meditations

Eight Wasted Years

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, or in this case a million. From the remarkable Seattle editorial cartoonist David Horsey

Holiday Diversions

Jodi has an amazing ability — perhaps “patience” is a better word, patience being something I understand primarily in the breech — to ‘suss out cool content on the “internets.” Here are two fun music videos I’ve indulged in regularly since she ran across them.

1. The Rentals are certainly a talented band, but there’s no place it shows better than in this live session of Last Romantic Day in a Minneapolis alternative station 89.3, the Current). If you listen to the entire interview it sounds like they drove all night and just winged it. If so then the average band needs to sleep less, because I own the studio version (bought off iTunes) and while a good song it doesn’t remotely approach the remarkable chemistry and delicate interlacing harmonies this live version shows.
2. One of those rare cases of art being both sophisticated and a guilty pleasure. The song is decent, but this video of the Scissor Sisters doing “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” is just outright head-turning, jaw-dropping, laugh-out-loud visually stunning. Have probably watched this end-to-end more than ten times and each time I catch a new twist in the one of the scenes. Simultaneously makes you laugh (a lot) and stuns you with the rich interlacing visual discordancy.

Of course, Jodi doesn’t have a monopoly on finding good on-line videos. I turned her on to Literal Take On Me.

Favorite Recipes #1: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Large chocolate chip cookies

In a bowl combine by stirring

2 sticks of melted butter (melted margarine can be substituted)
2 eggs (at least medium large)
1 tsp (or slightly more) of vanilla
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar

In a separate bowl combine:

2-3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp salt (optional, I almost never use)
1 tsp baking soda (also optional)

Slowly stir contents of ``dry bowl'' into ``wet bowl'' and add one package of
chocolate chips (butterscotch chips are also good). Up to 1/2 cup of chopped nuts as well.

Using a serving spoon or ice cream scoop, lay out dough in soft balls on two cookie sheets. You should get between 22 and 26 cookies per batch.

Place sheets in approximately 350 degree oven and cook for approximately twenty minutes. If one sheet is located on a higher rack than the other, you may want to switch the sheets after 12-15 minutes, so that the cookies on each sheet cook identically. The time of cooking is long enough that results vary from oven to oven, so be prepared to experiment with the first few batches. In the long run I find it better to adjust the temperature of the oven slightly than to change much from the 20 minute time of baking.

The key point is that they will look undone when removed, and will finish cooking from their own latent heat.

Allow cookies to cool reasonably on sheets before trying to remove them, or they will break into pieces.

Good Recipes

It likely comes from spending so much of my life in “cerebral” pursuits, but ever since graduate school I’ve enjoyed escaping into several more tangible activities, and none more than cooking.

As an oldest child with parents who were largely absent due to their complex careers, I started cooking back in high school. It was something of a chore in those days. Then again, the ‘70s weren’t exactly known for their cuisine, sigh... In any event, I began to genuinely enjoy the activity in college (particularly due to the inspiration of a good friend and talented cook himself, John Trustman. At about the same time my mother, who during my childhood seemed to consider hot dogs a food group, herself turned into an amazing cook. Mom was almost entirely what I call a “recipe cook” in that over the years she compiled detailed recipes for thousands of interesting dishes from newspapers, cookbooks — she probably had over a thousand at her death — friends and magazines.

I lean more (a lot more) towards being an “ingredients cook,” meaning someone who can throw things — particularly the sorts of fresh ingredients you can find in the PNW and at Farmer’s Markets — together without a specific plan and have it (usually) come out well . Still, over the years I’ve compiled my own extensive set of recipes, some of which I “made up” from messing with ingredients and many of which mom passed on to me (whether I wanted them or not at the time).

A lot of these recipes just live in my head, or scratched on pieces of paper in my mom’s hard to read script, so rather than let them be lost to time I’m going to make an effort to post at least one a month going forward. Enjoy!

The Permanent Republican Majority

As Dr. Phil might ask Karl Rove, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

Here’s a nice graphic (via Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium) showing just how deep a hole the Bush years have dug for the Republicans. (Rove should have it tattooed on his forehead.) On NPR the other day it was pointed out that Obama won eight of the ten most populous states, but that doesn’t really capture the magnitude. Obama won thirteen of the top fifteen, and seventeen of the top twenty-two (with Missouri still being too close to call).

It’s always dangerous to extrapolate from one election to another, but take the map below and flip Arizona (#16 in size and McCain’s home state which would have gone blue otherwise) and possibly Texas (#2 and with a rapidly growing Latino population) and the Democrats start to have the kind of “electoral lock” that the Republicans enjoyed for forty years.

