"Dreams from my Father" -- a Review

This morning Neal Boortz said in plain language that barring some unforeseen circumstance he expected Barack Obama to be our next president. Dick Morris was a guest on his program and agreed. I didn't pay attention to the rest because I was busy. But I listen to Boortz as a way of keeping my finger on one of many political pulses.

He also mentioned Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, which will now be widely read as people look into who this man is, where he came from and how he thinks. I was naive enough to imagine that I could go to my favorite site dealing with out of print books and order a copy for my collection at a reasonable price. Well I can (they start as low as seven bucks or so plus shipping) but first editions start in the five hundred dollar range and go up. One place is offering a signed first edition for nearly three thousand dollars. File those little factoids away for some party small talk.

It didn't take long to find a review from someone who has been inspired to read the book. In this case inspired is not a misused word. Read this by Sarah Aswell.

As Super Tuesday approaches and we try to separate empty promises and strategic moves from real, actual thoughts and goals, I couldn’t have read a better book than Dreams From My Father.

Here’s why: even though I didn’t realize it when I picked it up, Obama wrote this book over ten years ago, when he was fresh out of law school and long before he was worrying about what people wanted to hear. It is, I think, a great way to “get to know” the candidate outside of the media, the hype, and the confusion that comes along with a presidential bid.

The book follows Barack through his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his community work in Chicago, and his journey to meet his father’s family in Kenya. Along the way, he has to come to terms with the death of his absent father, being raised primarily by his white grandparents (you don’t hear about this much), and learning the ropes of being a community organizer in inner city Chicago.

The thing that amazed me most about the book was watching Obama 1) work through problems and 2) analyze both sides on an issue. These two traits came through in two different ways in the book: in personal situations (how he comes to understand and accept his troubled father and his Kenyan ancestry) and in political situations (how he comes to understand the long-standing and deep problems facing the urban poor).

It would have been very, very easy to have bad guys in this book. Evil high-up government officials who prevent community centers and jobs from reaching the impoverished in Chicago. His adulterous and alcoholic father who seemed to abandon his loved ones at every turn. But Barack thinks his way through these simple binary good/bad categories and goes far beyond them. He is constantly striving to 1) understand situations from all points of view and 2) think his way through to a solution. He has an uncanny ability to step away from the emotions of a problem and then systematically chip away at it.

He understands very well that you have to know why things are as they are before you develop a plan about how to fix it.
The best example of this might be his work in Chicago. Although it’s unheard of for anyone to criticize the black ministers who organize the urban black communities in Chicago, Obama quickly began to understand the huge problems that come with church-based activism in black communities. Churches would rarely work together to solve larger problems and ministers would rarely do more than preach (which, to be fair, is their job). The action that should have followed a sermon simply wasn’t organized. Because many black leaders were ministers, many black leaders were also, essentially, just talk. What followed was three years of work in which Obama not only made major, innovative steps in Chicago but in which he also learned how to inspire both individuals and small groups into action.

I was also impressed by what Barack Obama didn’t leave out of the book. He made a lot of mistakes, he deals with a lot of anger, and he doesn’t succeed at everything. Still, you can not only see him learning from his mistakes, but immediately applying those lessons to his next challenge.

The book, as a more general read, was good as well. The writing wasn’t stellar (something Obama is quick to point out in the forward to the reprint) but it was still much better than one might expect from someone who isn’t primarily a writer. Getting to see the inner struggle of a biracial person growing up in 60s and 70s America was also really fascinating.

There are a lot of great candidates in the upcoming election, and I feel positive about more than two of them. But especially after reading this book, my doubts about Obama’s lack of experience are gone. He has something that trumps years in Washington: a stellar judgment and an almost eerie ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes and understand both sides of an issue. More than that, his ability to inspire individuals to action is something that America could truly benefit from. You can even see it in his campaign: ordinary people stepping up and acting, even if they’ve never been involved in politics before.

I know that after reading his book, I donated to a political campaign for the first time in my life. He’s nothing less than inspiring.

Follow up...

I bought the book and was impressed with the candor with which Obama tells his story. He comes across to me as someone who has nothing to hide and makes no pretense about who he is or is not. His style of thinking, discussion and inquiry seems not to have changed from years ago, even though his ideas and opinions continue to mature. I'm writing this follow-up in August, half a year after posting this woman's review, and find myself to be an enthusiastic Obama supporter.

Happy Valentines Day

Nina Simone is one of my vavorite singers.

When you get through here, go to last year's post.

Happy Valentines Day!

Hilzoy on the Clinton style

Up close and personal. This is one valentine that Hillary Clinton would be pleased not to get.

Hilzoy starts by admitting to a lukewarm but positive default attitude about Mrs. Clinton. But the last few days reveal [yet another] dark underside to her management style. Solis Doyle, HRC's former campaign manager, is put under a microscope showing her most conspicuous trait, that she was "the boss from hell."

Valuing loyalty over competence is a terrible trait in a manager. But so are other things that come through in this piece: putting off decisions that obviously need to be made, for instance, and letting personnel problems fester rather than resolving them, and having subordinates who "protect" you from bad news that you really need to know. But the one that particularly struck me -- which is why I quoted Greene at such length -- was this: In 2006, Solis Doyle first burned through an extraordinary amount of money in 2006 -- the NYT story Greene quotes says that the campaign spent "$27,000 for valet parking, paid as much as $800 in a single month in credit card interest and — above all — paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to an assortment of consultants and aides." She then demonstrably lied about the campaign's financial situation in ways that angered Clinton's base of donors. Various Clinton insiders, including (according to Greene) Terry McAuliffe and Maggie Williams -- tried to get her fired. And yet Clinton hired her to manage her Presidential campaign.

Rewarding incompetent people because they are loyal is bad. But rewarding incompetent people who lie to the public and to your donors is worse. Lying to the public is both wrong and stupid: it brings your name into disrepute, and that's not good for anyone, least of all a politician. Lying to your donors is also wrong and stupid: wrong, since you presumably ought to feel some loyalty towards the people who have donated to your campaign, and stupid because they are the last people on earth whose trust you should abuse. Solis Doyle's performance in 2006 should have meant that she was not hired for any position of responsibility ever again. Instead, Hillary Clinton made her campaign manager.

