Evening. Naeem Kahn – Indian born American based designer. Oh, how clever of Lady M! “The dress is entirely handmade, requiring three weeks of work by 40 people, completed in Naeem Kahn’s family workshop in India.” So that’s another 40 jobs created or saved right there.
As you know, I have severely criticized Michelle Obama’s poor (too rich?) fashion choices and her posture.
Last night, however, Michelle Obama finally wore a beautiful dress, that fit her perfectly, was exactly proportioned for her, and the color was exactly right for her. She did not over acessorize with jewelry, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. Best yet, she managed to carry herself with the right poise and posture as the photo shows.
Yes, it’s that time of year again.
Since I don’t tolerate food with sugar added, here’s the sum total of my baking:
Apple and pecan pie:
The day before: marinade 1/2 cup of raisins in a glass dish and add enough bourbon to cover the raisins. Cover the dish and set aside overnight (no need to refrigerate).
The day you’re serving the pie:
Heat oven to 400F.
In a very large bowl, mix:
8 large apples, peeled and cored, and cut into large (1/4″ thick) pieces
(You might want to caramelize the apples slightly, by sauteing in butter and a dash of freshly-grated nutmeg)
the raisins marinated in bourbon
1 tbs cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 cup pecan pieces. You can also use chopped walnuts.
Mix all ingredients until well coated.
Line a deep pie dish with one Pillsbury pie crust (or you can make your own crust).
Pour the apples, raisins and pecans into the pie plate. Cut 1/4 lb (one bar) of refrigerated butter into chunks and dot the apples with the butter. Please use butter. Cover the apples with the other pie crust, seal the edges and perforate the top with a fork.
Bake at 400F for 45 minutes.
Serve warm with Vermont cheddar cheese, or with Edy’s No Sugar Added vanilla ice cream. I prefer the cheddar.
Note: While I add no sugar, if you use sweet apples the pie will be sweet. Bear that in mind if you must watch your blood sugars.
Additionally, this is not a low calorie dessert.
The 62-year-old branch head of one German bank was hailed as a hero after she confessed to transferring money from rich customers to help her poorer clients. Already, she has been dubbed “Die Robin Hood Bankerin”.
She was given a 22-month suspended sentence after moving more than €7.6m (£6.9m) in 117 transfers between 2003 and 2005. The court in Bonn was told that the employee, who has not been named, took no money for herself.
The judge referred to her stealing as “altruistic behavior”.
Here in the US we get the government to take our money and bailout the banks and financial firms because they are “too big to fail”.
President Obama will travel to Copenhagen in December to help kick off the global climate talks despite the conference’s failure to secure a binding worldwide treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
An administration official said Obama will travel to the Danish capital Dec. 9, one day before he visits nearby Oslo to officially accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
There had been doubts about whether the president would attend the climate change conference. He had said for weeks that he would go only if his presence would help produce a meaningful result.
Here’s a fashion statement that “would help produce a meaningful result”:
Tim Blair has the shirt. “Hide the decline” in global temperatures, that is.
A partial review of the hacked material suggests there was an effort at East Anglia, which houses an important center of global climate research, to shut out dissenters and their points of view.
In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call “disinformation” using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites.
The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.
But back to Obama’s sartorial choices: He’s reading up on fashion by carrying the GQ with himself on the cover,
Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.
The three, all members of the Navy’s elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral’s mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.
Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named “Objective Amber,” told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.
Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.
Abed claims he was punched, and now the Marines SEALS face assault charges? They should be given a medal for not doing to the terrorist what the terrorist did in Fallujah: burning, mutilating, and hanging four Americans:
The four Blackwater agents were transporting supplies for a catering company when they were ambushed and killed by gunfire and grenades. Insurgents burned the bodies and dragged them through the city. They hanged two of the bodies on a bridge over the Euphrates River for the world press to photograph.
For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.
It is he, who I am taking as representative of a larger mentality here, who uses equally inert lingo to suggest that Maj. Hasan was “pushed over the edge by his perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.” That’s a nice and shady use of the word “perception.” Might it not be equally true to say that Hasan was all-too-easily pulled over the edge, having already signaled his devout eagerness for the dive, by a cleric who makes a living by justifying murder of Muslims and non-Muslims alike?
In many recent reports of this controversy one has seen reporters from respectable papers referring not just to generic, uniform “Muslims” but even to the places where they live as “Muslim lands.” If you would object to seeing the absurd term “Christendom” in your newspaper as a description of Europe, let alone to reading about “Jewish land” on the West Bank, then please have the fortitude to complain next time violent theocracy is smuggled into the discourse under the increasingly feeble disguise of multicultural masochism.
Multicultural masochism, which leads to suicide through political correctness.
Thomas Sowell explains what politicians are after when making disastrous policy: Solving Whose Problem?
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems– of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
Dr Sowell looks at Barney Frank’s role in the mortgage crisis:
Very few people are likely to connect the dots back to those members of Congress who voted for bigger mortgage guarantees and bailouts by the FHA. So the Congressmen’s and the bureaucrats’ jobs are safe, even if millions of other people’s jobs are not.
Congressman Barney Frank is not about to cut back on risky mortgage loan guarantees by the FHA. He recently announced that he plans to introduce legislation to raise the limit on FHA loan guarantees even more.
Congressman Frank will make himself popular with people who get those loans and with banks that make these high-risk loans where they can pocket the profits and pass the risk on to the FHA.
So long as the taxpayers don’t understand that all this political generosity and compassion are at their expense, Barney Frank is an odds-on favorite to get re-elected. The man is not stupid.
What is stupid is believing that politicians are trying to solve our problems, instead of theirs.
While you’re at it, don’t bet on the Community Reinvestment Act to stop being law any time soon.
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And a side comment:
Townhall.com, where the Sowell article is posted, now has the most obnoxious, by far, website. As Gerard put it, it’s become a
crapulous example of graphic sludge, popovers, popunders, animations, blink tags and other web page bullshit gone wild
As if that weren’t enough, the RSS feeds are screwy, too.
If any of you guys in charge of that mess are reading this, I urge you to please clean up the mess.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva urged his Iranian counterpart on Monday to engage in dialogue on nuclear non-proliferation but backed Iran’s right to develop a peaceful nuclear program.
Ignoring critics who fear closer ties with Iran could dent Brazil’s ambitions on the global diplomatic stage, Lula met with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Brasilia on the first leg of the Iranian leader’s South American tour, which also includes stops in Bolivia and Venezuela.
But in Brazil, the Iranian leader will get a reprieve from Western threats of sanctions. With Lula, Ahmadinejad – and his entourage of businessmen – will discuss opportunities to increase and diversify commerce as well as boost cooperation in nanotechnology, biotechnology, agriculture, and energy, according Brazil’s Foreign Ministry. An Iranian deputy foreign minister said that Tehran hopes to increase trade with Brazil from $2 billion to $15 billion in the field of petrochemicals, agriculture, and medicine, according to the Los Angeles Times.
But Ahmadinejad’s looking for more than trade:
Here’s Ahmadinejad’s Brazilian TV interview (in Portuguese), where he said,
“The world needs a new economic order. Iran and Brazil have independent positions in relation to the international situation. … The two can work together to help create a new international order.”
