Neither One of Us Is Chinese

If this were a just world, here's what would happen to a couple of letter to the editor writers:

They would be sleeping soundly in their homes after a stressful and trying day. Suddenly a large man wearing a blue outfit with a club and a gun would enter their room pointing and shouting in a foreign language while holding his hand on his gun. Almost immediately, this guy falls down to the ground. While getting up from the ground he continues shouting at them in a foreign language. As our letter to the editor friends start to sit up in bed, the man fires electrodes into their skin and shocks them with 50,000 volts of electricity.

In a just world this would happen to these people. Unfortunately, this is not a just world.

Apple-Bourbon Sourdough Stuffing

2 sourdough baguettes cut into small pieces and toasted in a 250 oven for about .5 hours so. Well, until toasty.
On good sized red apple small cubed. I used a Fuji, but everybody's loving on the Honeycrisps these days.
1.5 to 2 cups of diced onions and celery
Minced fresh thyme and rosemary
two tablespoons butter
one tablespoon olive oil
2.5 cups apple cider
.5 cups bourbon
Large handful of fresh cut sage

Set your oven to 350. Oil and butter into a pan, followed by the apple, onion, celery and herbage. Salt, pepper. Let the veggies soften up while you get your bread in a large mixing bowl. When veggies are good to go, throw in the sage, and then pour the cider and bourbon into the pan. Let the whole thing get hot, then pour over the bread. Mix. Put into a casserole dish and bake 40 minutes or until the top is crispy.

It comes out pretty sweet, which I like with gravy, but the dish is like 90% the way to a dessert, so cranberries and nuts instead of the onion and celery? Maybe some orange rind and it would be cracking. I imagine you could up the bourbon and maybe even hit the dish with a bourbon spritz when it was done, light it up and serve it flaming.

Here's Your Beloved French

You Frenchie lovers.

Homefront

The Mothers - Kathe Kollwitz, 1921

Hey, welcome to a new series here at GBOR where I post the work of others because I am too lazy/busy to post anything original on my own. Kidding, of course, that's what I've been doing for years. In this case, I will be posting graphic work that it not my own. See the difference? I don't really have the language to talk about art and, as I have discovered when I foray into discussions of music, when I don't have the language it takes me about four seconds to say something stupid. On the other hand, if I stick to "I like this" or "For me, that it not what I like" people tend to respect that. I don't know why, maybe they just feel sorry for someone so completely defenseless. So that's pretty much what I'll be doing with these posts; just throwing up an image and saying "I like this."

As with music, my tastes in art tend to run to the dark and distorted, so we'll be seeing quite a bit of German Expressionism from the interwar period (is there any other kind?), but I imagine I'll mix in some other stuff that I like as well that it different. Maybe not the classics, but some lighter stuff. Like when I mix Mary McGregor in with my Tool.

This first image is probably my favorite art image of all time. It is so powerful, I cannot imagine anyone not being drawn to it. Why is it that I own a print of it that sits under my bed? I don't know. Maybe 'cause I'd have to look at it all the time.

I've Fallen and Can't Complete the Joke

I give the Emerald a certain amount of grief, but this is pretty good. And, for a humor piece, pretty accurate.

Oh My Freakin' God, Yes!

Awesome rant about freedom of speech on the college campuses. It's nothing you haven't read before, but it's done so well, you have to applaud. My favorite bit, set up with standard "UMass Amherst let a convicted terrorist speak on campus in the name of free speech, but me - me? - while the university also allowed me to speak, they also let me be openly heckled. That's right, the demon liberals violated my free speech rights by letting others also speak freely." You know the schitck. As I was saying, my favorite bit:

After the event, I asked several [hired security guards] why they stood by while my First Amendment rights were trampled. They smiled ruefully or shook their heads. It was plain they were ordered not to engage demonstrators.

It's possible these rental guards acted this way because they understood that they were only there to make sure no one killed any one else or did drugs, but I like to believe that they were actually just pitying Don Feder: American Thinker's very tenuous grasp of how the goddamn First Amendment works.

Salute

Virginia Slims

I read and loved Dennis Lehane's The Given Day (I can't find a link to the paperback, but I got it a Costco.) I recommend it to you all. The book is about a Boston cop that is forced to go undercover to monitor subversives while finding himself drawn to the power of his own Boston police union. I loved this passage which we all might recognize in some way, but it made me think of Ash in particular:

Mondays and Wednesdays brought another meeting of the Roxbury Letts followed by a boozy gathering at the Sowbelly Saloon. He spent his nights with them and his mornings with a curl-up-and-cry-for-your-momma hangover, nothing about the Letts being frivolous, including their drinking. Bunch of Sergeis and Borises and Josefs, with the occasional Peter or Pytor thrown in, the Letts raged through the night with vodka and slogans and wooden buckets of warm beer. Slamming the steins on scarred tables and quoting Marx, quoting Engels, quoting Lenin and Emma Goldman and screeching about the rights of the working man, all he while treating the barmaid like shit.

Read it.

50 Days? That's Almost Half a Football Season!

Dear Editor of the Register Guard,

I read in today's paper that James Matthew Dublin received a 50 day jail sentence for purchasing drugs, giving those drugs to a 15-year-old girl, raping a 15 year-old girl, and pledging to make that 15-year-old girl his regular "plaything" when he is in town. This is an outrage.

It appears that the normal sentence for these crimes would be a total of 62 months in jail, but District Attorney JoAnn Miller and Lane County Circuit Judge Doug Mitchell conspired to downgrade this sentence to a mere 50 days because Dublin, now a convicted sex offender, is a "responsible member of society" with a "clean record" who has never previously been caught drugging and sodomizing 15-year-old girls. Oh, and he's a military veteran with a Master's degree. I guess this makes it all right.

