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awesome. Steve Nash, Baron Davis, Thierry Henry, at a charity soccer game in NYC. Would have loved to play in this, or failing that, watched.
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Girl you know from the iconic photo of the napalmed baby running on the Saigon to Phnom Penh road in 1972 (note, the Seth in comments isn’t me)
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“Of course, they still could jump in at any time, thanks to their ability to raise cash fast with a few huge checks.”
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Separating Republican fools from their money is actually godz work, so kudos to these criminals.
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Actually, and surprisingly, I follow this handbook pretty closely, without ever encountering it before. Most weblogs do, probably
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my preferred wordpress theme didn’t include tags, but this instruction worked like a charm, and was simple.
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Not many will mourn its passing, that’s for damn sure. Not me, not me, I hate the goddamn things.
Author: swanksalot
Always good to have a second user look at things
links for 2008-07-01
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The Olympics bores me pretty much anyway, but NBC is going to get a lot of bad press over this decision, I believe.
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All ten of these (well, I’ve seen eight, and parts of one other) are ripe for remakes ’cause they mostly sucked.
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Amen to that.
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” latest round of mock outrage—in a presidential race that has turned the tactic into an art form”
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Mediocre reviews, might Netflix it anyway.
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Ahh, Sony, such a foot-in-mouth company
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stupid Mac tricks are not just for kids
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Ebert, in search of filmic redemption, and movies that make one cry. Ikiru still an all-time favorite.
Intelligentisia Good to the last drop
Chicago’s own Geoff Watts gets more kudos, this time from Michaele Weissman. The best cup of coffee I’ve had, probably ever, was a double espresso poured at the Intelligentsia Cafe on Broadway. Rich, delicious, there is little that compares. I tend to purchase Intelligentsia beans exclusively these days, and am rarely disappointed.
Salon: You chose three specialty coffee entrepreneurs, Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts and Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson, to be your guides for the book. Why these three?
Michaele Weissman: After the story on office coffee, I wrote a piece on young coffee entrepreneurs and their impact on the specialty coffee industry for the New York Times. All the experts I interviewed named Peter, Geoff and Duane as the most talented, or among the most talented, young specialty guys in the industry, and the coffees they roasted topped all the “best coffee” lists, so I called them up.
One thing led to another, and I wound up traveling with Peter Giuliano and Geoff Watts to Nicaragua on yet another coffee story for the New York Times. Peter and Geoff’s passion for, knowledge of and eloquence about coffee blew me away.
The perfect cup requires a good bean
Philosophy aside, what makes the difference in coffee? Is it the bean? The roast? The brew?
It all matters. The genetic qualities of the bean. The agronomic skill of the farmer. The climate. The processing of the bean, which is multi-stepped and fraught. The way the bean is transported. The roasting. The grinding. The brewing. Each step either enhances the bean’s potential or degrades it.
Think about wine grapes or olives that are pressed to make oil. You can begin with the most exquisite cultivars, but these products, fine wine, fine olive oil, only reach their potential when each step leading toward consumption is consummated skillfully and in a timely fashion. Same with coffee.
Only coffee is even more vulnerable to human error, because of the assaults to nature that occur when consumers take their newly purchased specialty beans home.
and a good method for brewing:
What is the best home coffee-brewing device: percolator, French press or just basic Mr. Coffee?
Percolator — never.
Mr. Coffee — throw it out immediately. Most standard automated coffee pots don’t heat the water hot enough or consistently enough. The water needs to be around 205 degrees F. as it pours over the grounds. Otherwise the grounds will be over-extracted and bitter or under-extracted and tasteless.
French press — this plunger system makes very nice coffee but requires a certain deftness of hand and it produces slightly gritty coffee that some people like and others don’t.
I prefer old-fashioned, inexpensive drip pots that use brown paper filters, such as the Chemex where you pour nearly boiling water over freshly ground coffee.
Oh, and always use filtered water.