The comment thread is in this case instructive. Smart, thoughtful community of readers over there, but this is literally a sad commentary.

Clinton and Obama...Teacher and Apprentice

Mark Ambinder tells the story of Obama's entry into the presidential race in The Atlantic. He didn't make the decision until January last year. Before that he had presidential ambitions, but he appears to have come to the Senate with a sense of humility and disciplined patience, prepared to wait his turn, presumably after the Clinton power machine had come and gone.

That plan, if it ever got articulated, had to be put aside.

What caused Obama to suddenly decide to run? The conventional explanation is that Democrats implored him to. “It was the closest thing to a draft that I’ve seen in my years of participating in politics,” Axelrod told me.

The story reads like a novella.

In the spring of 2006, the presidency was clearly on Obama’s mind when he told his friend Martha Minow that his wife would have to give her assent to a run. “Michelle was the boss, and he said he couldn’t do it unless she agreed,” Minow told me. At the time, one of Michelle Obama’s friends told me that she worried her husband would be targeted by white supremacists and wind up a martyr like Robert F. Kennedy. She also worried that his advisers were pushing him too hard to consider a run and, knowing her husband’s healthy ego, that he wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to think seriously about it.

When Obama went on tour in the fall of 2006 to promote his second book, The Audacity of Hope, some of his friends encouraged him to be open about his presidential ruminations. The result was a sustained wave of national publicity. Time put Obama on the cover with the headline “Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President.” The public responded, too. An appearance in Seattle sold out in two hours, leaving scalpers to profit from Obama’s popularity. Appearing on Meet the Press in October, when Tim Russert played a clip from the January 2006 show in which Obama had said he wouldn’t run, Obama simply responded that he had begun to think seriously about it.

On November 8, the day after Democrats took control of Congress, Obama, his wife, and his brain trust crowded into a fourth-floor conference room in the brick building in Chicago’s Loop that houses Axelrod’s consulting firm. “I want you to show me how you’re going to do this,” Michelle Obama said, according to an aide. “You need to show me that this is not going to be a bullshit fly-by-night campaign.” A month later, at an all-day meeting in Chicago billed as “the Summit,” the would-be campaign manager, David Plouffe, returned with a budget, an outline of early strategy, and a list of tasks to be accomplished before any campaign could begin. The conversation in the second meeting “had an existential quality to it,” according to a participant. “Why do you want to do this? What does this mean for us? What’s our motivation? What will get us through the hard times?”

Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett

I am slowly making my way through Krista Tippett's book, Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters--and How to Talk About It. Her weekly radio program on NPR is one of the journalistic treasures of our time as she interviews a range of high-profile figures from all across a spectrum of what she calls "public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas." If I've heard that phrase once I've heard it a hundred times, but it sums up her genre well enough. The topic is broad but each segment is deep.

The following is an excerpt from the book Speaking of Faith
by Krista Tippett
Published by Penguin; January 2008;$14.00US/$16.50CAN; 978-0-14-311318-8Copyright © 2007 Krista Tippett

In a small, captivating essay about Genesis, Creation and Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described biblical stories as "ancient, magical pictures that we need alongside modern technical, conceptual pictures if we are to become wise." In England, I began to see in these ancient, magical pictures a response to the deepest real-world confusions of my years in Berlin. I was aching with spiritual and moral questions I could scarcely articulate. I was reading mystical texts and Buddhist texts and they thrilled me. But this Bible on the bookshelf, long unopened, was the foundational text of my spiritual homeland and mother tongue.

The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolutes, as its champions sometimes imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with God in the darkness as well as the light of human experience. Like all sacred texts, it employs multiple forms of language to convey truth: poetry, narrative, legend, parable, echoing imagery, wordplay, prophecy, metaphor, didactics, wisdom saying. In the Christianity of the modern West, we've largely left the vivid storytelling of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, in Sunday school. We've consigned it to the world of childhood figuratively and literally. And in our time a superficial Christian rendering of these biblical texts underpins false dichotomies that plague our public life -- chasms we've set up between sacred text and truth, between idealized views of the way human beings should behave and the complex reality of the way they do.

But when I came back to read the biblical text after many years away, I began to love the Hebrew Bible fiercely for the fact that it tells life like it is. It has no fairy-tale heroes, only flawed, flamboyant human beings as prone to confusion as to righteousness. Like us millennia later, they had trouble reconciling the political and the private, the sexual and the societal. King David -- the forefather by whom the New Testament theologians traced Jesus' lineage -- was, as the text tells it, brilliant and charismatic and passionate. He held God's favor. David was at once a great leader and also an adulterer. He was a military hero, and yet he sent the husband of his mistress to the front lines to die. These facts about him stand together and in tension with an air of sadness in the biblical narrative. They are neither reconciled nor do they cancel each other out.

Or consider Lot, who is famous in Sunday school around the world for heeding God's command to leave the sinful Sodomites without looking back, while his weaker-willed wife gave in to nostalgia and was turned to a pillar salt. We've internalized the unforgivable sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as sexual, and contemporary religious voices routinely equate private sexual sin with the moral decline of our nation. But in the Bible itself, that equation is inferred rather than stated. It states that not a single righteous person could be found among the Sodomites, and this was the reason for their destruction. There is one scene in which Sodomite men attempt to lure other men from Lot's household out into the street with them, presumably for sexual purposes. Our hero Lot, offers his daughters instead. But in a later biblical reference and analysis of the nature of the Sodomites' sin -- one of very few -- the prophet Ezekiel says that they were condemned because they had "pride, surfeit of food, prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy." What if, with reference to Ezekiel, we began to understand the depravity of "sodomy" to be about a nation's neglect of its poor?

