August 2014 archive

The Breakfast Club (The Summer Wind)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

The Breakfast Club Logo photo BeerBreakfast_web_zps5485351c.png

This Day in History

Mount Vesuvius erupts, burying two Ancient Roman cities; Hurricane Andrew hits Florida; British troops burn Washington in War of 1812; Pluto demoted as a planet; Pete Rose banned from baseball for life

Breakfast Tunes

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Punting the Punditsis an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: House Homeland Security Committee Chair Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX); and  Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO).

The roundtable guests are: Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD); Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan; and former Obama White House senior adviser David Plouffe.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are: Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH); Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI); Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr. (D-MO); and actor and disabled veterans activist Gary Sinise.

His panel guests are: Nia-Malika Henderson, the Washington Post; David Rohde, Reuters; Susan Page, USA Today; CBS News State Department correspondent Margaret Brennan; and CBS News Homeland Security Correspondent Bob Orr.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: Chuck “I don’t fact check” Todd takes over mike from David “the dance master” Gregory who is off writing a book.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley:Ms. Crowley’s guests are: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI); Great Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Westmacott; and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon (D).

Her panel guest are: Thomas Manger, Chief of Police in Montgomery County Maryland and Vice President of the Police Executive Research Forum; Malik Aziz, Deputy Chief of Police in Dallas and Chair of the National Black Police Association; and James Craig, Chief of Police in Detroit.

Formula One 2014: Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps

Ah Formula One, the dismal sport.

How dismal is it Johnny?

Dismal enough that it signals the end of summer and a return to the dreary grind.

Dismal enough that still nobody has solved the problem of Mercedes dominance and we are reduced to talking about stupid things like the rivalry for first place in the Driver’s Championship (Rosberg leads by 11) and the fight for third place in the Constructor’s Championship between Ferrari and Williams.

Dismal enough that we are once again reminded that you have to bribe your way into a seat in an F1 cockpit but provided you have the nepotistic credentials and the money anyone at all can get a ride even if you’re too young to drink or have a driver’s license for a regular road.

It’s remarkably egalitarian that way.

As dismal as the weather at Spa where they say if it’s not raining it’s getting ready to rain.  At 4.35 miles per lap it’s the longest and one of the fastest tracks of the season.  On offer will be Mediums and Softs.  Because of the speed there will be added wear on the brakes where Hamilton has already had some problems.

Six In The Morning

On Sunday

The teenage girl whose baseball success provides a flimsy bridge across America’s great racial divide

 Out of America: Mo’ne is a black 13-year-old bringing a small ray of light against the dark backdrop of Missouri

 RUPERT CORNWELL Sunday 24 August 2014

At last there’s a good news story from America. Put aside the chaos abroad and the beheadings in Iraq, the sense of a president adrift and aloof, and the violence in Ferguson, Missouri, ripping open racial wounds that seemed to be healing. Instead, consider the feats of Mo’ne Davis.

Mo’ne is a black girl, aged 13, who hails from inner-city Philadelphia – and right now she’s probably the most famous baseball player on the planet. She’s on the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated; Michelle Obama has tweeted about her and every talk show in the land has tried to land her.

Baseball is a game for males, right? Not in the case of the Taney Dragons little leaguers, for whom Mo’ne is star pitcher and hitter. Little League has its own version of the World Series, for children between 11 and 13. Girls have featured in it before, but none with the impact of Mo’ne.




Sunday’s Headlines:

China executes eight for terrorist activities including Tiananmen attack

Militias turn Libya’s capital Tripoli into no-go zone for govt, travellers

Israeli airstrikes level Gaza buildings

Separatists plan victory parade on Ukraine’s Independence Day

Pentagon struggles to defend ‘militarization’ of police forces

There’s a new “worse than Hitler” bogeyman, prepare to bomb some more brown people!

'Destroy_this_mad_brute'_WWI_propaganda_poster_(US_version)There’s a new bogeyman in the middle east. It is a terrible monster of great proportions, a barbaric, sectarian, unrepentant butchery machine. Its name is ISIS and like the previous bogeymen (Saddam, Ahmadinejad, Gaddaffi, Osama bin Laden, Assad and Putin) it is like (or worse than) Hitler. You would think by now government propagandists would get worried that trotting out the Hitler meme so frequently would cause “Hitler fatigue.” Nonetheless, now that the terrible threat has been identified by a news media eager for action and ratings, there is a growing push for America to jump in and start killing brown people again.

