Honey-Braised Lamb Shanks
Lamb shanks are braised for hours in a sumptuous sauce of honey, almonds, and raisins in this centuries-old Moroccan dish served at the restaurant Mansouria.
¼ olive oil
3 tbsp. unsalted butter
4 lamb shanks, frenched, if desired
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 large white onion, finely chopped
1 cup golden raisins
2 tbsp. ras el hanout
¼ tsp. crushed saffron threads
1 stick cinnamon
1 cup blanched whole almonds
⅔ cup honey
Toasted sesame seeds, to garnish
Instructions here:
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/530528426105798657/photo/1
https://twitter.com/chicagotribune/status/530501844695805952/photo/1
LiberalPhenom @LiberalPhenom
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Chuck Todd’s hit job book on POTUS is coming out. Published by Little, Brown & Co. We must derail this evil. http://nyti.ms/1shG5Iu
7:21 PM – 6 Nov 2014
President Obama and The First Lady Host “A Salute to the Troops: In Performance at the White House”
https://twitter.com/TheObamaDiary/status/530530884722888704/photo/1
The Corporate Coup d’Etat is Nearly Complete
An election—and a nation—lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan
by
Harvey Wasserman
The GOP/corporate coup d’etat is nearly complete.
The Republicans now control the major media, the Supreme Court, the Congress and soon the presidency.
Think Jeb Bush in 2016.
All throughout America, right down to the local level, buried in a tsunami of cash and corruption, our public servants are being morphed into corporate operatives.
Our electoral apparatus is thoroughly compromised by oceans of dirty money, Jim Crow registration traps, rigged electronic voting machines, gerrymandering, corrupt secretaries of state.
The internet may be next. Above all, if there is one thing that could save us a shred of democracy, it’s preserving net neutrality. This fight could in fact outweigh all the others, and may be decided soon. Whatever depression you may now feel, shake it off to wage this battle. If we now lose the ability to freely communicate, we are in the deepest hole of all.
The roots of this corporate coup reach where they always do when empires collapse—useless, cancerous, debilitating, endless imperial war.
Lyndon Johnson lit the fuse in March, 1965. He had a chance to get us out of Vietnam. For many complex reasons—none of them sane—he escalated. He never recovered, and neither has our nation.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/11/05/corporate-coup-detat-nearly-complete
https://twitter.com/leahhopeABC7/status/530432138945245186/photo/1
https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/530483993771515905/photo/1
I love this photo. Look at the faces of these boys.
Yes, Dear Ones, you too can become POTUS.
Never, ever doubt that you can be and do whatever is in your destiny to achieve.
too much cuteness for words
https://twitter.com/KBTXNews/status/530400947172700160/photo/1
Luvvie has written a post about Janet Jackson. As usual the post and comments are HILARIOUS
…………..
Janet Jackson is 48, Flourishing and Looking FOREVER FAHN
Luvvie — November 4, 2014
I saw a picture of Janet Jackson looking AMAZING and I just had to say something. Let your eyeballs get what they need with this image of Ms. Jackson (if you nasty) from a fashion show in Dubai from this weekend.
I am INTO IT and her. YESSSSS!! Janet looking like old money, new money and unprinted money. Our girl went and got her a FAHN ASS Arab man, packed up her bags and said “I’ma gon find peace in the Middle East.” I ain’t mad at her AT ALL. Have you seen her boo (Wissam Al Mana)?? He is a tall drink of cold refreshing water. WHEW.
Out of all them Jacksons, Janet is the one who got away. She’s like “I’ma let yall have these shenanigans…” Werk, Mrs. Jackson-Al Mana. Life is looking great on you these days. I don’t even care that she’s still rocking the same slick back and phony pony since 1988. I don’t mind. The only thing she needs from the U.S. is her brown gel and she got the money to pay for them international shipping fees.
http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2014/11/janet-jackson-forever-fine.html
Democrats Have a White Women Problem
by Miriam Zoila Pérez ShareThis | Print | Comment (3)
Thursday, November 6 2014, 1:30 PM EST Tags: Election 2014, Gender, White Women
When you look at Tuesday’s election results by gender, it seems that the Democrats and Republicans split the women’s vote pretty evenly, with a few percentage points in favor of Dems. But when you examine that data by gender and race, you’ll get a wholly different picture that highlights an Achilles’ heel for Democrats: white women.
Exit polls released by CNN show that white women’s votes went to the Republicans by a margin of 13 percent. Fifty-six percent of white women voted Republican while only 43 percent voted Democrat.
