Yesterday, for obvious reasons, I was in a crappy mood all day.  So I turned to my favorite resource for lightening a sour mood, which is Regretsy.  After reading a few pages of it until I was all caught up, I looked up at the links at the top and decided to check them out.  I found People of Walmart to be unfunny, since most of the “humor” comes from poking fun at people for being ugly, fat, or unable to afford better-fitting clothes.  But Lamebook is another story entirely.  Lamebook is funny because it, like Regretsy, gets its humor straight from the goofier aspects of human nature.  I particularly like all the posts involving parents interacting with their children on Facebook.  Facebook is great, but it was only until moms started to join Facebook that it really became the centerpiece of the new American renaissance, I say.

The site cheered me up immensely, which is why I was sad to see a link at the top of the page asking for money for their legal fund.  They’re in some legal shit with Facebook over copyright quarreling, they say.  A little googling showed that this is indeed true, and Facebook’s rationale is as poor and mean-spirited as you could imagine:

In response to the complaint, Facebook deemed it “unfortunate” that Lamebook had turned to litigation after “months of working with Lamebook to amicably resolve what we believe is an improper attempt to build a brand that trades off Facebook’s popularity and fame”.

Facebook is claiming that the site can’t hide behind satire, which is funny, because I personally laughed my ass off for hours.  Human nature might be the main target of Lamebook, but the way that Facebook has drawn out certain tendencies in people is definitely part of that.  But what really annoyed me was that Facebook expressed petulant anger that someone else out there is OMG building off their popularity and fame.  Which in no way, shape or form takes jack shit away from Facebook.  If anything, Lamebook probably just makes readers want to use Facebook even more, since it highlights some of the best reasons to waste hours on Facebook (such as laughing at the way people can be).  I know it had that effect on me.  I’m trying to imagine if creative artists reacted to each other in this way.  Can you imagine, say, Dr. Dre being so stupid as to not work with Eminem because he doesn’t want anyone to benefit from his pre-existing reputation? 

This entire situation is a great demonstration of why the ready assumption that businesspeople are motivated mainly be a rational desire to increase profits is a really dumb one.  But you see that assumption all the time!  You see it with libertarians, who argue that we don’t need regulation because the profit motive makes markets self-correcting, as if they were mindless machines that aren’t influenced by some of the more irrational thinking of actual human beings.  And you see it with liberals, who make the opposite assumption---they believe that business is solely motivated by profit, and that means businesspeople are bound to make harmful choices if that’s how best to make a profit.  The truth is way more complicated.  Yes, profit motive is a big deal, and that sometimes results in good business decisions, as libertarians insist, and it sometimes results in BP spilling unimaginable amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, as liberals insist.  But insisting that businesspeople act mostly out of pure rationality is giving them too much credit.  I think it’s also important to remember how much irrationality impacts business choices.

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This is Bobbitt.  My family acquired her in the fall of 1993, when she was still a puppy.  We named her Bobbitt because she’s a weiner dog, we’re crass rednecks, and “Bobbitt” was the name of the man who had, in that year, the most famous weiner in the world.She was so small she fit in my pocket, and even when she was full grown, she never weighed more than about 12 pounds.  Despite this, she was stubborn, cantankerous, and alphaed every dog she can in contact with, acting like she was a big dog instead a tiny one.  When she was young, she, like most dogs, liked to chase the ball, ride in cars, and play wrestle.  When she got old, she didn’t have much energy and mostly preferred to sleep on the heating pad and sniff things.  She had a funny habit of going outside, putting her face in the grass, and then taking a dump on the concrete.  Even though she was totally deaf and mostly blind in recent years, she still wiggled like a puppy when she saw me.  Her favorite person in the world, whose side she rarely left, was my mother.  But I was a close second.  Every time I’ve said goodbye to her in recent years, I took my time.  Since she was 17 years old, there was always the chance this would be the last.  I imagined her death would be a well-earned, peaceful one---in her sleep, perhaps on her heating pad. 

Instead, some lowlife piece of shit took her away.  After my mom and the cops did some research, they found the people who took her.  Oh, the claim is that she and her dude found this creaky old dog who never wanders more than 20 feet away from my mom in a bar more than a mile away from where the dog disappeared.  We, as you can imagine, are skeptical.  We think they saw the dog hanging out on the sidewalk in front of my stepfather’s restaurant in Ft. Stockton, thought she was a puppy, and stole her.  We then believe that she, being Bobbitt, protested all night long until they couldn’t take it anymore.  And we believed they murdered this helpless animal, either directly or by putting her out in the desert where, being blind and deaf and slow-moving, wasn’t going to last too long.  But there’s no evidence, so the cops say there’s nothing they can do. 

Some times I find occasion to ponder the arguments of kind-hearted folks who think that other people do fucked up shit with good intentions.  I think of Jon Stewart on Rachel Maddow dismissing the idea that George Bush deliberately lied about WMDs in Iraq, for instance, because it’s too painful to believe someone could be that ugly in his heart, that power mad, that indifferent to others.  I look at that hopefulness about human nature and I marvel.  I rarely doubt that the world is full of bad shit happening because a lot of people are petty, cruel, sadistic, and selfish.  Once again, I’ve been reminded that I’m right about that one. 

