Author's posts

Apr 21 2011

It’s Your Move

I am gong to very honest with all of you. It’s your choice whether this site continues. I need to know what the community wants to do. Commenting and content have been sparse, except for a few devoted members and I appreciate and thank them for their work.

When I stepped in here in January, the site was already in decline and had been since last June. I suppose there are factors that have gone into that dynamic, I wouldn’t know, since my last comment here was on June 6th. I didn’t read anything here until I was told about buhdy’s diary in November and I didn’t comment until the site was transfered to me. The offer was made to keep the “lights on” for those whom had vested so much time and energy into writing, reading and comments, for those whom wanted to stay, for those to whom this was “home”.

My original intent was to remain in the background after the essay letting you all know that the site would stay active. That might have been a better idea than I thought. So except for the daily Stars Hollow Gazette Review and the occasional administrative duties, I will no longer be posting here. You all know where to find me and I will be still reading the essays and the comments.

This is about you and what you want to happen to Docudharma.  

Apr 20 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

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Wednesday is mishima‘s well deserved day of rest

and these featured articles-

The Stars Hollow Gazette

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Apr 20 2011

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Health and Fitness weekly diary which is cross-posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette. It is open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Brown Rice, but Better

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I had never heard od sprouted graind except for beans sprouts and neither had the author of the NYT’s blog, Martha Rose Shulman, the source of these articles:

   Until recently I’d never heard of sprouted brown rice. These sprouts aren’t like the ones you put on a sandwich. Sprouted brown rice looks and feels like regular brown rice, and it must be cooked for the same amount of time. But once cooked, it’s sweeter and more delicate than ordinary brown rice, and a little less chewy.

   Sprouting any grain increases its nutritional value by making its nutrients more bio-available, among them calcium. But it’s the flavor and texture of this new sprout that have gotten me hooked. If you’ve been hard pressed to get your family to embrace brown rice, this may be the way to go.

Sprouted brown rice is a packaged product that you can find in natural foods stores with other packaged grains. The grains are sprouted, then dried. It looks and cooks like regular brown rice.

Sprouted Brown Rice Bowl With Carrot and Hijiki


As per Ms Shulman, “Julienne carrots with hijiki seaweed is a traditional Japanese combination. . . . Hijiki is an excellent source of iodine, vitamin K, folate and magnesium; the seaweed is soaked and simmered before cooking with the carrot and aromatics.

Rice Bowl With Spinach and Smoked Trout

Thai-Style Sprouted Rice and Herb Salad

Shrimp and Brown Rice Soup

Stir-Fried Bean Sprouts With Sprouted Brown Rice

Apr 20 2011

Tickling Pengiuns

Apr 20 2011

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and this featured article-

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Apr 19 2011

Recipe for Disaster: Deep Water Drilling

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Getting Wise to the Dangers of Drilling

Rachel Maddow notes that as the awareness of the inadequacies of the safety improvements in deep water drilling is growing, the Department of Interior had decided to stop issuing press releases when they grant drilling permits.

Experts fear another oil disaster

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – With everything Big Oil and the government have learned in the year since the Gulf of Mexico disaster, could it happen again? Absolutely, according to an Associated Press examination of the industry and interviews with experts on the perils of deep-sea drilling.

The government has given the OK for oil exploration in treacherously deep waters to resume, saying it is confident such drilling can be done safely. The industry has given similar assurances. But there are still serious questions in some quarters about whether the lessons of the BP oil spill have been applied.

The industry “is ill-prepared at the least,” said Charles Perrow, a Yale University professor specializing in accidents involving high-risk technologies. “I have seen no evidence that they have marshaled containment efforts that are sufficient to deal with another major spill. I don’t think they have found ways to change the corporate culture sufficiently to prevent future accidents.”

He added: “There are so many opportunities for things to go wrong that major spills are unavoidable.”

Regulation of Offshore Rigs Is a Work in Progress


By John M. Broder and Clifford Krauss

WASHINGTON – A year after BP’s Macondo well blew out, killing 11 men and spewing millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the much-maligned federal agency responsible for policing offshore drilling has been remade, with a tough new director, an awkward new name and a sheaf of stricter safety rules. It is also trying to put some distance between itself and the industry it regulates.

But is it fixed? The simple answer is no. Even those who run the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service concede that it will be years before they can establish a robust regulatory regime able to minimize the risks to workers and the environment while still allowing exploration offshore.

“We are much safer today than we were a year ago,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who oversees the agency, “but we know we have more to do.”

Oil industry executives and their allies in Congress said that the Obama administration, in its zeal to overhaul the agency, has lost sight of what they believe the agency’s fundamental mission should be – promoting the development of the nation’s offshore oil and gas resources. Environmentalists said the agency, now known as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has made only cosmetic changes and remains too close to the people it is supposed to regulate.

Apr 19 2011

Budget Proposal Creates Surplus in 2021

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

A balanced budget with a surplus? No way not happening. Well it seems that there is a counter proposal by the Congressional Progressive Caucus that does just that.

The CPC proposal:

• Eliminates the deficits and creates a surplus by 2021

• Puts America back to work with a “Make it in America” jobs program

• Protects the social safety net

• Ends the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

• Is FAIR (Fixing America’s Inequality Responsibly)

What the proposal accomplishes:

• Primary budget balance by 2014.

• Budget surplus by 2021.

• Reduces public debt as a share of GDP to 64.1% by 2021, down 16.5 percentage points from

a baseline fully adjusted for both the doc fix and the AMT patch.

• Reduces deficits by $5.6 trillion over 2012-21, relative to this adjusted baseline.

• Outlays equal to 22.2% of GDP and revenue equal 22.3% of GDP by 2021.

There was debate this morning in the House about the austerity budget put forward by Tea Party Rep. Paul Ryan’ (R-WI) that decimates Medicaid and Medicare. When Rep Keith Ellison asked  Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN) when the Ryan budget plan would produce a surplus, Rokita was clueless:

   ELLISON: When does the Ryan budget create a surplus?

   ROKITA: The budget proposed and voted on by the committee – […]

   ROKITA: With responsible, gradual reforms to the drivers of our debt, like Medicare and Social Security, this budget will balance –

   ELLISON: I asked the gentlemen when the Ryan budget created a surplus. He could have given me a year. He didn’t. That’s because he’s probably embarrassed about when that is. Let me tell you when the Progressive Caucus comes to surplus: 2021. That is known as a responsible budget.

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Ryan’s budget will not produce a surplus until 2040 (pdf). The Economic Policy Institute looked that the Progressive Caucus budget. Their analysis said that it who produce a $30.7 billion surplus in 2021 (pdf).

h/t to Travis Waldron at Think Progress

Apr 19 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

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our weekly feature-

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Apr 17 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

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Join us Monday morning for ek hornbeck‘s Monday Business Edition

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Apr 17 2011

Another Congressional Game of Chicken: The Debt Ceiling

Cross Posted from The Strs Hollow Gazette

Will there be another “cave exploration by our Spelunker-in-Chief? Despite President Obama speech on Wednesday and his demand request for a “clean bill” to raise the debt ceiling, there are those who have their doubts about Obama resolve to stand his ground considering his past capitulations in the name of bipartisanship for the last two years.

Now Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has threatened to filibuster the bill should it not contain “other fiscal reforms” like a balanced budget amendment.

A top conservative senator on Thursday indicated he is willing to go to extreme lengths to prevent a vote on raising the debt ceiling, even if it hurts the Republican Party politically.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said on the conservative Laura Ingraham Show he is considering filibustering an upcoming vote to raise the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt limit if it doesn’t contain other fiscal reforms.

While the Senate Minority Leader Mitch “The Human Hybrid Turtle” McConnell (R-KY) has said that the ceiling should be raised to avoid the dire consequences, he would like to see it passed with only Democratic votes.

Mr. McConnell is discouraging his colleagues from filibustering a vote to increase the federal debt limit because he knows that, if push came to shove, some of his colleagues would almost certainly have to vote yea. He’d rather it pass in a 51-vote environment, where all of the votes could come from Democrats, than in a 60-vote environment, where at least seven Republicans would have to agree to a cloture motion.

