Snatched babies from their Mother’s breast and threw them into concentration camps (another “exceptional” United States idea).
Feel like a Nazi now? You should.
Oct 29 2020
Snatched babies from their Mother’s breast and threw them into concentration camps (another “exceptional” United States idea).
Feel like a Nazi now? You should.
Oct 29 2020
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 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) 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.
‘Black Tuesday’ on Wall St. as the Great Depression begins; Osama bin Laden admits ordering the Sept. 11th attacks; Suez crisis heats up Mideast; McKinley assassin executed; John Glenn returns to space.
Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step – it is an old business procedure.
Oct 28 2020
No one knows where of when carrot cake originated and there are as many stories as there are recipes for this favorite moist cake. It may have originated with carrot pudding, in the Middles Ages when sugar and sweeteners were hard to find or too expensive. Carrots have been long been used as as sweetener. The World Carrot Museum says that a recipe for carrot pudding called T’Khabis al-jazar (Carrots) was found in a 10th century Arabian cookbook. George Washing was served a carrot tea cake at Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan on the occasion of British Evacuation Day on November 25, 1783. You can find more about the history of Carrot Cake and recipes at the Carrot Museum website here.
My favorite Carrot Cake recipe is from the Betty Crocker Cookbook that was given to me over 50 years ago by my aunt who couldn’t cook to save her life. It calls for the cake to be baked in a 9″ x 13″ sheet pan but I have baked in two 9″ round cake pans, two 8″ loaf pans and a bundt pan. I even have baked it in a specialty pumpkin shaped cupcake pan and a large round pumpkin shaped sheet pan. You just have to adjust cooking times. All methods call for a 350°F preheated oven.
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups grated raw carrots (medium grate)
4 large eggs
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup canola or vegetable oil
8 ounces crushed pineapple, undrained
3 cups powdered sugar
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter (1 stick) softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
1. Heat the oven to 350°F. Spray bottom of 13×9-inch pan with nonstick cooking spray. In a large bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Add grated carrots and toss to coat. Set aside.
2. In a mixing bowl, using medium speed of electric mixer, beat eggs, sugar and vanilla. Add oil and pineapple, mix well. In batches on low speed, add carrot mixture, mix until combined. Pour into your pan. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
3. To make the cream cheese frosting, run a dry whisk or fork through the powdered sugar to break up any lumps and set aside. In a medium mixing bowl, using electric mixer at medium speed, beat cream cheese, butter and vanilla until very smooth. Turn the mixer on low speed and add in the powdered sugar in batches.
4. Cool cake completely, about 1 hour. Frost with the cream cheese frosting.
To ensure even distribution, coat shredded carrots in flour before stirring into the batter.
After the cake is generously frosting, dust with cinnamon or sprinkle with chopped pecans for a showstopping final look. If you’re really creative set aside some frosting in two small bowls; color one orange and the other greed using Wilton’s food coloring that can be found in stores like Michael’s or Bed Bath and Beyond. Using a pastry back and a round tip large #12. Instruction on how to do it can be found here at the Wilton site. It’s really very simple.
Oct 28 2020
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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 “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Jeffrey Frankel: Joe Biden looks like a safe pair of hands for the US economy
Contrary to popular belief, Democratic presidents have been better for the economy than Republicans
In a few days, Americans will choose a president. Opinion polling suggests that voters favour former Vice-President Joe Biden when it comes to social policy, foreign policy, the environment and managing the pandemic, not to mention personal character. But until recently, some polls indicated that on the economy, voters favoured Donald Trump.
The general impression that the US economy does better under Republicans than Democrats is long-standing. But the facts do not support it.
In the 16 complete presidential terms since the second world war, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, annual GDP growth averaged 4.3% under Democratic presidents, versus 2.5% under Republicans. Trump’s presidency has pulled down the Republican score further. In fact, average annual growth during his term to date has actually been negative.
Cecile Richards: Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment is a wake-up call for female voters
It’s not only Roe v Wade on the line. Parental leave, affordable childcare, equal pay, the Affordable Care Act – all are under threat
The pandemic and its collateral economic crisis have illustrated like never before that women are the backbone of America. Before Covid-19, women made up more than half the workforce, nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, and the majority of caregivers. One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential. Right now, millions of women are pulling off an impossible balancing act: working while trying to keep their families safe and healthy during a terrifying time. Others have lost jobs, have had their wages or hours cut, and more than 800,000 women have left the workforce.
This crisis is disproportionately burdening women, especially women of color. They need immediate relief, but instead of solving this crisis, Donald Trump and Senate Republicans have focused on one thing: pushing through a supreme court nominee who wants to take away healthcare for millions and strip away rights women have had for decades. And they’re doing it against the will of the majority of Americans, who believe that voters should decide who makes the next appointment to the court.
Heather Digby Parton: Progressives and power: If Trump is defeated, the real fight begins
With Amy Coney Barrett, the right won a huge victory. It will take focused, long-term activist power to defeat them
After seeing the spectacle this week of a Supreme Court justice installed just before an election for the express purpose of tilting the result in Donald Trump’s favor — and watching Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s evil threat of “what goes around comes around” take shape — it’s clear that the political battles we’ve been fighting for these past few years won’t be over once the election is decided even if Trump is defeated. The fight is just going to continue on new terrain. [..]