And if you look at the numbers for black and brown women, you see just how big the race gap really is. Ninety percent of black women and 67 precent of Latina women voted Democrat. (It’s worth noting that Black and Latino men also voted for Democrats more than white women did—86 and 58 percent respectively.) Even when you break it down by age, the white vote went to Republicans. These numbers mean even more when you consider that white people make up two-thirds of the electorate, with the vote evenly split between white men and women.
While the long game may be to focus on the emerging majority-of-color electorate, Democrats may be sacrificing today’s elections by overlooking the power of the white women’s vote. Both times that Barack Obama was elected president, there has been a pretty consistent line among advocates in the progressive feminist movement: “Women won the election.” But a small-but-important detail is often omitted: He actually lost with white women.
“When you actually look at the numbers, it’s women of color who have won the elections in spite of white women,” says Lindsey O’Pries, a white progressive activist living in Richmond, Va. “We’re not able to be critical of white women because we’re not acknowledging what’s happening. The refrain is, ‘Women won the election.’ But the credit is not being given where it is deserved.”
http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/11/democrats_have_a_white_women_problem.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28Colorlines.com%29
Here is the transcript from President Obama’s press conference yesterday. I want to highlight the healthcare related segments:
Following the elections, congressional Republicans are pushing once again for major reforms to your health care act.
OBAMA: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: In the past, you’ve said you hope some good ideas, that you don’t want to undermine the bill. Can you tell us what specific ideas you’re ruling out?
….
On health care, there are certainly some lines I’m going to draw. Repeal of the law, I won’t sign. Efforts that would take away health care from the 10 million people who now have it and the millions more who are eligible to get it, we’re not going to support. In some cases, there may be recommendations that Republicans have for changes that would undermine the structure of the law, and you know, I’ll be very honest with them about that and say “look, the law doesn’t work if you pull out that piece or that piece…..”
QUESTION: (inaudible) the individual mandate one of those lines that came across?
OBAMA: Yeah, the individual mandate is a line I came across because the concept, borrowed from Massachusetts, from a law instituted by a former opponent of mine, Mitt Romney, understood that if you’re providing health insurance to people through the private marketplace, then you’ve got to make sure that people can’t game the system and just wait until they get sick before they go try to buy health insurance. You can’t ensure that people with preexisting conditions can get health insurance unless you also say, while you’re healthy, before you need it, you’ve got to — you’ve got to get health insurance…..
So the core aspects of the law are off the table. This will produce a shutdown
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/11/06/the-obama-ppaca-agreement-zone/
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Calm, dignified competence as a threat
It’s been fascinating to watch media pundits respond to President Obama’s press conference yesterday. Given that so many of them had advanced the GOP message that this election was all about Obama, they were frustrated that the President did not appear at the podium depressed and contrite for having failed so badly. Instead, he said things like this:
What stands out to me, though, is that the American people sent a message, one that they’ve sent for several elections now. They expect the people they elect to work as hard as they do. They expect us to focus on their ambitions and not ours. They want us to get the job done. All of us in both parties have a responsibility to address that sentiment.
Dana Milbank signals the kind of response he was looking for by suggesting that President Obama wasn’t troubled enough by the election results.
Indeed, Tuesday’s returns did not trouble him greatly, he said. “There are times when you’re a politician and you’re disappointed with election results,” he said. “But maybe I’m just getting older. I don’t know. It doesn’t make me mopey.”
In many ways, I think these pundits are just too lazy to dig deep into the many complex reasons for Tuesday’s election results. Its so much easier to grab that GOP meme, make it all about Obama and then expect him to be contrite.
http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2014/11/calm-dignified-competence-as-threat.html?spref=tw
Thursday, Nov 6, 2014 07:30 AM CST
Right-winger’s “no compassion” crusade: Conservative writer William Voegeli Way back in 2012, during that simpler, gentler time for liberals and Democrats, President Barack Obama secured a second term in the White House by clearly defeating former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote. Coming after a first term characterized by financial disaster, near-unprecedented polarization and rampant economic and social inequality, this was quite an accomplishment. Perhaps most amazing of all, he did this despite voters ranking his opponent as superior on nearly every issue.