I hope wherever my dog now is, she’s chasing squirrels in her dreams forever. I have a lot of work to do today, but I took this short break because I had to get this off my chest. 

CSA Week #21

Turnips
Kale
Parsley
Beets
Sweet potatoes
Onions
Green bell peppers
Potatoes
Butternut squash
Broccoli
Tomatoes

First week of eggs

Now that this has been going on awhile, we’re getting a lot more people trolling about how this is a poor “recipe blog”, complaints that are usually accompanied, for reasons I don’t understand, with attacks on my intelligence and ability to feel basic human kindness. While I don’t understand the personal nature of the slams, I’m going to suggest that perhaps there’s just some confusion about what the point of this project is.  Of course you’re going to feel it falls short if you think this is a recipe blog!  But what I set out to do was create an un-recipe blog project.

For people who struggle with navigating the archives, here’s the link.  For people who find clicking links daunting, I’ll summarize.  I had been blogging about food politics, and why Americans don’t cook but instead eat so many of their meals by purchasing them from our elaborate junk food system.  Some of the explanation is due to structural problems like food deserts, but even people who can afford to cook and eat healthy don’t do so in our country.  The reasons that came out in threads centered around the notion that cooking is hard.  It’s time-consuming, expensive, and fraught in many people’s minds.  Especially if you want to cook sustainably by focusing on seasonal foods.  Especially if you want to cook affordably, which often means dealing with vegetables that are in season and cheap, but maybe not something you’re used to.  It becomes easier to just hop in the car and visit the drive-through. 

What I realized in those discussions is that it’s not that cooking is hard, it’s that following recipes is hard.  If you cook strictly from recipes, you have to find ones you like, create shopping lists, go to the store, go back to the store to pick ingredients you forgot, and do that for multiple meals a week, which can wear anyone down.  Add to that our culture of assuming “cooking” means elaborate meals, often presented in the traditional WASP style of many side dishes built around a hunk of meat. 

But I realized that’s not how I cook, and not how a lot of people I know cook who actually do eat at home most of the time.  We engage in a behavior called “making shit up as we go along while using cookbooks for inspiration”, a form of cooking discouraged from being discussed in the public sphere.  I thought, what this culture needs is a little less elaborate recipe hawking, and a little more demonstrating that you really can just throw a bunch of shit together and eat it.  That there’s middle ground between “creating elaborate and infinitely varying meals every night” and “eating hamburgers and fries for most of your meals”.  And I thought where better to start than here, and how better to start than taking on the ultimate in working with what you got, which is with my CSA.  CSAs, for those averse to clicking links or using Google, are community supported agriculture collectives.  We all buy a small share of a farmer’s output for a season, and receive it in weekly boxes.  And those boxes---like the prices at the grocery store---vary dramatically depending on the season.

Yes, I use recipes sometimes, and try to indicate from where.  I never said they’re useless, and I absolutely love some of the better recipe blogs out there.  But that’s the point---practical application of the principles laid out by sustainable food gurus is a mix of recipes, throwing stuff together, and above all, embracing simplicity so you don’t get burned out.

I refer a lot to from my favoritest cookbook ever, How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, because I think that Bittman really teaches you how to do this better than anyone.  His recipes really do function as templates that beg to modified.  It’s all about a kind of cooking that isn’t Cooking with a capital C.  Which is one reason I just provide snapshots of my food, instead of trying to be elaborate.  I was looking for a deliberately humble presentation.  The idea is that this is real life, and it’s good enough.

But hey, I’ve been doing this for months now.  I don’t mind dropping out.  It’s a lot of work, actually, to record everything I do in the kitchen.  I don’t get paid for it and it doesn’t add to my enjoyment in the kitchen.  So if it’s not worth it to the readers, I’ll happily stop.

Dinner #1

1) Made rice with veggie broth.

2) Made a stir fry with the daikon radish, some greens, some green onions, the two hot peppers, tofu, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, chili powder and lots of veggie broth.  Stirred it in with the rice.

Time: 30 minutes

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There were many frustrating things said by Jon Stewart during his interview with Rachel Maddow.  And lots of smart things, too.  But anyone who thought that his continuing problem of making false equivalences and missing the point in some of his critiques of media will sorely be disappointed.  On the contrary, he seemed married to this ridiculous argument that the number one worst thing a media outlet could do is have “bias”.  I felt Rachel didn’t challenge him enough on this, sadly, but conceded to a degree by analyzing the difference between having a point of view and being a partisan warrior.  That’s an interesting discussion, but it somewhat glides across the most important issue, which is truth.

I was sort of surprised that Rachel didn’t immediately go after this bias hand-wringing with what I thought was an airtight point about how print journalism has always had its corners that were fiercely ideological, but not one whiff less prestigious for it.  Would you really say that newspapers like The Guardian or magazines like The Nation aren’t highly respectable institutions where journalists are held to a high standard?  Of course not.  So why can’t cable news both have a point of view and be good at journalism?  I would argue, which she comes close to saying but then glides by, that being upfront about your point of view is even better, because it allows the viewer to have even more information to assess what they’re hearing. 

