Saturday night! Martha Argerich et al. playing Bach on four pianos, accompanied by strings!!

How I love Martha Argerich! I especially like how she hums and bops along with the music. This is an especial piece--suitable for Saturday night by oneself!

To all my crackpot friends.....?:0)

Linda Delk's mom sent her this. Love things like this....Thanks for sharing, Linda

Cracked Pot


An elderly Chinese woman had two large pots, each hung on the
ends of a pole which she carried across her neck.

One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect
and always delivered a full portion of water.

At the end of the long walks from the stream to the house, the cracked
pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the woman bringing home
only one and a half pots of water.

Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments.

But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and
miserable that it could only do half of what it had been made to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it
spoke to the woman one day by the stream.

'I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes water to
leak out all the way back to your house.'

The old woman smiled, 'Did you notice that there are flowers on your
side of the path, but not on the other pot's side?'

'That's because I have always known about your flaw,
so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while
we walk back, you water them.'

For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to
decorate the table.

Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty
to grace the house.'

Each of us has our own unique flaw. But it's the cracks and flaws we
each have that make our lives together so very interesting and rewarding...

You've just got to take each person for what they are and look for
the good in them.

SO, to all of my friends, have a great day and remember to
smell the flowers on your side of the path!

Love this tune!!

The Circus Is in Town--Really! Not just Congress....

My friend Linda, who is a fab photographer, took some photos yesterday when the circus arrived.  She hustled over to see the elephants being downloaded from the train and marched up past the House of Representatives and the Botanical Gardens on their way to Verizon Center, where the big show will be taking place.  She graciously allowed me to post some of her photos!

Leaving the train stop (not a regular station--circus animals only!)

Walking past the House of Representatives

Cleaning up.....This is also by the House of Representatives. Lots of elephant poop from there, too!!

Pronounced "Aunty" lamentation, right?

Well!  Found this jewel in two places I visited this evening: Belgian Waffle and Minnesota Matron.  The latter one is from earlier this month, and I didn't see it then.  Life was waiting for the right moment.....

Antilamentation 

by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

More E-mail

This is from Alan Grayson, whom I admire.  Mr. Grayson, formerly D-FL, was run off by the Repugs and various tea-partying types.  He gives me lots to think about regarding the No-fly zone for Libya.  That, apparently, is a topic whose time has come.  Kuchinich doesn't like it.

Dear Mary,

One of the unfortunate imperatives of public life is that when something is the lead story, you think you’ve got to be doing something about it. Not just have an opinion on it. Be doing something about it.
Volcano erupts? Prepare a news release on the new anti-volcano policy.
Zombies are multiplying? Introduce anti-zombie legislation.
Well, Libya’s been on the front page for a month now. Demonstrations. Civil unrest. Army attacks, etc. So our world leaders think that they’ve got to be doing something about it.
Hence the Libya no-fly zone.

Here is a link to UN Security Resolution 1973, authorizing the Libya no-fly zone. It shows a laudable, albeit rather repetitive, concern for civilian wellbeing. It also completely fails to explain how a no-fly zone will ensure the safety of civilians.

The Libyan Air Force hasn’t received a major delivery of new aircraft in 22 years. Roughly three-quarters of its “air”craft can’t fly.

It is true that the Libyan Air Force, such as it is, has been deployed. But the serious threat to civilians in Libya is not from the Libyan Air Force. It’s from the government security forces on the ground. A no-fly zone does not take away their guns, or their artillery.
For outsiders like us, there are two questions to answer:

(1) Do you want Gaddafi in or out? (2) Either way, what are you willing to do about it?

Here are my answers:

(1) Out, because Gaddafi is a dictator who has stunted the development of his country and its people (although in a list of the 5,000 things that are most important to America, I’d have to rank this close to the bottom, even if it is on the evening news every night). (2) Economic sanctions, including extending the de facto oil embargo and asset freeze that already are in effect.