One of my favorite characters in the Bible is also one of the most human and flawed. Jacob, the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, is a quintessential late bloomer, conniver, and egoist. The Bible calls him "clay footed" and yet, through foibles and false starts, God's beloved. He tricks his brother out of his inheritance. He later falls in with another trickster, his future father-in-law, who cons him into marrying the sister of the woman he loves. He works slavishly, marries both sisters finally, and becomes a successful man. In midlife, full of both pride and regret, Jacob heads home to face his demons and past mistakes. He makes his way across the land in which he has spent his adulthood back to the land of his childhood. His sins were great and his absence has been long, and he is terrified of what will greet him on the other side.

Jacob crosses the Jabbuk river. And in a moment cathartic for the sweep of monotheistic spiritual history to follow, he there encounters a mysterious man whom he afterward recognizes as a messenger of God or God himself. The "man" wrestles with Jacob, even putting his hip socket out of joint. Jacob wrestles back. "I will not let you go," he tells this stranger, who turns out to be the very source of his life, "until you bless me." At daybreak, he receives his blessing and a new name. Jacob becomes Israel -- a word that suggests one who strives, or wrestles, with God.

This is a story beloved by many who have struggled with the gap between real life and religious ideas. True biblical faith expands and deepens as it incorporates mistakes, questions, catastrophes, and changes of mind and heart. Like Moses who "quarreled" with God, Jacob embodies the tense interplay of devotion and struggle at the heart of Jewish tradition. I've come to find in Jacob's story a model grappling honestly and productively with sacred text itself. It is true of the entire Bible -- and perhaps of any sacred text for its believers -- that if you sit with these bare-bones stories, pick over them, retell them, they begin to grow -- take on nuance and possibility -- before your eyes. One layer of meaning is lifted and another reveals itself. You sense that the text would respond to every conceivable question. In other words, if I stick with these texts -- if I wrestle with them and insist on a blessing -- a blessing will come. The only limitation is my time, my powers of imaginative concentration, and my capacity to listen to the interpretations of others.

Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from SPEAKING OF FAITH by Krista Tippett. Copyright © Krista Tippett, 2008

Unlike her radio programs, Krista Tippett's book is in some way autobiographical. Her interviews are more than a catalogue of topical subjects. They are steps she takes in a personal journey, a lifelong trip that for the inquiring mind will never end. It is really true that the journey is often more important than the destination.

It was her providential good fortune to be able to meet and interview Elie Weisel years ago when she was working for the New York Times in Germany, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think it was a tipping point in her life. She tells that story and a lot more as she reads from her book to a live audience, broadcast as one of her programs, Remembering Forward which is available on line.

Rich Karlgaard on Childless Talk Show Hosts

Rich Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes Magazine.
He makes an observation worth noting about some talk-show hosts.
Not all of them, mind you. But enough to make the point.

No kids.

...Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham and the other yakkers stand to gain if Obama or Clinton becomes president. Where do you think these political pundits' motives lie? Are they for America or themselves?

Let me make another point--sure to be controversial. What do Limbaugh, Coulter and Ingraham have in common besides their out-of-proportion attacks on McCain?

They are all childless.

Call me biased, but when one has children, one quickly learns the arts of compromise and patience. One thinks about the future in a different way. If one is going to be a successful parent, one must grow beyond adolescent narcissism and rigidity and become, in a word, an adult.

Many people can become an adult without having or raising children. Mother Teresa could. I admit that I couldn't have. I think most people are more like me than Mother Teresa.

The thrice-married and -divorced Limbaugh has no children. It's all about Rush, you see.

The never-married Ingraham and Coulter have no children either. Ingraham is essentially the same person now as she was in Dartmouth when, according to Wikipedia, she "once attended meetings of a gay student organization for the purpose of publicly outing them in the newspaper." Ingraham secretly taped a meeting of the Gay Students Association and published the transcript, identifying students by name and calling them "sodomites." That is hateful. Ten years later, Ingraham "tempered" her views on gays and moved on to other targets.

Coulter, in a speech last week, said, "I'm not comparing McCain to Hitler...Hitler had a coherent tax policy."

This is not how responsible grownups talk. But, then, Coulter is not a responsible grownup.

Jim Culleny -- "In My Museum of Busted Love"

Responding to Elatia Harris' Valentine's Day challenge, Jim Culleny penned this extraordinarily original poem. It's been a while since I was calm enough, patient enough and free enough to ingest a poem. This one took me three times through to appreciate.

Poetry is like good wine or live music. To get the full enjoyment you have to take it easy and pay attention. Italic type spoils the effect, so I am using a different color. If you're color-blind, just know that what follows is a quote...

In My Museum of Busted Love
Jim Culleny

1. Ring

In my museum of busted love
would first be the engagement
ring of inertia

the sign urged upon greenhorns
when the young pulse of biology
meets the traditional need to rein it in
and set it to the pace of Eros
in civilized society:

the circus maximus of fidelity,
the merry-go-round of oughts
of lust and love--the diamond ring I one day reclaimed
with an ardent,
whew!

Display that once dazzling rock
beside the big one called Hope
in the museum’s Hall of Almost,
and watch it diminish
in the glare of possibility
to the luminescence
of dull inevitability.

2. Car

And of course there would be my tiny TR3,
a courtship vehicle of desperate love:

its bucket seat of impossible sex,
its inconvenient gear shift,
its shock absorbers announcing
the illicit choreography within,
bouncing its comical, dead serious,
life-altering profundity.

Put it and all its dents upon a dais
at an car show under hot spots
next to a Porsche.

Adorn it with a fender babe
in plenty of flesh and lurid pout
and let it tell its fun-filled
soon sad but torrid tale.

