Call It What It Is: Terrorism

I am tired of reading headlines such as this one from the PBS newsletter: "Shutdown Nears as Congress Remains Deadlocked."

The word "deadlocked" suggests a false equivalency, as if both parties are equally to blame for this current impasse. What is really going on is one party holding the government hostage in order to extort what it could not gain from the voters.

It is also very angry making when House leaders claim to be reasonable and willing to compromise, if only the Democratic Senate were not so intransigent, and they go unchallenged. They are willing to compromise in the sense that they are ready to reduce their unreasonable demands by two, while still holding the gun to the head of the country.

I hope Obama and the Senate leadership are explicit in explaining that "we do not negotiate with terrorists, period."

No Gloom, No Doom

It is not even a year since the Democratic party achieved a super majority in California and set off a flurry of dire predictions on the right. Think I'm exaggerating? A couple minutes of google searching will show you I'm not. Here is one of my favorites, from a writer for The Sovereign Investor.

No doubt that voters sending Barak Obama back to the White House was the biggest news in the November elections. But another vote – this one in California – could ultimately prove equally consequential to the future of America.

There, the spendthrift, welfare-worshipping Democratic Party won a supermajority in the state legislature. Though the Dems have controlled California politics for 40-plus years, this is the first time since the Great Depression that they’ve fielded a supermajority – a voting block large enough to override Republican resistance and pass any piece of legislation they and their tax-mongering leader, Gov. Jerry Brown, want.

California has always been a trend setter, and with this particular election it could establish a new trend that will see America slowly disassembled.
My prediction: The supermajority could mark the beginning of the end for California as a unified state … and, if it happens, that will establish a trend that sees a quest for smaller, more-responsive government across America.

Actually, California's system is still screwed up, at least in so far as it continues to take a super majority to increase taxes, and it will still have those awful, and dangerous propositions on the ballot (although Prop 30 worked out alright). And Bill Maher perhaps exaggerates California's cultural influence on the rest of the country, but he is certainly right in sticking it to the gloomers and doomers who were rooting for the Democrats to drive the state off the cliff.

Clever Book Titles

Alexander McCall Smith
Smith, born in Rhodesia in 1948, is a recognized expert in medical law and bioethics.  He is a professor (emeritus) of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. He is also a prolific writer, much of whose fiction is set in Africa. He definitely has a way with titles. Here is just a short selection:

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
Baboons Who Went This Way and That
The Careful Use of Compliments
The Charming Quirks of Others
The Double Comfort Safari Club
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Lost Art of Gratitude

Alexandra Fuller
Fuller, too, grew up in Rhodesia, and Africa is the setting for her poignant non-fiction books about her family.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Scribbling the Cat

 Karen Cantwell

I don't know anything about Cantwell, but I like these titles:

Silenced by the Yams
Citizen Insane
Take the Monkeys and Run
Saturday Night Cleaver

And the rest are just some titles I've made note of over the past few months:

Chihuahua of the Baskervilles
Maui Widow Waltz
Bratfest at Tiffany's
Paris Trance
Death, Taxes and Extra-Hold Hairspray
A Lie for a Lie
Beware False Profits
Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes
Chose the Wrong Guy, Gave Him the Wrong Finger

It's a Puzzlement

A few curiosities:

Many of the same people who insist that the the most important issue facing the country is the national debt we are leaving to our children and grandchildren are willing to glibly bet the entire future of those same children, grandchildren and beyond on their conveniently self-serving belief that the world's climate scientists are idiots.

People can get appropriately incensed about a video currently circulating in which an adult woman seizes a baseball out of a child's hands at a major league game, and they feel quite comfortable in labeling her evil. How many of those people are similarly infuriated by the greedy adults who have taken nutritional assistance, or food stamps if you will, away from thousands of similar children. Oops, I forgot, they're just moochers.

And of course there are the long-standing traditions in some circles of being more concerned with humans in the fetal stage of development than in any of the post-birth stages, and of holding firmly to the belief that all life is sacred, except for those evil lives the state needs to take by execution.

There. That felt good.

Conservatives vs. Reactionaries

I just read a quote where Rainer Stinner, the head of the liberal Free Democratic Party in Germany, referred to Angela Merkel as "the ultimate incrementalist." It reminded me of the difference between European conservatives and their American cousins. Of what important conservative leader in the U.S. could that be said?

An incrementalist is still interested in creeping ever so slowly forward. The most powerful and influential American conservatives, the ones who are running the conservative party, are still trying to roll back the New Deal and deny the concept of a social contract. They want to move backward, and not at a snail's pace either.

Another example of American Exceptionalism.

Romesco Sauce

I will take a break from sharing my opinion that the Republican party has been taken over by idiots, although I reserve the right to return to that boringly obvious subject in future posts.

Instead I want to share a culinary discovery. The subject is new to me, but perhaps it is familiar to you.

A little more than a week ago the NY Times Dining section had an article about Romesco sauce, an all-purpose Spanish (Catalonian) sauce that I had not heard of. The author of the article was familiar with the sauce, because she is a food writer after all, but the gist of the article is that she had no idea how many variations existed.

Given that fact that I simultaneously learned (1) this sauce exists and (2) there are a lot of variations, I decided to just google Romesco sauce and see for myself what were my options. Indeed, there are a lot of recipes. The common ingredients in all of them are some kind of roasted pepper, and either almonds or hazelnuts, and garlic. Most of the recipes also call for tomatoes and paprika and, this seems really odd, some amount of stale bread.

I could give you the link to the recipe I opted to use, but I look at other recipes and know for a fact that they would be good too. So I will recommend the sauce and let you select your own recipe.  One of my reasons is that the recipe I have used, twice now, uses roasted red bell peppers. Many recipes call for roasted ancho peppers. I would love to hear from someone who used peppers with just a little more zing than the ones I've used.

The sauce itself is incredibly versatile. It is good with meat, chicken, vegetables and pasta. It is also said to keep well in the freezer, although I haven't tried that yet.

Heitor loved this sauce so much that he told a friend about it. This friend is a film critic and part-time chef, known to us as "Cigi, the cooker." Cigi didn't know about this sauce so Heitor took some pleasure in telling him he should "get Gerry's recipe." I told Cigi the same thing I'm telling you: why do you thing Gawd invented Google?

Surreality in the World's Only Superpower

The expression "hoist with his own petard," really does explain the current state of the Republican party. The crazies who they cultivated so assiduously over the past few decades have now, with Boehner's surrender, more or less officially taken over the party.

I have believed for a long time that the party needs to hit rock bottom before it can ever reconnect with reality. As regards their current juvenile attempt to shut down the government unless the President accepts their blackmail terms, my feeling is essentially "bring it on."