Once upon a time i had the most amazing banana cake recipe. it was
hand written on fancy journal paper in curly letters by a long lost
friend. it made this delicious sticky sweet cake with a velvety crump
and no need for frosting. it was lost in the maelstrom of the last 3
years, along with everything else we own except for a couple of
suitcases of clothes and our recently aquired laptops.
the food bank we frequent seems to be overrun with bananas lately. and
last week i made a banana cake from an online recipe. it sucked, hard.
well, it was totally edible but it was not the life changing event of
the old banana cake. I got another bunch of food bank bananas today,
on the verge of black banana cake/bread goodness, and i need another
recipe. so dear internet friends, send me your best banana recipe and
help me restart my recipe collection.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

there’s apiece in the nytimes about PEnnsylvania dumping 41000ish
people from their insurance program for poor adults as of yesterday
even though over half a million people are still on the waiting list
for the plan.. in my own state, our supposedly democratic governor
(the one whose balancing the budget by slashing child support
enforcement and cutting allready measly tanf grants) dumped 17500
people from Basic Health. when asked if HHS could speed up the
insurance exchanges to cover the people who are now uncovered,
KAthleen Sebelius basically said ‘Suck it poor,sick people. you gotta
wait till 2014! with any luck you’ll all be dead in the saltmines by
then’ she then rubbed her hands together and growled ‘excellent’ to
herself like a real life Monty Burns. What you should take away from
this is that fewer poor people can go to the doctor today than before
our ‘historic’ give away to the insurance industry, i mean heath care
reform.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

echo, my little commenting platform, sucks. it lets me reply to
comments via email on my phone, but it doesnt let me free comments
stuck in the mod que unless i’m at an actual compy. it also
occasionally likes to send approved commenters of long standing into
the mod que. sorry. i’m trying to drag my sorry ass to internetlandia
more regularly, but….
(in other words, if you’re stuck in moderation pergatory and havent
been banned- you know who you are you stalking fuck nugget of
relentless abuse- then i’ll get to appoving you eventually. i promise.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Kid and I have this running convo where i call him a dork, geek,
monkey child, or some other good natured teasing thing and he responds
with some version of ‘well i got it from you so you are the real dork,
geek, queen of all monkeydom’. I usually respond with ‘oh no dude, all
the dna you got from me is the cool dna, the other 50 percent is pure
howler monkey’. The other day i tried to prove this by pointing out
the things that are different about us. ‘you are way sweeter than i am
kiddo’ to which the kid replied ‘ that doesn’t prove anything. you
might be as sweet as me if you’d had a different life. that’s nurture,
not nature’. this folks, is what i get for teaching the kid biological
anthropology for science last year, and for having the sweetest old
world monkey* boy on the planet.
*true fact, we have old world monkey noses because our nostrils are
paralell to the ground. new world monkeys have forward facing
nostrills. And then there’s lemurs. i don’t know where their nostrills
point, but they are cute

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Damn i love these movies. Yes, sacriledge, I saw the movies and I
haven’t read the books yet. Wevs.
But here’s one tiny way you know you’re watching feminist kickassery:
Lisbeth’s lawyer is obviously pregnant and has 2 young kids at home.
She helps Lisbeth avoid an assasination attempt, she gets her
briefcase snatched on her way to work, she comes home after her kids
have had dinner and she has a glass of wine IN PUBLIC and no one ever
says ‘you must be careful you’re pregnant/ a mom. Also (SPOILER
ALERT!!!!!!)after recieving death threats and bricks through her
window, editor Annika isn’t treated to a fucking ‘greater good’ speech
from Mikke, or even any excuses from him for putting all their lives
in danger. She calls him selfish.
As for Lisbeth, there is no one else on the planet who could take a
bullet to the brain and end up with an even cooler punk rock hair cut
after brain surgery. There is a moment when she smiles, the first of
only 2 in the whole film, that makes me want to give her a fist bump.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

did it become right and proper that a Democratic president sits on his hands during the biggest labor dispute in a generation?

Now I am sure we all know the ridiculous justifications the faugressives and neolibs will be spouting. The same people who would puff out their cheeks if GW was doing absolutely nothing about Wisconsin are the ones who will be saying “he has to think of re-election, budget costs, blah blah blah blah blah”. But the truth of the matter is that you cannot be a Democrat and be cool with this kind of union busting. 

Cannot.Be.A.Democrat.

But for the frothing-mouthed hordes of the cheetoh eating creative class, there is nothing Obama can do to prove that he is not the Great Audacious Hope of the Left. Even as our country sinks deeper and deeper in poverty and despair. Even as states balance budgets on the backs of poor women, children, the unemployed, people with disabilities, and the last few groups of organized labor in this country, Obama will stick to a bipartisan plan for dividing the spoils between the super rich and extremely rich. 

the union of  state and county and city employees that Scott Walker is trying to bust.

For 6 years I worked as a “part-time hourly” (in quotes because that designation is important, it’s what local schools use to keep high skill employees from benefits and union memebership. It’s the Walmart class of  government employees) computer lab administrator for a local community college.. I loved that job. I loved the students, the instructors. I loved that my job didn’t feel like some soul-sucking exercise in corporate suckitude. I loved it enough that I took a $5 an hour paycut to go from doing what I do in  the private sector to teaching what I do in the public sector. I was not eligible for any benefits, not health care or pension. I wan’t eligible for unemployment insurance because of my classification. If I worked over 18 hours a week I was subject to immediate termination. I went through a year where the school administration flately refused to follow federal guidelines for when paychecks are to be issued, and because I was one of the not-so-rare little snowflakes who didn’t have union representation, the state labor board couldn’t do anything about it unless I hired a private attorney.

The last year I worked there, I finally qualified for memebership in AFSCME. It didn’t get me heathcare or a pension. But it did get me my paychecks in a timely fashion. Once I had union membership I didn’t have a single late or missing check. I was informed in advance when paycheck dates would be weird because of scheduling. My few dollars a paycheck in union membership worked better than a year of legal threats at ensuring my basic employee rights were upheld.

And that is what they are trying to kill. Public workers don’t make a ton of money, tjhey make less than they would in the private sphere. But we do it because we love the work and the stability. For a lot of us, that is worth the loss in compensation.
But without unions to keep us from the most avarice of  politicians, we suffer, and so do the students and citizens who we work for every single day.

We’re having pork ribs, roasty potatoes with dill and paprika and
sauted brussel sprouts. But i made too much. oh tragedy. Anyone want
some?

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Bob Herbert has a piece up at NY Times called ‘absorbing the pain’
that’s a decent exercise in emapathising with the hardships of the
great recession. Herbert is great, but if I read one more snide
liberal comment about us dumb poor folks voting against our own best
interest, I’m going to shove a literal shit sandwich in person’s face.
As someone at corrente noted, voters voted against the party supplying
unending war and corporate croniyism in 2006, and 2008, and 2010.
there is no party that represents the best interest of the bottom 80%,
there is just the shit sandwich, shit sandwich with pickle choice. We
keep firing the people who brought us to this low point, only to have
the jobs filled by people whose major philosophical difference is in
what color ink to use to sign the legislation that fucks us all over.
IOW, Mr. Handwringing Liberal Douchenozzle, you are voting against
your own self-interest everytime you vote straight dem, so kindly shut
your sanctimonious pie hole.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning

Up in the shared items section is a link about a little discussed
provision in the WI kill the unions bill would remove legislative
control over medicaid rules and hand it to Wisconsin’s douchebag in
charge, i mean governor.
But i’m sure he just has te best interests of the Koch family, I mean
state citizens, in mind.

—
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
Willem de Kooning