3. Insight

And last(but way more than least)
at the gallery’s back door
near the broom closet
in a glass case unlit and forlorn,
passed by countless tenderfeet
hip and horny, tattooed, pierced,
bristling with ipods, iphones,
and lost in Myspace ,
seething with tech knowledge
but clueless as lovers
suffering the old implacable
urge of hormones in love
that doomed unwired Romeo
and foolishly unconscious Juliet
to live and die their misconceptions
in the pages of a play-write

… there upon a simple bronze base,
ignored but brilliant in its banality
sits the sweet fruit of my own

I-It
turf fight:

the Bubered wink of battered,
bruised, and tardy

I-Thou
insight

Lots more at the link.
Great recreational reading for Valentines Day. Or any day, for that matter.

Laila El-Haddad at Columbia University

Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian journalist living in America whose blog, Raising Yousuf, Unplugged: diary of a Palestinian mother, I have been following for some time [long post; scroll down third item from the end]. Having lived in Gaza she knows the subject and her journalistic credentials are excellent. Some of my small group of readers may live or travel to the New York area and are able to hear her in person at Columbia Thursday where she will be participating in a panel discussion on Gaza.

"GAZA: The Biggest Prison in the World?"
A Panel Discussion

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 14th 5:30-7:30pm
Location: 702 Hamilton, Columbia University

The Gaza Strip has been consistently described as the biggest prison in the world, with approximately 1.5 million people living in 139 square miles enclosed entirely within security barriers, where all movement in and out of Gaza, whether of people or of essential goods, can be cut off at any time byblockades.

Please join the Arab Student Association for a panel discussion that will explore the ongoing crisis on the ground, bringing together academic, journalistic and humanitarian perspectives.

Domestic politics overshadows all that is happening in America, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being the only solipsistic diversions for most people. This sad commentary on the ignorance of our electorate makes me wonder if being the world's wealthiest and most powerful country is an unmitigated blessing.

Obama snapshot

No special reason for blogging this except as a piece of memorabilia from this race for the nomination. It's too good to skim over with an uh-huhmm...
Barack Obama won the Maine contest this past weekend, the same weekend that Hillary Clinton replaced her campaign manager. Put whatever construction you want on those events. Sunday morning's Washington Journal (C-SPAN) had a caller who couldn't stop gushing about Obama. I don't know who the guest was but I heard from the next room "...another Obama crush." Exactly. It's as though some people have a crush on the guy.

This is part of the reason.

I drove for two hours yesterday to Bangor with my sister and daughter to see Barack speak in Maine. I figured it would be interesting to see a candidate speak, when Maine is typically forgotten. We made the mistake of getting there about an hour before the doors opened to the Bangor Auditorium, as the population of the city had increased by a third for his speech. We waited in the longest line I had ever seen in my life for almost two hours. We met some wonderful people, many younger and surprisingly many quite a bit older. After all of that waiting, we were only a few hundred feet from the auditorium when we were told that the main room had filled to capacity as well as the overflow room. Just when we were ready to turn back, we were told that Barack would speak to us outside, and would do so FIRST.

So imagine a scene like the stump speeches only read about in books, people jostling on snowbanks, climbing fences, trees, even each other in the calm cold that was Maine yesterday to hear and see Barack, for only a few minutes. And did he deliver.

There was excitement, there was hope, and there were specifics. Talk of new ways to use our old industrial centers, dead and forgotten by the establishment. Talk of help with college tuition. Talk of thinking about our children and grandchildren first. He then spent time talking to and shaking hands with the crowd before going in.

I could not believe this was happening. No crowd control, no checking of bags, Barack in a potentially dangerous setting with no way for Secret Service to cover him. And he did it without hesitation. Anyone who will do this in a state with a population likely to vote for Hillary, a tiny, white, poor, lost in the back woods near Canada population, and for those foolish enough to show up "late", is someone who clearly gives a damn. He was comfortable with a chaotic situation, worked it to his advantage on the fly, and did it with grace and aplomb. Hillary speaks of worries about Barack being a likable guy, same as George Bush. She's right, and also dead wrong. Likable they both can be, yes. But George Bush is the man who drinks you under the table, then drives you all home and thusly off a cliff. Barack is the guy you follow into battle, ready to do what needs to be done to save a country in danger. This life-long Independent is ready to sign on to the Democratic party, participate in today's caucus, and follow this leader all the way to November and beyond. I exhort everyone else here to consider the same.

Scones and Biscuits Made Easy

I made a batch of scones using frozen blueberries for a fund raising event . The idea, unfortunately, was better than the results. The dough quickly turned wet and sticky and they puddled in the oven as they rose. But I'm told they were a hit and a couple of people wanted the recipe.

So here is more than you ever wanted to know about scones, biscuits (and other quick breads).

Like most cooking, the recipe is more than a list of ingredients. The results have more to do with how they are handled than what they were. Bearing that in mind, here are the ingredients:

2 Cups Flour
Soda
2 or 3 Tablespoons Sugar
a little Salt
1/3 Cup Butter
Buttermilk
1 Egg
Vanilla?
(a little more flour for dusting)
1 more egg for basting

As you can see, they're like biscuits, but with butter instead of shortening, and an egg is added. I think of scones as a cousin to Southern biscuits, although I think what we call biscuits are cousins to scones. Scones came first, and in the UK when they speak of biscuits they are talking about what we call cookies. But that's not important to the recipe...

Anyone who can make biscuits can make scones. They're almost the same. The main difference is that scones are not worked as much. Some recipes say divide the dough into two round portions about an inch thick, then cut each into six pie-shaped pieces, very different from punching out biscuits then re-working the trimmings, maybe two or three times, until the batch is used. Dividing the dough once eliminates re-working. No waste. Quick and easy. (Some You Tube videos show the dough being punched out into fairly big rounds -- about six to a recipe -- and being lightly re-worked but I like the triangles.)

Soft wheat flour is important. Hard flour works for loaf bread and rolls, but it has too much gluten for good quick breads. Too tough. Not light enough. I like White Lily, regular or self-rising. (It's possible to make biscuits using White Lily self-rising flour with only the addition of heavy whipping cream. It's expensive but for someone in a hurry it's easy. Whipping cream has enough butterfat that a soft dough of White Lily self-rising flour and cream makes smooth, rich, easy to manage little biscuits. Only two ingredients. Nearly fool-proof.)

