I’m sure y’all have heard that Rick Sanchez speculated that another pregnancy is why Sarah Palin is resigning, since she’s the fertility goddess of the wackadoodle right.  hortense at Jezebel is offended because it’s in bad taste to speculate about whether a woman’s pregnant, which is the source of up to 50% of the copy of any tabloid in a given week.  And it’s in bad taste, but then again, who doesn’t suspect that Palin has at least considered having another baby so she has a baby-prop to appeal to the base after Trig gets a little too old to carry everywhere? 

No, I found the suggestion ridiculous because it’s ridiculous to think that someone would leave office in what appears to be a scandal-induced resignation because she’s pregnant.  What is this?  The 19th century?  We don’t seclude pregnant women from the public eye, lest they shame themselves by demonstrating with their pregnant bellies that they have sex.  Having sex with and even conceiving with your husband isn’t, last I checked, a sex scandal, even with Republicans. 

Sanchez’s speculation reminds me of when I had mono for the second time, in junior high. My mom asked the principal if she could do what we did last time, which was let me out of school to recover, and send me my schoolwork so I could do it at home and not fall behind in my classes.  The principal denied her request, and actually said, “We only do that if a girl is pregnant and her parents are ashamed to let her be seen in public.” At which point my mom said, “But being pregnant isn’t being sick!” Nor can you catch it from sitting next to someone in class, unlike some of your finer communicable diseases.  Someone needs to send Sanchez the memo.

Since tomorrow’s a big ol’ holiday, unless something really important comes up, I’m taking the day off.  But before I go fishing, I thought I’d review this awesome (and at $8 incredibly inexpensive) cookbook that Lisa Jervis just put out and sent to me: Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating.  It’s about making simple, mostly vegan food based around ingredients you can buy in bulk or from local farmer’s markets, to minimize packaging and maximize sustainability.  But what’s really awesome about it is that Jervis writes it for anyone at any level trying to start cooking in this way.  If you are used to microwaving your food and don’t even know the difference between a stock pot and a sauce pan, Jervis has a section explaining most of the basics that you’ll need to know to cook vegan/vegetarian food.

I like cooking, but breezing through the short, incredibly easy-to-understand chapter “tips and techniques” made me realize how much I didn’t know that’s actually pretty simple, like how to use salt while cooking.  And even for people that are hip to things that I just never picked up on like that, I think this book is really useful because it teaches you, in the space of about 15 minutes worth of reading, how to cook vegetables, which a lot of people don’t understand.  Don’t fear the greens!  You can cook them so they’ll be edible.  Grains also intimidate a lot of people, but after reading Jervis, you’ll realize it’s not that scary.  And tofu!  It wasn’t until over the Christmas holiday that another vegetarian friend showed me the secret to making good tofu (drain it), but if I’d read this book sooner, I would already have it down.  Plus, her technique is easier than the one my friend showed me.  Once you eat really well-prepared tofu, I promise you’ll never crinkle your nose and say “yuck, tofu” again.  To make it all that much easier on you, she also has a chapter on what to stock in your kitchen, both in tools and food to just have on hand.  The tools section is really helpful for people who don’t know where to start, and Jervis makes sure to explain what you can feel relatively at ease buying for nothing at thrift stores, and what you probably need to spend money on, or ask your mom to buy you for your birthday. 

Seriously, the problem I run into with so many cookbooks, even the ones that purport to make it easy on you, is that they assume that you know things that you may not know.  Jervis assumes nothing, and even for people that are used to trying out new recipes in the kitchen, that’s helpful.  To make it even better, she has a section on just quick things to whip up when it’s just you eating, or you don’t feel like cooking.  Not many popular chefs out there are really in the business of giving you ideas for quick, simple stuff to eat for lunch or breakfast, even though a lot of people would really appreciate those ideas, particularly if they’re trying to cut back on their meat and dairy consumption but are left with the question: but then what do I eat for lunch? 

So, $8.  Get the book.  It takes like half an hour to read the main parts, and then you have some recipes on hand and a huge section telling you where to find more, particularly online.  And enjoy your 4th of July, dirty hippie patriots!

Sarah Palin is resigning in order to something something something, mainly because she’s such a maverick that Alaska cannot contain her.  The video of her resignation announcement is here, and it’s basically inscrutable.  It’s a breathless, rat-a-tat ejaculation of phrases and seemingly unrelated thoughts about something related to governing, and about how she can’t waste money being Governor just to be Governor, because of catchphrases and such.  Imagine if you took Palin’s normal incoherence, ramped the speed up, and then tried to announce you were running for president while not announcing it and also detailing every anecdote you’d ever tell on the campaign trail...in seven minutes. 

I’m watching this for the second time, and I really have no idea what she thought she was doing, or what she was saying.  I think she may actually have declared herself president of Honduras.

Last weekend was my dude’s mmmmphnoneofurbizmmph birthday, and I went without mentioning it because I was busy waxing poetic over the Phenomenal Hand Clap Band’s latest, which was one of his presents.  But we went tubing for his birthday, and he had the mind to buy a cheap iPod player so that I could play a bunch of mixes made for the occasion while we floated along, drinking beer. 

In honor of that, one of the songs that I played that made all floating Texans happy. 

Original song: “Genius of Love” by the Tom Tom Club

1) “Mirror In The Bathroom"---The English Beat
2) “Bizarre Love Triangle"---New Order
3) “Close To Me"---The Cure
4) “Cannonball"---The Breeders
5) “Seether"---Veruca Salt
6) “And She Was"---The Talking Heads
7) “Private Idaho"---B-52s
8) “I Want To Be Adored"---The Stone Roses
9) “Groove Is In The Heart"---Deee-Lite
10) “Waiting On A Friend"---The Rolling Stones

So part of the fun will be playing videos by musicians actually mentioned in the song.  Below the fold.

Bohannon:

Kurtis Blow:

And because I don’t care what people think, this song is awesome, and when it shows up on a mix, I’m all happy:

Don’t these guys have anything better to do? The church now thinks it has a renegade nun problem.

In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.

Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals.

And one inquiry seems to go out of its way say the nuns are simply not homophobic enough.

The second investigation of nuns is a doctrinal assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization that claims 1,500 members from about 95 percent of women’s religious orders. This investigation was ordered by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is headed by an American, Cardinal William Levada.

Cardinal Levada sent a letter to the Leadership Conference saying an investigation was warranted because it appeared that the organization had done little since it was warned eight years ago that it had failed to “promote” the church’s teachings on three issues: the male-only priesthood, homosexuality and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church as the means to salvation.

The letter goes on to say that, “Given both the tenor and the doctrinal content of various addresses” at assemblies the Leadership Conference has held in recent years, the problem has not been fixed.

Somebody’s going to get in a lot of trouble for this.

High res screen capture here.

I never completely understood the early morning Starbucks run, myself---it always seemed to me faster to make your own coffee at home and drink it while getting showered and dressed.  99% of my early morning coffee runs over a lifetime are due to either to the fact that I’m moving and haven’t unpacked the coffeepot yet, that I just now discovered I’m out of coffee or creamer, or that I didn’t sleep at home.  There have been a few occasions when I overslept, ran to work, unlocked the office/flicked on the computer and then got coffee from the food stand while the computer warmed up.  But even that was rare. 

But the explanation for this carnage of Starbucks closings is that people are tightening their belts, financially speaking.

I got that graphic off FiveThirtyEight, where they’re relating it to a Harris poll (PDF) about how people are trying to save money during this recession.  19% of people have started to skip the morning coffee run.  Here’s some more statistics from the poll:

I usually think of myself as frugal.  I already had reduced to a cell phone, and I already have a habit of going to the hairdresser like 4 times a year.  I was never a huge fan of buying expensive coffee drinks in the morning, like I said, and I’m a fan of generics.  I reuse water bottles.  But I’m trying to find ways to save money, too, which has largely meant not going out to shows as much.  Which makes me feel a little antisocial to friends that I do that with a lot, which sucks, but it has redirected a lot of my energies to listening to music at home, which is a plus. And to save money there, I’m trying to buy some vinyl stuff for cheap in used record stores instead of buying everything new (though that happens, too). I’ve discovered that Amazon sells a lot of music for download cheaper than iTunes. Having friends over to make cheap vodka drinks instead of meeting them in a bar has happened a few times. We’re trying to avoid going to see movies in the theater just to do it, and staying in to watch DVDs from Netflix more often. But mostly I’m trying to find cheaper ways to eat.  I’m trying to find ways to use canned tomatoes instead of fresh ones for a lot of stuff, and eating more mac and cheese.  Trying to buy the cheap vegetables and then figure out what to cook with them, instead of just making a list based around what I’m in the mood for.

I kind of like being an innovator in the “cheap bastard” department.  I sold my truck after spending $50 to fill it up and then, after alarming everyone in the area by shaking a turnip at the sky and saying, “Never again!” I have an entire cabinet to stash shampoo, conditioner, and body wash that I buy up when it’s deeply discounted so that it can last me for months.  A lot of my clothes are secondhand.  But what this means is that I can’t think of interesting new ways to avoid spending money. 

So I ask you, Pandagonians, to help me out.  Do you have ways you save money?  Just learned, always have done it, I don’t care.  The weirder, the better.  And do you think that people who are reacting to the recession by tightening their belt are being wise, or is this just a panic reaction?  Do you give a flying fuck if Starbucks closes? 

The Washington Post is selling its access to its own reporters and to Obama administration officials:

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to “those powerful few” — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

This makes the Dana Milbank/Nico Pitney throwdown doubly (maybe triply!) juicy now - the same newspaper that fired Dan Froomkin for basically being popular and well-read while castigating itself over running too many pictures of things that are happening and letting Milbank get away with running anonymously sourced inaccurate quotes is now revealed to have sold its constitutionally protected access to government officials for the relative bowl of pottage.  It is insinuated (or outright stated) that bloggers are terrible, awful people because we might say mean things on the internet, or we might not actually delete all of our archives to avoid the terrible shame of accountability or maybe say things approving of a candidate who is paying us to say those things, except that we say them (after we’ve clearly broken ties with our private blogs) on campaign websites.

That’s the critical difference between blogs as media watchers and major media itself - as much as big media might like it, bloggers have neither the ability nor the desire to engage in the sort of ethical lapses that are available to outlets like the Washington Post every day.  We may sit in our mothers’ basements watching torrented Thundercats episodes, but we do it honestly.

She lambastes liberal commentators for not saying the exact thing I said yesterday.  Which is cool, whatever.

It’s tempting to dismiss this audio clip of Rush Limbaugh saying that Michael Jackson “flourished under Reagan,” “languished under Clinton and Bush,” and “died under Obama” as the irrelevant rantings of a drug-addled mad man.  He does claim, after all, that Jackson was an individual and not part of a group, completely ignoring the fact that Jackson built his name up as the star attraction of the Jackson 5.  But I would remind anyone who feels the tug of the temptation to remind yourself that this man is de facto head of the Republican party, and adjust your alarm accordingly. 

No, what we’re seeing here is the Cult of Reagan moving into the actual deification phase.  Reagan is more than a former President, more than a beloved statesman, but now a god with magical powers.  He’s apparently the god of individualism and initiative, because Limbaugh’s statement is that Jackson’s very weirdness made him an individual, which is why their god smiled upon him and granted him 7 hit singles off one album and a whole pile of money.  Knowing the way Limbaugh and his audience think, this statement has racial undertones, too.  It’s been a long-standing right wing argument that black poverty is caused by “dependence” on the “nanny state” and a lack of initiative, so there’s not just a little hint here that Limbaugh is suggesting that “true” Republicans not only break welfare dependency, they hand out hit records as rewards for showing the proper spark of initiative. But I’m just guessing.  It’s possible that, for once, Limbaugh wasn’t stewing in his own racist obsessions and just popped this one off strictly as a form of Reagan deification.

As someone who actually remembers the 80s better than Limbaugh apparently does, even though I was a child, I have to point out that Jackson was not actually weird in the 80s.  He probably felt a little weird to some people, because contrary to Limbaugh’s assertions, Reagan voters were inspired by conformist attitudes and a desire to return to a fantasy version of the 50s. From that perspective, pretty much all pop stars inspired a “kids these days get off my lawn” attitude, even amongst some of the younger Republican set.  But I don’t really see how the iconic Jackson fashions like the red jacket or the single glove were particularly weird (and what about his other favored 80s get-up---the jacket and tie?) were weirder than cardigans over T-shirts (Kurt Cobain’s thing) and the hat craze of the 90s.  In fact, it all makes a lot more sense than the hat craze.* Jackson’s career actually slipped the weirder and more disconnected from reality he got.

But when you’re deifying a President and granting him superhuman powers, I guess minor factual errors like this are small compared to the major factual error---the Reagan had superhuman individualism powers!---that you’re touting.

*Sorry, we caught part of “Singles” on TV yesterday, and looking at early 90s fashion will make you long for the 80s, at least the early to mid 80s.