From Pine View Farm

Criswell Jon Swift predicts.

Oh, yeah. Vote for Mr. Swift. Early and often.

Here’s the lie (don’t go there if you’ve just eaten a meal).

Here’s the truth.

Life must be so easy in their parallel universe.

H/T Karen for the wingnut.

Does sweet potato pie count as a vegetable in dietary planning?

There’s a plumber parked in front of the house of one of my neighbors.

I’ve dealt with that company. It’s my first call when I need a plumber.

But life is a lot better when you don’t need a plumber.

“Abstinence education” is a fraud and a sham that promotes STDs and out-of-wedlock pregnancy and wastes public money:

Research has shown that teens who take virginity pledges are just as sexually active as those who do not.

Now a new study has found that pledgers were less likely to protect themselves from disease or pregnancy by using condoms or other birth control methods. Moreover, five years after taking the pledge, 82 percent of pledgers denied ever having done so.

The issue is not that abstinence until marriage is bad. It is, by and large, a good thing. It is also, by and large, unheard of in real life.

Relying only on counseling abstinence to kids, without also teaching them what to do if they find themselves intentionally or accidentally no longer abstinent, is foolish.

Tirade below the Fold

Fix your laptop yourself!

Via the Lip.

Waterford Wedgewood:

The loss-making company, whose famous brands include Waterford crystal, Wedgwood and Royal Doulton fine bone china, Rosenthal porcelain and Spring premium cookware, ran out of time in its attempt to raise up to £200m in fresh capital. It said this morning that Deloitte will be appointed as receiver and administrator.blockquote>

 

In the Southern Living Our Best Recipes Cookbook (1980), this is billed as “Outer Banks Cornbread.”

1/2 stick (4 tbsp) butter
1 cp cornmeal (yellow preferred)
1 tbsp flour
2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
2 tsp sugar
1 cp milk
1 egg

Turn oven to 425 Fahrenheits. Place butter in 9 x 5 or equivalent Pyrex and shove in oven.

Mix all ingredients in a mixing bowl. If you feel adventurous, add an extra egg (makes the cornbread lighter).

When butter has melted in the Pyrex, take baking pan out of oven and pour batter into pan making sure to center it in the melted butter.

Shove the whole thing back into the oven and bake until done (approx. 20 mins. or until knife comes out clean).

Variations:

Jalapeno Cornbread: Add one small can chopped jalapenos or equivalent chopped pickled jalapenos or sauted chopped fresh jalapenos. Or habaneros if you are lucky enough to have some on hand.

Cheese Cornbread: Grate up some cheese and throw it into the mix.

Oyster Cornbread: Don’t go there.

Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, Chestnut a block and a half from Front St. there on the north side of Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., 6 p.

The meters are cheaper on Front than they are on Chestnut.

Come get in touch with your inner sane person.

Make them go away.

Bushies are going around comparing the Current Federal Administrator to a Truman an Electrolux.

(Aside: I love my Electrolux. It picks up everthing. Dust. Dog hair. Pebbles. Leaves. Small rocks. Boulders. Subcompact automobiles.)

He’s what you get when you cross a Harding with a Hoover.

An expensive ersatz DustBuster. You know, a leadership vacuum that sucks, and doesn’t even do that very well.

Except that even a DustBuster–the real one, not the ersatz one–is useful in emergencies.

’nuff said:

Pennsylvania has extended their open hours for filing unemployment claims. The department’s offices are now open six days a week.

As predictable as the arrest of a Wall Street banker:

Republicans, faced with their failed policies, blame everything except their own failed policies:

Republican Party officials say they will try next month to pass a resolution accusing President Bush and congressional Republican leaders of embracing “socialism,” underscoring deep dissension within the party at the end of Mr. Bush’s administration.

I’d end this just with just the word “buffoons,” except that they have done too much harm to too many persons for too many years to be dismissed so casually.

Addendum:

Susie.

Why do the guys in those Viagra ads always have wives who look at least 20 years younger than the guys do? (Yeah, I know, it’s the casting dept., but really . . .)

Regular readers know that I make no apologies for my faith. It just is.

Faith is the evidence of things unseen, not the denial of things seen.

And, in the full light of that, I have to say that this is gross beyond words. Totally took the edge off my M*A*S*H rerun.

