jeudi 22 janvier 2009
Caramel Banana Cake
So I have a bit of a thing for banana cake.But what's not to love? Moist cake, the creamy fragrance of banana and surprise crunchy nuggets of walnut. Bliss.This version takes banana cake to a new level of decadence with the addition of caramel icing. The icing isn't sickeningly sweet, but adds a slight toffee sweetness that matches well with the banana and walnut.With a healthy dollop of sour
"NO! NO! NO! IT'S ALL ABOUT MEEEEEEE!!!"
The Thing That Wouldn't Leave:
Sarah Palin: Determined to give comedy writers enough material to get them through the Obama drought.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is going on the offensive against news organizations and bloggers she says are perpetuating malicious gossip about her and her children. But political observers say the former Republican vice presidential candidate can't have it both ways: trotting out the children to showcase her family values, then trying to shield them from scrutiny.
Palin's criticism also raises questions about her motivations because she has said she is open to a presidential run in 2012.
"I think she's positioning herself. She's attacking the media as a way to generate support among a base she hopes will support her," said Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of communications at American University in Washington and an expert on the presidency.
Palin shied away from interviews during the campaign, although her children often accompanied her on her travels, including her oldest daughter, Bristol, who was pregnant at the time.
But in recent weeks, she has personally reached out to media outlets such as People magazine and The Associated Press to complain about information she claimed is wrong.
She slammed reports that 18-year-old Bristol Palin and the teen's fiance are high school dropouts. The governor insists the two are not dropouts because they enrolled in correspondence courses.
Sarah Palin: Determined to give comedy writers enough material to get them through the Obama drought.
It has started already
Digby: How the Assholocracy of the Washington press is already tired of its new toy and is bound and determined to lay the groundwork for a Grand Republican Restoration in 2012.
Oh, and while you're at it? Go read this post about how the Drudge spin about how much more the Obama inauguration cost than that of George W. Bush did eight years ago conveniently leaves the cost of security out of the latter.
Oh, and while you're at it? Go read this post about how the Drudge spin about how much more the Obama inauguration cost than that of George W. Bush did eight years ago conveniently leaves the cost of security out of the latter.
Here in the US, they'd get a bonus for effective cost-cutting
Corporate accountability in China:
Two men were sentenced to death on Thursday and the chairwoman of a dairy conglomerate received a life sentence for their roles in the contaminated-milk scandal that killed six children and sickened nearly 300,000, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency.
Tian Wenhua, the former head of Sanlu, the milk company at the center of the scandal, was sentenced to life in prison. All the deaths in the milk scandal so far have been linked to her company.
The initial verdicts Thursday were among the first in the trial of 21 defendants implicated in the scandal over milk products and infant formula contaminated with melamine. The industrial chemical, normally used in the production of fertilizer and plastics, was added to milk to falsely raise protein levels in tests.
Sorry, wingnuts...you'll have to go back to obsessing about his citizenship
Barack Obama, being NOT the clueless boob that his predecessor was, obviously heard the rumblings from the farthest reaches of wingnuttia (the ranks of which now include Faux Noise's Chris Wallace) that Obama is somehow not president because John Roberts either intentionally or unintentionally (I lean towards the Theory of Passive Aggressiveness, myself) flubbed the oath of office, and decided to swat those insignificant little flies out of the way:
Of course the authors of this piece, in the name of "fair and balanced" (which in hack journalism still means "utter horseshit presented as being just as valid as truth"), talk about how BOTH men flubbed the oath on Tuesday, rather than watching the video again, which clearly shows Barack Obama graciously being unwilling to make John Roberts look like a fool on worldwide television. But now this particular foofarah is over with, and now the wingnuts can go back to insisting that Barack Obama is really an Indonesian citizen.
President Obama took the oath of office -- again -- on Wednesday, out of what a White House lawyer described as "an abundance of caution."
"We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself. And out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time," said White House Counsel Greg Craig in a statement issued early Wednesday night.
