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April 17, 2015 11:27 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 86 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Self-conceit may lead to self destruction.”

–Aesop

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86 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  1. Traditional Marinara Cheesecake (for Earth Day, April 22)

    Ingredients:

    4 ounces (2 cups) Graham cracker crumbs
    1/2 stick butter
    1 heaped tablespoon sugar

    2 cups cream cheese
    3/4 cup superfine sugar
    3 eggs
    3 egg yolks
    3/4 cup sour cream
    1 teaspoon lime juice
    1 teaspoon vanilla extract
    2 tablespoons rum
    1 cup marinara sauce

    (for the syrup)
    1/3 cup water
    1/4 cup rum
    1 tablespoon ketchup
    1/4 cup superfine sugar
    1 tablespoon butter

    Preparation:

    Preheat the oven to 350°F, and put the kettle on to boil.

    For the base, process the crackers, butter and heaped tablespoon chestnut purée until like fine crumbs. Press the mixture into the bottom of a 9 inch springform pan and place in the fridge while you make the filling.

    Beat the cream cheese until smooth and add the sugar. Add the eggs and egg yolks, beating them in one by one until they are incorporated into the cream cheese and sugar. Pour in the sour cream, lime juice, vanilla extract and rum, and beat again until smooth and creamy. Finally fold in the marinara sauce.

    Line the outside of the springform pan containing the crumb base with a good wrapping of plastic wrap, so that the whole of the bottom and sides are enveloped in plastic. Do the same with aluminum foil, covering the layer of plastic wrap to make a very watertight casing. Stand the springform, thus covered, in a roasting pan and pour in the filling. Once that’s done, pour water from a recently boiled kettle into the roasting pan to come just over an inch up the side of the pan (the plastic wrap will make it bob up and down a bit) and place in the oven to cook for an hour.

    When the cheesecake’s ready it should be just set on top with a hint of wobble underneath; it certainly carries on cooking as it cools. Take the cheesecake out of the roasting pan, take off the foil and plastic wrap and let the cheesecake cool on a rack. Refrigerate overnight before unmolding and leaving it to get back to room temperature. If you need to unmold it long before you want to eat it, then just sit it on its serving plate in the fridge until about 20 to 30 minutes before you want to eat it. You can make the syrup in advance but do not pour over until the actual point of serving.

    You just put all of the syrup ingredients into a saucepan and melt together. Let the syrup boil for 10 minutes, then cool to just warmish (or even room temperature) before criss-crossing the top of the cheesecake with it.

    Enjoy!

     

    1. This sounds yummy. With the marinara, I wonder how it would be if the rum was replaced with Strega, an Italian liqueur. I may try it. I’ll report back on how it worked. 

  2. Sounds awesome, Nurse Chaps — I especially like the way you worked in that bit of (demon) rum!!!   

    Hey, it life gives you demons, why not bake a cheesecake??? 

    Dog bless! innocent

  3. So yesterday there was a front page post by Pols calling out Senators Bennet & Gardner for political grandstanding over the veterans hospital. Spot-on post.

    And now it’s gone. Do Pols have a nothing negative about Bennet rule like Tucker Carlson has a nothing negative about Fox News rule?

        1. You may have noticed that criticism of just about all Democrats (except Ed Perlmutter, it seems) is plentiful in these parts. Not many kind words for the likes of Michael (Thurston) Bennet or John Frackenlooper, to name a couple, coming from this corner.

          This is a liberal blog, I think it is safe to say, and I consider myself a progressive. I am a registered Democrat and have been since I first voted in 1972. But even though I participate in some party activities, I never get invited to the private parties. I don’t fit in and I can be disagreeable…sometimes. I do not gladly suffer misinformation, nor the presence of those who wield it as a weapon.

          But that is the great thing about the Democratic Party. While it has a cash-centric power base, just like the Pubs (and, presumably, most other parties), that base has a looser hold on the troops than does the very regimented and autocratic Republicans. We, progressives, are hard to lead because those who saw the t-shirt that said “question authority” and took it to heart, tend to be of the donkey party. Democrats, in my experience, are far more likely to think for themselves, unlike the intellectually lazy, financially eager money hounds on the other side of the spectrum.

