Tag: food

It will not surprise you to know that I thought the President’s speech yesterday was spot on, especially in its focus on putting people back to work modernizing our national infrastructure.  Try to find time to watch “A Better Bargain for the Middle Class” . . . and the subsidiary speeches he will be making to flesh out each theme: jobs, education, housing, health care, retirement security and ladders of opportunity.  Let us know what you think.

#

Rachel had two clips Tuesday night your Republican uncle needs to watch.

The first was on . . .

VOTER SUPPRESSION

Watch what the G.O.P. is doing in North Carolina.  You will find it hard to believe:

. . . [They] are ramming through with basically no debate [a bill that] would [put] an end to same-day voter registration which over 100,000 people used in the state in last November’s election . . . get rid of state support for voter registration drives . . . ban local election officials from extending polling times for an hour if, for example, there’s really long lines still waiting outside . . . lop off a full week of early voting . . . get rid of a program in high schools that reaches out to students who are nearing the age of voting to show them how to be model citizens.  . . . We can’t have students registering to vote!  We can’t have that! . . . It all goes away under the bill senate Republicans advanced this afternoon.

The bill would also require i.d. you never had to show before.  An estimated 300,000 registered legal voters in North Carolina will not have that kind of documentation.

In an ideal Republican world, it would be just white males with property who voted — as the Founders intended — because so much of the Democratic vote comes from people of color, from women, and from the young and poor who rent rather than own.  Well, we’re not going back to 1789.  But in virtually every Republican-controlled state — especially now that the Supreme Court has neutered the much-debated and reauthorized Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the G.O.P. (or S.O.P. as I have come to think of today’s incarnation) is working to keep people from voting.  What does your Republican uncle think of that?

The second clip was on something else important to Republicans . . .

HEALTH CARE

As aggressively as Republicans are working to make it harder to vote, they are working to block access to affordable health care.  Not, certainly, because they want to hurt the sick.  Their motives, rather,  are (1) to keep Democrats from being seen as having improved tens of millions of lives; (2) to repeal a program that adds 3.8% to the tax on investment income above $250,000, because it is the top 1% — and especially the top 1% of the top 1% — to whom this really matters and to whom the S.O.P. is most fully beholden.

To repeat from an earlier column, because I don’t think most people yet get this:

At its core, here’s what Obamacare does: it taxes the best off so virtually everyone can get better health care coverage.

A terrible idea, from the perspective of the S.O.P.  But not a bad idea if you might someday have a preexisting condition or run into the limits of a lifetime cap — or lack health insurance altogether.  Or if you like the idea of free preventive care; or the idea of caps on how much of your premium your insurer can keep for itself.

Karen Geronymo:  “Working 2-3 part time jobs (in healthcare!) for the past 15 years, I have maintained my own health insurance with a $6000-per-person deductible.  Despite the fact that I am healthy (thankfully) and take no medicine on a regular basis, my insurance premium (with the same company for the past 5 years) has increased an average of $150/month (yearly), costing me approximately $10,000 per year.  That’s crazy!   I am looking for some relief as dropping my insurance is not an option that I can afford.  I do laugh when I hear someone say that Obamacare is the slippery slope to socialized medicine…considering that most people will be happy to begin ‘receiving’ Medicare when they are of age to do so.  Additionally, when someone shows up at the teaching hospital I work in, they receive care regardless of ability to pay….who, but the taxpayer, is paying for that?”

Watch this clip.  Rachel shows how Republican members of Congress will shortly be working to alarm people, especially seniors, about Obamacare over their summer break — she’s gotten hold of the town-hall playbook they’ll be using.

And yet, Rachel says . . .

. . . you know, there is a pilot project that has been run in our country on how to implement health reform. The reform law that everybody calls Obamacare is essentially the same thing as the Romneycare health reform that Mitt Romney signed into law and implemented in Massachusetts where I live.  Very successful.  Very popular.  Very effective.

She goes on to show how the Romney team sold Massachusetts residents on Romneycare — using pro athletes, among others, to sell the plan — and how Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has used his office to threaten pro athletes not to do the same for Obamacare.