The most important piece of home equipment: A burr grinder. Those little blade grinders most people use basically beat the crap out of the coffee. Not good.
One of these days I’m getting a quality grinder. Some suggestions on that topic from a few years ago include:
“Breville BCG450XL Ikon Conical Burr Grinder” (Breville)
“Solis Crema Maestro Plus G385 Conical Burr Grinder” (Solis Crema)
or even for the wealthy:
links for 2008-06-30
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Amusements for your morning pleasures
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excellent overview of FISA as it stands today. Much shame on Obama for weaseling on this issue.
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“This is probably more than 50% of the reason why I left San Francisco.” – Never felt that strongly about bread, but
Twin Towers
Frank Rich covers the twin towers of Republican vote-winning orthodoxy: terrorism and gays, but questions how effective these issues will really be. Karl Rove is no evil genius, or the Rethuglicans would have won in 2006 as well.
Since 2002, it’s been a Beltway axiom akin to E=mc2 that Bomb in American City=G.O.P. Landslide.
That equation was the creation of Karl Rove. Among the only durable legacies of the Bush presidency are the twin fears that Mr. Rove relentlessly pushed on his client’s behalf: fear of terrorism and fear of gays. But these pillars are disintegrating too. They’re propped up mainly by political operatives like Mr. Black and their journalistic camp followers — the last Washington insiders who are still in Mr. Rove’s sway and are still refighting the last political war.
That the old Rove mojo still commands any respect is rather amazing given how blindsided he was by 2006. Two weeks before that year’s midterms, he condescendingly lectured an NPR interviewer about how he devoured “68 polls a week” — not a mere 67, mind you — and predicted unequivocally that Election Day would yield “a Republican Senate and a Republican House.” These nights you can still find Mr. Rove hawking his numbers as he peddles similar G.O.P. happy talk to credulous bloviators at Fox News.
But let’s put ourselves in Mr. Black’s shoes and try out the Rove playbook at home — though not in front of the children — by thinking the unthinkable. If a terrorist bomb did detonate in an American city before Election Day, would that automatically be to the Republican ticket’s benefit?
Not necessarily. Some might instead ask why the Bush White House didn’t replace Michael Chertoff as secretary of homeland security after a House report condemned his bungling of Katrina. The man didn’t know what was happening in the New Orleans Convention Center even when it was broadcast on national television.
Next, voters might take a hard look at the antiterrorism warriors of the McCain campaign (and of a potential McCain administration). This is the band of advisers and surrogates that surfaced to attack Mr. Obama two weeks ago for being “naïve” and “delusional” and guilty of a “Sept. 10th mind-set” after he had the gall to agree with the Supreme Court decision on Gitmo detainees. The McCain team’s track record is hardly sterling. It might make America more vulnerable to terrorist attack, not less, were it in power.
[From Op-Ed Columnist – If Terrorists Rock the Vote in 2008 – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]
Rich also discusses everyone’s favorite clowns, Rudy Giuliani, James Dobson, as well as a few other lesser clowns. Worth a read.
links for 2008-06-29
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Freepers are the brown-shirts of the 21st CE
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“You can’t talk like that about Obama – he’s the nominee of your party, not some house boy you can order around.”
More Waste, Fraud and Abuse
The Bushies obviously don’t care much about national security. They mainly care about robbing the public till.
Representative Henry Waxman recently asked a question for which we would also like an answer: “How did a company run by a 21-year-old president and a 25-year-old former masseur get a sensitive $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?” Mr. Waxman raised the issue after executives of a Miami Beach arms dealer, AEY, were indicted on fraud charges this month, accused of pawning off tens of millions of banned and decrepit Chinese cartridges on the United States Army to supply Afghan security forces.