Of course the authors of this piece, in the name of "fair and balanced" (which in hack journalism still means "utter horseshit presented as being just as valid as truth"), talk about how BOTH men flubbed the oath on Tuesday, rather than watching the video again, which clearly shows Barack Obama graciously being unwilling to make John Roberts look like a fool on worldwide television. But now this particular foofarah is over with, and now the wingnuts can go back to insisting that Barack Obama is really an Indonesian citizen.
mercredi 21 janvier 2009
It's worse than we ever imagined
I'll post the video as soon as it's available in the morning, for those who wanted to catch up on Lost before the season premiere and didn't catch former NSA agent and current whistleblower Russell Tice spilling the beans on Countdown about just how extensive the Bush Administration's mass surveillance of Americans' electronic activities was, and presumably still is.
What Tice is revealing, and he is expected to be on the show again tomorrow, shows a clear and pervasive violation of the Constitution -- yet another block put on the pile of Bush Administration corruption and lawbreaking, making it more difficult every day for the Democrats to "just look forward."
UPDATE: Watch:
What Tice is revealing, and he is expected to be on the show again tomorrow, shows a clear and pervasive violation of the Constitution -- yet another block put on the pile of Bush Administration corruption and lawbreaking, making it more difficult every day for the Democrats to "just look forward."
UPDATE: Watch:
The Lord's Prayer is not "nonsectarian"
...unless you believe that "nonsectarian" means "acceptable for all Christians" and that no one who isn't Christian counts.
I am old enough to remember having to say the Lord's Prayer in school. Yes, recitation of this prayer was required, right along with the pledge of allegiance and the singing of the national anthem. Every day. I never really thought much about it. In the early 1960's, when I was in early elementary school, you didn't. It was part of the natural order of things. I'm sure I wasn't all that much different from most kids in that I didn't think much about the words. I never knew what "trespasses" were, though for that matter, I never could figure out why the Republic was for "widget stands" either.
For many people my age, the Lord's Prayer has always seemed kind of innocuous. Perhaps that's why it's so often said at public events where a prayer is required. It's a way to say a prayer that isn't overtly Christian because it doesn't mention Jesus.
But the Lord's Prayer is most definitely a Christian Prayer:
And there's more here.
I don't know about younger people who went to school after organized prayer was taken out of the schools, but I'm sure I'm not the only person in my age group who never particularly thought of this prayer as Christian, indeed heavily associated with Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, although it very clearly is. And perhaps that's why Rick Warren was able to get away with reciting it in its entirety in his benediction at yesterday's inaugural. And perhaps that's why I was more pissed off by him bringing Jesus into the inauguration of a man who is President of all Americans, not just Christians:
One could say that Rick Warren was simply invoking the name of someone who is important to him, were it not for the documented fact of him invoking Hitler's brownshirts as a model to follow in spreading his particular brand of Christianity around. In case you haven't seen it, I'll post it again:
Now granted, this makes it sound like the podium was named Adolf Hitler and that Jesus was a dangerous fanatic, but if that isn't a call to arms to spread Christianity by any means necessary, even at the point of a gun or a sword, I don't know what is. And that is why there is no finessing what Rick Warren did yesterday in hijacking an American President for Jesus.
I know that Barack Obama is a Christian. He is entitled to his beliefs, and no one is trying to take them from him. I even understand why he thought reaching out to Rick Warren was a gesture of conciliation to the evangelical right. It's in his nature to do these things. But with all the ministers in this country doing good work, that this snake oil salesman was chosen, and that there are people trying to spin what he did as somehow inclusive, is preposterous. I find myself thinking of Rev. Marge Munger of the United Methodist Church of Lake Orion. I'm not going to go into details, but I will always be grateful to this minister whom I've never met for the help she gave a friend of mine nearly a decade ago during a personal crisis. And there are Christians in the best sense of the word like her all over this country.
But the inauguration is now in the past, and there's nothing to be gained by continuing to harp on it. But I think it's important to recognize that while Barack Obama was gracious enough to include ALL Americans in his speech yesterday, the man he chose to open his inauguration made very clear who's boss in HIS world. And Warren's other actions have made clear that he intends to be the boss in OURS.
I am old enough to remember having to say the Lord's Prayer in school. Yes, recitation of this prayer was required, right along with the pledge of allegiance and the singing of the national anthem. Every day. I never really thought much about it. In the early 1960's, when I was in early elementary school, you didn't. It was part of the natural order of things. I'm sure I wasn't all that much different from most kids in that I didn't think much about the words. I never knew what "trespasses" were, though for that matter, I never could figure out why the Republic was for "widget stands" either.