And it’s likely that an oil embargo/asset freeze will work. Oil is 95% of Libya’s exports, and 25% of GNP. Libya has about four years of oil revenue in the bank, but with an asset freeze and economic sanctions, that becomes meaningless. Whatever the result in the streets, as soon as Gaddafi runs out of money, he’s gone.

But a no-fly zone? In the case of Libya, that’s a tactic in search of a strategy. The Yiddish word for it is “shmei,” roughly translated as aimless strolling around. A no-fly zone is basically just looking like you’re doing something to remove Gaddafi, at the cost of $60 million in a day (which was the cost of the first day’s worth of cruise missiles launched).
The last time we tried this, in Iraq, we had to sustain it for 12 years. At enormous effort and expense. And it didn’t bring down Saddam at all.

More fundamentally, a no-fly zone in Libya feeds the dangerous fantasy that every problem has a military solution. That the answer to the use of force is the use of more force. That if a hammer doesn’t drive that nail in, try a howitzer.

It was Mao Tse-Tung who said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Do we really want Mao’s principles running our foreign policy?
Sincerely,
Alan Grayson

“I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’
I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’”

 Michael Jackson

We can eat, um, FABULOUSLY on $40/week, according to OPRAH

The April, 2011, issue of O, the OPRAH magazine, has an article (with a blurb right on the front cover) on how WELL we can eat for a whole week on just $40 worth of groceries!!! (There's a caveat at the bottom of the article, however.  OPRAH (the magazine) says the prices of the ingredients for this full week of swell eating for $40 were in effect 1) at the author's local grocery store and 2) at the time of writing.) 

Fair enough.  We can scan the shopping list for the week's food and ask questions later.

I'm going to cite a few of the author's grocery prices against what I'd have to pay for the same items at Giant, Safeway, Whole Foods, Glut Coop, Yes! Organic, Trader Joe's, or the Dupont Circle Farmer's Market--all in the DC Metropolitan Area. I don't shop at WalMart or CostCo (no car), but I generally avoid Dean & Deluca, too.

I can't remember all of the items now, and I LOST the list I copied this ayem. But you will get the drift. I DO recall that in no case, at my usual local outlets, was the price, however misremembered, of any item cheaper than its counterpart on the OPRAH list.

Here goes (approx 1/3 of total items) :


OPRAH's list                                           MY list
 
1 lb. fresh tilapia   = $1.00                         1 lb. fresh tilapia=$9.95/lb!!!
2 chickens (5 lbs ea.)  = $5.35 total           2 chickens, 5 lbs. ea  = $10.00
1 doz. eggs  = $1.29                                   1 doz.eggs = $4.50
3 lbs fresh kale = $1.00 total                      1 lb. fresh kale  = $9.00 total
1 loaf of bread = $1.19                               1 loaf of bread  = $5.00
1 lb. black beans  = $.99                             1 lb. black beans = $2.29
Approximate total =  $11.82                    Approximate total  =  $40.75

And so it goes. My questions for OPRAH (the magazine) are 1) WHERE does your author live, for pete's sake?  Mexico?  2) Just WHEN did the author compose this gem?  At the end of the Clinton administration?

Scared panda hugs the leg of a policeman after the earthquake... on Twitpic

Please click this link to see a remarkable picture!!

Scared panda hugs the leg of a policeman after the earthquake... on Twitpic

Spring, Indeed....

Belgian Waffle is one hell of a blogger. Her post today addresses Spring and Spring cleaning. I love Waffle's posts. She takes self-loathing to new heights. I am an amateur in every way compared with her. Like the following passage. It fully describes how I feel about cleaning my place--and I don't even have any kids or animals to clean up after like she does. Still...as my sister-in-law (I won't say which one) (actually, I can't remember which one, other than it wasn't Trudy) (or was it?) used to say, "if the foo sh*ts,...wear it."