The Eugene police seem to think so, as Sgt. Kevin McCormick seems to say that the embarrassment of getting caught is punishment enough for Dublin and serves as a warning to other Johns. I have always been of the belief that grown men who would have sex with 15-year-old girls had long since abandoned their capacity for embarrassment.

The Register Guard itself completed the task of turning this tragedy into farce with the headline "Teen prostitution case ends." A 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted, but let's definitely make the headline about her and her actions. After all, a great guy made a "huge mistake" and now he will sort of not really have to pay for it.

Unfortunately this story is indicative of a culture that is extremely permissive when it comes to sexual crimes against women, where the police, the courts, and the media all go out of their way to make the male perpetrator out to be the sympathetic figure.

Damn, So Close

Listened to an NPR story this morning on the Catholic Church and health care reform.

Good news: The Catholic Church supports health care reform! Seems like they support a robust public option! The Catholic Church has been in favor of socialized medicine in the United States going back to Harry S. Truman. You know, with Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals, the Church provides around 1/6th of all the medical services in this country! And they would be totally on board with health care reform, but...

Bad news: Even though all the proposed health care bills strongly prohibit any federal funds being used for abortion, there is the remote possibility that one day, theoretically, after seismic shift in political belief on the issue, it's conceivably possible that maybe Congress could change the law, and so, the Catholic Church just cannot bring itself to support any law that might allow for the possibility that poor women might be able to exercise the same legal right that Catholic school girls enjoy every single day.

Let's let asshat Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sum it up it in the asshatiest way possible:

"We want health care reform very, very much, but we cannot do that over children's dead bodies, to put it most bluntly," he says. "There is a fundamental issue here about whether taking life should be treated the same way as supporting and healing life."

Indeed, as we all learned in catechism, Jesus prefers that thousands of people die today for lack of basic health care than to make it possible for even one fetus to be theoretically aborted maybe in the future.

Assume the Position

This is the funniest thing I have read in a long time. I literally LOLed (LLOL) this morning.

Eugene should support police

The people of Eugene should be grateful to have a dedicated police officer such as Judd Warden. Officer Warden works hard and is committed to upholding the law and keeping citizens safe. Until you have been put into a situation, like law enforcement officers deal with day to day, don’t be so critical of their actions.

Eugene police officers are sent into unknown situations routinely with very limited information. They constantly must be aware and ready for a life or death situation. Until they can prove otherwise, a high risk police scene is considered dangerous until secured. If suspects are not cooperating with police officers, then they face being restrained with what force is necessary until they cooperate.

I know that if I were visiting another country and police officers were speaking with authority in a language I did not understand, I would immediately lie face down on the ground with my arms and legs spread wide until directed otherwise. That usually is a universal signal of surrender or complying with law enforcement.

For that matter, if I were protesting in Kesey square in downtown Eugene and police officers were attempting to arrest me, I would assume the same position.

Don’t scrutinize the Eugene police for their actions, when it’s the actions of the suspects that are out of line.

It’s time Eugene citizens starting showing more support for their police officers instead of being unsupportive.

Mike Montgomery

Noti

Angry Dad

This is the kind of thing that gets me all fired up in the morning.

Exposed!

We're fucked. I suppose that everyone who reads this blog (save for the random crazy) situates themselves on the left of the political spectrum. Whether you call yourself a liberal, progressive, Marxist, Trot, or Obamafascist, I think we should all be very concerned that the right has finally caught on to our Hexagon of Power aka The Leftist Plot to Take Down America from the Inside aka Operation Slowly and Peacefully Try to Make America a Better Place.

Now, I don't claim to the the sharpest candle in the box, and I know that most of my readers know more about our Masters than I do, so I am not at all surprised that, despite my firm lefty beliefs and career in America's labor movement, I have never heard of three of the seven links in the Hexagon of Power. Tides? What the hell is Tides?

I know the Working Families Party, of course. They have been much mocked by me. If not on the blog, then certainly in the friendly confines of my chats with friends. This is the party, at least in Oregon, that would like to be a sort of more moderate version of the Democrats. Or as they like to say, they want to focus on "our" issues, not God, gays, and guns (and abortion). Not that the fine people in the Working Families Party don't actually agree with me/us on the Triple G (plus A) issues, it's just that Oregon has a lot of rednecks that might vote for "our issues" if only we just didn't spend so much time standing up for the civil rights of queers, non-Christians, and women. You know?

Don't get me started on SEIU. Nothing is as progressive as dividing the labor movement because you don't want to pay your back dues to the AFL-CIO. The less said the better.

So, there it is. We progressives can no longer hide our hidden-even-from-ourselves Hexagon of Power, as we have been exposed. I guess we have to crawl back under the rocks from whence we came, never to disturb this great nation again. Damn.

h/t NW Wingnut

Let's Not Rush Into Anything

University drafts first sustainable climate plan
By 2050, the University hopes to achieve climate neutrality, net zero emissions

Fair and Balanced

There was an article in the Register Guard about the drive to organize the faculty here at the UO. It was pretty boring. The only excitement came in the UO administration's pledge to be neutral during the campaign. A pledge they immediately undercut:

Asked to comment on the union effort, the UO Provost Jim Bean said the university “supports the rights of faculty and staff” as they decide whether to unionize and will make relevant information available.

“The ultimate decision about whether to unionize is up to each individual faculty and staff member, and the university will remain neutral in that process,” he said. “Accordingly, the university’s goal on this issue will be to merely ensure that accurate and relevant information is available to everyone.“

To be fair, so far the UO hasn't put out anti-union propaganda. When they do, I will expect them to put out pro-union propaganda to remain neutral. I will be disappointed in this expectation.

Oh yeah, the GTFF can't get a mention.