          So, yes, speaking only as one old timer around here, yes…thank you, please. 

          1. Agree with Duke and I am sure the issue is the site itself, It’s overstuffed -hardest site for me to navigate (even w Firefox)

             Here’s the prob- too much here (hoarding) I have the meagerest Internet connection so it takes forever to build pages, (my fault) But,(for example) “recent comments” only match with those  pages  one has viewed  so I think the article slipped through the cracks, assume it’s still there -anyone checked?

             Back to Col pols its about at intervention stage for them, Time to fess up as to exactly how many cats (hoarding) are in the house. LOL

        1. At one time we had more conservatives who could write a post without consulting the Tea Party Talking-Point-Of-The-Day site for a copy/paste session.

          I do appreciate having a few thoughtful conservatives posting these days, even if most of them are half-renegades.

          I suppose you can take comfort in just how many of us are former Republicans. Or not, if you’re not feeling like being comforted.

      1. Looks like it….kiss At least for the Eurovision videos.  Although Duke may watch it if we talk up the cleavage. Speaking of which, what the hell exactly is the milkmaid in the video milking?

          1. Search me. I can proudly say I’ve never once once clicked on any of David’s cheesy Euro-trash musical offerings. Wouldn’t want to risk that kind of ear worm. It might be fatal. 

            1. If you’ve never clicked, how do you know they’re bad? It’s sad you take pride in denigrating something without ever looking at it. Makes you the left-win equivalent of Ann Coulter.

              Also, not all the Eurovison songs are pop. It ranges from hard rock to jazz to opera (in Corsican) to cultural specific. Who knows, you might find you like some. There’s a reason the television audience for ESC is the largest non sports championship audience every year.

              1. I’m not sure where the left/right stuff comes in. I’ve seen and heard enough of this kind of thing in the past to know it’s not my cuppa.  The cheesy visuals that you post are quite enough to warn me off. Even if I ran into something I liked, David, that wouldn’t be worth the super high risk of being infected with some awful shlocky ear worm and subjected to some super cheesy video. I’d rather miss the 1% I might like, thanks. You can call me Ann Coulter. Just don’t call me to click on your favorite tunes.cool

                PS. Is mama the sole source of “popular demand”?  

              2. Take it to Facebook, Neville.

                Gosh, David’s back and he’s seeing conspiracies (unflattering Dem posts have mysteriously disappeared!) and posting time wasting music videos. 

                Go back to work, David.  I’m sure they miss you greatly.

              1. Bet the neighborhood kids stay off your lawn, too. Or would if parents were allowed to let their kids play outside unsupervised anymore. Kind of a moot point these days. wink

          3. OK, not literally milking, just a bit of fake butter churning and clothes washing, – but very little left to the imagination. I guess it’s good to be sexy and Slavic. 

            I’m a feminist, and progressive, and a professional, but was never very good at being politically correct, and have inherited my newspaperman father’s salty sense of humor. So sue me. 

              1. And as a bi woman, it is my mission to upset everyone’s assumptions and confuse the hell out of them! You’re welcome….

                Milking the audience, yes.

            2. BTW, a lot of this comes from the voting system. Everyone in Europe gets 20 votes (per phone ID). Voters have a couple of favorites they give a lot of their votes to. But people tend to spread out their votes and this is where it becomes challenging to the acts.

              There are 26 songs in the final. How do you get voters to remember yours to give you a couple of votes? If you were born in say Romania and now like in the UK then you’ll pay attention to the Romanian & Moldavian songs. But you may have trouble remembering if it was Lithuania or Latvia that had one you liked.

              And so many acts go for something memorable. Poland had a good song (I think). And in the center stage they had traditional dancers that accented the song well. But the milk-maids insured that everyone watching remembered that specific song.

              The end result was the professional jury vote for Poland, as for Romania the year before (that year’s best staging) was low. I think the juries discounted a really good song because of the staging. But the tele-voters ate it up and delivered a lot of votes (in both cases).