To hear Jon Stewart talk about it, the main problem with Fox News is that they’re conservative and that they’re passionate about it.  This is not what’s wrong with Fox News.  A conservative news outlet that still practiced real journalism wouldn’t be a problem like Fox is. The problem with Fox is that they promote misinformation at a breath-taking clip.  Any given moment during the day, you can turn it on and whatever they’re saying is probably dishonest on some level, or even an open lie.  They set out to confuse instead of enlighten.  They want the average viewer to be more, not less, ignorant for watching them.

Say what you will about Keith Olbermann, who Stewart appears to think is on MSNBC 60% of the day.  He’s a brash asshole.  I don’t like him or his tone.  But he’s not a liar.  And other overtly liberal shows, or even politically moderate ones like Chris Matthews’ show, set out to make the viewer smarter and more knowledgeable.  I was particularly annoyed at the little swipe Stewart took at Anderson Cooper on CNN for being unwilling at times to hide the fact that he’s “liberal”, or at least that he’s not going to play along with conservative lies.  Cooper is one of the best journalists on TV, and I often find that I learn a lot watching his show. We need more journalists willing to ask hard questions.  If Stewart really wants TV journalists and pundits to be anti-corruption, he should applaud Cooper for his occasional forays into brooking no bullshit, and demand more.  It’s not Cooper’s fault that Republicans shovel out more bullshit. 

That’s possibly what’s most upsetting to me about Stewart’s critique. It’s incoherent.  He wants anti-corruption journalism, but when journalists actually do that, he gets antsy because it requires digging up information that will allow the audience to make judgment calls.  He got openly upset when presented with the facts that Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq and promoted torture, because highlighting this information made Bush look like a bad man, even an evil man, and Stewart doesn’t like to say that.  But if you actually set out to investigate corruption, the people orchestrating it---like Bush---are going to look like villains.  You can’t have it both ways.  Either journalism plays the watchdog, and some people come out stinking like shit, or journalism plays the role of horse race callers, which isn’t journalism at all. I’m not sure what Stewart is really asking for now, and I think the reason is that he’s not too sure himself.

This post is part of a month-long Friday series promoting the Radical 80s Prom on 12/3.  If you’re in New York on December 3rd, please come by the Bowery Poetry Club from 10PM-2AM and dance to some great 80s tunes, for a good cause.  If you are coming, I’d love to get an RSVP from you on Facebook.

When people think of the culture wars, they think of abortion, gay rights, guns, or Sarah Palin shoving cookies on innocent children. But they don’t often think of what I think of as one of the most interesting cultural happenings in the past 40 years, the disco riot of 1979, which was a culmination of the baffling Disco Sucks movement of the late 70s.  Not baffling in the sense that people were tired of disco, which dominated the airwaves, but baffling in how angry it was, how semi-organized.  Enough, apparently, to kick off a riot.  Cultural critics with more heft that I have analyzed the entire thing, looking over the way that Disco Sucks movement channeled of lot of straight white male resentment at women, people of color, and GLBT people---groups that culturally dominated and defined disco, especially in its early days.  Disco Sucks was supposed to be straight white men reclaiming the radio dial that was rightfully theirs. 

If you think this reading is overwrought, I refer you to Roy Edroso, who discovered that culture warriors are still angry about disco flooding the airwaves with singing divas carefully elevated by gay DJs. In a rant that also implied that Roots is a horrible stain (presumably for overruling decades of post-Confederate propaganda suggesting slavery wasn’t so bad), Ed Driscoll flipped out on, of all things, Saturday Night Fever. 

A minor example, also from the mid-1970s, was Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever. It was sold to the public as being an adaptation of a magazine article on the real-life exploits of disaffected Brooklyn youth, when it reality, it was basically Quadrophenia with better dance moves, updated clothes, and cockney accents replaced with Brooklynese:

His larger point seemed to be that the cultural touchstones of liberalism from the 70s were all lies---lies I tell you!---leading people down the wrong path towards thinking badly of Watergate and slavery, and thinking that even straight white dudes from Brooklyn could enjoy disco. 

If that doesn’t convince you, think about this: how many of the anti-disco rioters grew older and crabbier, moved to the suburbs, and now consider themselves members or fans of the Tea Party?  See what I mean?

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Because I’m not gay.  At the beginning of the project, I thought that the input of straight people was not necessary, as the project was about GLBT adults telling teenagers that the message that they’re getting---from peers, from adults, from right wing media, from churches---that they aren’t good enough and will die lonely and afraid is a straight lie.  It’s a common lie, of course.  In the Christian right, it’s an article of faith that gay men die when they’re 40, just from the gayness, and no one ever loves them.  Kids who are brought up on a steady stream of this shit often understandably despair.  The point of the project was to say that even if you’re being horribly bullied now, hang on, because the lies that people tell you are lies.  And that the truth is there is a world outside of your immediate one where you can actually live a normal life. 

