Salt City Sinner

Through a series of phone calls and e-mails, my mom and I are hatching a master plan to man a booth at (next year's?) a downtown farmer's market in the near future. Here's the basic concept: we buy fresh and local produce at Tuesday night's market, prepare in-season, locally grown fare*, and then sell said tasty fare complete with recipe at Saturday's all-day event. The idea would be not just to say "Hey, come buy my kick-ass beet pesto with crostini or maybe a tasty bowl of ratatouille" but to say all that plus "oh, and by the way, you can buy the makings at the following booths, all local, and here's the recipe!" Thus we are not just parlaying the five-plus years of intense co-cooking and culinary education she has been providing me into a lucrative booth, we are also encouraging people to try it for themselves with healthy, local food that's in-season. We still need to secure a spot, get the necessary permits and equipment, prepare a m...

While I'm on an admittedly juvenile bender of comparing politicians to cartoon characters, I think I might have found an Obama equivalent (at least, as far as I'm concerned). Keep in mind that this is not quite the equal of the howling idiocy of the right recently. Still, though, isn't there something familiar in Obama's political cowardice, his abandonment of the people (myself included) who got him elected? This summer has been quite a burden on my few remaining brain cells.

A wise man once coined the maxim de mortuis, nil nisi bonum, and we here at RedState have always made an effort to let even the death of even the most contemptible of our political foes pass without a word of criticism. - RS Insider, RedState, 11:45 AM EDT *Pause for laughter* I can’t say that I’ll miss him. He, to me, represented all that is wrong with Washington — a kingdom of nepotism and worship at the alter of failed liberal policies that get repeated ad infinitum...John Kerry is now the senior [Massachusetts] senator. God help that state. - Erick Erickson, RedState, 8:43 AM EDT ...Ted Kennedy, a man whose personal life ranged from alcoholism to debauchery to sexual harrassment to (sadly, uncharged) second-degree murder, and whose public career entailed the embrace of nearly every foolish, ruinous and cruel political idea of the past five decades... - Dan McLaughlin, RedState, 11:12 AM EDT Insofar as he was a man of any religious faith at all, he was nominally a Catholic, a faith ...

Insipid wingnut Matthew Vadum managed to excrete a particularly vile little piece at the American Spectator today, entitled " Obama's Plan to Desecrate 9/11 " (no, really, go ahead and have a look - I'll wait). In part, it reads: On the Aug. 11 call, Yearwood and other leaders kept saying repeatedly that they wanted 9/11 to be used for something "positive," "forward-leaning," and "productive," said a source with knowledge of the teleconference. The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning. And how are nihilistic liberals planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning? [Author's note: even in the midst of the lunacy coming out of the right these days, it stone cold blows my freaking mind that I typed that sentence quoting, in full and in context, a conservative who...

(I decided this deserved it's own entry)

Godwin's Law : "Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is a humorous observation coined by Mike Godwin in 1990, and which has become an Internet adage. It states: 'As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.'...There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself) than others invented later. For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically 'lost' whatever debate was in progress. This principle itself is frequently referred to as Godwin's Law. It is considered poor form to raise such a comparison arbitrarily with the motive of ending the thread." Back in my political forum-posting days, anti-Bush sentiment ran pretty hot at times. This issue came up s...

From KSL : SALT LAKE CITY -- A new poll shows many Utahns aren't sure if President Barack Obama is a native of Africa or the United States. The Dan Jones poll done for KSL-TV and the Deseret News shows one-third of those questioned either do not believe or are not sure if Pres. Obama was born on U.S. soil. However, two-thirds of those asked say they believe the president was born in Hawaii, as he claims and a birth certificate has proven. The president's place of birth has been questioned by so-called "birthers" who believe he lied about his background and therefore is not qualified to be president. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the birth certificate is online. Ladies and gentlemen of the Beehive State, we have achieved Escape Velocity. (h/t to Tom Grover)

I was briefly elated to hear that the SEIU decided that it was time to get in the game when it comes to the "Tea Party" protesters who have been attempting to disrupt August's health reform town hall meetings. Whether they are as astroturfed as it originally seemed is a matter of some dispute now, but their rage and ignorance when it comes to actually discussing what is or isn't in the health care bill (euthanasia for seniors, for example, or state-sponsored abortion) has now become obvious. What wasn't obvious, and in my mind wasn't inevitable, is the sad turn that the Tea Party movement has now taken: openly advocating violence and intimidation. Brian Beutler at TPMDC captured a screenshot of the following tweets from Scott Oskay: As Beutler reports, #iamthemob is now tearing up Twitter as a topic, and if you go there yourself you can see what the general mood of the Tea Party people is in anticipation of additional protests in St. Louis tomorrow: angry, v...

Much has already been said about the Astroturfed "popular uprisings" that are being organized by corporate fronts like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. This is nothing new, indeed Rachel Maddow puts things in context fairly well: Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy So fake outrage organized by corporate interests over the internet: okay, that's nothing particularly noteworthy necessarily. But it is a recurring flap that has caught my attention lately. These tea-baggers seem to be screaming "NO GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE!" out of one side of their mouths, while howling "DON'T TOUCH MY MEDICARE!" out of the other. What?! Indeed, no less a personage than Arthur Laffer, architect of the laughable (no pun intended) Laffer Curve , had this to say: Let's parse that again: LAFFER: "I..I mean, if you like the post office, and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wa...

H/t Rumproast: