whole they perceive crime as Extremely/Very serious (42% vs. only 8% in the area where they live).

The public’s perception of education looks remarkably similar:

  In both instances, people are generally pretty happy with their own schools, the crime rate in their own neighborhoods, but believe that across the country crime is rampant and schools are failing left and right. In reality, crime has gone down and it’s gone down for years. The point I was trying to make is that maybe the general sentiment that education is going down the tube is about as accurate as the notion that crime is going up and up and up…

Crime may be down, but education is trickier to gauge.

Jeff Goldberg now:

I AM NOT ENGAGING in a thought exercise, or a one-man war game, when I discuss the plausibility and potential consequences of an Israeli strike on Iran. Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Jeff Goldberg in 2002:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities.

Now, this isn’t just a matter of Goldberg now admitting he was wrong about WMD, it is widely believed that Iraq was actively pursuing a nuclear program as late as 1991.

(TinyRevolution via Atrios)

But, hey, Goldberg’s a thoughtful guy and only an anti-Semite would say he’s promoting the bombing of Iran by saying Israel will do it anyway and encouraging Chris Hitchens to yak about how the Iranian regime should be overthrown.

TNC has a good piece (EDIT: it is actually Mark Kleiman, sitting in for TNC) up about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates last year. It goes to my main thought on the issue, the fact that whether or not race played a role, it’s just plain fucked up to arrest someone in his own home and manipulate appearances to justify it:

Read Crowley’s report and stop on page two when he admits seeing Gates’s Harvard photo ID. I don’t care what Gates had said to him up until then, Crowley was obligated to leave. He had identified Gates….

[.....]

No one who is familiar with law enforcement can miss the significance of Crowley’s report. As so often happens with documentary evidence, a person seeking to create a false impression spends lots of time nailing down the elements he thinks will establish his goal, but forgets about the larger picture. Under color of law, Crowley entered a residence to investigate a possible break-in, and after his probable cause had evaporated, he continued to act under color of law, but without any justifiable purpose. And he covered it up with false charges. Figuring that his best defense was a criminal charge, Crowley did what bad cops do. He decided he would look better if Gates looked worse. Perhaps one day cops will figure out that trumped-up charges worsen a case of investigating something that turns out not to have been a crime. It is horribly wrong when police officers falsely accuse an injured arrestee of A&B PO (“assault and battery on a police officer,” a felony) but at least there is some logic to the lie. If a disorderly conduct charge follows an investigation of a non-crime, chances are pretty good that the cop handled himself badly. Pursuit of charges should be strongly disfavored.

The lying matters.

I’m not an anti-cop person. Aside from one bogus traffic ticket, I’ve never had a problem with a cop, and the one police office I know pretty well is a good guy. But Sgt. Crowley should have been severely disciplined, if not fired, for what he did.

Bryan Fischer takes xenophobia to a whole new level:

Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government. Each one is a potential jihadist recruitment and training center, and determined to implement the ‘Grand Jihad’ of which Andy McCarthy has written.

Because of this subversive ideology, Muslims cannot claim religious freedom protections under the First Amendment. They are currently using First Amendment freedoms to make plans to destroy the First Amendment altogether. There is no such thing as freedom of religion in Islam, and it is sheer and utter folly for Americans to delude themselves into thinking otherwise.

Not to worry! He has a simple plan that all potential mosque-builders and American Muslims can follow in order to get their building permits:

If a mosque was willing to publicly renounce the Koran and its 109 verses that call for the death of infidels, renounce Allah and his messenger Mohammed, publicly condemn Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and Abdelbaset al Megrahi (the Lockerbie bomber), maybe then they could be allowed to build their buildings. But then they wouldn’t be Muslims at that point, now would they?

Leaving aside how a mosque could publicly renounce anything, this is really one of the most staggeringly stupid things I’ve ever read. This makes Andy McCarthy’s anti-Muslim screeds look like poems about kittens. Good grief.

