The Carter Gilson Report

We recently received a bread machine from my mother-in-law, and since then, we have been looking for the best tasting, easy loaf that we can make without thinking too much about it. It took some experimenting, but I think we finally have it down.

This is a 2 lb loaf, so if your bread machine doesn’t go that big, you’ll have to pare it down.

• 1 2/3 Cups Water
• 4 Tbsp Butter or Margarine
• 2 Tbsp Honey
• 2 Tbsp Non-Fat Dry Milk
• 1/2 Cup Wheat Germ
• 3 1/2 Cups Flour
• 1 Cup Oats
• 2 tsp Salt
• 2 tsp Yeast

Put it together according to your bread machine’s directions, but that is the order that I add it to the bowl. It comes out dense and moist and yummy. You should try it.

Chaos and anarchy are scary things and people don’t always trust one another in a crisis. But the fact remains that whenever a crisis occurs in the African American communities, many of the authorities who know better (and would be far more prudent if a different community were involved) are too willing to believe wild, unbelievable rumors they would never believe of others — and they overreact.

Go read.

Prime Fighting Age Presidential daugher Jenna Bush, 25, has gotten engaged. The lucky man is Prime Fighing Age Henry Hager, 28, the son of Virginia Republican Party Chair John Hager. The younger Hager worked in the White House as an aide to Karl Rove. They have been dating for two years.

Wait, two years? Jenna, what about that thing you had in Argentina over Christmas? Did that mean nothing to you? Ramiro will be so sad to lose his 10.

Oh, this just makes me sick (no pun intended). R.J. Reynolds, sinking to a new low, is vigorously promoting Camel no. 9 cigarettes — cigarettes that are designed to entice young women:

Note the lovely sleek packaging, and the “Light and Luscious” tagline. Reynolds has been throwing parties at nightclubs to promote the brand — Girls’ Night Out-type events where women get makeovers, massages, gift bags, and free cigarettes. They’ve also advertised heavily in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Vogue — all publications geared toward young women. And it pisses me off.

According to the CDC, more than 178,000 women died from smoking-related illnesses each year from 1995-1999. 178,000 EACH YEAR. Lung cancer deaths surpassed those from lung cancer in 1985. And younger women are far more likely to start smoking than older women — a fact the R.J. Reynolds is counting on, no doubt.

Smoking also greatly increases a woman’s chance of developing heart disease — which is the leading cause of death for women. It more than doubles the risk of heart attack — and women who smoke while using hormonal birth control methods are at an even higher risk.

Women who smoke also have an increased of developing oral cancer, cancers of the larynx, pharynx, esophagus, kidneys, pancreas, and the cervix. Not to mention the lovely wrinkles, yellow teeth, and nasty ashtray smell smoking gives you.

If it seems like I’m taking this personally, well, I am. I started smoking when I was 16. I was curious about it, and there was a store near my rural Vermont high school that didn’t ask to see an ID to buy cigarettes. And I got addicted to smoking really, really fast. I smoked about a pack a day for the next 14 years or so, until I quit for good on February 16th, 2004. Jeff can attest to how hard quitting was — no, he never smoked, but he had to deal with me while I was quitting. It was awful. It was actually painful. It sucked so much that the memory of it has kept me from lighting up again — I wouldn’t want to go through quitting again.

And there is one other reason why I take this personally — it’s this obituary:

Laura Lynn Gronlund
1964 – 2003

Laurie passed away on February 25, 2003, at 6:30AM CST in Grapevine, TX after a brave battle with cancer which lasted more than two years.

Born May 13, 1964, in Chicago, Ill., Laurie enjoyed reading, writing, watching hockey and big, slobbery dogs. She was a “good egg” whose life was an adventure she always cherished. Whether up or down, Laurie tackled life with a genuine passion and a multi-faceted sense of humor, which she always held dear. Her father, Ralph G., preceded her in death in 1992.

