…to mention just a few of the blots on her wacky escutcheon. There’s also plenty of room for Vanité, Absurdité, Malignité, Hilarité, Vénalité and Stupidité in the Bachmann motto…
OBLIGATORY INTERJECTION: What’s a motto? Nuttin’. What’s a motto wit’ you? [RIMSHOT] Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the Sac à thé, it’s scrump-diddle-umptious!
…But no room for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, of course. That kind of fruity talk is strictly for whiny socialist surrender monkeys.
You’re right, you sharp-eyed, sharp-memoried kids, I’ve gone here before. Didn’t get it quite perfect the first time tho (as commenter Tony recently pointed out) so I went back to give it a bit of a makeover. Better now, n’est-ce pas?
As the Wege reminds us:
“She’s not just Minnesota’s nutter anymore. Now Michele Bachmann belongs to the entire nation. Enjoy.”
Enjoy? That’s not quite the word I’d use, but whatevs…
At last! After I don’t remember how many failed attempts, I finally took a picture of my cat that turned out to be in focus and reasonably well-lit. ”A Clear, Well-Lighted Cat” as Hemingway might say.
We got Katya from an animal rescue shelter in Prior Lake back in mid April. At the time, she was a tiny skinny little thing that the vet estimated to be about 5 months old. A stray, found somewhere in St Paul by a shelter volunteer described to us as “The Really Gay Guy” (And what on earth does being not just gay, but “really” gay entail? she wondered. )
But anyway. In April it had been nearly four years since our beloved Venerable Pup died, and we were starting to pine for a pet of some sort in the house again. Since our current schedules don’t really allow us enough time to devote to a dog properly — not enough time for all the walks a dog deserves — we decided to look for a cat. The problem would be finding a cat that wouldn’t aggravate Mr. Tild’s allergies.
Then we heard about supposedly “hypoallergenic” breeds such as Ragdolls and Cornish Rexes and Russian Blues, and the thought of having a Russian Blue cat appealed to me, ol’ commie symp that I am (as evidenced here, here and here.) So we started searching online for a Russian Blue cat to adopt, and that lead us to the shelter in Prior Lake and Katya.
Who of course wasn’t named Katya at the time. The shelter folks dubbed her “Smokie, a Russian Blue mix” in the Petfinders ad, and a mix is most likely what she is. Odds are pretty slim that she could be a purebred, but whatever kind of a mix she is, she certainly looks entirely like a Russian Blue. She’s got virtually all of the distinctive Russian Blue indicators, altho she also resembles a Korat in a couple of ways (fur and eyes.) But she definitely does NOT have the Korat profile, i.e. doesn’t have the Korat’s lion-esque nose.)
Therefore without further ado I present:
Her Imperial Majesty Ekaterina Velikaya, Empress of All the Russias
(or at least Empress of All the Russian Blue Kittehs)
Yes, after the Empress, not the battleship. And no horse jokes, please.
Or: I don’t care how many you said you wanted. 192 is enough for anybody!
Pictured: the last of the 16 dozen krumkakke I made last week.
Grandma Dallelie’s Krumkakke Recipe
6 eggs, room temperature
1 C. sugar
1 C. melted butter
1 tsp. whipping cream
1 C. flour
1 tsp. (rounded) ground cardamom
Beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl until frothy. Add the (cooled) melted butter, whipping cream and sugar; mix well.
Sift the cardamom together with the flour. Gradually add the flour and cardamom to the eggs-butter-sugar mixture until all is mixed well.
Heat up your krumkakke iron. Lucky me — 20+ years ago my inlaws gave me a nonstick electric double krumkakke iron similar to this one. Even tho it’s nonstick, I still season the griddle surfaces with a little Canola oil cooking spray while the iron is still cold.
Drop a generous teaspoonful of batter in the center of each krumkakke design on the heated iron surface and close the iron lid; cook for about 10 seconds, then open the iron and using a fork slide each krumkakke out onto a paper towel on the table next to the krumkakke iron. Let the krumkakke cool for a few seconds, then roll into a 2″ diameter hollow tube shape (it will end up looking kinda like cannoli or manicotti).
Don’t let the krumkakke cool off too much or it will be too crisp to roll up.
Notice several things with reconciliation. First, assume during reconciliation that Emmer and Dayton are close in votes statewide and therefore removal of ballots would produce a rough equivalent for each of them. In this scenario for every 100 ballots removed 50 belong to Dayton and 45 to Emmer. This is a net gain of 5 for Emmer. This would require 175,400 ballots to be removed from the state. This is 175,400 phantom or overvotes. An improbable number.
American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.
More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as “mainstream Americans” now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.
All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money—hundreds of billions of dollars—is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.
The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.
Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.
What else are we to think in face of the blatant lies Paulsen continues to spew in his campaign ads? Apparently Paulsen thinks MN-03 voters are too dumb to notice. What a guy!
But it’s not just WCCO that’s giving Paulsen’s ads poor grades. KSTP’s Truth Test gave Paulsen’s first ad a “D”:
MPR’s PoliGraph verdict on Paulsen’s second ad: FALSE
And their verdict on Jim Meffert’s ad? TRUE
And now WCCO’s Reality Check on Paulsen’s latest ad:
The truth about Erik Paulsen is that he only made it into Congress by riding his predecessor Jim Ramstad’s coattails. Ramstad was a decidedly centrist Republican who during the 20 years he represented MN-03 often voted against the party line (i.e., he could be rational.) Paulsen got elected by presenting himself as Ramstad Redux, altho previously in the MN State House he had been one of the more conservative Republicans, far to the right of Ramstad and to the right of the average 3rd district voter. How far to the right?
Since the beginning of his term, Rep. Paulsen has voted with Michele Bachmann an astounding 93% of the time.
93%.
And WWRD? What Would Ramstad Do? You’d have to ask him, but you can be sure that his answer would NOT be
“Vote 93% of the time in virtual lockstep with (far-right looneytune ) Michele Bachmann .”
Update: Erik doesn’t seem to have learned anything from being roundly criticized for his pattern of lies and distortions. His latest ad is more of the same fact-free prevarication:
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