In the meantime the bright spring sunlight, which is a joyful, wonderful thing, gives me several problems, what with being a mardy old cow. The first is the house. There's a reason spring cleaning is called spring cleaning, and it's because the spring sunlight makes you realise just what a nest of FILTH you (I) have been living in all winter. Ye gods. I thought it was bad, but now I can see it's .. well. I was going to show you what I found behind the recycling box, but apparently I can't, because the thing that looked like an enormous dead spider clearly WASN'T DEAD. Nice. You'll just have to take my word for it. The not-dead spider is just one of an endless series of housekeeping unpleasantnesses that I now feel I must tackle, and they all seem inextricably linked in a wearisome way. If I want to get the front shutter mended, I must dispose of the Christmas tree in case the landlady takes exception to it, wash the windows, and deal with the chip on the bath. If it does get mended, I'll be able to see the state of the sofa, and I know I won't like it. Can't I just sit here in the sun? Maybe go and get a Cornetto?

Worse, even, than the house is the sight that greets me in the (smeary, toothpaste flecked) mirror, where the sun also gives a new, entirely unwelcome clarity. Who the fuck is that old woman and what is she doing in my house (and why hasn't she hoovered, if she must be here)? It's not that I let myself go over the winter, exactly. More like I pushed myself of a cliff into a sea of butter with salt crystals, bouncing off the jagged cliffs of Daim bar and Hula Hoop. Alcohol should also be included in this ridiculous simile, but I can't be arsed to crowbar it in.

And so on....Mme. Waffle is a British ex-pat in Belgium, thus the cool Brit idiom. Thanks, dear Waffle....I can only watch so much Al Jazeera English.

More jokes, please....

I have an insatiable appetite for jokes these days, now that the planet has been jolted off its axis by the big earthquake in Japan. These are old, but I laughed anyway.

PONDERISMS

1· I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.

2· There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.

3· Life is sexually transmitted.

4· Healthy is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

5· The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

6· Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.

7· Have you noticed since everyone has a camcorder these days no one talks about seeing UFOs like they used to?

8· Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.

9· All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.

10· In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.

11· How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?

12· Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, 'I think I'll squeeze these dangly things and drink whatever comes out'?

13 · If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?

14· Why does your OB-GYN leave the room when you get undressed if they are going to look up there anyway?

15· If quizzes are quizzical, what are tests?

16· If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, then what is baby oil made from?

17· Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?

18· Does pushing the elevator button more than once make it arrive faster?

19· Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

20· Do you ever wonder why you gave me your email address?

XE Gets E-mail....

This arrived in my inbox just now from Alan Grayson, former member of Congress (D-FL), now brave worker for people like you and me. I've got my red shirt on today to show that I Stand With Wisconsin.

Here's Alan's e-mail:

On May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square in Chicago, the public rallied peacefully in support of 40,000 workers in Chicago who had gone on strike, to win the right to organize. The police attacked, and eight died.

On July 6, 1892, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, 3800 workers went on strike, to win the right to organize. Three hundred hired and armed goons attacked them. Five people died.

On April 20, 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado, 1200 coal miners went on strike, to win the right to organize. The Colorado National Guard attacked their shantytown, and burned it to the ground. Nineteen people died. Two women and 11 children were asphyxiated, and they burned to death.

Here and around the world, many people have fought and died, so that you and I would have the right to organize.

And so that 250,000 public workers in Wisconsin would have that right, too.

This is not exactly a new idea. Six months after the Ludlow Massacre, President Wilson signed the Clayton Act, prohibiting the prosecution of union members under Antitrust Law. That was almost a century ago.

Two decades later, during the Franklin Roosevelt's first term as President, he signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. It protects the right to organize. That was over 75 years ago.

The right to organize also is a fundamental principle of international law. Over 150 countries have ratified the "Right to Organize" Convention, an international treaty. It was adopted in 1949, over 60 years ago.

So why are we even talking about this, 11 years into the 21st Century?

Because the teabaggers want to "take back America." They want to take it back, all right – take it all the way back to the 19th century. When there was no right to organize. When people worked for a dollar a day. When grown men competed against children for jobs. When women were barred from most jobs entirely. When you worked until you died.

Not to mention slavery.

I want to see an America that is healthy and wealthy.