The question, of course, is what happens to all that if they win. You’ll recall that there was a ton of grassroots energy in the center left organized around Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008, which was promptly squelched by a combination of top-down direction from the administration and a foolish belief among many of the faithful that their work was done and they could just trust Obama. That’s the natural consequence of a “movement” that’s based upon a charismatic leader.
That’s not going to be an issue this time. Joe Biden is not a charismatic leader, and while people are enthusiastic about ousting the worst president in American history, they are also primed for change in a substantive way. Trump and the Republicans have exposed the rot in our system in a way nothing else could have done.
Amanda Marcotte: Justice Barrett: Culmination of the right’s five-year misogynist temper tantrum
Five long years from “blood coming out of her wherever” to Justice Barrett — but women can finally defeat Trump
It was five years and two months ago that candidate Donald Trump became livid that a mere woman — Fox News host Megyn Kelly — had the temerity to talk back to him, and responded with a vile sexist dig. Kelly is no friend to feminists, but for once in her miserable career as a right-wing troll, she had done the right thing: Standing up to Trump’s sexism. [..]
Now, five-plus years later, Trump and the Republicans are still at it, swearing in Amy Coney Barrett as the newest associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Barrett isn’t there because she’s especially qualified or intelligent. No, the entire purpose of her nomination in the last days of the campaign is to get in one more giant fuck-you to feminists before the women’s vote throws Trump out on his butt.
It’s all part of the same project: The right is using Trump’s presidency as a weapon to punish women for speaking out against sexism, and to put women in their place.
Of course picking Barrett over any other cookie-cutter right-wing ideologues was about trolling feminists. The “joke” is that they’ve replaced a legendary feminist — the recently departed Ruth Bader Ginsburg — with a woman who believes husbands are the “heads” of their wives and who refused to agree with the 1965 Supreme Court decision that legalized birth control.
Lynn Stuart Parramore: Trump’s ’60 Minutes’ interview underscores America’s ongoing manterrupter problem
Lesley Stahl, like women everywhere, knows that gaining a seat at the table doesn’t mean much if you can’t be heard over the din
The entitled male is hard to shut up. Recent displays of infuriating “manterrupting” illustrate how tough it can be to manage the problem. CBS News journalist Lesley Stahl, in her “60 Minutes” interview Sunday with President Donald Trump, was interrupted, talked over, instructed and lectured about how to speak. Despite — or perhaps because of — her unrattled persistence, Trump finally cut her off completely and walked out of the interview early.
As every woman who has sat seething through a meeting knows, “manterrupting” is real. Social science studies suggest that men interrupt women 33 percent more than they interrupt other men.
Researchers who study this offer three basic categories of response tactics: aggressive, polite and a combination of the two. Effective strategies, ranging from “verbal chicken” to “pause and resume” and the “question sneak attack,” can up women’s chances of having their say among verbally hostile men.
Oct 28 2020
Not who you think.
Trump Is Giving Up
By Ross Douthat, The New York Times
Oct. 20, 2020
Trump has really acted like a Black Sox ballplayer trying to throw the World Series. There are two major issues for voters in this election: the pandemic and the economy. Trump’s numbers on handling the virus are lousy, but his numbers on handling the economy are still pretty good, presumably thanks to both the memory of where the unemployment rate stood before the coronavirus hit and the fact that the flood of Covid-19 relief spending kept people’s disposable income up.
This context suggested an obvious fall campaign strategy: Push more relief money into the economy, try to ostentatiously take the pandemic seriously and promise the country that mask-wearing and relief dollars are a bridge to a vaccine and normalcy in 2021.
Instead Trump has ended up with the opposite approach. He mostly ignored the negotiations over relief money for months, engaging only at a point where he had become so politically weak that both Republican deficit hawks (or the born-again variety, at least) and Democratic free-spenders assume he’ll soon be gone. And meanwhile he’s let himself be drawn ever deeper — especially since his own encounter with the disease — into the libertarian style of Covid-19 contrarianism, which argues that we’re overtesting, overreacting and probably close to herd immunity anyway.
…
As politics, meanwhile, even more than the mixed messaging on Biden and the missed opportunities on relief spending, the retreat to corona-minimizing is a case study in how the Trump of 2020 has ceded his biggest general-election advantage from 2016 — his relative distance from the ideological rigidities of the anti-government right — and locked himself into a small box with flatterers and cranks.From these follies the God of surprises might yet deliver him. But every decision of his own lately has been a choice for political defeat.
Oct 28 2020
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 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) 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 Statue of Liberty is dedicated in New York; Benito Mussolini takes control of the Italian government; The Cuban Missile Crisis ends; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and actress Julia Roberts are born.
In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.
Oct 27 2020
“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
I think about Canada a lot. I could take a canoe from Lubec to Campobello, it’s only about 20 yards and an easy paddle at slack tide.