Straight people, I figured, don’t have a place in that message.  I never had any doubts when I was being bullied for being bookish, nerdy and unathletic* in high school that I would have a normal life, with all the attendant privileges of being straight.  I never thought I would never find love or acceptance.  I never believed my family would turn me out.  On the contrary---nerds find a lot of larger social support in the world.  There are countless books, TV shows, and movies that promote the myth that the nerds in high school bloom into the adults who own the world, and then they get to go back to their high school reunions and enjoy being hot, smart, and accomplished while their former bullies sulk in the corner, their glory days behind them.  You can focus on life after high school easily when you’re a nerd.  College is right around the corner, where nerdiness, you’re routinely assured, is rewarded.  Being nerdy =/ being gay.  A lot of gay kids have no one telling them there’s a corner to turn, and that it gets better.  The role of allies is to be vocal supporters, cheerleaders, analysts, and fighters.  But it is not to claim to share the same experiences.

This, by the way, is why examining your privilege is not the great evil wingnuts make it out to be.  It’s true that some liberals turn it into a self-flagellation spectacle that helps no one, but leaving that nonsense aside, it’s good to know where you stand.  Makes you think about things like, “I’m not going to clutter this up with my pointless retroactive self-pity that I’ve encountered people who don’t like me.”

But I will say that when straight people started to get involved, I relented a little on this, though not enough to think my contribution was necessary.  It’s nice to watch the videos where straight people do good ally work, which is to say they lay into homophobes for promoting the message that gay people aren’t good enough.  Sarah Silverman did this, for instance.  That message---that this is not just the fault of bullies, but also of churches, pundits, authority figures, whoever promotes homophobia---is necessary.  It’s probably not bad for gay kids to see that the world they’re growing up into is one that has straight people who have no problem with homosexuality.  So, I was okay with that.

What I’m not okay with is sharing your own, irrelevant stories of bullying.  Gabriel Arana describes this problem perfectly:

Indeed, the wave of B-list celebrities and straight liberals making “It Gets Better” videos just keeps growing. But there’s a problem: As the discussion about gay-teen suicide has radiated outward, it’s stopped being about gay teens. Kim Kardashian has a video relaying how hurt she was at online comments calling her fat. Ezra Klein’s video discusses how he was called a nerd in high school. Even Obama’s video steers clear of too much talk about gay people, safely focusing on the hurt that comes with “being different or ... not fitting in with everybody else.” The public conversation and the policy response have shifted from stopping anti-gay harassment to preventing bullying in general.

In turn, this has allowed homophobic adults off the hook.  All they have to say is that they object to the narrow behavior of shoving kids into lockers, and then feel free to go back to saying, “Gay people will never be loved, will die at 40, are evil perverts, and don’t deserve rights.” To their children.  Some of whom are gay and hear that they are defective and should just give up.

So, no.  It’s not about bullying in schools.  It’s about homophobia, and bullying is just one expression of that.

I do think there’s an important public dialogue to be had about bullying, don’t get me wrong.  But this isn’t really the hook to hang that on. 

*I want to update this to make it clear I’m not trying to pick on anyone who was trying to do their best to empathize by relating homophobic abuse to other kinds kids face.  People who pick on you for reading too much aren’t unaware that they’re full of shit, and that being anti-reading will end up hurting them more in the end. 

Update: Now they’re denying it.

One of the ways the Republicans were able to regain power---besides the most important tactic, the traditional suppressed voter turnout at the midterms---was to be completely uncompromising.  In fact, they were so uncompromising that it was ridiculous.  If a liberal said the sky was blue, they’d say, “Nuh-uh, hot pink!”, and then run to Fox News to complain that the liberal elitists were bashing their religious beliefs. 

There are many lessons you could learn from this, but the most important one is that these aren’t people for whom concessions will ever come.  Not when they’re in power, and not when they’re out of it.  They won’t be seen by their base as agreeing on anything with the man they’ve painted a Muslim Kenyan who stole the Presidency so that he can have a steady flow of infant blood to drink.  Which is why this news story is me giving up on the Obama administration and using the precious minutes saved from the day to work on other things, read novels, and play Rock Band.

President Barack Obama’s top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers.

That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts, given the legislative and political realities facing Obama in the aftermath of last week’s electoral defeat.

“We have to deal with the world as we find it,” Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office.

When will they learn that you don’t deal with bullies by acting like bullies are people who can be reasoned with.  What the Democrats need is Jack Donaghy on hand to explain the world to them.

To modify Jack’s point for the situation at hand: “The Republicans are being irrational, and irrational behavior doesn’t respond to rationality.  It responds to fear.”

Though I suppose you could point out that the Republicans are being entirely rational with their over-the-top assholery, promotion of irrationality, and grand-standing.  It’s basically bullying, and they have correctly assessed that their targets give in to bullies.  The lunch money will be handed over every single time.  In this case, the lunch money is our nation’s viability as a proper Western democracy with a substantial middle class.  The Republicans made a threatening gesture at Democrats, and Democrats caved immediately and gave Republicans the banana republic they want.

