At 9:00 EST on CNN.
Update: Apparently she was bumped by Thomas Friedman. He was very good, however. But I missed "The Stagers" (looked like a repeat anyway).
I'd received this email earlier:
Hey Everyone!
Just wanted to let you all know that Steph has just been booked on CNN's "Larry King Live" tonight at 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific. Be sure to tune in to see what she has to say this time!
Sincerely,
Team Steph
Feels like Tuesday night, since I worked yesterday. It's going to be a long week. Fortunately next week is Thanksgiving and we have the Friday off, too (on which day I'm trying to schedule the final inspection for the kitchen remodeling project).
Arianna Huffington sitting in for Rachel Maddow tonight. You'd think she could afford to get some lessons to lose some of that heavy accent. Sorry, but I have a hard time understanding what she says. (And to think she was schooled at Oxford (or Cambridge).) She definitely shouldn't be on TV. She's a sharp person, but I think her accent is a distraction and an impediment to getting her message across. (The Gabor sisters could get away with it, since they didn't have much to say.) Arianna comes across much better in writing.
I guess some people just have a deaf ear when it comes to accents. Not to brag, but I've been told more than once, by Germans, that I speak unaccented German--though it's been a while since I've spoken it. (I still have dreams in German, however.) I got my fundamental training in German at the Goethe-Institut in Ebersberg outside of Munich, a great place to learn it. (I think that the school there has since been turned into a spa.)
(Gays appear to be good at languages, judging by the number of gays with language skills that have been booted out of the military on account of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." And a lot of these people knew Arabic.)
I think my stomach flu is gone (I won't go into the details). Tonight I made a lean hamburger for dinner (had to add olive oil for it to fry in) and a recipe of chili to take to work. Now that the kitchen is back in order, it's time to clean out the freezer. I haven't cleaned it out since before B. left. (That'll take ten minutes.)
The water here lately has been horrible, very heavily chlorine-tasting and -smelling. See here. Since the water has been hooked back up to the refrigerator, I've been drinking the filtered water from the fridge. Before that, I went through almost all my hurricane emergency bottled water. But the hurricane season is almost over, thank God.
Weather has been beautiful. This is the time of year when South Florida really becomes almost magical.
From Media Matters here, via Dibgy.
I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact. And, frank -- for that matter, if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they're the opposite, of what you're taught in Sunday school.
I went to Sunday school too and dare say I turned out to be a better Christian than Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly.
From Firedoglake here.
The simplest thing to do to help the US economy (by not losing millions of jobs and one of the few remaining export industries) is to just pass universal health care, taking those costs off them, and in the meantime give them bridging funds to get them by until that's done. Foreign car companies have far fewer health care costs, so all universal health care does is even out the playing field. . . .
Neoconservative William Kristol (the one who brought us Sarah Palin) writes this in his New York Times column today.
Last week, assembled at Miami’s InterContinental Hotel for a meeting of the Republican Governors Association, the governors seemed cheerful. . . .
But there was an almost-never-mentioned elephant in the Versailles Ballroom (yes, that’s its name) full of Republicans: George W. Bush. For the hard fact is this: The worst financial crisis in almost 80 years has happened on his watch. The Bush administration will leave behind probably the most severe recession in at least a quarter-century. Fairly or unfairly, this will be viewed as George Bush’s economic meltdown.
If Republicans and conservatives don’t come to grips with what’s happened — and can’t develop an economic agenda moving forward that seems to incorporate lessons learned from what’s happened — then they could be back, politically, in 1933.
From 1933 to 1980, Republicans repeatedly failed to convince the country they were no longer the party of Herbert Hoover — the party, as it was perceived, of economic incompetence, austerity and recession (if not depression). . . .
I don’t pretend to know just what has to be done. But I suspect that free-marketers need to be less doctrinaire and less simple-mindedly utility-maximizing, and that they should depend less on abstract econometric models. I think they’ll have to take much more seriously the task of thinking through what are the right rules of the road for both the private and public sectors. They’ll have to figure out what institutional barriers and what monetary, fiscal and legal guardrails are needed for the accountability, transparency and responsibility that allow free markets to work.
And I don’t see why conservatives ought to defend a system that permits securitizing mortgages (or car loans) in a way that seems to make the lenders almost unaccountable for the risk while spreading it, toxically, everywhere else. I don’t see why a commitment to free markets requires permitting banks or bank-like institutions to leverage their assets at 30 to 1. There’s nothing conservative about letting free markets degenerate into something close to Karl Marx’s vision of an atomizing, irresponsible and self-devouring capitalism.
If conservatives do some difficult re-thinking in the field of political economy, they can come back. If they don’t — well, there were a lot of admirable conservative thinkers and writers, professors and novelists, from 1933 to 1980. But conservatives didn’t govern.
New Yorker article here.
Obama will enter the White House at a moment of economic crisis worse than anything the nation has seen since the Great Depression; the old assumptions of free-market fundamentalism have, like a charlatan’s incantations, failed to work, and the need for some “new machinery” is painfully obvious. But what philosophy of government will characterize it?
The answer was given three days before the election by a soldier and memoirist of the Reagan revolution, Peggy Noonan, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment.” The Journal’s editorial page anticipated with dread “one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven’t since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s.” The Journal’s nightmare scenario of America under President Obama and a Democratic Congress included health care for all, a green revolution, expanded voting rights, due process for terror suspects, more powerful unions, financial regulation, and a shift of the tax burden upward. (If the editorial had had more space, full employment and the conquest of disease might have made the list.) . . .
Natural air conditioning tonight. Have the electrical mechanical energy-guzzling A/C contraption off and the windows open.
Had to work today till 7:30 p.m.--thus no posts. Picked up a Mexican pizza from Taco Bell on the drive home, fed me and the cats, then watched "Desperate Housewives." Really good. Even the garage band silliness redeemed itself. (Why did the owner of the night club have the emergency exit padlocked?)
I really don't mind working on the weekends. Much less stressful. No phones, no emails, no dress code, no traffic, nobody there.
GI problem seems to be abating (in case you'd like to know). I'd been afraid I might end up in the hospital, diagnosed with some exotic tropical disease.
Finished off the shrimp and scallops from Red Lobster tonight (not bad cold). I've been so hungry but afraid to irritate my GI tract with the wrong foods and suffer the consequences. I weighed myself at Publix a few days ago, and I'd lost 7 pounds since last Sunday at the gym. Not a bad thing, however. I was a little flabby. (Still am.)
Have to work tomorrow, but not till 12:30.
I've seen these cartoons before but didn't know where they came from. Saw this story in Salon. See website here (if you haven't already). Funny stuff.
(I did this one.)
Spent most of the day putting the kitchen back together. As you can see, I'm not quite finished. (I'm probably half-way through, if that.) I also cooked a hamburger--first time I'd been able to use the stove in a while. The exhaust fan in the new microwave above the stove kicks ass.
The fan on the counter (at right, sitting on top of the Building Permit) will be hung here in the "computer room" next Saturday. (It used to hang in the kitchen before I sprayed it white.) The new fan looks a lot better in the kitchen (see below).
The first thing I did today was hang the paper towel holder (at an angle) from the cabinet above the sink. Unfortunately I also pierced the inside of the cabinet. Fixed the damage, however. It was minor. You can't even tell.
I haven't been out of the house all day, not even to the garbage chute.
Talked to my father today. He hasn't heard from my brother in "months and months." (He was homeless for a while. Long story.)
