In tonight’s “too little, too late” department: Harry Reid is dropping some truth bombs about Sharron Angle.  Politico, being wingnutty, takes a skeptical tone towards Reid’s accusations that Angle speaks in code and wants to eliminate the vast majority of the federal government, with a special eye towards services that it actually provides people.  It is, of course, absolutely true.  Anyone who has been paying attention since before the primaries knows that Angle started off as a hard core Christian libertarian who wanted to eliminate Social Security, unemployment, the Department of Education, basically anything and everything that could conceivably call an “entitlement”.  And even after the Republican party got a hold of her and explained very carefully that while it was great that she believed those things, she needed to lie about her beliefs to get elected, she still had a tendency to slip up frequently in public. She called people who suffered from layoffs and had to collect unemployment “spoiled”, and implied they just didn’t want to work. 

What’s funny is Reid’s assertion that he’s never run against anyone who speaks in code before.  I don’t believe that.  Let’s hope that Reid is just fudging the truth for rhetorical purposes here, because I’d argue that speaking in code is the Republican code.  What Angle brings to the equation is a particularly weak ability to sell her code as anything but code.  Every time she says something like “privatize Social Security”, you can just tell that what’s going on in her brain is, “That’s the phrase, right?  The one that will get me elected?”

I’m glad Reid is impatient, and I know that he’s a busy man, but I’m just sad that we’re seeing this so late in the game.  If it had been a relentless drumbeat of this kind of thing---explaining to the public that “privatize” means “destroy”, or better yet, explain that it means “take your hard earned money and give it Wall Street so they can flush it down the toilet"---then it probably would have been able to dampen the damage of Angle’s “fear the immigrants” cascade of ads.  As it stands, once you get people into the irrational hate zone, getting them out is pretty damn hard.  This is reflected in the polls, where Angle is coming out ahead. 

But hey, it’s a few more days.  Maybe Gawker will publish a tell-all story accusing Angle of getting drunk and making out with dudes.  Certainly would have mattered more than doing it to Christine O’Donnell. 

So, Rock Band 3 came out on Tuesday, and it’s been ever so much fun.  I was pleased as punch to see that they included many bands that I always thought they should have more of, bands they were probably holding out on until they got the keyboards: The Cure, Yes, Elton John, and the Beach Boys.  Here’s the complete song list. But of all the new songs, I have to admit this one tickled me the most, and it’s going to be the original song for this week’s Genius Ten.  I haven’t sung it yet, but out of male singers, at least, playing at being Morrissey is second only to playing at being Iggy Pop, in terms of sheer shit-eating grin fun.

Original song: “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” by The Smiths

One of the greatest parts of growing up in the Southwest is that there is a thriving cult of Morrissey and The Smiths out there, with a side dose of love for The Cure.  The greatness of these bands never stopped being recognized.  If they had a Smiths reunion concern that only toured the Southwest United States, they would make more money than they know what to do with.  I remember the first time I encountered someone outside of this bubble who had sneering disregard for The Smiths, which I later discovered is not an uncommon sentiment, particularly in the world of white guys. I was floored.  It was like making fun of, well, like Joy Division.  Aren’t they sacrosanct?

Speaking of, if the game only included Joy Division and/or New Order, I would die a happy video game dork.  Leave your list in comments, thoughts about Rock Band 3, or thoughts about anything at all. Open thread.  Link whore, if you want.  Fridays: they’re alright for link whoring.

1) “Love Vigilantes” by New Order
2) “Warsaw” by Joy Division (See, Genius loves me. Pay attention, Harmonix.)
3) “Alec Eiffel” by The Pixies
4) “Ana Ng” by They Might Be Giants
5) “To Me You Are A Work Of Art” by Morrissey
6) “Catch” by The Cure
7) “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth
8) “The Headmaster Ritual” by The Smiths
9) “Andy Warhol” by David Bowie
10) “Sound of Silver” by LCD Soundsystem

Videos and a cat picture of exquisite cuteness below the fold.