(hat tip)

This interview was forwarded to me:

1. For almost two decades we’ve been told that when you’re looking for signs of what Wall Street wants Washington to do about the federal budget, the bond market is the place to watch. What’s the bond market saying today?

The bond market is being as unequivocal today as it was when Bob Rubin used what it was saying in 1993 to convince Bill Clinton that he had to push to reduce the deficit. The only difference is that, instead of demanding deficit reduction, the bond market today is exhibiting no worries about the deficit or federal borrowing at all In fact it’s indicating that Washington should do more to stimulate the economy.

Although there are also a number of technical reasons why the demand for federal debt is strong and interest rates have remained low, the bond market’s interest in Treasury securities has been high no matter what the maturity. This demonstrates that, contrary to what deficit hawks and demagogues have been insisting, there is little or no concern on Wall Street about the government’s borrowing, either short- or long-term.

2. Why are Congress and the White House ignoring the bond market now after feeling the need to follow it so closely before?

In 1993, the bond market was threatening higher interest rates if the deficit wasn’t reduced, something elected officials could ignore at their own political peril. By contrast, the only threat the bond market can make now is to lower interest rates further, and that isn’t as fearsome to politicians.

In addition, the bond market in 1993 had a former bond trader—Bob Rubin—as a high-level advisor to the president and, therefore, in a position to communicate and validate what it was saying to Washington.

Most important, however, what the bond market is saying today is different from what deficit hawks and GOP critics of the Obama White House want to hear. As a result, the echo chamber that amplified and repeated the bond market’s message almost two decades ago doesn’t exist today.

Read the whole thing and tell me how accurate you think this is…

From the NYTimes, “Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Moving From South Asia to U.S.“:

A dangerous new mutation that makes some bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics has become increasingly common in India and Pakistan and is being found in patients in Britain and the United States who got medical care in those countries, according to new studies.

Experts in antibiotic resistance called the gene mutation, named NDM-1, “worrying” and “ominous,” and they said they feared it would spread globally.
[...]

Bacteria with the NDM-1 gene are resistant even to the antibiotics called carbapenems, used as a last resort when common antibiotics have failed. The mutation has been found in E. coli and in Klebsiella pneumoniae, a frequent culprit in respiratory and urinary infections…

In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted the first three cases of NDM-1 resistance in this country and advised doctors to watch for it in patients who had received medical care in South Asia. The initials stand for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase.

“Medical tourism” to India for many surgeries — cosmetic, dental and even organ transplants — is becoming more common as experienced surgeons and first-class hospitals offer care at a fraction of Western prices. Tourists and people visiting family are also sometimes hospitalized. The Lancet researchers found dozens of samples of bacteria with the NDM-1 resistance gene in two Indian cities they surveyed, which they said “suggests a serious problem.”

Also worrying was that the gene was found on plasmids — bits of mobile DNA that can jump easily from one bacteria strain to another. And it is found in gram-negative bacteria, for which not many new antibiotics are being developed. (MRSA, by contrast, is a gram-positive bacteria, and there are more drug candidates in the works.)

To follow up on mistermix’s post about age, I know I’ve said this before, but the age split in the 2008 election is completely unprecedented in modern American political history. Obama won the 18-29 group by 34 points, the most any candidate has ever won any group by since this has been measured (note that they didn’t measure this in 1964, at least I can’t find the stats), while losing the over 65 vote by 8 points.

You might say, well McCain was old and Obama was young, and that’s the main reason. But look at 1992 —Bush I was only a little younger than McCain and Clinton was about the same age as Obama. Clinton beat Bush among every age group by between 3 and 13 points. In fact, his second largest win was among those over 65 (who voted by far the least for Perot as well, btw).

Something changed radically in American politics over the past 8 or so years when it comes to the affect effect of age/generation on voting patterns. In my view, this hasn’t received the attention it deserves.