On Old long syne . . .

Should Old Acquaintance be forgot,
and never thought upon;
The flames of Love extinguished,
and fully past and gone:
Is thy sweet Heart now grown so cold,
that loving Breast of thine;
That thou canst never once
reflect On Old long syne.

 On Old long syne my Jo,
 On Old long syne,
That thou canst never once reflect,
 On Old long syne.


. . . a tip of the hat to master Robert Burns . . .

dancing in the rain . . .

birds are dinosaurs too . . .

I guess I am a dinosaur . . . I keep reading where folks have grown beyond paper . . . like here . . . but I haven't much of a techie soul it seems . . . so am I still a tree-hugger when I subscribe to the Times Sunday edition? I noticed this holiday season that much of the packaging for some gifts has evolved into sensible, and 100% recycled, plainer paper product . . . is that a way to rationalize the continued overuse of paper?

write a song . . . life may get better . . .

protecting the middle class . . .

Raising the agreed threshold from $250,000 to $400,000 (or to $1,000,000) does not qualify as "protecting the middle class" no matter how often or how loudly Republicans proclaim such nonsense . . .

discussing guns . . .

Daily Times/Gannett editorial

We are not in a war zone, but we might as well be.

A frequent factor in these violent incidents is mental illness. In many — but not all — of these incidents, the weapons used to wreak havoc were obtained legally.

This is not a proposed assault on the Second Amendment. There is, of course, no way to avoid all gun violence. But there is a clear choice we must ultimately make: What kind of society do we want to inhabit — one in which we risk our lives to watch a movie, go shopping or enter a classroom?

Or one where capable and responsible adults are free to own guns but every effort is made to weed out those who could turn violent?

ho ho ho . . .

happy holidays to all . . . and may you be blessed . . .

what's for dinner . . .

I harvested most of our meyer lemons today and was a bit overwhelmed so I decided to try to find a recipe for dinner . . . since we also have a surfeit of goat cheese (for holiday dishes) I decided to google the pair and came up with what will be tonight's dinner.

Maybe we'll add a bit of chooped green onion or a some basil from the yard to give a little color (our pasta is whole wheat so there will be some darkening of the palette) to the serving dish . . .

epistemic closure and political marginalization . . .

Andrew Sullivan (speaks for many of us) has had Enough!

This faction and its unhinged fanaticism has no place in any advanced democracy. They must be broken. But the current irony is that no one has managed to expose their extremism more clearly than their own Speaker. His career is over. As is the current Republican party. We need a new governing coalition in the House - Democrats and those few sane Republicans willing to put country before ideology. But even that may be impossible.

fred eaglesmith . . . sharing . . .

reading brooklynbadboy . . .

Over at Daily Kos, brooklynbadboy has written something well worth the read . . .

Last night, the House of Representatives was actively working on a bill that would not even be brought to the floor in the Senate and would face certain death at the president's desk. But let's think about that fact for a minute. Is this the way American government is supposed to work? Seriously? Back room negotiations between the speaker and the president? Bills that are written up on the fly and go nowhere? Bills that never even get considered for a vote for the other body? Bills that are vetoed before they are even passed?

Think about this: Guess how many vetoes President Obama has issued. The answer is two. The average for presidents is 48. FDR vetoed an average of 53 bills per year and he never once had to deal with Republican majorities. President Obama has less vetoes than Warren Harding—and he was only president for four months! It seems to me the system isn't working properly when the president isn't seeing bills he doesn't like. That isn't a sign of a healthy separation of powers or checks and balances.

long winter's night . . .

sometimes it is a john prine night . . .

christmas was invented just for me and you . . .

easy does it . . . counting the days to yuletide . . .

when you need picking up . . . but know you're okay . . .

So . . .

are we taking a holiday on Friday?

blues with an extraordinary lady . . .

My army bud and mentor Brian Voorhies was invited last evening to sit in on harmonica with a fine blues band from Syracuse led by the extraordinary Carolyn Kelly who "sings with as much power and style as anyone I've ever heard,and is such a gracious person as well." Enjoy.

merry christmas y'all . . . countin' down the days . . .

math is hard . . .