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I suppose I should say something about the piece that Gawker ran from a dude that claimed he got drunk and made out with Christine O’Donnell once, though actual sexual intercourse didn’t happen, making the title somewhat misleading.  Some thoughts:

1) If their intention was to smear O’Donnell, I would say it backfired miserably.  All this demonstrated was that she’s actually pretty sincere in her beliefs, at least in that right wing it’s-not-technically-sex-love-ya-Jesus way.  I personally thought she was a grade A liar with her chastity crap at her age, but apparently not. 

2) The guy who wrote it comes across as a smug, sexist piece of shit.  The irony is that he thinks he’s smearing her, but the way he comes across plus the actual innocuous details of the night end up making O’Donnell look pretty good.  He wants to smear her as “aggressive”, but she just sounds confident and like she likes to have fun.  Now we all know in real life, O’Donnell is herself a smug asshole, so I’m not surprised that she was attracted to the author of this piece.  Like attracts like.  But if this was a random story about a stranger, from the details provided, she would actually seem like she’s a decent sort of person.

3) Did Gawker really think their core audience is going to buy into the implication of all this?  What actions taken by O’Donnell in this story are actually, you know, wrong?  Drinking too much on Halloween?  If that’s a crime, then you’d have to throw half the country in jail.  Wearing a relatively tame “sexy ladybug” costume that’s actually kind of cute?  All that shows is that she likes to have fun.  Thinking a guy is cute and getting him to go out with her and her friend?  Not adhering to a painful ritual of hair removal that is far from expected by any men that aren’t douchebags?  Not immediately feasting upon a boner just because it’s in the room?  She didn’t do anything wrong.  Suggesting otherwise is just pure sexism, particularly since the guy who wrote this clearly thinks he should be applauded for the behavior he condemns in O’Donnell.

You could, I suppose, make the case that she’s a hypocrite, but it’s honestly a stretch.  Realistically speaking, struggling with but not giving in to the temptation to have sex is part of the whole chastity deal.  All this does is give the religious right ammo to argue that it’s totally possible to refrain from having sex for decades, if need be.

This round-up of Republican race-baiting ads by Alex Pareene at Salon is at turns hilarious and frightening.  But it also gives us an excellent glimpse of what Republican politicians think of their base---how they feel they need to speak to them to get a message across.  Conservatives are always accusing liberals of stereotyping them and ascribing to them ugly motivations they don’t actually have.  But what do Republican politicians that conservatives vote for, give money to, and sometimes hero worship think of them?  If anything, their opinion seems to be lower than liberals’ opinion of conservatives. 

*Republicans believe the base is stupid. By far, the most hilarious part of these ads is how over the top they are.  Like I said on Twitter, the ideal Republican ad would be: “Mexicans. Mosques. Abortions. Butt Sex. Democrats Love These Things. Be Afraid.” By Tuesday, I expect at least one candidate, probably Sharron Angle, to put out an ad that shows a bunch of Latino dudes leaving a mosque and gang-raping a white woman.  (Though I suppose you could turn that into a counter-ad that says, “But Sharron Angle says she should make lemonade out of these lemons.") I remember a time, not that long ago, when these sorts of messages were sent through dog whistles, that in turn were hastily researched and analyzed and translated by bloggers.  But no more!  Fearful that their base is too stupid to understand nudges, Republican candidates are spelling it out in big red letters.

*Republicans believe the base is racist. Any time a liberal points out there might be a little racial animosity motivating the conservative base, conservatives get all upset, saying “RAAAAAAACIST”, as if this disproves the charge, or accusing liberals of being the “real” racists, in the classic “I’m rubber, you’re glue” maneuver that they picked up from their local kindergarten playground.  But we’re not the only ones saying it.  If there’s one thing that an ad is saying when it shows Latinos as a group hellbent on raping and pillaging, or suggests that there’s something wrong with Arab Americans being involved with politics at all, it’s that the people making it believe their audience is not only racist, but considers racism to be an extremely important part of their political identity.