There are no political gains to be made from this.  None.  The Republicans will always find a way to cater to corporate interests and the rich more than Democrats, so believing that you can win over those folks to support you more than Republicans---something that’s bound to be haunting Democrats after Citizens United---is an utter fantasy.  And you have to ask yourself, what’s the point of winning elections if you let the losers dictate your choices for you?  Might as well stay home and play Rock Band.  At least you’re using fewer of the planet’s resources, and by letting the situation go to hell the easy way, you have less stress and might live longer.  Long enough to watch all the horrible consequences for our once great nation when you take all our economic resources and put the hands of a tiny, ego-crazed minority of people. 

Although the big news out of this story is that Sarah Palin believes that teaching kids about nutrition is the rough equivalent of marching them towards an enviro-friendly gulag, this is what stood out to me:

She was the guest speaker last night at a fundraiser at Plumstead Christian School in Plumstead Township.

[...]

School officials hope her appearance in the end will bring in several hundred dollars. Palin’s appearance fee, thought to be $75,000, was reportedly covered by private donors.

You know, sometimes you have to spend money to make a lot less money. 

So, let’s make this clear.  Private donors raise $75,000 to bring a woman who likely earns three separate paychecks just for breathing.  (Or, more likely, having an employee breathe under her name.) The fundraiser she appears at earns several hundred dollars.  If you, like me, wonder why the donors didn’t just donate the $75,000 to the school and skip over Palin getting pissed about the lack of nacho cheese fountains in sixth grade, well...I heard there’s nothing to uplift the soul like Sarah Palin’s nasal whine cutting through a school cafeteria.

I swear to god, half my blogging (if not more) from here on out is going to have to be dedicated, once again, to examples of how Republicans claim they’re motivated by strong principles, but in fact they’re just straight up culture warriors who never take a pass at a pot shot. Here’s the latest example:

In some post-election hardball between the Obama administration and newly-elected Republicans, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is threatening to take back stimulus funds from states if they do not follow through on proposed rail projects.

CNN obtained copies of letters LaHood sent to incoming Republican governors in Ohio and Wisconsin who have stated their opposition to rail projects already underway in their states. In the letters, LaHood said a rail link between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati in Ohio, and a high-speed rail connection between Chicago, Illinois, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are vital to economic growth in both regions.

Lahood wrote that he respects the power of governors to make decisions for their states, but, “There seems to be some confusion about how these high-speed rail dollars can be spent.”

To Wisconsin’s Gov.-elect Scott Walker, LaHood said that none of the funds can be used for roads or any other projects. He went on to say, “Consequently, unless you change your position, we plan to engage in an orderly transition to wind down Wisconsin’s project so that we do not waste taxpayer’s money.” That letter was delivered on Monday.

To make this very clear, the Republicans---who generally like to carry on about how they’re just against the stimulus, full stop---are happy to take the stimulus funds.  They want the funds they claim are evil.  They just don’t want to spend them on trains. 

David Dayen has a theory:

These Republican governors are engaged in a little game. They want to decry “wasteful spending” without reducing that spending one bit. They just want to move the high speed rail money into fixing roads and bridges. I imagine this is because that will be completed faster and with a higher profile than the longer-term HSR projects.

Maybe that’s part of it.  But I wouldn’t discount the straight up Republican hostility towards trains, especially compared to cars.  When Republicans are pandering to their base, one of their most important pitches is to imply that evil liberals are trying to make you share breathing space with undesirables.  As I noted earlier, one of the biggest selling points on creating hostility to health care reform was to provoke anxieties in the base of having to share public spaces with (fill the group that any particular wingnut hates).  The RNC’s anti-health care website had a picture on it of a multi-racial line in an E.R.  They weren’t overly subtle about this.  This is political pandering to people who go into a red-eyed rage at having to dial “1” for English.

The symbol of modern conservatism is the SUV that pulls in and out of the garage of the front yard-free McMansion placed inside a gated community, a perfect little system that allows the conservative base voter to leave their home and run errands with an absolute minimum of contact with the outside world.  Trains are basically the opposite of that---everyone buys a ticket (which may involve pressing “1” for English), and you sit down basically wherever, and anyone can sit in your car or even your aisle.  If SUVs are the symbols of everything wrong with conservative America to liberals, then trains are definitely a symbol of everything wrong with liberal America to conservatives---the egalitarian nature of them, the prioritizing of fuel efficiency over living like a little pretend king in a little pretend castle, the lack of airs that are associated with train travel.  Once the trains come in, it becomes easier not to own a car, and next thing you know, people are walking more, which means even more shoulder-rubbing with the hoi polloi.  It’s all very disconcerting.  No wonder Republican politicians want nothing to do with it.

Like a good little liberal, I actually really love traveling by train, and access to nearby cities with a short trip on Amtrak is one of my favorite things about living out East.  I did like driving on long distance trips when I had a car---at least, a 3 or 4 hour one, not the 6 or 7 or 10 hour ones I often had to make---but trains are more comfortable, plus you can plug in your laptop and watch videos if you want.  Or, gasp, read a book.  And they’re safer.  I’m sure all of this is just making the culture war aspects of it worse, but I thought I’d just say. 