They want an America that provides cheap labor to our corporate overlords. An America where the middle class is chained by debt.

We didn't ask for this fight. But we have no choice except to fight back. For the survival of the middle class in America. For us, for our children, and for our grandchildren. And so that the victims in Haymarket, in Homestead and in Ludlow did not die in vain.

As Cardinal Spellman said 45 years ago, "it is a war thrust upon us, and we cannot yield to tyranny."

I'm ready to fight for what's right. What about you?

Courage,

Alan Grayson

Looks like heaven to me!

Thanks to TBTAM for this--and her wonderful recipe for frugal fig flatbread!! Yum! Slurp!!

Bring Back Bob Hope!

It's been a looooong time since I watched the Oscars (2007, in fact, when Ellen DeGeneres was host). It took what seemed like several hours of watching to even get into the spirit--which seemed largely missing. And then they played the video of Bob Hope welcoming the audience to the Academy Awards "or, as it's known in my house, Passover." You had to have been there.

I kind of liked James Franco and Anne Hathaway. They were cute together. What I didn't like was the Red Carpet stuff...gah. It was so BANAL....there, that's a good word.

For Best Picture, "The King's Speech" was the safe choice. "Black Swan" was a much more significant film, and "True Grit" was simply wonderful. (And I'm sorry they gave the supporting actress Oscar to that loudmouth instead of to the girl from "True Grit.") I'm sorry, too, I haven't seen "Toy Story 3" or the one that won so many Oscars, "Inception."

Still, it was fun by the time it was over. It usually is, despite all the nitpicking gripes about hosts and winners. After all, it IS the Oscars!!

Happy Presidents Day, Muthas.....

Echidne saved this unhappy tiding out of the obscurity known as the Noncoverage of Important Things by the media: [occasional instances of bolding by XE as the seizures strike]

Monday, February 21, 2011
Meanwhile, in Frederick County, Maryland, Mothers Should Not Work For Money


The Board of County Commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland, has voted to cut the Head Start program by fifty percent. The Head Start program is:

...a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families.

Two County Commissioners explain why this cut is perfectly fine:

County Commissioner Paul Smith said, ‘As many of you know, I had a lot of kids and my wife stayed home at a significant sacrifice in those early years, because she knew she had to be with those kids. I know everybody isn't able to survive doing that, but clearly if we can strengthen marriage, we can decrease the number of children we have to reach.'

Commissioner Kirby Delauter added, according to the newspaper, 'My wife is college educated and could go out and get a very good job. She gave that up for 18 years, so she could stay home with our kids and we gave up a lot to do that. I agree with commissioner smith. The marriage thing is very important.’

When the predictable reactions came in (including a vigil by women of Frederick County), Commissioner Smith clarified his stance:

"I think the ideal situation is for parents to take care of their own children," Smith told The Baltimore Sun. "The mother is the one to be the best situated to take care of small children. I believe that."

Note that neither Commissioner Smith nor Commissioner Delauter has taken care of his own kids.

But despite that, the two gentlemen hold firm opinions about the proper role of women as well as about who it is who should ultimately bear the financial burdens for child-rearing: Women. Because it is the women who stay at home for several years this way who are left with lower retirement income. It is also these same women who are especially vulnerable in the case of a divorce. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Delauter finds any of that problematic.

Then how about that classism? Do you know how poor a family must be to qualify for Head Start in Frederick County, Maryland? How many poor families can afford for one parent to stay at home? And what about the goals of the Head Start program? It's not really intended as just a daycare program, you know.

Were these two men born this asinine or did they have to work at it? Not that I really care.
----
Thanks for the tip go to vis in the comments.

Comments (8)

Bloggers, Take Note: The Pen Is LOTS Mightier Than....

...The Keyboard when it comes to MEMORY.