*Republicans believe their base doesn’t give much of a shit about policy. As I noted earlier, the weirdest thing about about all these political ads is how unmoored they are from the real world consequences of voting and electing people to office to enact policy.  A number of candidates around the country ran ads about the Islamic community center near the WTC, but the only one who, in theory, could even do anything about it is Carl Paladino, and even that’s iffy.  And, as I noted earlier, voting on the topic of “immigration” isn’t actually going to accomplish the desire goal for the bigots, which is the expulsion of the people they spend so much time hating.  Angle is backing up the Arizona law, but running for a national office where she wouldn’t actually be able to pass that kind of legislation.  Even if Republicans pass some laws addressing immigrants, they are almost certainly going to be laws that are aimed at keeping immigrants coming to the U.S., where they can be used for cheap labor, but limiting their rights so they can’t ever get to a point where they’re voting, drawing Social Security, or getting a shot at fair wages or joining unions.

In other words, these ads basically encourage people to vote as a form of self-expression.  This is (see point #1) stupid.  It’s a secret ballot, and not really the appropriate place to express yourself.  Write a blog, make a sign, read crappy books by assholes like Laura Inagraham in public, if you want to express yourself, but the voting booth is where you try to affect policy.  I suppose the rationale is that if enough people express their racism at the voting booth, then they send a message by electing their candidate.  But surely there are better ways for the bigot voters to send the message “We hate people that don’t look or worship like us” than to send morons like Sharron Angle to Congress, I’d think. 

Bad news this morning: According to FiveThirtyEight, Sharron Angle is pulling ahead in Nevada.  Her strategy of blanketing the state with overtly racist ads is apparently working.  Here’s the Young Turks talking about the ads:

A description of a particularly egregious one:

Sharron Angle’s latest attack against Senate opponent Harry Reid features a group of white graduates celebrating and posing for pictures, presumably leaving high school for higher education.

That image is followed by a photo of three scowling Hispanic men, whom the ad suggests are trying to seize preferred college tuition rates from the students. A banner proclaiming the men “illegal aliens” accompanies the photo.

The ad copy basically accuses Reid of taking money from the cute white kids and giving it to the scowling Hispanic men, so they can go to college and presumably scowl at your adorable grandchildren there, too.  She’s now released a “board game” ad that also reinforces the message that voting for Sharron Angle is a way to express your displeasure at the existence of Hispanic immigrants. 

I wish I could be surprised this is working in Nevada, but I’m not.  The state has become something of a beacon for retirees, a population that’s more conservative on average than the general population, and more likely to fall for race-baiting tactics.  There are just a lot of people who don’t care that you’re nuts, as long as you hate the same people they do.  And that’s showing up in the polls in Nevada. 

The good news, what little there is, is that it’s only putting her 4 points up.  I despair that slightly more than half the population is like, “Is she racist? That’s enough for me!”, but that’s actually a lower percentage than you probably had in the past.  The bad news is that Nevada is 56% white non-Hispanic, which means that you still have most white people voting for racism.  Like, way way way more white people are eager pro-racism voters than anti-racism voters.  What’s frustrating especially is that the bigot vote is basically just a matter of self-expression.  Even if a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment puts Angle into office, it’s not like it’s going to matter much in terms of the policies the bigot voters want.  Republicans aren’t going to do anything to actually get rid of the Mexican immigrants that the voters hate so much.  They’ll probably just keep making it hard for immigrants to achieve citizenship or get fair wages for their work. 