But what I love about the clip is Rachel’s interview with Senator Al Franken.  What a magnificent senator he has turned out to be (will Senator Jon Stewart be next?  Governor Amy Poehler?  I’d vote for Tina Fey for anything).  Watch, and feel good about Obamacare.

GRAPPLES – CORRECTION!

Adam’s Apples:  “Grapples are not ingeniously ‘cross-bred to taste like a grape.’  They are regular apples infused with grape flavor.  Akin to these.  Apple breeders are honest hard-working folk who grow great apples that require no additives. The world of apples offers an amazing range of tastes and textures, no chemistry required.  Make your way to an orchard or greenmarket this fall to try the real thing.”

THAT 1987 INTERVIEW

Bill S.:  “I watched the Werner Erhard tape with great interest. It was amusing to hear you lament how 30 year Treasury rates were only 9% after hitting 15% five years back. I liked your suggesting keeping assets in cash just weeks before the Black Monday crash. (I also liked hearing you joke that folks believing you are holding back on the big stock tip that will make them rich. I kept thinking of BOREF in that segment and how if that stock ever hits its perceived potential you will never be accused of keeping that one to yourself.)”

PLUMOGRANATES

Brooks Hilliard:  “Was at Trader Joe’s yesterday afternoon and bought some of these.  You are absolutely right (‘I just had my first plumogranate!  Oh . . . joy!‘) . . . they’re GREAT!!!”

☞ And lest you think I recommend my hybrids lightly — that I’m some kind of fruit-novelty pushover — let me say I have tried the “grapple” — those apples cross-bred to taste like a grape — and they’re just weird.  If grapple were a stock, I’d be short.

BALANCE

Cat:  “So, let me start by saying I’m a lesbian and a Democrat. And glad to be both!  However, one thing that kills me about the the political debate is how extreme both sides can be.  The whole ‘polarized’ thing we hear about all the time.  Your impassioned post yesterday paints a clear and vivid picture that seems impossible to refute.  But I’d be willing to bet there’s some equally passionate Republican out there painting his or her own equally vivid picture.  I have a, well, suspicion of anything so strongly, clearly, unimpeachably, rigidly one-sided.  Kinda a knee-jerk ‘what isn’t he telling me’ reaction.  Cherry picking examples, which everyone does all the time (even avowed unbiased sources), is inherently unbalanced.  We do it to prove a point, make a case, counterbalance the other guy, etc.   That’s fair enough.  But my fairness streak (a mile wide and 2 miles deep), leads me to challenge you:  write a similar, passionate, well thought out defense of the other guys.  You needn’t publish it, or even share it, but the exercise might be insightful, even for an experienced hand like yourself.   I suppose balance and reason (oh, and civilized discourse and compromise)  don’t get us very far these days, and certainly the other guys stack every deck they can get their paws on, but still …   I don’t mean to say that you are unbalanced or unreasonable or that your discourse is uncivilized.  Only to acknowledge that voices that don’t take the extreme ‘flatten the fly with a sledge hammer’ approach tend to get drowned out.   Does this make any sense?”

☞ It makes a lot of sense.  I’m  a big fan of fairness streaks and hope my own surfaces from time to time.  I guess the other side of the general case you’re making – with which I agree – is the case against “false equivalence.”  The notion that if someone makes an impassioned case for racial cleansing, or for denying lesbians the right to civil marriage, or for the earth’s being – quite obviously – flat . . . and someone else makes an impassioned refutation, then the truth presumably lies someplace in between.

To me, the positions and tactics of the new Republican Party – the S.O.P., as I see it – are extreme and needlessly hurtful to our collective prosperity.  I don’t see “the other side” to voter suppression.  Or to remaining the only industrialized country without universal health care.  Or to not putting people eager for work to work doing things like repairing tens of thousands of bridges that will become orders of magnitude more expensive to repair once they collapse.  Or to not reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.  Or to not closing the gun show loophole.  Or to paying banks to make student loans when they take none of the risk of extending those loans.

