... Beer pancakes
This is a good way to use up all your extra beer before starting the Lenten fast, even though some traditions hold that beer is ok to drink, even if you are fasting.
Use dark beer for sweeter taste.
Ingredients:
16 ounces milk
16 ounces beer (lager, or darker beer for sweeter taste)
2 cups sifted wheat flour, or 1.5 cups of wheat flour, or 1/2 cup rye flour
1-2 eggs
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or melted butter
1 tablespoon sugar or white honey
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 potato
Hillary Clinton outraged LGBT activists on Friday with her comments at Nancy Reagan’s funeral praising the former first lady for helping start a “national conversation” about HIV – remarks that critics say ignore the Reagans’ deeply troubling legacy on the 1980s Aids crisis.I did not even need to look this up. I remember very well what the Reagan response was to HIV/AIDs.
“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/Aids back in the 1980s,” the Democratic frontrunner told MSNBC in an interview at the funeral, which was held at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California.
Clinton continued: “Because of both president and Mrs Reagan, in particular Mrs Reagan, we started a national conversation when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that, too, is something that I really appreciate. With her very effective, low-key advocacy … it penetrated the public conscience and people began to say: ‘Hey, we have to do something about this too.’”...
"We are on the eve of great decisions. Not easy decisions, such as to fight when attacked..."Nobody disputed with Adlai; it is an easy decision to fight when attacked. There were casualties and great suffering, but those benefits of life have been passed out to all generations of mankind, not just the mid-20th century generations that had developed Media Spotlights to light up themselves, culminating in Tom Brokaw fawning over the GGF in a disgustingly obsequious and self-serving manner.
...In a video interview, given in Buenos Aires in 2014, Cáceres says it was Clinton who helped legitimate and institutionalize the [Honduran] coup. In response to a question about the exhaustion of the opposition movement (to restore democracy), Cáceres says (around 6:10): “The same Hillary Clinton, in her book Hard Choices, practically said what was going to happen in Honduras. This demonstrates the bad legacy of North American influence in our country. The return of Mel Zelaya to the presidency (that is, to his constitutionally elected position) was turned into a secondary concern. There were going to be elections.” Clinton, in her position as secretary of state, pressured (as her emails show) other countries to agree to sideline the demands of Cáceres and others that Zelaya be returned to power. Instead, Clinton pushed for the election of what she calls in Hard Choices a “unity government.” But Cáceres says: “We warned that this would be very dangerous.… The elections took place under intense militarism, and enormous fraud.”
The Clinton-brokered election did indeed install and legitimate a militarized regime based on repression. In the interview, Cáceres says that Clinton’s coup-government, under pressure from Washington, passed terrorist and intelligence laws that criminalized political protest. Cáceres called it “counterinsurgency,” carried out on behalf of “international capital”—mostly resource extractors—that has terrorized the population, murdering political activists by the high hundreds. “Every day,” Cáceres said elsewhere, “people are killed.”
Interestingly, Hillary Clinton removed the most damning sentences regarding her role in legitimating the Honduran coup from the paperback edition of Hard Choices...
...Many of running’s psychological benefits already are well-known. It releases dopamine and increases blood flow in the brain, which not only makes people feel better than if they’d stayed on the couch, but helps them think sharper and more creatively, too. In a study published this month in the Journal of Psychology, a group of Finnish and American researchers found that—in lab rats, at least—distance running actually generates more new brain cells in adults than other types of exercise. And earlier studies have shown that running especially increases neurons in mice’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a key role in learning and memory...I knew there had to be an explanation why I am so brainy.
H.L.Mencken
... Voter registration laws in the U.S. have only been around for about 150 years, said Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland who specializes in voter behavior.
“Voter registration was put in place in the U.S. in the 1870s and the 1880s – and the historical record is very clear – first to hold out Catholics, southern European immigrants and to push African Americans off the rolls,” he said...
... The replacement differed in some particulars — it gave local elected officials the right to propose alternatives to an emergency manager’s cuts, if they saved as much money, and to vote to remove him or her by a two-thirds vote (though only after 18 months.) But it retained the main elements of the rejected law, such as the power to modify union contracts and sell off local assets. The tweaks would only apply to future emergency managers, not the ones already governing cities and school systems. And the legislature attached a small budget appropriation to the new law, which made it impervious to referendum...In essence, the Republican lawmakers in their legendary disdain and lack of comprehension of "scientifickal stuff" saw no difference between the Arithmetic of cutting costs and advanced Chemistry.
... When the Cold War ended, the United States was on good terms with all of the world’s major powers, al Qaeda was a minor nuisance, a genuine peace process was underway in the Middle East, and America was enjoying its “unipolar moment.” Power politics was supposedly becoming a thing of the past, and humankind was going to get busy getting rich in a globalized world where concerns about prosperity, democracy, and human rights would increasingly dominate the international political agenda. Liberal values were destined to spread to every corner of the globe, and if that process didn’t move fast enough, American power would help push it along.