The curb stomping at the Rand Paul/Jack Conway debate has, with good reason, been capturing a lot of attention.  It’s one of those iconic moments that distills so much into one shocking image.  But it’s just one in an escalating tide of Tea Party-inspired right wing thuggery, some of which has been endorsed by the candidates. Digby has rounded up many examples: Joe Miller playing the part of the big man by hiring militia types for “security”, Allen West doing the same with a motorcycle gang, and of course various acts of right wing terrorism, including Dr. Tiller’s murder.  Our country’s been in worse shape in terms of political violence before, but I think that’s why this is all so scary---we have a national myth that those days are behind us, and we’ve grown as a people.  And yet. 

In another post, Digby highlights the the double standards they establish.

It’s quite interesting that so many of the tea party candidates are having “unauthorized” people who ask them questions arrested (or restrained and assaulted by their followers) when it was just a year ago that this was how they instructed their own people to behave at political meetings:

This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls.

This double standard doesn’t surprise me at all.  They simply think they’re Real Americans, and the rest of us aren’t, therefore they get to do what they want and the rest of us are eligible to sit down and shut up, or take a beating. 

There’s a fetish right now for blaming this crazy level of right wing populist fury on the economy.  And while I think bad times are increasing tension, my feeling is the economy doesn’t have as much to do with this as people think.  If Obama was presiding over unprecedented prosperity, the wingnuts would still be out in droves, and at best their arguments would be slightly changed.  I would point out that political thuggery from modern movement conservatives is hardly new, and arguably helped swing the 2000 election, by giving the Supreme Court a reason to argue that they had to shut down the vote counting to keep the peace. At the time, they called it the ”Brooks Brothers riot”, a cadre of young Republicans flown into Florida to intimidate poll workers and shut down the vote counting, lest it reveal Gore the winner.

Can’t point to the economy as a reason for it then. 

I have an alternate theory, that goes back to the “I want my country back” slogan.  Ever since Nixon, Republicans have run, in one way or another, on the grounds that they’re the party of Real Americans, in opposition to those hippies/queers/welfare queens/multiculturalists/feminazis/fill in your scare word.  And they’ve been unbelievably successful with this.  There isn’t an election since then that they couldn’t rationalize, often correctly, is proof that they have the controlling majority of the country.  Carter was a fluke, both because of Watergate and because he managed to capture the evangelical vote before it settled comfortably into its rather permanent Republican home.  Clinton won---twice---because Ross Perot split the wingnut vote.  But each subsequent election, the demographics of this country shifted---growing numbers of non-white voters, single women, and urban white liberals meant this stranglehold on the majority could quite likely disappear.

And frankly, it did in 2000.  Gore actually won the popular vote in 2000, fair and square, even while being perceived as a stiff.  And the reaction you got was threats of violence, chaos, and a ridiculous Supreme Court decision that amounted to blatant theft.  Perhaps we’ve forgotten because it’s too painful to remember.  But I believe that’s what’s coming back, only this time it wasn’t subdued by a close call that could be handed unfairly to the Republican.  This time, it was a blow out.  And all the wingnut fears about losing “their” country have come to pass.

That’s what’s pissing them off.  Economic woes are just one of the bats they’re using to beat us with. 

I will note that I said just recently that just because we’re so close to the elections doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get a steady stream of Tea Party candidates doing evil, headline-grabbing shit.  Granted, holding a woman down and stomping on her head isn’t something that Rand Paul did, but being a weasel about it (as evidenced in the video above, which also features an excellent interview with Lauren Valle, the stomping victim) is grade A wingnuttery.  I’m as annoyed as anyone by the routine calls for this to be condemned by a candidate or that, but I do make an exception when it comes to the actual followers of a candidate engaging in violence or hate speech.  In these cases, when a candidate issues a full-throated condemnation, it can go a long way towards dissuading violence.  Violent, hateful thugs believe that they have the quiet support of leaders and their community, and if you issue half-hearted condemnations, they read that as support. Which can incite more violence.