I do often know the other side’s argument – e.g., that without photo ID, there will be significant voter fraud, or that we can’t afford to put people to work modernizing our infrastructure, or that allowing gays to marry poses a great threat — but it’s hard for me to give much weight to the impassioned Republicans making these arguments because I no more buy them than I believe that the earth is flat.  Study after study – and the failed concerted efforts of the Bush Administration to find more than a statistically insignificant number of examples – and common sense – all tell me that people do not go to the polls in any significant numbers impersonating others.  And I believe we can’t afford not to put people to work modernizing our infrastructure – that by blocking this, I believe, the Republicans are adding to our economic woes and long-term deficits.  And I believe the advances we’ve made toward LGBT equality enrich, rather than threaten, our national commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And on and on.

So I love your email and fairness streak.  And I take your point generally.  And I hope that when I make an unfair, extremist argument, you will call me out.

But first . . .

I just had my first plumogranate!  Oh . . . joy!

And now . . .

This has suddenly shown up on the Internet — I have no idea why — and so . . . in the spirit of Nick at Nite . . . I offer you an hour and a half of my thoughts from September, 1987, a month or so before the Crash of 1987 . . . an interview conducted by Werner Erhard for participants who had paid I think $600 each to be part of this televised lecture series.

Watching it now, I naturally focus mainly on my hair.  And whether I’ll ever brush the clump that seems to have fallen down back up into place.  (I got distracted about half way through watching, so actually don’t know how it turns out.  If I said anything particularly regrettable in the second half, chalk it up to youthful exuberance.)  About eighteen minutes in, I note that Ford Motor stock is up 10-fold over the past few years and farmland down by about two-thirds, so a thirty-fold shift in the relative value of a share of Ford versus and acre of soil so — I said — maybe it was time to sell Ford and buy farmland.  (I also suggested that stocks in general seemed a bit toppy.)  With hindsight, you could have done worse.

But much of it is just the platitudes for which you have all paid me so well over the years (thank you very much), and which may be as true today as they were in Aesop’s and Ben Franklin’s day.

Anyway, it being summertime — when even “60 Minutes” is in re-runs — this quarter-century old re-run seemed as good an excuse as any for me to go for a swim.  Watch?

COFFEE TOFFEE

Just when you had despaired that The Frieze would never again have their Coffee Toffee Crunch — not to say that the Lychee sorbet, almost always in stock, is anything short of life-changing, either, but it’s not Coffee Toffee Crunch — you return one last time, and there, at last . . . they still don’t have it (bet you didn’t see that cone coming) and so, largely drained of your will to live, you half-heartedly try a taste of the Banana Vanilla Wafer . . . nah . . . and then a taste of the Grapenuts ‘N’ Raisin (really?) . . . and — I did not see this coming — your life is changed forever.  THIS IS THE BEST ICE CREAM EVER!  Grapenuts ‘N’ Raisins.  Proof that’s it’s darkest before the dawn.

That’s item number one, for South Floridians.  (Unless they start offering franchises to expand beyond their sole Miami Beach location, in which case you should quit your job, move someplace sunny, buy a pair of flip-flops, and open one.)

Item number two is for New Yorkers:

COFFEE AND A GOAT

My friend Victor is friends with Anthony and Aurora who are yet to  buy a goat, which I find odd, because they operate their Fair Folks Cafe under the corporate name Fair Folks & a Goat.  I want to see the goat.  Even a fake goat.  Were he tied up outside the place with a dish of water under a sign like, PLEASE DON’T FEED THE GOAT — BUT TRY OUR ESPRESSO, I don’t see how folks could resist.  Still, even goatless they seem to be doing fine, offering all the coffee you can drink with a $25/month membership. Here‘s how the place looks (thank you, New York Times) and here‘s what they’re saying over at Yelp, in case you’re a New Yorker who wants a satellite home-base in Greenwich Village.

Item number three is for anyone with an appreciation of the truly daft:

COFFEE AND A SMOKE

When it comes to smoking, Democrats are all about trying to discourage it (smoking is the country’s leading cause of preventable death), Republicans are all about helping the tobacco industry as best they can.  Fair enough.  Well, it now seems, according to investigative work performed by right-leaning groups, that “top Senate Democrats who have pushed policies that fund anti-tobacco measures have money invested in pharmaceutical companies that manufacture tobacco cessation products such as Nicorette.”