A lot of Republicans ran on the promise of repealing health care reform, which only worked, of course, after telling their base that “health care reform” is basically code for “giving people you moved out of the city to get away from money so they can sit in the doctor’s waiting room right next to you like it was some subway or something”.  Of course, repealing the law was a farcically empty promise, though I suppose the hope is they could beat Obama down enough he’d actually sign that bill.  He did hang his head and claim that the public somehow rejected him, even though what actually happened is most of the public rejected going out in the cold to walk down to the polls for a midterm they were barely paying attention to, if at all.  They didn’t reject access to health care, which the Republicans already know, which is why they’re pretending that they’re going to rewrite the law to make it better.  What they don’t tell the public is “better” means “whatever it takes to keep you the undesirables from walking into a doctor’s office and getting a check-up like you’re one of the privileged like me”. 

Well, even I’m not cynical enough to think that Obama could be bipartisan shamed enough into repealing health care reform, and neither are the Republicans, since their plan is to harass it to death.

Republicans can call hearings and compel testimony, and Obama has no veto power to stop them. In the House, they’ll control three major committees with a mandate to poke around on health care, subpoenas available if needed. In the Senate, they’ll have added leverage on two key panels, so their demands can’t be easily ignored.

Republicans say they’ll focus on what the new health care law will mean for Medicare and employer health plans, mainstays of the middle class.

“Oversight will play a crucial role in Republican efforts,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said. “We may not be able to bring about straight repeal in the next two years ... but we can compel administration officials to attempt to defend this indefensible health spending bill.”

In other words, they’re going to take a page from the book of people who protest, vandalize, block, and bomb abortion clinics---if they can’t change the law, they’re going to try to make it too difficult for you to use your rights.  Except they’re going to try to do it with hearings. 

This is, of course, making a mockery of the powers that have been given to Congress.  They’re basically admitting up front they don’t actually care about truth or good government, but are willing to use the powers given to them to get at these things in order to stop good government and to hopefully distract from the truth.  Clearly, their biggest concern is once the public starts actually experiencing the effects of health care reform, the enthusiasm for repeal will evaporate. 

What’s so hilarious about this is Republicans are always playing like they’re just sticklers for process.  They’re not bigots!  They just argue that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over state governments.....and now apparently they have no jurisdiction over federal law, either.  But let’s be clear---just because they don’t actually understand the law doesn’t mean they aren’t sticklers for it, in ways that precisely mirror their prejudices.  This has nothing to do with anything but their thorough enthusiasm for sticking to the process.

Oh wait, that argument only matters if they’re on the losing side of it.  When they’re on the winning side, then actually it’s opposite day, and they object strongly to the childish notion that the powers given should only be used in the spirit they were given in.  There’s no hiding from the fact that you’re a grade A hypocrite if you complain out one side of your mouth about “judicial activism” and then applaud Congress for calling hearings where they have no intention of gathering information to govern better, but in fact every intention of just confusing and stalling the issue.  Wearing the mantle of original intent and process-orientation---but only when things are going your way---is basically wearing a “I’m a big fat lying liar piece of shit” sign.

I’ve seen a spattering of puzzled reactions to this bizarre story George Bush is telling of how he supposedly came to be anti-abortion, basically that he saw his mother’s miscarried fetus in a jar and that did him in.  All we actually learn from this story is that Bush is really good fluent in Evangelicalese, particularly when it comes to the evangelical skill of turning your own life experiences into apocryphal stories.  Amongst evangelical Christians, fibbing about your past to create “evidence” for some theological or political belief is super normal.  Think of Christine O’Donnell claiming she dabbled in witchcraft.  To us, that’s stupid, but within that community, breathy claims to have witnesses Satan worshiping are pretty common.  Anti-abortion politics is another area where being full of shit is the norm.  There are a number of people who make a living giving speeches where they claim they “survived” abortion and were born anyway, a claim that’s even more farcical than the Satan-worshiping crap but just as firmly believed.  Or should I say, “believed”, because there’s good reason to think that the people who engage in this behavior are very deliberately shutting down the part of their brains that tells the difference between mythologies and actual facts, something I have no doubt religious belief greases the wheels for in general.

Why do I think Bush is full of shit, besides the fact that he tells other, verifiable whoppers in his story?  A couple of reasons.  For one, the woman who supposedly set him on this path, his mother, is pro-choice, as was his father until it became too much of a problem for him politically not to switch sides.  We have every reason to believe that, within the Bush family, being anti-abortion is not actually felt as a value.  It’s just something you feed the rubes to get them to vote for you. 

Not that I doubt that Bush Jr. is indeed anti-choice.  I think he’s a believing evangelical Christian, and yes, that he buys their line on abortion.  But his conversion to Christianity was literally decades after this supposed event.  Moreover, his administration also fought strongly against attempts to expand contraception usage, which would prevent abortion and therefore the killing of fetuses.  Someone who was truly moved by the supposed plight of fetuses would do everything in his power to make sure that fewer were conceived accidentally, and therefore likely to be aborted.  But Bush pushed abstinence-only education that denounced contraception, and the FDA under him tried to slow contraception use.  All this resorts in more fetuses being created against women’s will, which means more abortions. 