If you want a classic example, check out how the stomper himself is behaving.  Sure, he was dismissed from the campaign, but clearly he feels that his community has his back.  And that’s because they do.  Getting a solid dose of shaming early on from Paul would have probably squelched this, but now it’s out of control.  The stomper is now demanding an apology from his victim, which is the logical result of the wingnut “look what you made me do!” mentality.  Which, I would like to point out, is basically the standard issue mind fuck that wife beaters and child abusers play on their victims, issuing a beating and then demanding an apology from the victim for driving them to it.  If a group of big ass men who gang up on a much smaller woman and curb stomp her think that they’re so justified in their actions that she owes them an apology, that’s creating an environment conducive to further violence.

It’s been revealed that the person who stomped on a woman’s head and neck at a Kentucky Senate debate was not just a Rand Paul supporter, but a Paul county coordinator.

Tim Profitt from Paris, Kentucky is the Rand Paul for Senate Bourbon County coordinator and is being sought as the head stomper by the Lexington police.

I would like to talk about why this is obviously a Democratic plant, because it so clearly is.

FIRST, Tim “Profitt”?  You’re going to name your fake county coordinator for a Randian capitalist “Profitt”?  You might as well have named him Greed McGoo, you children’s cartoon writing motherfuckers.

SECOND, “Bourbon” County?  Really?  I mean, is that the only thing you elitist liberal wine-sipping Dems know about Kentucky? 

This is the sort of sickening Alinsky-style tactic and propagandistic lies that make the Democratic Party so untrustworthy.

Also, women do not have necks.  That is a matter of scientific fact.  Also, per noted legal scholar Ann Althouse, this was really much more of a shoe-intensive shoulder rub than anything else.  And women are always complaining about how their shoulders hurt.

Today has been kind of a crazy day---and I expect it will be that way all the way until the election---so I thought I’d toss out a more fun post for those two things that go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or lube and condoms: Halloween in election years and political costumes.  Putting together a costume that’s basically a political joke is not only a way to relieve some election season tension, it’s also a great way to dodge the “wear your underwear and some cat ears” costume pressure for women.  If done properly, a funny political costume can be a subtle, non-annoying, totally fun way to remind people to vote the next week. In 2008, I did what all brunettes with bangs pretty much had to do, and went as Sarah Palin.  It was so much fun we ended up doing a comedy short video that exploited my costume and a friend’s GI Joe-inspired costume. 

This year, I thought it would be wrong not to do a similar political costume, so after kicking a few half-baked ideas around, I settled on being a “mama grizzly”: 50s era dress, apron, pearl earrings and necklace, and bear ears.  (I’ll probably also do a bear nose and mouth with make-up.) I’ll probably write a slogan on the apron. I’m thinking “Ban Schools, Not Guns”. 

But if you want to use your costume as a political comment, to make fun of the right, or just to represent some major issue of the election season, there are a lot of options.

*Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: a military uniform with your mouth taped shut, or at least a big X over it.  (I’m not a fan of costumes that interfere with socializing.) Attach a gay pride button to your uniform. 

*I’ll bet a tea bag could made out of burlap sack, some string, and a stiff piece of paper for the label.  This is something you could affix a sign to very easily.

*Aqua Buddha. This costume would be especially fun if you live in Kentucky.

*Kelly Baden on Twitter mentioned her Christine O’Donnell costume: “Suit, witch hat, sign that reads “I am You” , straight brown hair”

*"Second amendment remedies” begs to be a costume.  You can get a fake gun and some doctor/nurse costume, maybe with a clarifying sign. 

*You could combine a revolutionary war costume with a clown costume to represent the Tea Party: powdered wig and tricorn hat, clown suit and shoes, red clown nose.  Get a horn and honk at people, telling them to get the government out of your Medicare.

Offer your own in comments!