Fast forward to today. Relations with Russia and China are increasingly confrontational; democracy is in retreat in Eastern Europe and Turkey; and the entire Middle East is going from bad to worse. The United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars fighting in Afghanistan for 14 years, and the Taliban are holding their own and may even be winning. Two decades of U.S. mediation have left the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” in tatters. Even the European Union — perhaps the clearest embodiment of liberal ideals on the planet — is facing unprecedented strains for which there is no easy remedy...
Dozens of Republican senators, many professing religious piety, have stated that they will not discharge their duty set forth in the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads, in part, “The president shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint… Judges of the Supreme Court.”
Have they considered the religious consequences of their inaction?
When United States senators take office, they say this oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.” ...
Wow. Super Tuesday was an earthquake, and not just because Donald Trump ran the tables. The best thing was the complete drubbing and humiliation that voters all over America handed to the little Napoleon from Florida, Marco Rubio.
So doing, the voters began the process of ridding the nation of the GOP War Party and its neocon claque of rabid interventionists. They have held sway for nearly three decades in the Imperial City and the consequences have been deplorable...
and having given thanks to God, he uttered...
"Now let Thou Thy servant depart, O Lord, with peace according to Thy word, wherefore hath mine eyes beheld Thy salvation, which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples, a light to the enlightening of gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel" (Lk 2: 29-32).
Righteous Simeon said to the Most Holy Virgin: "Behold, This One is set for the fall and rising up of many in Israel and for the sign spoken against, and for Thee Thyself a sword shalt pierce the soul, so that the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed" (Lk 2: 35).
Former Turkish international football player Hakan Sukur is facing up to four years in jail, if he is found guilty of insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Twitter. An indictment has been approved with a first hearing expected within weeks.
The Bakirkoy 28th Criminal Court of First Instance accepted the indictment against Sukur on Wednesday. The case against the former footballer says he insulted Erdogan and his son in posts he wrote on Twitter.
Sukur says that he did not intend to target the president. However, prosecutors say that the tweets were “clearly related” to the Turkish president, the Dogan news agency reports, as cited by AFP...
...Turkey, which for half a century was a stalwart ally in the Middle East while proving that a Muslim-majority nation could be both secular and democratic, has moved so far away from its NATO allies that it is widely acknowledged to be defiantly supporting the Islamic State in Syria in its war against the West. Since Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power in 2003, Turkey has taken a harshly authoritarian turn, embracing Islamic terrorists of every stripe while picking fights it can't finish across the region - including an escalating war with 25 million ISIS-battling Kurds and a cold war turning hot with Russia, whose plane it rashly shot down in November. With those fights coming home to roost - as bombs explode in its cities and with enemies at its borders - Turkish leaders are now demanding unconditional NATO support, with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declaring on Saturday that he expects "our U.S. ally to support Turkey with no ifs or buts." ...
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says that President Obama cannot truly understand the African-American experience because he was “raised white.”
“He’s an ‘African’ American. He was, you know, raised white. Many of his formative years were spent in Indonesia,” Carson said to journalist Glenn Thrush. “So, for him to, you know, claim that, you know, he identifies with the experience of black Americans, I think, is a bit of a stretch.”
During an interview for Politico’s “Off Message,” which aired Tuesday, the retired neurosurgeon suggested that his upbringing reflects the black experience in the U.S. more than Obama’s.
Carson was born in Detroit to African-American parents. His rise from childhood poverty to resounding success as a neurosurgeon served as an inspirational story that propelled him into the national spotlight and, ultimately, the race for the White House.
Obama was born in Honolulu to a white mother and a black Kenyan father. He spent several years of his childhood in Indonesia before returning to Hawaii.
Carson told Thrush that he did not derive much joy or pride from watching Obama’s inauguration as the nation’s first black president because of his life story.
“You know, I did not. I mean, like most Americans, I was proud that we broke the color barrier when he was elected, but I also recognize that his experience and my experience are night-and-day different. He didn’t grow up like I grew up by any stretch of the imagination,” he said...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court won't get a hearing or a vote from the Republican-led Senate, GOP members of the Judiciary Committee said Tuesday as they insisted only the next president must fill the vacancy.The collection of scamps and rascals that make up the US Senate Republican caucus not only have abdicated their responsibility to advise and consent on the President's Constitutionally-mandated responsibility to name a successor to the Supreme Court, they have done so with the grinning facade of Mitch McConnell's death-mask face!
Related Stories
"No hearing, no vote," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., as he emerged from a closed-door meeting with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Even the most divisive nominees for the high court have received a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, and the election-year decision to deny such a session is a sharp break with the Senate's traditional "advise and consent" role. A committee review and a hearing is the first step in the process...
...As a rationale for their decision, Republicans pointed to a 1992 speech by Vice President Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, in which Biden said that in a presidential election year the Senate should "not consider holding hearings until after the election."...
Posts
All Comments