Most cooks mix biscuits by hand, but I use a pastry blender. I like how it cuts shortening or butter into pea-sized pieces. And I like that my hands are not messy when I use a spoon to stir in liquid to make the dough ball. After that, it's hands on all the way.

Why do they rise?

Quick breads rise for several reasons. The main cause is that baking powder makes gas when it becomes hot. It is heat-activated and works in the heat of the oven. If you use buttermilk instead of regular milk, a little soda in the dry ingredients will add pockets of air to the dough as the acid of the buttermilk reacts with the soda. With a little practice you can feel the dough getting spongy against your spoon as you stir, especially when you first pour in the milk. (No soda for plain milk. And no spongy feeling.)

Another reason not to work the dough too much is that it presses out little air pockets which later expand in the oven making the dough to rise even better. (Also, liquids turn to steam, another factor in making the product rise. The reason the oven should be very hot is that the structure needs to get firm quickly so it doesn't fall.)

A few tips...

►Purists sift dry ingredients but it works okay to toss everything together and mix them with the pastry blender or spoon.

►Most recipes call for mixing the egg into the milk before adding to the dry ingredients. It works okay to make a little hole in the flour, pour in some milk, add the egg directly, then stir in more milk as needed to make the dough ball. The amount of milk will not always be the same and there is no way to know ahead of time how to measure it. No need to mess up unused milk with egg. The dough ball should be stiff, so it is better to have less liquid than more.

►Brushing the tops with egg makes for a nice finish, unlike biscuits which come out dry on top. (That's why a lot of cooks brush biscuits and cornbread with butter when they first come out of the oven. Scones don't need that.) I like mixing a little plain milk into the egg to make it spread better.

►Currants are an easy addition, better than raisins in my opinion. Try dried cranberries. If you use blueberries like I did, work fast before they get wet.

►Yes, I add vanilla. I haven't found it anywhere else but it seems like a good idea.

►The oven must be hot and pre-heated. Not all ovens are alike, but 400° F is a good place to start. Peek in at about 12 minutes and see how they look. By then they sould have jumped up and be looking close to done. If they aren't done in fifteen minutes your oven is not hot enough. (If they're too dark on the top, lower the pan next time. If they're burned on the bottom, move the rack up from the bottom of the oven next time.) (I dunno. Is that common sense? I've known people who couldn't figure that out.)

Serving...

I have seen products in coffee-house displays labeled "scones" that looked like paperweights to me. They were cute but dry-looking. Scones should not be dry. They should make you salivate to look at one...and served hot, they should welcome a blob of additional butter and a layer of fruit preserves, jam or marmalade. Traditionally they are split open and buttered hot, served with whipped cream like shortcakes.

I think of scones as finger foods, not too big and easy to munch. To that end, mine are not as high as most and cut smaller, making them easier to handle, with something sweet on top. Americans love honey buns, donuts, danish, bagels, etc., so holding and munching a scone comes naturally.

I covered the last ones I made with a good layer of cinnamon and sugar mix which stuck in the eggwash and made a nice pattern as they rose and baked. Not happy with the look, I then mixed powdered sugar, milk and a taste of vanilla into a smooth sauce and covered the whole batch with a white drizzle after they cooled.

I saw one recipe using a mixture of orange juice and powdered sugar to make a glaze, but your imagination is whatever you want to try. Now go make some scones. If they turn out well, find someone to share them with before they cool. Tell them it's time for a coffee break.

McCain/ Gingrich in '08?

One guess is as good as the next. I've been keeping an eye on Newt for a long time. He was my Congressman when he was architect for the Contract with America. And I know he's smart. Smart enough to know what to say and what not to say. If it happens, remember where you read it first.

One guy who's bound to get a look is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who's got a perfect blend of maverick and conservative credentials. Why would Gingrich do it, when he clearly has differences with McCain? Because he's a party warrior. "I clearly have disagreements, particularly with Sen. McCain on key issues such as amnesty for illegal immigrants or tax cuts or what I thought was a censorship law that was unconstitutional, McCain-Feingold. But if I had to look at the record of Sen. McCain over his career, compared to the record of Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton, he is vastly better for America's future than either of those two candidates," Gingrich told Human Events a few days ago.

Why would McCain pick Gingrich? The war in Iraq, for starters. It may not be at the forefront of voters' minds, if we are to believe the exits, but it still matters. Two thirds of Americans say they are against the war, no matter how well the surge is doing. McCain can straight-talk all he wants, but you don't get elected by telling two thirds of the country that they are dumb and ignorant. So he needs someone who can reach out on the Iraq issue. Gingrich can do that, because he's already been outspoken about the leadership failures in Iraq—and get away with it, because many in the party still harbor a touch of nostalgia for his role in taking back the House in 1994. Oh yeah, and as a former rep from Tennessee, he's got southern ties.

People are talking...

Hugh Hewitt on Townhall.com

World Net Daily

ABC News quotes Newt himself...

Looks like ya'll are short of help...

I've heard it a thousand times.
A line of hungry patrons stretches out the door, trash that would normally be picked up at once is collecting on the floor, the displays look like the wrath of God, unbussed tables are all that remain in the dining room and those on duty are busting their butts to keep up...And some smart ass says, "Looks like you're short of help."

File this one under D'oh.

Scott Hodes who maintains the FOIA blog looks at how the bureaucracy manages (or doesn't) similar challenges in his line of work, but in this case the reasons are transparent.

...maybe they should get more money to hire more so that these records can go to the people in a reasonable time. And the Post is naive to think that the White House doesn't know what it is doing here--they don't want to hire enough personnel because the longer the records sit, the better it is for them--

Reflections about Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, R.I.P.

This week a detainee died of natural causes at Guantanamo. It'll be a fate that will likely befall many other detainees. This particular one was accused of being a terrorist by people who held grudges against him and needed the bounty offered by the US government. He was never charged, never allowed to defend himself in court, and we'll never know just what he was guilty of doing. And if questioned, your leaders will tell you that his detention and death was necessary to protect your family. And you'll still believe that you live in a free society.