Plus, I find it uniquely difficult to believe that a man who just so happened to fall into the conservative line on war is more inspired by a tender heart than by patriarchal desires for control.  If he just happened to be anti-choice because fetuses moved him and not because he’s a conservative with an eye towards controlling female sexuality, then why was that tender heart not moved towards pacifism?  How could a man who claims to care so much about the pre-sentient not care very much at all about those who actually fear death and experience suffering?  I don’t believe that it’s really possible to be the person who actually is moved by a fetus in a jar but no so much by an actual child killed in war or in Hurricane Katrina.  Or even to be able to shoot living animals who, unlike fetuses, experience fear and pain. To what extent someone has more sympathy for the non-sentient over the sentient, that sympathy is rooted in rationalizing a desire to control and to punish female sexuality, and that’s it.

I do believe the fetus in the jar was shown, of course.  I just don’t think the meaning Bush gave it was experienced at the time, but was something that he rewrote into the experience to rationalize his misogynist view of women’s rights.

As much as I’m generally supportive of Michelle Obama’s initiatives to get Americans, especially kids, to eat better and exercise more, I have to blog some more about why her program is bound to fail.  It’s because it’s all about adding, but there’s not enough about subtracting, and without the latter, not much is really going to happen in terms of getting Americans, especially children, to a place where they’re eating healthier food.  Adding is great, of course.  More programs focusing on physical fitness, more programs addressing the problem of food deserts, more education, etc.  Adding especially has the potential to help people living in poverty, whose greater rates of obesity are the result of lack of access to better food.  Adding is great.  I’m not dissing adding.

The problem with adding is that it’s way more politically feasible and it’s easy to focus on it at the expense of subtracting.  Everyone can feel they’re doing something without actually crossing anyone who would resist them.  Fast food companies are happy to tack a salad no one eats to their menu and call it a day.  A lot of subtracting efforts are punitive, which automatically sets off a lot of liberals, sometimes with good reason---when regressive tax structures are put into place on certain foods without increasing access to other foods, that’s a major problem.  Everyone loves to applaud adding sidewalks, but if you actually try to subtract environmental cues that encourage driving over walking---like reducing the amount of available parking---people flip out.  Food producers, junk food companies, and the voters all prefer the message, “Eat an apple” over “Don’t eat piles of cheese.” We like to applaud having someone ask the food industry politely not to serve so much crap, but any effort to actually get them to stop serving so much crap is received as punitive and resisted.

People like to talk about adding, because the people who are helped the most with this focus are those living in poverty and who don’t have regular access to good food.  But Americans of every class eat poorly and don’t exercise enough.  Getting the poor up to middle class levels will help, but it will still result in a nation of epic heart disease and diabetes.  The problem isn’t just that some people don’t have access to healthy food.  It’s also that people who have that access don’t use it.

If you could fix our problems only with adding, that would be fine, but you can’t.  You just can’t.  Unless we start depriving the food industry of money and an unrestricted landscape, for instance, the First Lady can leap around with children until she collapses from exhaustion, and not a damn thing will change.

Example #1:

And Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

That’s right.  The government runs an agency whose entire purpose is to move Americans away from ingrained cultural tendencies not to suck down rubbery-tasting cheese by the gallon, and instead get us to coat everything we eat with cheese.  They do this for the sole purpose of improving profits for companies that are, bit by bit, destroying the health of Americans. For example:

Domino’s Pizza was hurting early last year. Domestic sales had fallen, and a survey of big pizza chain customers left the company tied for the worst tasting pies.

Then help arrived from an organization called Dairy Management. It teamed up with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas with 40 percent more cheese, and proceeded to devise and pay for a $12 million marketing campaign.

Consumers devoured the cheesier pizza, and sales soared by double digits.

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Rick Perlstein has a wonderful article up at The Daily Beast about how voters turned out in the polls to register their disapproval of having their taxes raised, when actually, their taxes were cut.  He argues, correctly in my opinion, that governance is impossible in the current atmosphere, because what you actually do doesn’t matter a bit in terms of convincing people to vote for you.  What matters is what people think you do.  In a properly functioning democracy, what people think aligns more closely to what is actually true, but in our dysfunctional democracy, the voters actually are more likely to believe something that isn’t true than something that is.

This is for two reasons: 1) Republicans are shameless liars and 2) There are no checks on their shameless lying. 

On cable news, the belief that taxes were raised for most people is trotted out without correction, since everything is about what someone said, not what the actual facts are.  The most you’ll get most of the time is, “Republicans claim taxes went up.  Democrats claim taxes went down.  Let’s talk to this moron over here about what this means for the elections.” Rarely do you get a report on what actually happened, and rarely do they make it as entertaining as the horse race coverage on the rare occasions they do report the facts.

But in recent years, it’s gotten even worse, since the coverage has gone from, “Republicans said (fill in uncorrected lie).  Democrats said (something closer to the truth).” Now it’s “Republicans said (lie that’s so outrageous that it can be fact-checked in two seconds, not that anyone is going to do that).  Democrats said (mumble mumble civility).” As Rick argues:

When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free.

And dammit, the essence of Obamaism as an ideology is that it is Uncivil to Call Out Liars.