I’m sure everyone reading this has already seen this story about what looks like at least three Rand Paul supporters grabbing a MoveOn activist who was handing out fliers/doing political theater outside the Paul/Conway debate last night.  They grab the woman, carefully hold her down, and start to curb stomp her when someone waves at the guy doing the stomping and calls him off after he stomps her the first time.  It’s not a full-blown skinhead-style curb stomp---the woman was able to talk to reporters before she was taken to the hospital, and she has all her teeth and everything, and I’m sure she’s okay---but god only knows how bad it would have gotten if they weren’t called off.  They are, if you watch the video, being very deliberate about it, carefully holding her down and positioning her.

Which all makes the Paul campaign’s reaction worse:

We understand that there was an altercation outside of the debate between supporters of both sides and that is incredibly unfortunate. Violence of any kind has no place in our civil discourse and we urge supporters on all sides to be civil to one another as tensions rise heading toward this very important election.

This is sniveling, cowardly, and frankly sick.  There were no “both sides”.  There was a group of large men that support Paul that attacked a single, much smaller female MoveOn activist.  She was not being violent towards them.  Handing out fliers and doing political theater at a debate can’t even really be called “annoying”.  The word is “expected”.  I expected an immediate and routine disavowal of any responsibility for the violence, but trying to play it off like it was “both sides”?  That’s some sick shit.  It’s cowardly.  Of course, I wouldn’t expect any less of Rand Paul, who has above all other things during this election, proven himself to be a whiny crybaby, a coward who acts like he has convictions and then whines and runs the second anyone argues with him, and a childish brat who probably hasn’t grown up a day since his Aqua Buddha years.

Not that I’m saying that the Tea Party may contain an incredibly disturbing psychosexual undercurrent focused on fetishizing powerful women that are still ideologically beholden to them, but fuck it, I am.

Add this to list of bizarre and unusual campaign trail antics: at last week’s Tea Party Express rally in Phoenix, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio welcomed Sarah Palin with a pair of pink underwear.

“I just got done welcoming Sarah Palin to our County. Had a nice chat and gave her a pair of pink underwear,” Arpaio posted onTwitter, along with a photo of him with the former Alaska governor.

Why pink underwear? The hard-line lawman has gained national attention for his controversial methods, such as requiring prisoners to wear all pink, underwear included.

With Election Day drawing near, it’s probably a good time for a solid reminder of exactly how scary the agenda being pushed by the Republican party is.  And I have just the book for that, Jeff Sharlet’s follow-up to his bestseller The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power called C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.  While The Family, often called The Fellowship, is sort of bipartisan, it is more in name than in practice.  For instance, Democrat Bart Stupak was a resident at the C Street house owned by The Family, and he was clearly doing the hardcore social conservative bidding of his Republican fellows in the house, especially Joseph Pitts, who was really the author of the Stupak-Pitts amendment that has been such a disaster for abortion access in this country.

On the podcast this week, I interviewed Jeff, and I highly recommend checking it out. His first book ended up getting him on TV a lot, but it was almost solely because so many members of The Family got tangled up in sex scandals involving their own adulteries.  In the book, he expresses frustration that it’s this and not their political machinations that got so much attention, so I asked him about it on the interview.  His answer is great; check it out. 

This election season, the narrative has all been about how those nutty Tea Party types are throwing mainstream Republicans out and taking over the party.  What has largely gone undiscussed is how the mainstream Republican party has been controlled by the nuts for a long time.  They’re just more genteel, more elitist nuts, but they’re just as fundamentalist.  In a lot of ways, they’re even worse, because their “religion” is adaptable to their needs in ways that would make even the most O’Donnell-like hypocritical goober blush.  The way they coddle each other’s adulteries while pushing a kind of “family values” that is, naturally, about as misogynist as you get is just the tip of this. It’s the way they blatantly bend their beliefs to justify their naked power-mongering that I found most alarming.  For instance, Jeff found that they bring Muslims into the fold, so long as said Muslims have power and resources they wish to exploit.  Even though The Family consider their fellowship to be all about Christianity, they justify this by calling the Muslim fellows “followers of Jesus”.  It’s all just a gloss of religious faith on the reality of what they’re up to, which is creating an extra-governmental, worldwide power brokering alliance, one that’s in service of creating iron fist theocratic powers that just so happen to have lots of natural resources to exploit for their own personal gain. 