LINK to dday's post at Digby's blog

LINK to NY Times story

Here's something else to think about.

And this.

These links are probably not connected. But they very well could be. It is deeply troubling that so few people I know personally don't seem to care one way or the other.

Something John McCain said regarding torture rings in my memory. "We Americans are better than that."
I like that. I hope he does well.


If McCain were to win the nomination, Black said, his doctors would hold a detailed briefing for reporters describing his medical history. That history includes breaking both arms and a leg after ejecting from his fighter jet when he was shot down over Hanoi during the Vietnam War. He also suffered fractures to both shoulders, broken ribs and a severe injury to his right knee from being tortured during 5 1⁄2 years as a prisoner of war.

The result is that McCain cannot raise his arms above his shoulders to comb his hair. When it is very cold, his joints occasionally ache, something he rarely mentions, Cindy McCain said. His hair also turned prematurely white while in prison.

LINK to Energizer McCain keeps going and going



Digby looks at the issue of outsourcing torture to avoid legal problems. The world of legal jurisdictions allows a tempting menu of options to achieve just about any objective as long as the rules are followed (read evaded).

Considering that all this was done by people who had previously brought us secret wars in Cambodia and sold arms to our alleged enemies to fund illegal wars from a shadow government run out of the white house, it really shouldn't be surprising that they did what they did. And unless there is a reckoning, it would be criminally stupid if we are surprised the next time they get their hands on the white house and do it all again. It's what they do.

Sadly, very few people seem to think it's a problem.

Fred Clark (and Caitlin Wall): Translating Huckabee (Updated)

First posted January 22. I enjoyed Fred Clark's comments so much I stole his whole post. February 7 someone else takes note of the governor's rhetorical gifts. Having been spoon-fed this kind of language from childhood, I haven't paid much attention, but with the man's growing profile this not-so-subtle talent is worth noting.
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He said it so well I'm stealing the whole thing. I'm leaving out a couple of footnotes, so if you want to read those and check out the comment thread you'll have to go there. I first heard reference to "dog-whistle politics" about three years ago and have had my ears perked up ever since. Obviously Fred's ears have been trained longer than that. This is rich!

Doing my best impression of Barbara Billingsley in Airplane: "Oh stewardess! I speak evangelical ..."
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Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was very skilled at peppering President George W. Bush's public statements with so-called "dog whistle" language targeting evangelical Christian voters. These passing phrases and allusions wouldn't alter or confuse Bush's message to other listeners, but they would have an additional resonance for the evangelicals listening. The actual meaning of those phrases didn't much matter, what was important was that he came across as conversant in the local idiom, the insider's jargon.
To cite a famous example, when Bush said that he believed in the "wonder-working pow'r" of the American people, the message was simply that if Bush used that phrase he must know that song, so he must've sung that song, so he must've been to church, so he must be one of us. No one was supposed to, and few did, think too hard about the bizarre meaning of that statement -- which seemed to equate the American people with "the precious blood of the lamb," suggesting that we could, by rallying around our president, "be free from the burden of sin." That (heretical, arrogant, insane) implication wasn't the point of the allusion. The point was just to reassure evangelicals that he spoke their language, and was therefore on their side, without scaring off everyone else.
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Unlike Bush, Mike Huckabee really is a native speaker of the evangelical idiom. He isn't just parroting phrases spelled out phonetically for him by some Wheaton-alum speechwriter, he's talking the way he naturally talks. The effect for evangelical voters is thus the same -- they are reassured he is "one of us." But the effect for everyone else is quite different, because unlike Bush's dog whistles, everyone else can hear Huckabee's allusions too and non-native speakers have a hard time making sense of what he's saying.
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To take a trivial example, Huckabee has on several occasions mentioned that he reads a chapter from Proverbs* every day and that he carries his New Testament with him for this purpose. The book of Proverbs, of course, is not in the New Testament, but evangelicals are all familiar with the Pocket Testament League's tiny volumes, the size of a deck of cards, that include not just the 27 books of the New Testament but also the Psalms and Proverbs.** These editions were designed for convenience and not with the intent of dismissing the other 37 books of the Hebrew Scriptures as unimportant, although it's worth noting that most American evangelicals wouldn't notice if the prophets suddenly disappeared from their Bibles. (Evangelical reading tends to focus on Paul's Epistles, Proverbs and pselected Psalms, which is also why Huckabee earns points for his frequent citations from Proverbs but Barack Obama gets none for quoting the book of Amos, as he did yesterday.)
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More potentially confusing is Huckabee's reference to "a living God." He used this phrase in the comment we looked at earlier, in which the former Arkansas governor explicitly endorses theocracy. Here again is that comment, as reported by MSNBC:
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"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said.

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Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has some fun with this juxtaposition of "living God" and talk of the Constitution. Since the idea of a "living Constitution" is often railed against by social conservatives who see it as a synonym for "anything goes," Grumer wonders if this means Huckabee believes in an anything-goes God as well:
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Wait, “the living god”? Wouldn’t that be some kinda wishy-washy progressive modernist God? I figured Huck for a strict constructionist God, an eye-for-an-eye guy who meant every word of Leviticus when he spake it. “Living God” implies some kind of dynamic, changing God, probably soft on crime, the kind of warm, fuzzy God from whom Words emanate with penumbrae.