Which brings me back to the Rally To Restore Sanity, which was widely and correctly criticized for embodying Jon Stewart’s worst tendencies of making false equivalences.  But I want to commend them strongly for one thing they did do exactly right, which was to stake out territory where calling out lies and bullshit is not considered uncivil.  That’s basically what “The Daily Show” is all about, after all.  The definition of “civil” isn’t “never do anything that makes someone else uncomfortable or angry”, because that automatically means that you have to be complicit with people who exploit that to do actual bad things.  Indeed, bad people are drawn to those with a mistaken idea of what civility is, because they’re easy to exploit.  You don’t have to forget someone is a human being to call bullshit.  In fact, I would argue that the greater call towards civility is towards the public at large.  The only way to be civil to the voters is to speak the truth without shame.

There’s a certain nobility in actually trying to crunch the numbers and chronicling the code words wingnuts drop to admit they simply pulled the $200 million number out of their ass.  In case you don’t know what I’m talking about---which I doubt at this point---$200 million a day is the number that the wingnutteria came up with when they rooted around in their collective asses to look for a reason to be shocked that the President is going on a diplomatic trip to India.

But see, what’s interesting about the $200 million a day number is that it’s clearly a lie.  It’s so impossibly large, so over-the-top that the only explanation is that the assholes at Wingnut Propaganda Central got together and said, “Let’s see how much shit people will swallow.  Let’s make up a number that’s so obviously untrue, so big as to be unbelievable, and see if the morons who live off our propaganda eat it up.” And the answer was that the wingnutteria will believe anything.  Now Fox News if free to start running stories about how Obama grows horns and eats babies, and they can do so with the full assurance that their audience has not an ounce of skepticism or critical thought left in them to say, “Hey, wait a minute....”

Not only did the morons swallow the number, they built on it.  As Roy has chronicled, the claim is being floated that this is a “vacation”.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t usually give speeches in front of a bunch of dudes wearing too-goofy-not-to-be-ceremonial hats on my vacations.

This whole thing is awesome just for being completely transparent.  It’s not just the money and the insinuations of uppitiness.  It’s also transparently about establishing the idea that only weirdo furriners would do something like take a trip to a country where a lot of people don’t speak English and the food is downright spicy.  And that therefore any attempts at diplomacy and relationship-building---things that used to be considered part of the President’s, you know, job---should be treated as rock solid evidence that it’s about time that Islamofascistcommie that probably reads books in his spare time that the lie-bral media calls the “President” should produce the extra special super proof that he’s got a birth certificate, even though no proof will ever be accepted.

I look forward to future wingnut “scandals”.  Wait until they find out that the First Lady has a passport.  Then the feigned outrage will definitely get out of control. 

CSA Week #20

Pumpkin
Turnip
Sweet potato
Acorn squash
Beets
Cauliflower
Green peppers
Onion
Hot peppers
Broccoli
Potatoes
Tomatoes
Daikon radish

This is like the shortest one ever, because I’ve mostly been out and about during dinner time and not cooking much.  I did use CSA stuff in lunches and breakfasts, so I cover that briefly.  But this week, I’m sure I’ll be able to do more.  This last week just involved a lot of eating out because I was in Manhattan.

Incidentally, this is the last week of the main community supported agriculture season.  However, the farmer who supplies us had a good season, so he extended this by 5 weeks for people who want to buy in.  So I’ll be doing this for five more weeks. The shipment will be a little different.  This that I’ve had was a half share, and you could only buy in the extension with a full share, so I’ll probably be seeing more of certain kinds of vegetables.  Also, full shares come with a dozen eggs a week.  That’ll be an interesting challenge, but I do have Thanksgiving on the horizon, and now that the election is over, I think I’ll be spending more time at home cooking dinner.  If not, I’ll just continue to find ways to make this food into lunch.

Prepping

1) Sunday, I made some veggie broth from all the trimmings I’d kept in the freezer. 

2) I also decided to cook the greens before they wilted.  I destemmed and then put the greens in the skillet with some thyme, some garlic, and salt and pepper.  Doused it with veggie broth, about a cup, and when most of that burned off, I added a can of white beans and chopped up the parsley in it.  Cooked it until it wasn’t too liquidy, put a little lemon juice over it, and put it in the fridge. 

3) Made the rest of quinoa I had the bag. All these things create a ton of dishes, but I have time to do them on a lazy Sunday.  Which means that, on busier weekdays, I can cook without too much prep time or time spent on dishes.

Lunch

1) Took some of the turnip and chickpea mix, cracked an egg over it, and formed it into two veggie patties with some bread crumbs and oregano, one to eat on the spot and another for later.  Cut some bread off a homemade loaf, threw in a tomato, and had a sandwich.  This can be crumbly, so it’s good to make sure to keep shaping it in the frying pan with a spatula. And not to put down the Garden Burger, which has saved me from starvation many a time, but this is quick, cheaper, tastier, and you know exactly what’s in it.

2) Warmed up some of the beans and greens and ate that on the side.

Time: 15 minutes

Leftovers: This made enough for lunch two days in a row.

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