Yeah, I know that Christmas was over a week ago, but this is just too well-said to pass up (emphasis added). Tom Noyes:

I had a great Christmas weekend, unspoiled by the failure of several retail workers to wish me Merry Christmas. But then, I don’t expect others to practice my religion on my behalf. I don’t expect others to show up for worship at my church, or gather with my family, or give to others if I can’t be bothered. The exercise of my beliefs is up to me.

That’s about one-third of the post. The remaining two-thirds are just as good.

Over at El Reg.

(Warning: Questionable Content. Then, again, it is El Reg.)

Praised with faint damns: she’s no Margaret Thatcher (not that being one is any kind of accomplishment). Michael Stickings in the Guardian:

There is no denying that Palin is plucky and driven, and perhaps likeable to some, but she is also, as she proved throughout the campaign, arrogant, ignorant, un-self-conscious and seemingly unaware of much of the world around her. Thatcher was never a genius, but at least she had a keen and perceptive mind . . . and possessed a genuine curiosity about the world. She went to Oxford, lest we forget, where she studied chemistry before embarking on an almost three-decades-long climb up the Conservative ranks before finally reaching the very top in 1979.

Palin, for her part, spent a few years meandering around post-secondary institutions in Hawaii, Idaho and Alaska before settling in as a local sportscaster, cozying up to the extremist Alaskan Independence party and entering local politics, first in Wasilla and then squeaking past the corrupt leadership of the state Republican party in Juneau, where she was discovered by Kristol et al, anointed by James Dobson and the Christian right and dumped onto the national ticket to arouse the lethargic, anti-McCain base.

Thatcher was not sublime, despite the best efforts of the right-wing publicity machine to portray her as a British Reagan (also not sublime–Will Bunch q. v.), but Palin is, indeed, ridicuous.

Pay close attention. Watch as she fades away . . . .

AARP USA:

In 1993, Bandel took the option of leaving the Army without retirement and never thought he would be called back to action.

“Here he’s 50 years old, getting his AARP card, and here he’s being redeployed with all these 18-year-olds,” said Paul’s wife, Linda Bandel.

“I can understand, say, ‘Here, we have this assignment for you stateside. Go do your training,’” said Paul Bandel. “But, ‘Hey, here’s a gun, go back to the desert.’”

If I were slogging through the desert with a full pack when I was 18, I sure wouldn’t have wanted to depend on the 50-year-old me trying to keep up.

But YMMV.

All together now, sing the Bushie theme song.

Via Raw Story.

. . . other than to bonuses down the tubes?

Bill Shein reviews talking points for banks designed to address that question. A sample:

GOOD: “Working closely with Congress, Treasury, and the Fed, we will help unfreeze credit markets and ensure that American business has the resources it needs.”

BAD: “Our massive bonuses from the last few years — based on illusory, phony profits from fictional mortgage-backed securities — are ours to keep. Isn’t that awesome? Don’t you wish you worked for a huge bank and not the Associated Press? Send me your résumé and I’ll see what I can do.”

Even if I did not already dislike Hampton Inns, the violence their recent commercial does to the Beatles’ “A Little Help from My Friends” would be enough to keep me from ever staying at one again.

As I have pointed out before, when conservative policies fail, conservatives blame everything except, well, their policies. From Paul Krugman:

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

There’s more at the link.

Conservatism is a failed and bankrupt ideology deserving the dustbin of history.

No doubt its adherents will continue to attempt to torment us with it.

Truth is their weakness, self-delusion is their strength.

Addendum:

Not directly related, but what Digby said.

Josh Marshall announces the winners of this year’s Golden Dukies (the video is worth watching to see the acceptance speech right there at the very end):

Read the judges’ comments here.

Sign the petition.

Via Eschaton.

Vanity Fair chronicles what went wrong. And how.

er, And How!

Via the Booman.

Uncle Jay reviews the news of 2008:

H/T Nancy for the link.

(With apologies to the Firesign Theatre.)

I have returned from my Secure Undisclosed Destination. Shortly after I got there, the local intranet crashed, so I was unable to irritate persons in public.

But I’m back.

This came through in my Quotes of the Day email a few days ago (emphasis added):

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- Charles Babbage, 1792 - 1871

I figured I could do something with it, but what it was was not readily apparent.

So I decided to let it sit on the back burner of my brainpan for a while.

Then my friend Nancy nailed it. Put in the wrong numbers, and you get the bailout:

Re the quote: “. . .if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”

That sounds like the Sec’y of the Treasury & Congress wrestling with the housing crisis!! {How in hell did it happen & whom shall we give the bailout $s to??}