The concern is that this is a form of insider trading.  If people people buy Nicorette gum as a result of Senate Democrats’ anti-smoking efforts, Senators with knowledge of this (whether they are pro- or anti-tobacco, but why quibble) will have information that could lead them (or anyone else, but, again, why quibble) to profit.

Over the past four years as he repeatedly pressed for federal funding to stop smoking, [Iowa Democratic Senator Tom] Harkin has owned between $50,001 and $100,000 in stock in health products maker Johnson & Johnson, which makes the popular anti-smoking product Nicorette. . . . He’s hardly alone. A half-dozen senators who have been among the most vocal advocates for federal funding for smoking cessation — including Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, and Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois — have direct or indirect investments in companies that make anti-tobacco products.

Shocking, no?  J&J makes a profit of about $10 billion a year from the sale of these 100 brands.  If whatever the Senate does somehow doubles its profit from Nicorette, J&J’s earnings might rise by 1%.  That could send J&J shares themselves up 1%.  Which could augment Tom Harken’s net worth, if he has $75,000 worth of J&J stock, by $750.  According to this, the Senator’s net worth in 2010 was $16 million, thus probably more like  $20 million today, so that $750 would hike it by 0.00375 percent.  Which is nearly four-thousandths of a percent.

Our friends on the right are not concerned by climate change. But this?  This is headline-worthy.

MONEY

I know.  I owe you responses from last week.

I met Mike Wallace only once, at a National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association dinner years ago (he was already in his eighties but playing tennis every day and far too young in his thinking  to decline our invitation) and like most Americans, I felt I had come to know him over the years, one “60 Minutes” segment at a time, as he championed truth, freedom, and the American way.   Give the man a cape: until his death at 93 Saturday, he was fearlessly fighting for us.

He was also the subject of this 1981 New Yorker cartoon that I liked so much I bought the original.  He had a framed copy in his office; for 31 years I have had the framed original in mine.  Titled MAN WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE, by Charley Barsotti, it depicts an old-fashioned mid-level manager — frumpy, balding, mustache — sitting behind an old-fashioned desk at what has to be an-old fashioned firm.  I think he’s the comptroller.  Over the intercom, his secretary is saying:  “Mike Wallace to see yo Sir.”

“Terrific,” says the man with a clear conscience, “send him right in!”

BACON

Barry:  “Of course you’re aware of the wonderful Bacon Maple Bar offered by Voodoo Doughnut here in Oregon. Not to mention the Bacon Maple Ale, which is a collaboration between Voodoo Doughnut and Rogue Brewery, also based in Oregon. Voodoo’s entire menu is worth a look. And the shops are just as cool as you’d expect them to be, as they are dedicated to Keeping Oregon Weird.”

Tommy Thomason:  “Dilbert weighs in: bacon and financial planning.”

IT GETS BETTER

It’s not easy being one of the estimated 1,800 LGBT students at Brigham Young University.  But even that is changing.  Says one student in this moving video:  “I decided to come out to my friends.  And they’ve been supportive!  Even here at B.Y.U.”  Says another:  “I don’t go to school with a bunch of hateful people.  Which is what I thought before — I thought I was surrounded by homophobic people that would hate me if they knew.”

There really are two different worlds, in part divided by the generations.  My friend the openly gay Columbia crew coach had one of his oarsman show up a few weeks ago, distraught.  He had just told his dad he was gay and his dad had given him a choice: enter a Catholic “reparative therapy” program to change his sexual orientation, and he would continue to pay his tuition; or not, and he would have nothing further to do with his son.  They have not spoken since.

Coach Parker called the financial aid office, got the young man an emergency appointment, Columbia arranged for a full work-study financial aid package — which means no time for crew, but beats dropping out — and I’m going to go out on a limb to guess that most Americans, in 2012, albeit not all, would be rooting for this kid and think his father is a dick.  Or, to be less flip, think his father is sincere in his fears or revulsion or embarrassment — but misguided.)

IT GETS BIGGER

Type on this page too large or small?  See the aAA at top right to match your world view.