Jonathan Chait has the answer to why the Republicans aren't providing the spending cuts they desire . . .

“Where are the president’s spending cuts?” asks John Boehner. With Republicans coming to grips with their inability to stop taxes on the rich from rising, the center of the debate has turned to the expenditure side. In the short run, the two parties have run into an absurd standoff, where Republicans demand that President Obama produce an offer of higher spending cuts, and Obama replies that Republicans should say what spending cuts they want, and Republicans insist that Obama should try to guess what kind of spending cuts they would like.

Reporters are presenting this as a kind of negotiating problem, based on each side’s desire for the other to stick its neck out first. But it actually reflects a much more fundamental problem than that. Republicans think government spending is huge, but they can’t really identify ways they want to solve that problem, because government spending is not really huge. That is to say, on top of an ideological gulf between the two parties, we have an epistemological gulf. The Republican understanding of government spending is based on hazy, abstract notions that don’t match reality and can’t be translated into a workable program.

. . .

When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.

Ravi Shankar . . . 7 April 1920 – 11 December 2012

hey, A! . . . I love you . . .

recommended read . . .

From Nulwee over at Daily Kos . . . Pisugtooq ...

The Arcitc is a constantly variable dreamscape, and with its variations comes fortune or doom for the individual. These are populations that already reside in conditions that are as unpredictable and unrelenting as possible. We are throwing too much chaos in the equation.

Variations. It is very frustrating to behold months of dry conditions and then have your friends and neighbors complaining at the first, briefest rains that do little more than tide over wild biota as the streams run low, and the heat that is just not right to those with what's called 'native eye' and an affinity for the land. And it is troubling to know that whatever pleasant warmth these people feel, disproportionately larger changes are happening in the North's landscape of desire and imagination.

The Arctic is very sensitive to oil spills and other forms of pollution. Polar bears in areas affected by oil spills have been observed licking oil off their fur, resulting in the agony of renal failure. Of climate, the yearly return of something as simple as the narrow stream-like leads in the ice and a particular amount of snow is vital to the health of the population. There are so many things that climate variations can throw out of whack, and we don't know most of what those are. At the same time, the Arctic nations are witnessing the scramble for the next, great natural resource bubble.

he said / she said journalism and 2012 election . . .

The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog calls this "the cult of false equivalence" . . . somehow much more to the point than my own "balance" lines earlier . . . Dan Froomkin calls it How the Mainstream Press Bungled the Single Biggest Story of the 2012 Campaign . . .

... according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital's media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media's fear of being seen as taking sides.

Dan Froomkin's column has valuable links to Thomas Mann's and Norman Ornstein's work.

up there with the mona lisa . . . and the david too . . .

love you til I die . . .

balance . . .

too much is excess . . . not enough is unacceptable . . .

ed . . . my man . . .

fox hannity is an asshole . . . ed asner is a pisser . . .

"right to work" laws are anything but . . .

A "right to work" law does not provide work nor give workers any right other than free representation at the expense of their unionized coworkers. No state requires a worker to join a union to keep a job. In free bargaining states, people in union workplaces pay a fee to cover the direct costs of representing them. By creating such free-riders, RTW laws weaken union workers and provide employers additional power over workers. Follow the reasoning behind a 2011 briefing paper from the Economic Policy Institute:

Wages in right-to-work states are 3.2% lower than those in non-RTW states, after controlling for a full complement of individual demographic and socioeconomic variables as well as state macroeconomic indicators. Using the average wage in non-RTW states as the base ($22.11), the average full-time, full-year worker in an RTW state makes about $1,500 less annually than a similar worker in a non-RTW state.

moving on . . . casually enough . . .

made in usa . . .

They make and sell sweatshirts and tees in San Francisco . . .

omg . . .

HuffPost is reporting that Elizabeth Warren will have a seat on the banking committee!

wherefore reality . . .

It's becoming clearer - the President is overplaying his hand . . . he is attempting to pursue what he promised to pursue during the recent election . . . a clear sign to the right that he has gone overboard . . .