So where did this new “worse than Hitler” bogeyman come from? Well, sorry to say it appears that some of our policy geniuses in the US government created it:

The reality of US policy is to support the government of Iraq, but not Syria, against ISIS. But one reason that group has been able to grow so strong in Iraq is that it can draw on its resources and fighters in Syria. Not everything that went wrong in Iraq was the fault of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as has now become the political and media consensus in the West. Iraqi politicians have been telling me for the last two years that foreign backing for the Sunni revolt in Syria would inevitably destabilize their country as well. This has now happened.

By continuing these contradictory policies in two countries, the US has ensured that ISIS can reinforce its fighters in Iraq from Syria and vice versa. So far, Washington has been successful in escaping blame for the rise of ISIS by putting all the blame on the Iraqi government. In fact, it has created a situation in which ISIS can survive and may well flourish.

… with a good bit of help from some of our frenemies allies:

[I]n the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime. …

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others. …

“The U.S. Treasury is aware of this activity and has expressed concern about this flow of private financing. But Western diplomats’ and officials’ general response has been a collective shrug,” [a Brookings] report states.

… But in fact, these policy geniuses have been running the asylum installed in government for years and have been allowed to create havoc unsupervised. For these geniuses, the creation of a vacuum of power in the oil-rich middle-east is an accomplishment not a failure:

The simple fact is that the Iraq War was a smashing success – at least for the neocons – because it smashed the keystone in the arch of the region’s stability. By removing Saddam Hussein, his government and the Republican Guard, neocons removed a bulwark against the very jihadism that has policymakers and pundits forever wringing their hands raw, military contractors ringing their cash registers, and the denizens of the national security state resting assured under a blanket of secrecy. …

The Iraq War made it functionally impossible for the United States to ever fully walk away from Iraq, the Persian Gulf or anywhere Muslims and oil mix. And for Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and William Kristol, it’s a dream come true. Regime change in Iraq created a power vacuum that was and is too strong to resist.

In fact, that vacuum allowed a wandering Jordanian jihadist named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group of international also-rans to run amok in the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq. After a series of suicide attacks and a pledge to al-Qaeda, the anti-Shi’ite, anti-American, anti-almost-everything group became “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and, as Bobby Ghosh explains, eventually metastasized into ISIS.

I don’t know about you, but I am sick of being lied to by the US government about the true nature of our wars and policies while being expected to support them based on their lies and deceptions. Their actions of bombing liberally (for “humanitarian” reasons) are clearly not fixing the problems. US covert actions and wars of choice against other nations and peoples only seem to be exacerbating the problems (often long running sectarian and ethnic strife) by larding up the local adversaries with weaponry, which grows the numbers of people who wish America harm exponentially.

Can we (the people), in good conscience support any military action by the US until the government comes clean about the history and chronology of events and fully explains our goals in the process?  If the US is bombing to protect “American interests,” which are virtually synonymous with the interests of large corporations which have no loyalty to anything but profit, then military intervention is morally insupportable.

Years of dubious decisions and foolish policy based upon destroying a series of bogeymen (all of whom are “worse than Hitler”) and their armies for “humanitarian” reasons or to “spread democracy” (which presumably propagates in a wide range of calibers) have left the US government fighting against its own expensive weapons surrendered in haste by armies that the US has hastily stood up without adequate political and social support. In short, our ill-advised policies continue to come back and bite us in the posterior.

It is time for an accounting, not another bombing campaign.

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Vegetarian Taco Night

Vegetarian Taco Night photo 22recipehealth-articleLarge_zps75aee41b.jpg

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Taco night is nothing new, but over the last five days, we’ve had taco week. The markets are piled high with irresistible produce – summer squash, tomatoes, green beans, corn, peppers and chiles, greens and herbs – and corn tortillas are a great vehicle for them.

~Martha Rose Shulman~

Chard and Sweet Corn Tacos

These sweet and spicy tacos can be filled with chard of any color, or other greens like beet greens or amaranth.

Summer Tacos with Corn, Green Beans and Tomatillo Salsa

Another way to use the versatile green bean in summer cooking. Cut into one-inch lengths and add to a mix of corn, chiles and green tomatillo salsa.

Tacos with Roasted Potatoes, Squash and Peppers (Rajas)

You can turn the heat up or down on this taco, depending on your taste for spiciness. Season the potatoes, onions and squash before roasting.

Tacos With Summer Squash, Tomatoes and Beans

Beans such as pintos, even out of a can, add substance to this summery taco filling. Goat cheese provides a creamy, rich finish.