The ultimate goal would be to gain French Citizenship and end up in Tahiti.
Oct 27 2020
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media 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 “Pondering the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: Trump Tells Coronavirus, ‘I Surrender’
The president plays the climate-denial playbook on a pandemic.
As we head into the final stretch of the election, Covid-19 is on a roll.
Coronavirus cases keep hitting records — among other things, five aides to Vice President Mike Pence have tested positive. Hospitalizations, which lag behind cases, are soaring. And deaths, which lag even further behind, are starting to rise, too. Put it this way: Just between now and Election Day, we’re likely to lose almost twice as many Americans to Covid-19 as died on 9/11.
So how is the Trump administration responding? Actually doing anything about the pandemic is apparently off the table. What we’re getting instead is a multilevel public relations strategy: We’re doing a great job. Anyway, there’s nothing anyone can do. And besides, doctors are faking the numbers so they can make more money.
These are, of course, inconsistent stories, and the smearing of health care workers who put their lives on the line to save others is just vile. But none of this should surprise us.
This is, after all, Donald Trump. Also, we’ve seen this combination of denial, declared helplessness and conspiracy theorizing before: Trump and company are following the same strategy on Covid-19 that the right has long followed on climate change.
Ruth Marcus: Amy Coney Barrett joins a Supreme Court that’s largely out of step with the national consensus
In adding a sixth decidedly conservative justice, the court is slipping further out of sync with the national consensus.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett joins a court dangerously out of sync with the country. The nation is roughly evenly divided politically and has been for decades. Yet the court — now even more so with Barrett’s arrival — is dominated not only by Republican-appointed justices but also by muscularly conservative ones. [,,]
The court serves an important counter-majoritarian role in preserving constitutional protections; we don’t want it to slavishly follow the election returns. But neither is it good for the court to be sharply out of step with the national consensus. That’s bad for the institution and bad for the country.
The court’s makeup is determined by the electoral landscape (control of the presidency and the Senate). But its rulings — on gerrymandering, on campaign finance, on voting rights — help define the contours of that landscape.
As Lederman put it, “there’s a strong — and not coincidental — symbiosis between the Republicans’ long-term, successful efforts to shape the Court and the ability of the GOP to secure success in the political arena beyond what its popular support would naturally produce: the entrenchments are mutually reinforcing.”
Mutually reinforcing, and distinctly unhealthy.
Eugene Robinson: The Trump administration’s covid-19 message: You’re on your own. Try not to die.
The White House’s surrender to the pandemic is the most urgent reason to vote Trump out.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic.”
There you have it from President Trump’s chief of staff, announcement of failure, incompetence and cold indifference. You’re on your own, America. Try not to die.
When Mark Meadows said those words on Sunday morning to CNN’s Jake Tapper, he was stating the obvious: The Trump administration never mounted more than a halfhearted attempt to limit the spread of covid-19, and now has simply given up. Daily reporting of new cases has reached an all-time high, yet Trump flies around the country holding superspreader campaign rallies and claiming that we are somehow “rounding the turn” on the virus. What is that even supposed to mean? What could he possibly be talking about, except a turn for the worse?
There are many, many reasons Americans should vote Trump out of the White House, but perhaps the most urgent is his refusal — or perhaps his inability — to face the reality of covid-19. This election is literally a choice between life and death.
Amanda Marcotte: With one week left, Trump team rolls out new campaign message: Let the coronavirus win
Over 225,000 are dead, but Trump is still committed to his March theory that it’s all a hoax aimed at hurting him
In the last week before Election Day, Donald Trump and his team have decided the best possible message on the coronavirus pandemic is the same one Trump wanted back in the spring.
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Bob Woodward in a taped conversation on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.” [..]
Now, with more than 225,000 people dead and 8.6 million infected, all trends make clear that the situation is getting worse, as the U.S. sets new records in transmission rates, dwarfing earlier peaks in the spring and summer. The virus has torn through the White House, infecting Trump and his wife and his son and dozens of others close to the president, including five aides to Vice President Pence whose diagnoses were announced over the weekend.
Despite this, Trump is still committed to the same lie he rolled out in February: The panic is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats and the media to hurt him.
Dean Obeidallah: Obama gives us one of the best reasons to dump Trump
There are just so many reasons why millions want to defeat Donald Trump this election. And now former President Barack Obama, who was back on the campaign trail last week in support of his former Vice President Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, has served up one more.
In his speeches, Obama highlighted an array of issues that merit dumping Trump, including Trump’s incompetent response to the deadly pandemic and the questions about his business empire. Obama used humor to drive the point home: “Listen, can you imagine, if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for reelection? You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that?” Obama quipped, “They would have called me ‘Beijing Barry,'” eliciting a wave of car horns beeping in approval at his drive-in rally.
But the moment that deeply resonated with me — and I’m betting with so many others — was when the former President told the crowd that with Biden in the White House, “It won’t be so exhausting.” With Biden and Harris at the helm, said Obama, “you’re not going to have to think about the crazy things they said every day.”
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