{"id":5246,"date":"2011-01-26T11:58:12","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T18:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5246"},"modified":"2011-01-26T18:01:38","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T01:01:38","slug":"sotu-spaghetti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5246","title":{"rendered":"SOTU Spaghetti"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I make a dish called pasta puttanesca<\/a>; literally, “whore’s spaghetti.”\u00a0 The sauce is made of olive oil, garlic, anchovies, chopped tomatoes, capers, basil, and perhaps a few olives, tossed into pasta.\u00a0 Last night, since I was about to sit down to watch President Obama deliver the annual State of the Union address to an assembly of infamous whores, pasta puttanesca seemed like the perfect TV dinner.\u00a0 But we had no penne, no rigatoni, no mostaccioli, no ziti — the cupboard was empty save for a box of angel hair spaghetti.\u00a0 So what?\u00a0 Pasta is pasta, right?<\/p>\n

I learned otherwise.\u00a0 When you mix the sauce with penne, there’s plenty of sauce to coat the pasta and the dish is tasty.\u00a0 When you mix it with angel hair, there’s so damn much pasta surface area for the sauce to cover that the sauce gets lost and the flavor disappears.<\/p>\n

Sort of like the President’s SOTU address: diluted, safe, conciliatory to the point of blandness.\u00a0 It was a pep rally, short on substance.\u00a0 Beyond Obama’s proposal to stop subsidizing the oil industry — a great idea but almost certainly a non-starter given the oil industry’s deep penetration of the House and Senate — where was the substance?\u00a0 Yes, by all means let’s have high-speed rail and rebuild our infrastructure — but how, with whom, and with what?\u00a0 I was disappointed.\u00a0 Obama has a lot of capital right now, more than Bush ever had, but he’s apparently unwilling to risk any of it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because I was in the military for so many years, I don’t get this thing with opposition party rebuttals to the presidential SOTU address.\u00a0 When the colonel addresses his officers and men, the major doesn’t get to take the stage afterward to disagree.\u00a0 Yes, I know television has been broadcasting SOTU rebuttals every year since 1966<\/a>, but precedence doesn’t make it right.\u00a0 It’s certainly not in the Constitution, which simply directs the President to:<\/p>\n

. . . from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.
\n– Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And though I cannot cite the specific article which specifies it, the Constitution’s pretty clear that there will be only one President.<\/p>\n

But as far as the media* is concerned we have, in effect, multiple presidents.\u00a0 We have John McCain, who has become a sort of a “Sunday President” through his frequent and regular appearances on Meet the Press and other Sunday talk shows.\u00a0 And now we have not one, but two Republican spokesmen to deliver separate “official” and “Tea Party” Republican responses to the President’s address.\u00a0 I wonder what would have happened if the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party had asked for air time to deliver a rebuttal of their own.\u00a0 Well, no . . . what’s to wonder?\u00a0 No network would have covered it.<\/p>\n

After its ruling in Bush v. Gore, I didn’t think there was much more the Supreme Court could do to damage its reputation, but with the petulant and partisan absence of Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas from last night’s SOTU, the court has shown it still has the mojo.<\/p>\n

Boy, that Michele Bachmann’s a piece of work, isn’t she?\u00a0 Watching her Tea Party SOTU rebuttal last night, I kept wondering what the hell she was looking at.\u00a0 Something behind me and to my left, but what?\u00a0 Later in the evening I checked Twitter and discovered everyone else had the same question.<\/p>\n

On my way home from this morning’s haircut appointment I listened to NPR’s Diane Rehm<\/a> interview Kenneth Slawenski, author of a biography of J.D. Salinger.\u00a0 Diane, for some reason, seemed hostile and on edge this morning.\u00a0 Every time Slawenski related a fact about Salinger’s life — for example, that he had been a soldier and had landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, or had written a letter about a work in progress to a friend or agent — Diane would insistently interrupt, asking questions like, “How do you know that?” or “Do you have proof of that?” or “Did you actually see those letters?”.\u00a0 Most annoying, particularly in light of Diane’s failure to challenge the outright lies told by the Tea Party hacks and climate change deniers she so often invites to speak.\u00a0 Why not ask them<\/em> to prove their assertions?<\/p>\n

It’s annual checkup and vaccination day for our two pets, Schatzi the dachshund and Chewie the cat.\u00a0 Schatzi’s an enthusiastic traveler but a fearful patient; Chewie’s the opposite.\u00a0 I’ll have to listen to Chewie howl all the way to and from the vet’s, and hold a trembling Schatzi while she gets probed and poked.<\/p>\n

For the past two years I’ve come to depend on a Facebook application called Visual Bookshelf, a library database I use to catalog and review books.\u00a0 Two weeks ago VB disappeared, taking with it all my content.\u00a0 Despite hundreds of user queries on the VB discussion board, program developers were mum about the outage.\u00a0 I vowed, if VB ever came back, to copy all the content I’d ever posted there and duplicate it in a database at home.\u00a0 Yesterday VB started working again, and I immediately copied all my reviews.\u00a0 The catalog’s a little tougher, but I’m working on it.\u00a0 I’ll keep using VB, but I’ll have a backup at home.\u00a0 Lesson # 1: don’t depend on free Facebook apps.\u00a0 Lesson # 2: backup, backup, backup.<\/p>\n

Earlier this morning I brought the cat carrier in from the garage.\u00a0 That was a mistake.\u00a0 Chewie saw it and went into hiding.\u00a0 I have two hours to find her and lure her out.\u00a0 Better get busy!<\/p>\n

*For clarity’s sake I note that CNN was the only network to air Michele Bachmann’s rebuttal live, but the fact that the rest of the networks covered it later justifies lumping all of them together.\u00a0 Same thing happens whenever Sarah Palin complains to Sean Hannity on Fox, and all the other networks re-broadcast it hours later.\u00a0 Hint, media mavens: it’s not news, it’s political propaganda — and you’re being used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I make a dish called pasta puttanesca; literally, “whore’s spaghetti.”\u00a0 The sauce is made of olive oil, garlic, anchovies, chopped tomatoes, capers, basil, and perhaps a few olives, tossed into pasta.\u00a0 Last night, since I was about to sit down to watch President Obama deliver the annual State of the Union address to an assembly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,40,10,16,2,8],"tags":[42,41,77,78],"class_list":["post-5246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooking","category-critters","category-current-events","category-media","category-personal","category-politics","tag-diane-rehm","tag-npr","tag-sotu","tag-visual-bookshelf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5246"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5260,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5246\/revisions\/5260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}