The Pentagon’s folly with the fly-by-night trafficker is just the latest example of the Bush administration’s cynically cozy contracting practices and shockingly weak oversight that have wasted billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
Congressional investigators took testimony from a United States military attaché who accused the American ambassador in Albania of helping to cover up the Chinese ammunition’s origins. The ambassador, John Withers, denies wrongdoing. But Rep. Waxman is wisely working to map the dimensions of fraud and waste.
[From Editorial – More Waste, Fraud and Abuse – Editorial – NYTimes.com]
Shockingly weak oversight in this and many other areas. Waxman is doing excellent work documenting all the high crimes and misdemeanors, but is any penalty ever going to be imposed?
Seven Months Left
The big question is – do the Bushites successfully escalate the simmering war with Iran to invasion levels before leaving office? Let us all pray to whatever deities are appropriate that the warning signs Seymour Hersh discusses in his latest New Yorker article are not as dire as they appear.
ate last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.
[snip]
Military and civilian leaders in the Pentagon share the White House’s concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but there is disagreement about whether a military strike is the right solution. Some Pentagon officials believe, as they have let Congress and the media know, that bombing Iran is not a viable response to the nuclear-proliferation issue, and that more diplomacy is necessary.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose chairman is Admiral Mike Mullen, were “pushing back very hard” against White House pressure to undertake a military strike against Iran, the person familiar with the Finding told me. Similarly, a Pentagon consultant who is involved in the war on terror said that “at least ten senior flag and general officers, including combatant commanders”—the four-star officers who direct military operations around the world—“have weighed in on that issue.”
The most outspoken of those officers is Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was the head of U.S. Central Command, and thus in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In March, Fallon resigned under pressure, after giving a series of interviews stating his reservations about an armed attack on Iran. For example, late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
[From Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker]
Otherwise, we’re all fracked. Read the entire scary article here. Maybe impeachment proceedings would derail the nutjobs in the White House? Something, anything to distract them from starting yet another war of aggression.
Legal Shields for Bush Donors
[not a Medtronic device, but some Chinese electric acupuncture stimulation machine, Kent Young, Chinatown]
Another way the Bush Administration and its Republican cronies has screwed the nation: this time by gutting consumers rights to legal redress. Bridget Robb used a faulty Medtronic device and nearly died. Robb wanted to sue for the months of medical fees, but:
her lawyer told her that is probably not an option because of a clause the Food and Drug Administration has written into its policy on what kinds of standards medical devices like hers must meet. Because the defibrillator passed the FDA’s tests and was deemed safe, the company that made it may be immune from legal action.
Since 2005, lawsuit limits like the one protecting Medtronic and other manufacturers have been included in dozens of agency rules covering everything from drugs to car parts, shielding them from consumer suits if their products are approved by federal agencies. And it has often been done at the behest of the White House, critics say, with little input from Congress.
That has prompted a debate over whether the unprecedented increase in benefits granted to product makers is fair to consumers or even constitutional.
[From Critics blast feds’ legal shields for manufacturers — chicagotribune.com]
The same impulse that shields telecom companies from having to explain why they were allowed to break the law of the land without repercussion1 created this clause. If your widget causes harm, you should have to pay the consequence. The FDA is so corrupted that having one’s widget deemed safe might be as simple as taking an FDA official out to a strip club, or promising a salaried position when the FDA official resigns. Despicable.
Footnotes:Consumer advocates and some law professors argue that the anti-lawsuit clauses undermine consumers’ rights and make it difficult to hold businesses accountable for faulty products. And they say the federal government should not be blocking lawsuits that are permitted by individual states.
“I’ve been here since the second Reagan administration, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Michael Bird, federal affairs counsel for the National Conference of State Legislatures. “This is not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind.”
An example of this arose in 2006, when a Consumer Product Safety Commission regulation on flame-retardant mattresses limited the ability of consumers to win cases under state laws if their mattresses caught on fire.