A recent example of this is The Family’s interest in Uganda, where members of their fellowship have worked to pass harsh anti-homosexuality laws that would result in the death penalty for anyone caught being a “serial offender”, i.e. someone who has sex twice with someone of their same gender.  You can read about some of that from Jeff in Harper’s.

Roy Edroso’s Village Voice column this morning is awesome; he chronicles the rightblogger obsession with the Juan Williams situation.  In doing so, he conclusively proves Glenn Greenwald’s theory that conservative outrage has nothing to do with freedom of speech, and everything to do with their firm insistence that bigotry towards Muslims should be considered unobjectionable and mainstream. 

All that is very interesting, and you should read the links, but what I want to add is that reading all this made me realize that all the conservative tendencies liberal bloggers used to make fun from the beginning have really gotten so bad that they’re beyond parody.  When we say they’ve lost their minds, we really mean it.  Your average right wing blog post now reads like a parody that I would have written in 2006, and then tossed before I published it because I didn’t want to be accused of hyperbole.  So I thought I’d organize some thoughts on what I’ve observed has really become the common wisdom amongst right wing bloggers and pundits.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us. It was scary enough when President Bush used this phrase to threaten every country in the world that took the entirely sensible, reality-based position that it could both be true that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and that this was no excuse for the U.S. to break international law for some old-fashioned imperialist war.  Now it’s basically become the right wing version of the Golden Rule---a maxim that guides all their interactions with other people.  There are allies and enemies, and nothing in between.

You see this is the universal, knee-jerk assumption that and news outlet that isn’t right wing propaganda is thereby “liberal”.  The notion that NPR might have reasons outside of Stalinist thought policing for leftist intent behind their skittishness with sharing employees with a veritable propaganda outfit didn’t even occur to the right wingers that were flipping out about Williams’ firing.  It was simply assumed that NPR is basically the liberal version of Fox News, a propaganda outfit with no relationship to the truth or objectivity or even old-fashioned lack of bias.

This notion that NPR is some kind of socialist propaganda network will come as a great surprise to anyone who actually listens to the station, of course.  For one thing, they used to have Juan Williams as an employee, albeit in a more factually correct capacity as a conservative-leaning pundit than as the faux liberal he plays on Fox.  They also have shows that are dedicated to chronicling the daily workings of capitalism with a distinctly pro-capitalist vibe, though I suppose anything but unquestioning worship at this point is taken by right wingers to be “liberal bias”.  NPR is better than most news outlets about trying to do responsible journalism that sticks to the facts, but even they fall occasionally for the trick of trying to establish “balance” by having one fact-based commentator counter-balanced by some lying wingnut.  I monitor them pretty carefully for their reporting on sexual health stuff for “Reality Cast”, and find that they occasionally will let anti-choicers say factually untrue things without correcting the record.  But on the whole, their product is a scrupulous rendering of facts.  If this appeals more to liberal listeners than conservatives, it doesn’t mean the station is liberal.  It in fact points to something deeply wrong with conservatives.

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CSA Week #18

Broccoli
Cauliflower
Pumpkin
Onions
Banana peppers
Apples
Potatoes
Greens
Tomatoes

Just two more weeks left of the regular season community supported agriculture project.  But no worries---in November, I move onto the 5 week extension.  Since winter vegetables are often what perplex me the most, I’m looking forward to getting the creative juices flowing.

Prepping

1) I hadn’t done any cooking over the weekend, because we were going out with a friend who was visiting, so I thought it would be fun to spend some time Sunday getting some time in the kitchen by myself, doing more time-consuming tasks.  I started by making some veggie broth on the stove with the scraps I collect from cutting up vegetables.