But here’s the thing: The one issue where voters clearly preferred Obama was a big one, perhaps the biggest there is. According to an exit poll from ABC (but whose results were echoed in the polling of other organizations), voters told pollsters that they considered President Obama overwhelmingly more likely to care about “people like me.” How overwhelmingly? The point-gap between Romney and Obama on the issue was no less than 63. Most Americans, in other words, chose Obama despite being lukewarm about his record, and did so in part because they believed he had a greater capacity for empathy.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, to find that the concept of empathy has lost considerable favor among conservatives since 2012 (although, to be fair, it was never their top priority). But while we’ve seen rants in Breitbart or the New York Post about the folly of empathy, we hadn’t seen the argument put forward much by a more learned member of the conservative movement. And this is where “The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion,” a new book from the conservative author and Claremont Review of Books editor William Voegeli, comes in.
In order to hear why “no compassion” should be treated as a political mantra (and not just a great Talking Heads song), Salon recently spoke with Voegeli over the phone. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/06/right_wingers_no_compassion_crusade_conservative_writer_william_voegeli_unloads/?source=newsletter
Clyburn Dismisses Tim Scott: Just Because He’s Black, That Doesn’t Mean Progress
by Andrew Kirell | 4:16 pm, November 5th, 2014
On Tuesday evening, interim Republican Sen. Tim Scott won South Carolina’s special election to fill the remaining two years of retired Sen. Jim DeMint‘s term. Despite that electoral victory making Scott the first black senator elected by South Carolina, fellow South Carolinian James Clyburn is not impressed.
Speaking with the Washington Post, Clyburn, who is a black Democratic congressman, said:
If you call progress electing a person with the pigmentation that he has, who votes against the interest and aspirations of 95 percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress.
The Post also noted other reasons black voters may differ from Scott:
Scott got an F on the NAACP annual scorecard. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, he voted to hold Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress, opposed the Congressional Black Caucus’s budget proposal and voted to delay funding a settlement between the United States and black farmers who alleged that the federal government refused them loans because of their race.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/clyburn-dismisses-tim-scott-just-because-hes-black-that-doesnt-mean-progress/
TOWN explains Black Republicans:
Town
Black Republican Phenomenon:
Two types of black people are afflicted with Black Republican Phenomenon.
The first type is dancing with who brung them to the dance. They are ambitious, have money, etc. They don’t hate other black people but they know they have the positions and money they have because of white Republicans so that’s who they rock with. This is a rare type. (Example: Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice…I would maybe include Michael Steele in this group)
The second type is more common type. They don’t like other black people. They crave the white gaze. They like being told they are special. White Republicans LOVE this type because they say what the white Republicans want to say but are fearful of saying for being called racist. They would sell their own black mothers for a dime as long as they got a pat on the head from Mr. Charlie. This includes Stacey Dash, Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Crystal Wright, any black person in the Tea Party etc. etc. etc.
http://pragmaticobotsunite.com/thursday-open-thread-black-indians/#comment-1679651046
Spot on.
I’ve said this before – the President and First Lady have Black Professional Sensibilities.
They will do their jobs to the best of their abilities, and then some..
But, they’re not about to socialize with you. They have ACTUAL FRIENDS for that.
……………………………………………………………….
Side-Eye (Harder) @prisonculture
How much of the Beltway carping about President Obama’s so-called aloofness & unwillingness to schmooze is about blacks as inscrutable?
Side-Eye (Harder) @prisonculture
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The black as “unknowable” to white people & therefore needing to be surveilled & watched more closely. I mean that’s the history here.
3:22 PM – 6 Nov 2014
Side-Eye (Harder) @prisonculture
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Because there is something pathological about this obsession on the part of white pundits and reporters about this shit…
3:24 PM – 6 Nov 2014
SG2,
I want some…you fix a big pot, will you?
Good Evening, Everyone :)
Isn’t it funny how the republicans who were so insistent that older meant better and younger meant unprepared, shallow celebrity, are now touting their barely out of diapers crop of newly elected legislators as a sign that they’re the party of the young. LOL.
Just as they’re now the party of diversity because they hand picked two flimsy, self-loathing black opportunists from South Carolina and Utah to serve as their black face and to ‘prove’ they aren’t racist. In return, Tim Scott and Mia Love just have to be the useful idiots they were recruited to be, and just do as their told at all times.
*they’re*
There is no shortage of people who are willing to sell their souls for a sweet gig like being in Congress.
You may find this blog post interesting. http://fishofgold.net/category/open-letters/
Good Morning, Everyone!
Now I know SG2 has already made a dish of this lamb shank. Where’s my plate, lady?
It does sound and look good. Still not eating meat so I just have to sigh. Good morning everyone.
Morning, everyone!
Doesn’t the dish look delicious?!
We’re moving in with you SouthernGirl, if you promise to feed us a steady diet of yummy stuff like this.