Tacos with Spicy Tofu, Tomatoes and Chard

In these tacos, tofu stands in for meat in a vegan picadillo, cooked in a modified salsa ranchera.

Random Japan

 photo 2014-08-21_213830_zps9c0e3325.jpg

 Start a horticultural revolution with gourds in the shape of Mao Zedong and more!

   Master Blaster

China certainly knows how to have fun with their vegetation. If they’re not putting panties on peaches, they’re growing gourds in the shape of various religious and political figures.

China has a long history of making art and figures out of gourds and more recently the process has been simplified so that any Joe Schmoe can make his own Jesus squash or garden full of dangling Mao Zedongs. All it takes are some molds and a good ol’ green thumb.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Glenn Greenwald: Should Twitter, Facebook and Google Executives be the Arbiters of What We See and Read?

There have been increasingly vocal calls for Twitter, Facebook and other Silicon Valley corporations to more aggressively police what their users are permitted to see and read. Last month in The Washington Post, for instance, MSNBC host Ronan Farrow demanded that social media companies ban the accounts of “terrorists” who issue “direct calls” for violence.

This week, the announcement by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo that the company would prohibit the posting of the James Foley beheading video and photos from it (and suspend the accounts of anyone who links to the video) met with overwhelming approval. What made that so significant, as The Guardian‘s James Ball noted today, was that “Twitter has promoted its free speech credentials aggressively since the network’s inception.” By contrast, Facebook has long actively regulated what its users are permitted to say and read; at the end of 2013, the company reversed its prior ruling and decided that posting of beheading videos would be allowed, but only if the user did not express support for the act. [..]

The question posed by Twitter’s announcement is not whether you think it’s a good idea for people to see the Foley video. Instead, the relevant question is whether you want Twitter, Facebook and Google executives exercising vast power over what can be seen and read.

David Sirota: Journalists on the Government’s Blacklist

As states move to hide details of government deals with Wall Street, and as politicians come up with new arguments to defend secrecy, a study released earlier this month revealed that many government information officers block specific journalists they don’t like from accessing information. The news comes as 47 federal inspectors general sent a letter to lawmakers criticizing “serious limitations on access to records” that they say have “impeded” their oversight work.

The data about public information officers was compiled over the past few years by Kennesaw State University professor Dr. Carolyn Carlson. Her surveys found that 4 in 10 public information officers say “there are specific reporters they will not allow their staff to talk to due to problems with their stories in the past.”

“That horrified us that so many would do that,” Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review, which reported on her presentation at the July conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Ari Paul: No mo’ Cuomo

Corruption and austerity collide to make the governor unworthy of the office

New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is usually defined in cold partisan terms. Fox News host Sean Hannity recently cited the governor’s support of gay marriage as the kind of cultural liberal intolerance that would drive religious conservatives like him out of the state. Cuomo also faces complaints from the left, on the grounds that he has implemented a strictly right-wing economic agenda that involves tax breaks for the wealthy and fighting state unions.

The contrasting views would seem to paint him as a deft political player who knows how to find electoral safety in the center. But the late New York City Mayor Ed Koch, speaking on the night of Cuomo’s election as governor in 2010, described him differently: “He is a schmuck.” Koch was convinced that during his 1977 mayoral campaign against Mario Cuomo, it was his opponent’s son Andrew Cuomo who was responsible for the hateful slogan “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.”

Cuomo’s current problems are not of a partisan nature but of the kind of vain disregard for playing by the rules that caused Koch to hold such a grudge.

Robert Parry: Behind Obama’s ‘Chaotic’ Foreign Policy

President Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been disjointed and even incoherent because he has – since taking office in 2009 – pursued conflicting strategies, mixing his own penchant for less belligerent “realism” with Official Washington’s dominant tough-guy ideologies of neoconservatism and its close cousin, “liberal interventionism.”

What this has meant is that Obama often has acted at cross-purposes, inclined to cooperate with sometimes adversaries like Russia on pragmatic solutions to thorny foreign crises, such as Syria’s chemical weapons and Iran’s nuclear program, but other times stoking these and other crises by following neocon demands that he adopt aggressive tactics against Russia, Syria, Iran and other “enemies.”[..]

Eugene Robinson: Spousal Secrets No More

How far would you go to stay out of jail? Would you publicly humiliate your wife of 38 years, portraying her as some kind of shrieking harridan? Would you put the innermost secrets of your marriage on display, inviting voyeurs to rummage at will?

For Robert McDonnell, the former Virginia governor on trial for alleged corruption, the answers appear to be: “As far as necessary,” “Hey, why not?” and “Sounds like a plan.”