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In the ensuing discussion, Grumer writes, "I'm just amused by the fact that the adjective 'living' seems to imply diametrically opposite things when you apply it to 'God' or 'Constitution.'"
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That's astute. The same could be said of the evangelical idiom "the living Word of God" as a reference to the Bible. "Living" there certainly doesn't mean all the wanton things they take it to mean in the phrase "living Constitution." But I don't want to get bogged down in the legal and legalist lit-crit, what I'm interested in here is what this phrase "living God" means.
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When a Southern Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee speaks of "the living God," what he means is that God is active, busy, involved in the world, even that God intervenes in the lives of people and the affairs of nations. That's not in itself an unusual claim for us Christian types to make. I would probably disagree with Huckabee as to the extent and content and intent of that divine involvement, as well as over our capacity for understanding it (there's that effing ineffability again), but I wouldn't object to the use of the phrase "living God." What it means, essentially, is that he is not a Deist.
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I should caution, however, that I'm not entirely confident in my ability to translate Huckabee's evangelical-speak because I'm not entirely confident that he isn't using a different kind of dog whistle -- one to which my evangelical ears are not attuned.
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Bush's dog-whistle code-words were designed to appeal to evangelical Christian voters without scaring away everyone else. Huckabee isn't doing that -- he employs evangelical idioms without any apparent regard for how it sounds to those unfamiliar with it. But Huckabee may also be employing his own set of vague allusions to appeal to a particular subset of evangelical types without scaring away the rest of the people in the pews. Over at Daily Kos, dogemperor makes the case that Huckabee admires Bill Gothard. Huckabee has even proudly noted that he has been through Gothard's "Basic Seminar."
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Gothard is not well-known outside of his particular fiefdom, but Huckabee's expressed admiration for him -- and Gothard's attendance at a Houston fundraiser for the candidate -- is deeply disturbing. You know how, say, Christopher Hitchens gets a case of the howling fantods any time he hears anyone from the religious right speak? That's how most evangelicals respond to Bill Gothard. At the fundamentalist Baptist, and very Republican, church I grew up in Gothard's seminars were often criticized as a "cult."
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It may simply be that, as a politician, Huckabee is willing to accept support from anyone who is willing to offer it. I haven't heard any reports that Huckabee's daughter has been ordered to remain single until age 30, after which she would be allowed to marry only with her father's permission (yes, that really is something the Gothardites I've encountered believe), or any other indications that the former governor is truly a Gothard devotee. So his praise of Gothard and the Basic Seminar might just be a politician's flattery -- just as his praise for the World's Worst Books after receiving Tim LaHaye's endorsement might not mean he's a full-blown prophecy maniac. But both of these instances give me pause. Huckabee talks like a run-of-the-mill evangelical, but if he's really a fan of both LaHaye and Gothard, then he may be something very different and far more troublesome.
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* Many evangelicals seem to think that the division of Proverbs into 31 chapters was divinely inspired as a sign that we should read a chapter of this book every day. That entails skipping the final chapter five months out of the year -- nothing against Lemuel, but hey, he's no Solomon, you know? Contemporary evangelical piety might be a very different thing if the book of Ecclesiastes had also been divided into 31 chapters.
** I've kept one of these pocket-sized volumes in the glove compartment of my car ever since the day I found myself unexpectedly at a hospital bedside needing, but not having with me, the 23rd Psalm, and Psalm 139, and Romans 8, and 1 Corinthians 15. It turns out it's also a good thing to keep in one's glove compartment because troopers tend to look closely at everything you're pulling out of there when they ask to see your registration and proof of insurance.

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Caitlin Wall at FP's Passport blog posts How to speak Huckabee... Insightful variations on the same theme.

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As I watched Mike Huckabee's speech from Arkansas Tuesday night, I couldn't quite shake the feeling that he was speaking in some sort of code.

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Not all of Huckabee's images are biblical. Here he sends a message in Sportstalk:

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Now, it's tough for this old Razorback to say things like 'Roll, tide roll,' but I'm doing it tonight. And it's tough for this old Razorback to look over there to the state just to the east of us and anticipate being able to say that we're too, Volunteers. I think before the night is over, I'll even be singing 'Rocky Top.' This old razorback may even catch some bulldog fever before the night is over. And we're going to forget all about the Cotton Bowl and even be grateful for our friends to the north before tonight night is over, I'm fully believing."
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Huckabee is tapping the rich lexicon of southern college football to highlight his decisive win in Arkansas and herald his strong showings in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Missouri. He ultimately took home all of the above, save the Show Me state.
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Translation: I am from Arkansas, but I also won Alabama and probably took Tennesee, Georgia, and maybe even Missouri.

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It's no accident that Southerners do well in politics, especially if they have a good foundation in religion. It is their birthright to say one thing and mean several without saying so...and get away with it.

I have come across observations that Barack Obama speaks in poetry while Hillary Clinton speaks in prose. How can I say this without sounding racist? Obama's oratorical gifts derive in part from his insights into black preaching that is the best of Southern poetry. He therefore shares a gift like Huckabee's that Mrs. Clinton does not have. She may have gone to Vacation Bible School, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Cognitive Dissonance

Thanks to Google I have a personal metric by which to track public awareness of Barak Obama. A post I composed in December 2006, updated several times since then, usually appears on the first screen of results for any search for Barack Obama's religion. I have been able to watch the numbers rise and fall daily for over a year. And because the rest of my two-thousand-plus posts are so obscure, that post receives upwards of seventy percent of all hits, sometimes spiking as much as ninety-plus percent of the last rolling 100. My two hit counters run pretty much the same.

Observation: Interest in Obama's religion spiked after, not before the last two high-profile voting events. The Iowa caucus and yesterday's "Super Tuesday" both showed large spikes. This indicates more people paying attention AFTER the results than before voting.

If that's human nature, it's a sad commentary. When the voting is over it's a bit late to be doing homework.

Super Tuesday Snips

Everybody's an expert at speculating. You know what they say about opinions. These snips caught my eye this morning.

The Lovers And The Fighters by Digby

...the campaign will boil down to whether or not independents believe that the way to fix a broken system is through inspiration or confrontation --- in particular whether they believe that the radical Republicans can be tamed by inclusion and compromise or if it will take a metaphorical billy club.

McCain will make the case that he is a man apart, beholden to no one, the only person who can make both parties straighten up and fly right. He'll run as the fighter for America. Obama is making the case that he's a man apart, a leader of millions, who will make both parties work together for the common good. He'll run as the healer of America. It will depend a great deal on a non-partisan voter's personal temperament and worldview as to which one he or she will believe.