Survivors: Daughter, Rachel L.; mother, Mary S.; sister, Karen G.; brother, Christopher G. and sister-in-law, Cynthia G.; stepbrother, Jeff A. and her boyfriend, Sean A.; and countless family and friends scattered around the globe.

(Last names of her family edited by me.)

Laurie was a wonderful person. I didn’t get to know her terribly well, because we lived so far apart, but we were good online buddies. We liked to talk hockey, and joke with each other. She made me laugh every single day. And smoking killed her.

There are calls for the cigarettes to be taken off the market, by womens’ and public health group. That’s heartening, but it’s not going to work. R.J. Reynolds doesn’t care about the lives of its customers. The money is what they care about, and the only way to stop them is to stop buying their products. If you smoke, please quit. If someone you care about smokes, get them to quit. Nag, beg, plead, bribe, anything. Get them to quit. I know how hard it is, but it’s worth it.

Last night, the Watertown, MA town council voted to get out of the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place to Hate program. The program, which organizes volunteers to repair damage done by hate crime vandals (such as anti-semitic graffitti), have come under fire lately because of a curious position fo the ADL. H2otown reports:

Facing renewed scrutiny (and presumably a few Google searches) locals discovered that the current head of the ADL refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide, a bizarre and disappointing stance for an organization formed to protect the rights of Jewish people from bigotry.

The Armenian Genocide was perpetrated by the Ottoman Emprie during World War I. More than a million Armenians were forcibly deported and killed over a two year period. As it was practically a blueprint for the Holocaust, it’s hard to understand the ADL’s stance here.

Countdown’s TheNewsHole:

For Sooners looking to show their terror-fighting pride while tearing up the asphalt, the Oklahoma Tax Commission has extended the deadline to order the global war on terrorism license plate (aka GWOT) pictured here.

The worst bit, to me, is that Oklahoma was home to the worst home-grown domestic terrorist attack in American history, yet doesn’t ever seem to see the connection in methods between Tim McVeigh and Osama bin Laden.

This is lovely. I feel so great about working next to these behemoths all day, now.

Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology looked into 62 brands of printers, 17 of which they call” high particle emitters”. They found that these laser printers release tiny particles into the air that could post a “significant health threat” if inhaled or ingested.

The really startling thing is the level of dust actually equalled the effects of smoking in some cases. Will OSHA do anything about this? Is OSHA even funded anymore? I haven’t checked.

I know I promised never to bring him up again, but Bill Curry has a great Op-Ed in this morning’s Hartford Coruant that really gets to the heart of why he is so awful.

This past week, the White House issued an interim Iraq report. It claims progress on just eight of 18 “benchmarks” and stretches even for that. Iraq was supposed to complete a constitutional review, but gets a passing grade for forming the committee. And so on. To read it is to be sick at heart.

Unless, of course, you’re Joe Lieberman, who says he read it and found nothing to cast the least doubt on our plan of action. In fact, he’s now sure the war can only be lost by “defeatists at home.”
…
The most important bipartisan movement in a generation is taking shape on Capitol Hill. But ironically, Joe Lieberman isn’t part of it. Instead, he joins Bush in attacking the “defeatists.” Yes, we’ve come to that phase of a war when disgraced leaders blame the outcome on those brave enough to oppose them. Sadly, Lieberman shows signs of giving in to the temptation.

And just who is Bill Curry?

Bill Curry, former counselor to President Bill Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for governor twice.

He also worked on Lieberman’s 1988 campaign to unseat Lowell Weicker.

The Times had a great editorial yesterday:

Recent research surveyed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a governmental think tank for the rich nations, found that mobility in the United States is lower than in other industrial countries. One study found that mobility between generations — people doing better or worse than their parents — is weaker in America than in Denmark, Austria, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain and France. In America, there is more than a 40 percent chance that if a father is in the bottom fifth of the earnings’ distribution, his son will end up there, too. In Denmark, the equivalent odds are under 25 percent, and they are less than 30 percent in Britain.
emphasis and links mine

One of the big conclusions of the Times is that opportunities are not equally distributed, thus upward mobility is restricted to luck and/or very hard work. This is not the land of opportunity anymore.