Here's proof:

Pen Mightier Than Keyboard for Making Imprint on Brain
The act of handwriting activates brain regions that help boost recall, researchers find
URL of this page: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_108033.html (*this news item will not be available after 04/24/2011)

By Alan Mozes
Monday, January 24, 2011 HealthDay Logo
HealthDay news image

Related MedlinePlus Page

* Memory

MONDAY, Jan. 24 (HealthDay News) -- As keyboards increasingly replace pens, new research cautions that the switch may come with an unforeseen price: the loss of critical brain activity central to learning that is uniquely tied to the old-fashioned act of handwriting.

The concern stems from the results of a number of experiments recently reviewed by a pair of researchers in France and Norway, who concluded that writing by hand is actually a very different sensory experience than typing on a keyboard, with each activating distinctly different parts of the brain.

"Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us," co-author associate professor Anne Mangen from the University of Stavangers Reading Centre in Stavanger, Norway, said in a university news release. "We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects -- be it a book, a keyboard or a pen -- to perform certain tasks."

This is evidenced, she said, in tests that reveal that the act of handwriting -- literally the feeling of touching a pen to paper -- appears to imprint a "motor memory" in the sensorimotor region of the brain.

In turn, this process promotes the visual recognition of letters and words, suggesting that the two seemingly separate acts of reading and writing are, in fact, linked, Mangen explained.

Click link at the beginning of this excerpt to read the entire article.

XE Gets E-mail....

This flew into my inbox yesterday from Judith....a revered Native American poet and activist:

You cannot make the rich or the government do the decent thing.
Taxes in this country are levied on the powerless and waived for those who benefit the most and who should be shouldering the burden. Taxes could go a long way to minimize disparity--but that's not how it works here. Instead, taxes are a wedge forced on the working and middle classes. [It] Causes class hatred against those of us who need help. [I] Can't figure why people can't identify where the problem really is and who has all the wealth and all the breaks. There are numerous ways to start straightening out this mess. Bring the troops home and end the war in Iraq. Untold money is being given to contractors who have robbed our treasury from the start. Make the banks release the money to those who qualify instead of sitting on their assets. They are keeping people from buying homes, and starting businesses. Someone needs the guts to do the hard work and forget about what will happen in the next election. Winston Churchill...should have defined what he meant when he said you can't tax a nation into prosperity. You can if the right people are the ones taxed. You can't give the rich even more money and believe they will use it for the good of others. That's a fool's dream. You don't give money to auto makers and banks without a way of making them adhere to doing the right thing or facing a stiff penalty. If you give them a blank check they will indeed spend it, and the one doing this has only himself to blame. We are in serious trouble, and trusting those in power with out accountability is a fools game. We need to demand more from the ones who got us into this mess. Bush is out of office, and new and worse problems are occuring. Everyone needs to figure out for themself where the blame lies and fight to right the wrongs. Time is running out.

Thanks, Judith. I especially like "You can't give the rich even more money and believe they will use it for the good of others. That's a fool's dream."

Office Notes

Things have been pretty quiet around the XE office this week. Client A's M-I-L has been very sick, and Client A has been taking care of her. Maximum points, Client A!! And it's OK if your project is late arriving here. XE can work all night, no problem.

The Steering Committee met this afternoon and narrowly avoided driving themselves into the ditch for yet another week! All of this was accomplished on Moroccan Mint Tea and not the usual Boilermakers.

Joanne of Fellowship reports she hates everybody. Especially the rest of the Fellowship team. What to do? They all suck. Maybe they'll quit.

XE took a very enjoyable tour of Monkey Towers in Montreal two days ago.

XE also managed a weekend in Chicago at the adorable home of her oldest grandson's M-I-L, who is une femme formidable! XE especially loves the color scheme in the adorable home--very especially the orange kitchen!!

And the bunny tracks in the snow on the deck (as seen through the screen door, which was frozen shut)!!

No school closings here today; it was "HOT" and "LIKE SPRING" and other terms of winter-driven desperation. The cold and possibly the snow will be back, possums. Not to worry.