  5. It’s an OK pop song, and the lyrics general enough not to offend anyone’s sensibilities. I don’t know if Poland is still an extremely religious and conservative country, as it was after it broke from USSR’s domination in 1990. It’s been through quite a few changes since then.

      1. See David, it’s that insinuating itself thing that I feel such a pressing need to avoid. Do not want to risk being trapped in my own head with shlocky Euro-pop. Get me some Howlin’ Wolf. Stat!

    2. I was in Poland in 2011. Still a religious country; conservative, maybe not so much except with the domination of the Catholic Church.

    3. Join in with others, in the read, John C. Calhoun is a predominant intellectual character of the times, and leading up to secession, as senator(?) ..from the article (last) … published posthumously in 1851, which completely misrepresented the Founders and their Constitution. Calhoun’s view (that the Union was a consortium of states with no direct relationship to the people)

      From James A Mitchner’s epic historical novel, Chesapeake, Calhoun delivers a “white paper” speech to Congress outlining how the labor intensive tobacco( and later, cotton)cultivation required slave labor in order for the bottom line to survive. Disingenuous artifice to be sure, as is practiced today as well.

      With the predominance of Right to work (for less) states being Southern,  their peculiar view of labor stands out. Also, Southerners such as Calhoun were not above bringing to the Congress canings or gun play. Other writers have recently pointed out the role of Northern Banks of NY & Boston profited from the south agronomy.

      1. Okay, I’ve read it and it’s spot on. I’ve been watching the modern phenomenon for a while now: the 1%ers pointing at minority populations and immigrants and telling the lower middle-class white people, “It’s them! They’re why you can’t get ahead! We ‘create’ all of these great jobs and they poach them.”  It’s nothing new or different. It’s been going on for over a hundred years.

        You’d just think that eventually, the people who keep getting this crap preached to them would catch on, but if you bleed the schools of enough money that they can’t even teach the basics adequately the population stays too dumb to figure it out. 

        1. You would think eventually the people who kepp getting this crap preached to them would catch on?

          Not really. I’m old enough to remember George Wallace’s appeal amongst lower middle class white folks as he warned them that African-Americans were threatening them in their place. (Not much mention of Latinos in the late 60’s. That came later courtesy of asshats like Pat Buchanan and Tom Tancredo.) 

          It’s amazing (and not in a good way) but not all that much has changed in 40 or 50 years.

  7. This was a lovely song, by a beautiful singer. Thank you for sharing. Unless you watched the video to the very end, you wouldn’t know that Ms. Kuszynska is paralyzed from the waist down, which makes it all the more amazing. (Singers can tell you that you always sing better standing up, and opera singers can tell you that they have to work hard to produce a good sound when they singing in different positions).

    1. My bar mitzvah teacher has a granddaughter who’s an amazing soprano (she is still studying in IU-Bloomington for her master’s in voice). Her zaidy is a well-known cantor himself, and have sang high holidays for West Virginia up until two years ago for 40+ years, so that’s where she got her talent from.

  8. Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s time for a medical marijuana revolution 

    I see signs of a revolution everywhere.

    I see it in the op-ed pages of the newspapers, and on the state ballots in nearly half the country. I see it in politicians who once preferred to play it safe with this explosive issue but are now willing to stake their political futures on it. I see the revolution in the eyes of sterling scientists, previously reluctant to dip a toe into this heavily stigmatized world, who are diving in head first. I see it in the new surgeon general who cites data showing just how helpful it can be.

    I see a revolution in the attitudes of everyday Americans. For the first time a majority, 53%, favor its legalization, with 77% supporting it for medical purposes.

    Ending prohibition, as we did in Colorado in 2012, isn’t The Great Social Experiment.  The Great Social Experiment was prohibition – and it has failed miserably.  After decades of corruption and impotence, nearly a trillion dollars spent and incarceration at a scale never before known to man – it’s time for our politicians to put on their big boy panties and end this scourge on our nation.  

    #healthcare not #handcuffs

      1. It’s rumored that DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart may be in her final days.  These words below – from a leader who overseas agents who are having sex parties paid for by the Columbia cartel; a woman whose agency knew the CIA was selling cocaine in Los Angeles to fund wars of their choosing.  Yet, it was a simple, hemp stars and stripes flying over our nation’s Capitol on July 4, 2013 that became the worst day of her entire 33-year career.  