2) I had two big spaghetti squashes (one from the grocery store, one from the CSA---long story), and these always take some muscle to prepare, so I thought I’d just whip that out while I was cooking veggie broth.  Cut them in half, deseeded them, and put the face down in the oven for 40 minutes at 375.  Put them in the fridge when done.

Dinner #1

1) The oven was already hot, so I made the dough for http://markbittman.com/dinner-with-bittman-quick-whole-wheat-and-mol”>this particular no-yeast sandwich bread. After I pulled the squash out and lowered the temperature to 325, I put the bread pan full of this in and let it cook for an hour.

2) Bittman also has a recipe for veggie burgers made with beets, prunes, and bulgur wheat.  I thought the dried fruit would be a nice sweet counterpart to the bitterness of radishes and turnips, so I substituted my radishes and turnips for the beets, and added carrots.  This was a lot of vegetables, so I doubled all the other ingredients.  I substituted raisins for prunes and bread crumbs for almonds---just to basically use everything I had on hand.  You have to let this one steep in boiled red wine for 20 minutes, which was nice, because it gave me a chance to do all the dishes while I waited.  After that, you form patties and cook them in a skillet.

3) Steamed broccoli. Served it with some yogurt sauce.

4) Put the veggie burgers on slices of the bread with some tomato and a little cheese.  As expected, the sweetness of the bread, carrots, and raisins counter-balanced any traces of bitterness in the radishes or turnips.  Highly recommended.

Time: An hour and a half, but if you just used pre-made bread, about 45 minutes.

Leftovers: A whole lot of patties, which were really good for breakfast.  But so many I had to reuse for another dinner.

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Been a long time since anything in the clothes-wearing department has been addressed on this blog, so I thought it would be fun on a Friday night to blog a couple of items of interest. First of all, I appreciated that Jezebel tackled the issue of getting your clothes altered, mostly because I---swear to god---read this blog post first thing after returning home after dropping off some clothes to be altered. They make some good points, but I want to add that even though it can seem expensive, sometimes have a tailor on speed dial is a lot cheaper than you’d think.  Sure, if you buy brand new clothes and then have them altered, it’s going to set you back a lot.  (Though for a basic item that you’ll use over and over, it’s worth it.) But there are actually two major ways that using a tailor can save you money:

1) Shopping your own closet. Sadie at Jezebel mentions this, but it’s well worth mentioning again.  A lot of clothes that you might throw out because you’re bored with them or they never looked quite right can be completely remade with a quick trip to the tailor.  For instance, I had a really nice blue dress that fit well, but never quite seemed young enough for me.  So, I took it to the tailor and had the hem raised from mid-calf to a number of inches above the knee.  It went from being a dress I didn’t know what to do with to one that I wear all the time.

2) Buying used clothes. If something is a little too big, but is like $1 at a garage sale, it can be worth it to buy it and have it taken in.  Taking up hems is a big thing for me.  A lot of long skirts are cheaper at resale shops, because they don’t sell as fast as cute, shorter skirts.  But you always have them brought above the knee, if you want.  Sleeves can come off.  Waists can be brought in if you want to take something a little shapeless and make it a little more Joan Holloway.  (Belts can do this, too, but sometimes there’s too much cloth.) If you’re flat-chested, you can get something that flatters everywhere else for cheap and have the chest brought in.  The three skirts I took in to convert from long to above-the-knee length were bought at garage sales and resale shops.  I’m going to get three fun, young-looking, fashionable skirts that are in excellent condition and totally unique for about $75, max.  It’s hard to get that off the rack.  Some vintage stores also offer cheap to free alterations of their own clothes.

Of course, if you know how to sew, then this is even easier for you.  I don’t, but I’m considering learning some day when I’ve got the time and energy to pick up a new skill.

Link #2 is a great idea.  Someone started a Tumblr blog to collect pictures of Muslims wearing things, so that you can spot “Muslim garb” and know when to be afraid. Helpful pictures include:

And:

Never worry again that you won’t know when to be afraid!