Family

When I was growing up, I believed I lived far, far away from a nearby mob of relatives such as my playmates enjoyed (endured?) on Thanksgiving and Christmas and other holidays.  Family picnics? We had ONE family picnic in the years before I left home after high school graduation. I took photos of it myself with my new camera--an eighth grade graduation gift.

Present at the picnic table were Mom and Dad, my brother Paul and his wife, Gertrude, and their three small children, Susan, Cindy, and Mark (Mary, Paula, Lisa, and Tom had not yet arrived), and me. We feasted on Mom's delicious fried chicken and potato salad, and possibly watermelon--which we had packed into our 1936 Plymouth for the drive from Fargo to Wahpeton. My brother & his family recently had moved to Wahpeton. Their new home was next to the railroad tracks in a house that had a rather biggish hole in one corner of the living room floor when they first moved in. 

After we ate, the kids played on the swings in Chahinkapa Park, and we all walked through the nearby zoo, which had a bear and some chickens, and I don't know what else. Probably nothing.  It was early days, as my late mother-in-law used to say.  Chahinkapa Park now has a Rose Chapel for weddings, and Paul has retired after a long, successful career with the telephone company.  In those days, however, his job title was "cable splicer's assistant"--whose main responsibility was to stand near the bottom of the telephone pole and toss pliers and other parts up to the cable splicer working on the wires at the top of the pole.

Unknown to me at the time, was that, besides my Uncle Henry's family, 2.5 hours away, we had scads of relatives--Uncle Joe, Aunt Frances, Aunt Anna, Uncle Tony and their large families--within half a day's drive of Wahpeton.  WW2 was always the reason for our nontravel back then, and that was that. But when I was a kid, I didn't know all of these people lived so close by.

This morning, my niece Susan sent me a copy of my great-grandmother's obituary, and I learned, to my complete surprise, that my dad's father had TWELVE siblings, and not the half-dozen I knew about.  I never met any of them, including my Grandpa, who died right after WW2.

I'm still digesting the news. Not that it matters, I guess.  I was visiting Penny, a lovely woman and my oldest grandson's mother-in-law, in Chicago this past weekend, and she was talking about feeling one of her flaws is not being "social." I laughed and said, "After nearly 50 years of being deaf, I have to be reminded to call my family." Compared with me, she's Perle Mesta. 

We Get E-mail....

The old grade school connection lives and flourishes! I got this priceless e-mail today from Jimmy, who made every girl's heart flutter in 5th grade....

-In today's NY Times, Paul Krugman told a story about what happened in a U S House hearing on Wed., led by congressman Paul Ryan. (R) WI:

excerpt:

But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”

source:

Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist - NYTimes.com

-------------------------

It reminded me of some Senate hearings years and years ago, led by a Senator from WI, Joe McCarthy. (Joe sponsored my room mate, so I watched him carefully).

My job as a Senate Page that day was to "man" the door, and keep out the riffraff. I created quite a stir at this first day of the hearings, by refusing to let in an olive-skinned, sleazeball-looking young guy, who turned out to be Roy Cohn. (He was finally let in by "higher authority", and identified as a McCarthy aide)

But I still remember old Joe waving "a list of 130 members of the Communist Party", which of course, turned out to be bogus.

And yes, I was right about Roy Cohn--not because of his olive skin, but because you can dress up a sleazeball, and he's still a sleazeball. Us North Dakota boys knew those things, even as a teenager in the 1950s.

(Jim, I do wonder on which planet Mr. Bernanke's United States with "very, very low" inflation is. It can't be the one where, if he takes himself to the movies, a medium diet drink now is $5! Still, I suppose if you have a big, fat salary, Abe Lincoln has replaced George Washington on the smallest significant bill. It must be the same one on which Congress Critters and Presidents do not eat the same food as everyone else in the country and thus scramble to allow GMO alfalfa and GMO sugar beets with their 400% increase in pesticides.)

But I digress. Leave it to the Repugs to scramble their sources and act like, um, sleazeballs.

My Role Model!!

Take a look at those arms!! Michelle Obama has nothing on this 73-year-old from Baltimore. Now's the time...Gonna get with it.