For many people my age, the Lord's Prayer has always seemed kind of innocuous. Perhaps that's why it's so often said at public events where a prayer is required. It's a way to say a prayer that isn't overtly Christian because it doesn't mention Jesus.
But the Lord's Prayer is most definitely a Christian Prayer:
The Lord's Prayer, also known as the Our Father or Pater noster, is probably the best-known prayer in Christianity. On Easter Sunday 2007 it was estimated that 2 billion Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians read, recited, or sang the short prayer in hundreds of languages in houses of worship of all shapes and sizes.[1] Although many theological differences and various modes and manners of worship divide Christians, according to Fuller Seminary professor Clayton Schmit "there is a sense of solidarity in knowing that Christians around the globe are praying together…, and these words always unite us."[1]
Two versions of it occur in the New Testament, one in the Gospel of Matthew 6:9–13 as part of the discourse on ostentation, a section of the Sermon on the Mount, and the other in the Gospel of Luke 11:2–4.
The prayer's absence from the Gospel of Mark (cf. the Prayer for forgiveness of 11:25–26), taken together with its presence in both Luke and Matthew, has caused scholars who accept the Q hypothesis (as opposed to Augustinian hypothesis) to conclude that it is a quotation from the Q document, especially because of the context in Luke's presentation of the prayer.
The context of the prayer in Matthew is as part of a discourse deploring people who pray simply for the purpose of being seen to pray. Matthew describes Jesus as instructing people to pray after the manner of this prayer. Taking into account the prayer's structure, flow of subject matter and emphases, one interpretation of the Lord's Prayer is as a guideline on how to pray rather than something to be learned and repeated by rote. There are other interpretations suggesting that the prayer was intended as a specific prayer to be used. The New Testament reports Jesus and the disciples praying on several occasions; but as it never describes them actually using this prayer, it is uncertain how important it was originally viewed as being.
And there's more here.
I don't know about younger people who went to school after organized prayer was taken out of the schools, but I'm sure I'm not the only person in my age group who never particularly thought of this prayer as Christian, indeed heavily associated with Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, although it very clearly is. And perhaps that's why Rick Warren was able to get away with reciting it in its entirety in his benediction at yesterday's inaugural. And perhaps that's why I was more pissed off by him bringing Jesus into the inauguration of a man who is President of all Americans, not just Christians:
I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus (hay-SOOS), who taught us to pray, Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
One could say that Rick Warren was simply invoking the name of someone who is important to him, were it not for the documented fact of him invoking Hitler's brownshirts as a model to follow in spreading his particular brand of Christianity around. In case you haven't seen it, I'll post it again:
"What is the vision for the next 25 years? I'll tell you what it is. It is the global expansion of the kingdom of God. It is the total mobilization of this church.
[snip]
"In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich, Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil. And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed a sign with their bodies that said, 'Hitler, we are yours.' And they nearly took the world.
[snip]
When I hear these kinds of stories, I think 'What would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ would say, 'Jesus, we are yours'?"
Now granted, this makes it sound like the podium was named Adolf Hitler and that Jesus was a dangerous fanatic, but if that isn't a call to arms to spread Christianity by any means necessary, even at the point of a gun or a sword, I don't know what is. And that is why there is no finessing what Rick Warren did yesterday in hijacking an American President for Jesus.
I know that Barack Obama is a Christian. He is entitled to his beliefs, and no one is trying to take them from him. I even understand why he thought reaching out to Rick Warren was a gesture of conciliation to the evangelical right. It's in his nature to do these things. But with all the ministers in this country doing good work, that this snake oil salesman was chosen, and that there are people trying to spin what he did as somehow inclusive, is preposterous. I find myself thinking of Rev. Marge Munger of the United Methodist Church of Lake Orion. I'm not going to go into details, but I will always be grateful to this minister whom I've never met for the help she gave a friend of mine nearly a decade ago during a personal crisis. And there are Christians in the best sense of the word like her all over this country.
But the inauguration is now in the past, and there's nothing to be gained by continuing to harp on it. But I think it's important to recognize that while Barack Obama was gracious enough to include ALL Americans in his speech yesterday, the man he chose to open his inauguration made very clear who's boss in HIS world. And Warren's other actions have made clear that he intends to be the boss in OURS.
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