Oh yay, multiple spammy emails from the Obama campaign. I can’t
fucking wait. Once you get over the idea that Obama in particular and
the Democratic party in general are the liberal/left party and realize
they’re just better used car salesman for the kleptocracy, watching
the Obama fan base twist every negative, Bush-like action Obama takes
into some kinda ’12 dimensional chess’ positive is actually kinda
funny (as long as you can disconect from the real world implications
of those policies, like torture, imperialsm, disemployment, poverty,
sexism and on and on). I am going to start calling our dear leader
‘Barack HOOVER Obama’ since it turns out that my 2008 primary
predictions about his economic prowess we not, sadly, hyperbole.

Blue Lyon has a great post up called ’employed but not getting by’
about living wages,etc. In it she uses the most recent census
calculation for the percentage of people who live in poverty, 14.6% is
the amount I believe. But (and I’m not criticizing Blue Lyon’s
research, but the census numbers) I’m pretty sure that we were at 17%
in 2007 or earlier. So either my brain is fuzzy (entirely possible) or
at the same exact time that we have record levels of disemployment,
shrinking wages and what little work is available is part-time, we’ve
also managed to cut poverty by almost 3%. That’s a fucking
miracle.That might even be better than Clinton’s record on poverty
amelioration. (As I type this I’m also remembering an 11.5% or 35
million people being floated about that time period, which means a 3%
increase or 10 million new members of the lowest class).

All the British actors who can pull off a convincing American accent
are not working for you. They are on our tv shows, like Hugh Laurie,
or in our movies, like Kate Winslet. Every single time an actor does
an American accent in a BBC I want to puncture my eardrums. Either
hire better dialect coaches or hire actual Americans. And I know it
goes both ways. I think I speak for a huge swath of the American
public when I say express how very sorry we are for inflicting Gwenyth
Paltrow and he awfulness on you.
Sincerely,RQ

Someone at Corrente (forgive me for forgetting the tag, I’m typing on
my phone and can’t comment or link to the post) thinks we need a good
old fashioned blogswarm on the subject of jobs just at the NYTimes is
writing about the happy ‘News’ that Dems in general and Obama in
particular will be getting an upward bounce because of March’s
creative accounting of a tiny employment number increase. I’m in, but
not just a blogswarm. We need it to trend on Twitter and annoy all
friends and family members on facebook. And we need to pick a
politically crucial day to do it (perhaps reminding Obama of his
failures as a Democrat is not a bad thing to do while he gives away
the farm, I mean makes compromises on the budget with republifuckers.
Not that I think he’ll listen, mind you. But real debate is never
about enlightening your opponent, it’s about catching the attention of
the audience.

I almost always have the ingredients on hand to make them. Baking was
my first solo foray into cooking from a recipe. I started with these
god awful vanilla refridgerator cookies, again because the ingredients
were what we had on hand. I was in 5th grade so I was probably 10. I
had my mom’s vintage 70’s Betty Crocker cookbook and the cookies were
supposed to be vanilla and chocolate pinwheels, but we didn’t have
cocoa powder and rolling the doughs was complicated for a lone 10 year
old. Shortly after I found the peanut butter cookie recipe that I
still use 25 years later, with one tiny alteration. Baking was also
the Kid’s first solo in the kitchen, and with no motherly bias I can
say his from scratch brownies are the best brownies on the planet,
outshining those dry things they sell in fancy bakeries by kilowatts.
Last night he made pork chops with mushroom sauce, mashy potatoes and
asperagus (the pork was a wee bit undercooked, but shhhhh. Everything
else was so perfect I didn’t wanna bust his happy).

Go read her cannon fodder piece. It’s shit like that study that makes
me give a hard side eye at virtuos foodies and environmentalists.
Whenever they open their mouths I know I’m in for a whole lot more
work added to my load and a bigger bite of my tiny budget being eaten
into, when the best solution is an istitutional, not personal one.