Around that time, the FDA approved a rule on drug labeling that included a similar clause. That year, parents whose son killed himself while taking the antidepressant Paxil sued maker GlaxoSmithKline for failing to disclose that Paxil increases suicide risk. They lost their case because, the judge wrote, “federal law pre-empts plaintiffs’ instant action.”
Some complain that the Bush administration pushed these regulations through the federal agencies it controls instead of trying to move them through Congress. Passing a bill requires hearings and public debate, while an agency often can change its rules with little fanfare.
In 2007, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began including lawsuit-protection language in its rules on door locks, safety restraints and crash protection for cars. Now NHTSA may insert such a clause in proposed standards on how strong a car’s roof must be to prevent injuries from rollovers.
- FISA, if you’ve forgotten. We’ve discussed that travesty a number of times. [↩]
Tomatoes may not be source of salmonella
Wait, after all the fulminating, and gnashing of teeth, tomatoes are maybe not to blame? Geez, can we have a competent (and fully funded) FDA please?
As the number of cases in an ongoing salmonella outbreak climbed past 800 on Friday, federal health officials said they might never find the cause—and that tomatoes might not be the culprit after all.
Though fresh tomatoes have a “strong association” with many of the cases and remain a top suspect, health officials have not confirmed that the fruit carried the rare Salmonella Saintpaul strain.
Of 1,700 domestic and international tomato samples collected so far, none have tested positive, said David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods with the Food and Drug Administration.
Officials would not divulge if, or what, other produce was being seriously investigated, only saying they would “continue to keep an open mind about the possible source.”
[From Tomatoes may not be source of salmonella — chicagotribune.com]
I took the opportunity to eat heirloom tomatoes instead1 and roll my eyes at the incompetence of our national food inspectors.
Footnotes:- Of course, I eat as many heirloom tomatoes as I can every summer [↩]
links for 2008-06-28
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Buzz Bissinger still comes off as an old school dick, an asshole from the insular world of journalism-that-doesn’t-exist-anymore.
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Too bad this isn’t a default configuration, but good to do in any case. My main problem with Firefox 2 was poor color display.
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good tips for increasing viability and usefulness of site feeds, and other related topics (pinging, yadda yadda)
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art is forever, hopefully.
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worth paying attention to
July Fourth Massacre
Since Valentines Day has already passed.
Just hours after the court’s decision on Thursday, gun rights groups sued the City of Chicago, seeking to invalidate several municipal codes, including a 1982 ordinance that effectively barred handguns by forbidding their registration in the city.
Chicago officials were also steadfast in saying they believed that the court’s decision, which left open possibilities for local gun ordinances, would have little immediate effect.
“We feel we will be able to continue enforcing those ordinances very aggressively,” Jenny Hoyle, a spokeswoman for Chicago law department, said of the codes challenged by the N.R.A.
Just what every urban environment needs, more guns!
links for 2008-06-27
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ballet teacher Ed Parish, who I knew through my aunt and uncle (Megan and John), taught me a thing or two about cooking for some reason.
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“Romanian senate passed a law requiring that half the reported news be happy, positive news… It’s the only country in the world where, by force of law, half the news has to be negative”
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lots of objectional material in the 114 page bill
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I might move to SF just to vote “Yes” on this, and contribute
Shiny Happy Media
From the Department of Could Be Worse News…
BUCHAREST (AFP) – Upbeat news would have to make up half of all newscasts on all of Romania’s radio and television stations, under legislation adopted unanimously Wednesday in the senate.
“News programmes on TV and radio shall contain, in the same proportion, news with positive and negative themes,” states the legislation, which is going to President Traian Basescu for adoption.
[From Equal time for happy news on Romania TV, radio – Yahoo! News]
As Chuck Shepherd notes, the flip side of this bill is that the other half of the news is, by law, required to be negative.
links for 2008-06-26
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If you know how to listen to rar files, there’s some good old vinyl records here
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Thoughts on the new MoveOn “Alex” ad. I suppose I have to watch the ad now.