McDonnell’s testimony this week in a Richmond federal courtroom about his wife Maureen’s psychological turmoil has been both cringe-worthy and compelling. It has been clear for some time that McDonnell’s strategy for winning acquittal amounted to what could be called the “crazy wife” defense. But only when he took the stand did it become apparent how thoroughly he intended to humiliate the “soul mate” he still claims to love.

McDonnell disclosed Thursday that he moved out of the family’s home shortly before the trial began. “I knew there was no way I could go home after a day in court and have to rehash the day’s events with my wife,” he testified.

I guess not. Anyone who said such things in public about his or her spouse would be advised to clear out.

On This Day In History August 23

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

August 23 is the 235th day of the year (236th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 130 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1902, pioneering cookbook author Fannie Farmer, who changed the way Americans prepare food by advocating the use of standardized measurements in recipes, opens Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery in Boston. In addition to teaching women about cooking, Farmer later educated medical professionals about the importance of proper nutrition for the sick.

Farmer was born March 23, 1857, and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. Her family believed in education for women and Farmer attended Medford High School; however, as a teenager she suffered a paralytic stroke that turned her into a homebound invalid for a period of years. As a result, she was unable to complete high school or attend college and her illness left her with a permanent limp. When she was in her early 30s, Farmer attended the Boston Cooking School. Founded in 1879, the school promoted a scientific approach to food preparation and trained women to become cooking teachers at a time when their employment opportunities were limited. Farmer graduated from the program in 1889 and in 1891 became the school’s principal. In 1896, she published her first cookbook, The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, which included a wide range of straightforward recipes along with information on cooking and sanitation techniques, household management and nutrition. Farmer’s book became a bestseller and revolutionized American cooking through its use of precise measurements, a novel culinary concept at the time.

Cookbook fame

Fannie published her most well-known work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, in 1896. Her cookbook introduced the concept of using standardized measuring spoons and cups, as well as level measurement. A follow-up to an earlier version called Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book, published by Mary J. Lincoln in 1884, the book under Farmer’s direction eventually contained 1,849 recipes, from milk toast to Zigaras à la Russe. Farmer also included essays on housekeeping, cleaning, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, and nutritional information.

The book’s publisher (Little, Brown & Company) did not predict good sales and limited the first edition to 3,000 copies, published at the author’s expense. The book was so popular in America, so thorough, and so comprehensive that cooks would refer to later editions simply as the “Fannie Farmer cookbook”, and it is still available in print over 100 years later.

Farmer provided scientific explanations of the chemical processes that occur in food during cooking, and also helped to standardize the system of measurements used in cooking in the USA. Before the Cookbook’s publication, other American recipes frequently called for amounts such as “a piece of butter the size of an egg” or “a teacup of milk.” Farmer’s systematic discussion of measurement – “A cupful is measured level … A tablespoonful is measured level. A teaspoonful is measured level.” – led to her being named “the mother of level measurements.”

I still have my copy.

The Breakfast Club (Analyze This)

breakfast beers photo breakfastbeers.jpgModern music, at least in the classical sense, covers the period from 1890 to 1930 and is a reaction against the previous Romantic movement that is generally considered to have lasted for the 95 years from 1815 to 1910.

The Romantic movement was a rebellion against the stylized rationality of the Enlightenment and sought to emphasize Nature, the past (particularly the Middle Ages), the mystic and supernatural, and Nationalism.

Modernism on the other hand celebrated the accomplishments of science and industry and encouraged experimentalism with the elements of music including tonality, rhythm, melody, and harmony.  As a result is sounded very strange and novel to audiences at the time and generated quite a bit of controversy-

Those kids today, they don’t listen to real music.  It’s nothing but noise.

The 3 composers most commonly associated with  the rise of Modernism are Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Claude Debussey.

Mahler was much more famous as a conductor than a composer and was not exactly considered prolific which is probably just as well as his works were not very popular.  He paid the bills and made his reputation on wildly successful stagings of popular Operas and Symphonies by the late Romantics, eventually ending his career in New York as the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic.

The piece I’ve chosen today, the Eighth Symphony, has kind of a weird history.  Just before it’s debut Mahler discovered his wife Alma, was having an affair with Walter Gropius.  Mahler was kind of upset and went to Sigmund Freud for analysis.  Alma agreed to stay but continued her affair with Gropius.  Still, this symphony is dedicated to her.  Mahler died the next year.

This particular performance is the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Obligatories, News, and Blogs below.

Load more