Is this good for the country? Somehow I doubt it. For better or ill we have an unusual two-dominant-party political system that seems to function best when the parties are roughly competitive. Then again, after the rancor of 2000 and 2004 there’s something to be said for the peace of a landslide. I’m going to enjoy it for a bit.

Could you hurry up and get out of here?

Why oh why do we have to put up with even one more day of the utterly incompetent Bush administration? Today Henry Paulson — frequently cited as Bush’s “just right” choice for Treasury Secretary after the uninspiring tenures of Paul O’Neill and John Snow — gave a press conference that amounted to little more than an Emily Litella soliloquy. “TARP? Oh Never Mind.”

Paulson managed to make a good decision — walking away from the ill-considered and likely unworkable idea of buying up banks’ “toxic assets” with $700B of taxpayer money — into yet another confirmation that they’re just making it up as they go. The Dow is down over 400 points (almost 5%) and every YES vote in Congress must be wondering what the hell they’ve signed up for. But you have to hand it to these guys, arrogant to the end:

Although Mr. Paulson did not mention possible penalties for banks that are reluctant to open their money spigots, there was no mistaking the tone of his message, coupled as it was with a statement from several financial regulatory agencies that they “expect all banking organizations to fulfill their fundamental role in the economy as intermediaries of credit to businesses, consumers and other creditworthy borrowers.”

Now can someone please tell me why any bank in the country is going to fear punitive response from an administration that will be cast in the dustbin of history in two months?

Please Henry, take your little friends W and Dick and Condi and all the rest and GO HOME NOW. The adults have work to do.

The Turnout Advantage

Before the election, in my often contrarian way, I pointed out that high turnout on election day likely favored McCain not Obama. While politicos will be crunching the numbers for months there are several reasons to think I was right. From Chuck Todd at MSNBC’s First Read

McCain’s underperformance: Channeling John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times, we also looked at the state-by-state vote totals. And we found that Obama’s wins in many battlegrounds weren’t solely a result of Obama increasing Kerry’s totals from 2004; they were also because McCain’s performance was DOWN from Bush’s in 2004. (See our “Unbuilding 2008” section for the stats here.) In short, we saw a one-sided rise in turnout. Had McCain's turnout increased at the same rate as Obama's in many of the battleground states, we would have topped 140 million, which was the argument some in the McCain campaign were making. They needed a HUGE turnout -- and they didn’t get it.

One particularly good example Todd left out is Ohio, where Obama essentially matched the vote total Kerry got in 2004 while McCain significantly underperformed Bush and the state flipped. Bush’s ‘04 campaign in Ohio will likely be studied by political science types for a long time (and not just because of the ongoing conspiracy theory that Bush and/or Rove and/or Diebold stole it). Rove leveraged 13 anti-Gay marriage initiatives to turn out 4 million more Christian Conservatives than voted in 2000, and nowhere more effectively than in Southeast Ohio. Again, it will take a while before all the dust settles on the numbers — a quick web search will show you people are still arguing over Ohio in ‘04 — but overall it does seem like Evangelical Christians disaffection was a key variable. Imagine how bad it would have been without Palin.

Another good thing in my life

A couple weeks ago I wrote that one of the great things that’s happened to me in the last few years is buying an amazing 100 year old house in Kansas City. It is, to be sure, just a “posession” and so not all that important in the grand scheme of life. But another great thing in my life — and important in all schemes, both grand and banal — is meeting Jodi (and her wonderful boys and lovely little dog).

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And just like the house, what’s on the inside is even better.

And Missouri is yet to be determined

The chart below (via Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com) gives one good measure of the strength of Obama’s win. Take away any state where his margin was less than 5% and... he still wins (and with Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to spare.

And his EV landslide may yet get bigger. Turns out my home state of Missouri has tightened up a bit with McCain now leading by less than 5000 votes. The odds are still long for Obama — and I would hope no one is losing sleep over this — as the major source of ballots yet to be counted are 7000 provisional ones (which will largely come from Obama leaning areas). Still, I would love to see Obama at 376 EVs and have my home state go for him, preferably by one vote.

A Memento

A few weeks ago we had a 100th birthday party for our house, and the next door neighbors — wonderful people — gave us a bottle of champagne. Jodi and I decided to save it for "something special" and nothing seemed more appropriate than last Tuesday night.

It would be easy to go on for pages and pages about how much Obama's election means to us, but for now it can be boiled down to three key points:

1. Is this an amazing country or what?
2. Please please don't be another Jimmy Carter!
3. That being said, ANYONE will be an improvement over the last 8 years.