        We’re way beyond Reefer Madness, ma’am. 

         

        1. I cry for her, Michael, but my tears are tears of laughter. I hope the door hits her in the fanny on the way out. And with that, I’m going to bed.

        3. I’m very proud of you, my friend. To receive such derision from such a pathetic excuse for a public servant is high honor indeed…well done!

    2. Charlotte’s Web made a believer out of the good doctor. And Michael, you said that wrong. Alcohol prohibition was The Noble Experiment, if I remember my history right. 

    1. Hey, lightning never strikes twice in the same place, right?  I mean, how many of these sites could there really be in Weld County? Nothing to see here…move along. 

        1. And that perfectly groomed blond lady on TV in the immaculately tailored pants suit and stiletto heels would never mislead us about how clean and safe all the oil and gas tech is. I mean, she’s so blond! So trim! So squeaky clean!

          1. She is my arch-nemesis. If someone would fund it, I would dress up in a black pantsuit, blonde wig, and heels to call her a liar and tell millions of Americans the truth about natural gas.

            this is the best she’s got….

            “the new energy super power is red, white and blue…log on to learn more”

                1. Looks like this might take a little while…I tried to sign up at gofundme.com but you can’t establish an account unless you can upload a photo…?…and I don’t know how to do that….so…I’m working on it….

                  1. Of course, there are many ways to skin that cat.  The easiest is to take (or have taken) a cell phone photo, e-mail it to you, get into e-mail on your computer, save the photo to your computer, upload to the site.

      2. Thanks, Mike. I haven’t figured out how to do fancy stuff like photos, but this pic was what provoked my original post, above. Will this get any of the right people’s attention?

          1. Who’d have thunk?  Just insert ‘Colorado’ anywhere this article references Louisiana and ‘COGA’ for BP and this article writes itself….

            Former Army General Lambasts Oil Industry for ‘Hijacking’ Democracy

            After a BP executive lambasted “opportunistic” environmentalists and journalistic “sensationalism” from a podium in front of hundreds of environmental journalists in a New Orleans ballroom Wednesday evening, Russel Honore could not hide his disgust. Taking the podium some time after, Honore, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General, had harsh words for the oil and gas industry. In the four years that has passed since the BP oil spill, Honore has run out of patience with energy companies that he says have “hijacked” his state.

            “They have hijacked our damn democracy. They lobby, they write the laws.”

            Environmental impacts of the BP spill and other energy activities should not be downplayed, he said. “Regardless of what that kemo-sabe told you, that dolphin took a hit” from the Gulf oil disaster, Honore said, referring to Geoff Morrell, the BP communications executive who spoke before him.

        2. I have a diary in the works on the Shakin’ and Bakin’ in Greeley. Today was a day for culture, however, which is also important. A Bisl Klezmer did a concert at my UU church as part of Holocaust Remembrance month.

    1. I’m sure he’ll be overcome by the vapors prior to announcing his candidacy.  “What?  People are interested in why I’ve never married?  My goodness, it is so powerfully, powerfully hot in here.  Could someone get me a sweet tea or a lemonade?”

  11. Here’s an idea:

    Send a donation to Alan Grayson and a copy of your receipt to Michael Bennet.

     

    While I’m at it, I’ll send something to Al Franken too.

  13. Defenders of Freedom:

    Religious liberty in our country is under fire as never before.  We’re standing up for it.  Please stand with us.

    I’m not sure how I got on this mailing list, but I’m confident all of my homies on CoPols who get up every morning hell-bent on destroying John’s Freedom and way of life in Backbone would want to peruse this fundraising letter “embrace” of all who choose to attend (as long as some of you stay in the custodians closet). 

    “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” … and call our your bigoted white ass when necessary. 

  14. From the Mayor of that rugged, boot-strappin’ panacea of all our social ills (ain’t no cheeseburger joint or polyester pants in this town, no siree) , Backbone:  where men are men and sheep are nervous…

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