In the same New York Times article by Nate Silver the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling would lead to another recession:

If the Congress does not vote to increase the debt ceiling – a statutory provision that governs how many of its debts the Treasury is allowed to pay back (but not how many obligations the United States is allowed to incur in the first place) – then the Treasury will first undertake a series of what it terms “extraordinary actions” to buy time. The “extraordinary actions” are not actually all that extraordinary – at least some of them were undertaken prior to six of the seven debt ceiling votes between 1996 and 2007.

But once the Treasury exhausts this authority, the United States would default on its debt for the first time in its history, which could have consequences like the ones that Mr. Boehner has imagined: a severe global financial crisis (possibly larger in magnitude than the one the world began experiencing in 2007 and 2008), and a significant long-term increase in the United States’ borrowing costs, which could cost it its leadership position in the global economy. Another severe recession would probably be about the best-case scenario if that were to occur.

The bill will not get to the Senate until sometime in May. When it does reach the “upper” chamber, it most likely will be loaded with hundreds of riders from the House Tea Party Republicans. The President and the Senate Democratic leaders have a limited choices. However, if that choose  to  stand their ground and push for that “clean bill”, there could be “savior”, Wall St., which stands to lose billions or more if the US  defaults on its debt. As David Dayen at FDL suggests this is a plausible solution. But is it possible  considering Obama’s inability to win at this “Congressional Game of Chicken”?

Apr 16 2011

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

these weekly features-

A Special Feature for you night owl car racing aficionados at about 2:30 AM, Live Blog from Shanghai the Formula 1 Grand Prix of China with ek hornbeck

and this featured article-

Join us every Sunday at 8 AM for Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition by TheMomCat

at 4 PM, an opportunity to join in ranting with Rant of the Week by TheMomCat

and at 9 PM for Translator‘s Pique the Geek

This is an Open Thread

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Apr 16 2011

What’s Cooking: Sweet Potato Mash

I love sweet potatoes and not just at Thanksgiving. I like them baked, boiled and mashed and dipped in tempura batter and fried. They are great in breads and baked desserts. They are very nutritional, an excellent source of vitamin A and a good source of potassium and vitamin C, B6, riboflavin, copper, pantothetic acid and folic acid. Sweet potatoes are native to Central America, grown in the Southern US states since the 16th century and are in the same family of plants as Morning Glories. The plant is a trailing vine with a large tuberous root.

Sweet Potatoes are often confused with yams which are native to Africa and relate to lilies and grasses. Even though they are both flowering plants, botanically they are different.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture requires labels with the term ‘yam’ to be accompanied by the term ‘sweet potato.’ Unless you specifically search for yams, which are usually found in an international market, you are probably eating sweet potatoes!

A couple of Thanksgivings ago, my daughter decided to ditch the “traditional” candied version topped with marshmallow that would put a normal person into a diabetic coma and went “surfing” for something different. The recipe she found now makes it to our table more often than once a year. It is still sweet but not overwhelming. It’s great served as a side with pork or ham, as well as turkey. Nummy as a midnight snack with a little whipped cream, too.

Bourbon-Walnut Sweet Potato Mash

Ingredients:

   4 pounds red-skinned sweet potatoes

   1/2 cup whipping cream

   6 tablespoons (3/4 cup) butter

   1/4 cup pure maple syrup

   2 tablespoons bourbon

   1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

   1 teaspoon ground allspice

   3/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

   1 cup walnuts, toasted, chopped

Preparaton:

Preheat oven to 350°F. Roast potatoes on rimmed baking sheet until tender, 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Cool slightly. Scoop flesh into large bowl; discard skins. Mash hot potatoes until coarse puree forms.

Heat cream and butter in heavy small saucepan over low heat until butter melts, stirring occasionally. Gradually stir hot cream mixture into hot potatoes. Stir in syrup, bourbon, and all spices. Season with salt and pepper.

DO AHEAD: Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover and chill. Rewarm in microwave. Sprinkle nuts over and serve.

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