We need to provide more opportunities, through better access to education, better access to equal healthcare (where one bad accident won’t bankrupt people), and a more powerful social safety net. Random Chance should not be allowed in this country to dictate the fates of its people.

Jen Moseley at Feministing finds this amusing:

I’m not sure why, but this story gave me a giggle. It’s actually something good to remember, the skewing of contraceptive failure rates by abstinence-only purity pushers. The stats they tend to use include the highest ever found failure rates for condoms, but the lowest for abstinence. But, the part that made me laugh was the serious tone of this:

When it comes to “typical,” measurable behavior among professed users, abstinence actually suffers a higher “failure rate” than the pill and some other contraceptives, says a study based on the National Survey of Family Growth. That’s because teens who profess to remain abstinent practice that method, on average, as imperfectly and irregularly as kids who use condoms or the pill, the study found.

So, kids, if you forget to use your abstinence, put a condom on.

As an unintentionally abstinant youth, I can speak from experience that the best form of birth control is shyness. At least from a male perspective. Past that, Jen’s advice is good.

“When you stand up and are arrested, and the Hindu is allowed to go free, this country has gone upside-down.” Rev. Flip Benham, Operation Save America.

This is the guy who sent the three nutjobs into the Senate Gallery this morning to disrupt the invocation.

Blue Mass. Group:

Governor Patrick has vetoed budget language that would allow for ongoing acceptance of federal abstinence-only-until-marriage funding. Thanks to Governor Patrick’s earlier decision to refuse this funding, reinforced by his veto today, Massachusetts has joined the growing list of states (now up to ten) that are refusing funding for these harmful and misleading programs. This is a major victory for the young people of Massachusetts!

After a bit of a shaky start, the Patrick administration is doing the things that we voted for him to do.

AP:

A Hindu clergyman made history Thursday by offering the Senate’s morning prayer, but only after police officers removed three shouting protesters from the visitors’ gallery.

I wonder if it’s somehow connected to this:

On Thursday, a Hindu chaplain from Reno, Nevada, by the name of Rajan Zed is scheduled to deliver the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate. Zed tells the Las Vegas Sun that in his prayer he will likely include references to ancient Hindu scriptures, including Rig Veda, Upanishards, and Bhagavard-Gita. Historians believe it will be the first Hindu prayer ever read at the Senate since it was formed in 1789.

WallBuilders president David Barton is questioning why the U.S. government is seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god. Barton points out that since Hindus worship multiple gods, the prayer will be completely outside the American paradigm, flying in the face of the American motto “One Nation Under God.”

That lovely bit of hate comes from the American Family Association, urging their members to call their senators to complain. As John Aravosis explains:

The AFA is made up of equal opportunity bigots: they slur gays, Catholics, Hindus and just about everyone else who isn’t a conservative Christian fundamentalist. Their vision of America is a country made up of Southern Baptists, or at least a nation in which everyone has to live under laws that conform to Southern Baptist preachings.

Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake reminds us what today is really about:

That’s right: Today’s the day we honor the anniversary of what is almost certainly the most important event in our nation’s history — the birth of Geraldo Rivera!

It got me wondering just who else we should be celebrating today.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804
Rube Goldberg, 1883
Mitch Miller, 1911
Neil Simon, 1927
Michael Milken, 1946
Koko, 1971

I think this list is pretty representative of America, actually.

Crooks and Liars has the goods.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental com-pact between yourself and the majority of this nation’s citizens — the ones who did not cast votes for you.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the President of the United States.
In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the President… of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.
And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander-in-chief who puts party over nation.

Once again, Keith made my wife want to give him a big smooch. Not that I can blame her.