All You Need Is Hate by Stanley Fish, NY Times

...Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.

The Conservative No McCain Zone: Big Arguments for a Bad Idea by Vanderleun

...the culture war is over. And the conservatives have lost. Reaction? Consume your own.

Here's the news on "The Big 3 Issues:"

Abortion: Alas, this is a done deal. There will not come a time in the foreseeable future when abortion on demand will not be available in the United States. The best that can be hoped for at this point is a widespread understanding among the populace that abortion, though perfectly legal, is morally wrong except in certain, widely understood, circumstances. (And, no, I'm not going to spell those circumstances out -- that's up to you. Work it out with yourself, your family and your friends.)

The law and public morality are not coterminous, nor should they be. When they are the result is dhimmitude. Not really the state one is seeking, correct?

Homosexuality and gay marriage: This too is a done deal. To paraphrase Gay Rights activists from years ago, "They're here. They're queer. Get used to it."

Reversing Illegal Immigration: Done deal #3. I know that, like visions of sugarplums, visions of some sort of "fence" protecting America from the hordes of marching Mexicans dance in the heads of Americans who just want them all to turn around and march back. But, alas, that too joins the previous two issues in the category, "It Ain't Gonna Happen."

I know, believe me, all the designs for a kinder and gentler fence that will have hi-tech detectors and some sort of ready interdiction corps sitting on helicopter scramble pads across the southern border. I know all the arguments for expanding the ever-so-effective techniques used to stop the flow of illegal drugs to stop the flow of illegal aliens. None of these will prove any more effective than "The War on Some Drugs" we've be squandering billions on over the decades.

What would work would be some sort of East German wall 1,969 miles long. This monstrosity would have guard towers, mine fields, attack Dobermans, armored cars, and about 100,000 armed border guards with a shoot on sight policy (3 shifts of 17 guards per mile). After around 500 Mexican civilians were shot dead, this might have some effect on reducing the flow. I'm not quite ready for this draconian a solution. Are you?

Cindy McCain’s Painkiller Problem by Radley Balko

McCain’s condescending, dismissive attitude toward medical marijuana patients only exacerbates the hypocrisy. Cindy McCain’s powerful husband and high profile probably had something to do with the fact that she didn’t get the Richard Paey treatment. But as with Rush Limbaugh, prosecutors likely laid off of her also because she played the drug war game—she admitted she was an “addict,” repented, and sought treatment. Paey had the audacity to insist that he oughtn’t go to jail for treating his own pain, and that he wasn’t an “addict,” but a chronic pain patient who was dependent on the medication in order to lead a normal life.

Contra my friend Jeremy Lott, the problem with the hypocritical practice of letting politicians’ family members get off for drug crimes that land normal people in prison is that it doesn’t seem to do much in the way of making them more sympathetic. It just hardens them into more militant drug warriors. We have to throw Richard Paey in prison so we don’t get any more Cindy McCains. See the logic?

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters by Andrew Sullivan

Cover story. Long and big.
And nope, I didn't read it, but I think it's important.
I'm tired, tired of all the words.
I'm ready to change presidents and see what happens next. I can't imagine, Democrat or Republican, how it can get much worse.

FOX News Ratings Woes

This is more delicious than a box of cherry cordials.

...Fox News years ago made an obvious decision to appeal almost exclusively to Republican viewers. The good news then for Fox News was that it succeeded. The bad news now for Fox News is that it succeeded.

Frozen Grand Central Station

Improv Everywhere

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.

Back in 2006 we had around 200 people shop in slow motion at a Manhattan Home Depot. For part two of that mission everyone froze in place. As it turned out the slow motion was subtle, but the freezing in place was absolutely striking. I wanted to recreate the frozen idea, but this time in a larger, more open space. Home Depot had many aisles and multiple floors so you could never see more than a handful of frozen people at a time. At Grand Central’s enormous Main Concourse, we would be able to see everyone simultaneously.
We met in nearby Bryant Park and synchronized our watches. We would freeze at exactly 2:30 PM. A nice mix of people of all ages and races showed up, so we would look like any random sample of New Yorkers before we froze.

Willy Loman Lives

Radio blogging here...
This ten-minute feature by Scott Simon hit me hard this morning. Willie Loman and I are the same age. We have a lot more in common that most people might guess. But in many ways his story is that of everyone...sooner or later.

There's a transcript there, but don't read it. Allow yourself to listen so you can hear the deliveries of Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy in their own voices. It's just ten minutes.

Youth Radio's Paul Katzman on the Draft

This morning's Weekend Edition Saturday included a feature from Atlanta's Youth Radio by Paul Katzman, senior at Atlanta's Grady High School I don't know if this was broadcast nationally or was a local fill spot from WABE, Atlanta's NPR affiliate.

This young man observes that today's young people seem complacent to stories in the news that would have sparked outrage from the same age group a few years ago.

What has happened to student activism? Thirty years ago if it came out that the president condoned the treatment of some detainees that some considered torture, the youth of the day would not have sat idly by and accepted it.
Students used to riot over such injustices.
But today public outcries on political matters have been relegated to the arena of publishing punditry, forwarded emails and the blogosphere. What will it take for the youth of America to care about our immoral war? There's on e simple answer: a military draft.

He goes on the describe how unless and until more people see the results of war in a personal way, the loss of family members and others they know, nothing much will happen to bring about a change.

This young man is able to see a truth that too many people we call leaders either cannot see or don't want to admit.
Listen to his words and pay attention to what he says. Remember that he is still in high school and is referring to his own peer group.

I don't think he has been brainwashed or put up to this by anyone. He strikes me as a serious and patriotic youngster speaking his mind. And I agree with him. I was a draftee in 1965 and the experience changed my life. I have written about my experiences at some tiresome length on this blog as regular readers know.

I don't know how I can promote Paul Katzman's ideas and opinions as a budding journalist but if one man's blogpost will help, then here it is.

Meantime, I have been watching and waiting for the return of a military draft for some time. Sooner or later it will return.