Quick Hit: The Obameter

From the fine folks who brought you the Truth-O-Meter, the St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact has now launched the Obameter, a project to track President Obama’s performance on his campaign promises.  They list 510 promises, and

We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.

The report card […] provides an up-to-the-minute tally of all the promises.

Found via Feminist Law Profs, with whose opinion I concur1 in noting

One great feature of the Internet is the ability to track the performance of politicians in real time like this.

This is a fantastic project, and I’d love to see this kind of tracking become an expected, normal part of our political discourse.

1 see what I did there?

Grove Street Stout

Just brewed Grove Street Stout, actually my first stout in…six or seven years, I think.  Nothing very fancy, should be nice and dry, a little bit over the gravity and IBU limits for the BJCP Dry Stout style, but well within the range for American Stout.  Used Glacier for flavor and aroma, so we’ll see how that goes; I’ve been trying to branch out to different hops lately.  Also tried making a quart yeast starter 24 hours in advance this time, so hopefully that’ll get fermentation going right quick.  It was kind of fun doing the stovetop mash for the half-pound of grain I used for the starter; made me wish I had the space, equipment and time to do all-grain brews…

…Did He Really Just Say That?

Yes.  Yes, he did.

Pete Sessions (R-TX32), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, did in fact say that the Republicans need to mount an “insurgency” against the Democratic majority in Congress, and that the Taliban can serve as a model for how to go about it.

The Taliban.

As the gnome pointed out over IM, even if Sessions hadn’t picked such a fraught analogy as the (of all things) Taliban, he’s still saying that the Republican minority in Congress should work like an “insurgency,” i.e. operate outside Congressional rules and procedures, in order to disrupt and obstruct the Democratic agenda.

Look, I know no major Democratic strategists read my tiny little blog.  But come on.  There is, very clearly, no good faith negotiating partner available for the Obama administration.  The Republicans don’t care what the actual outcomes of policies are, they only care about their “team” “winning” and the Democratic “team” “losing”.

If it were remotely plausible that the Republicans wanted what’s best for all of America but disagreed on how to achieve that, I would be all for trying to work with them, compromising on some things, and embracing bipartisanship as a useful method for moving forward.  But they are, in fact, utterly, brazenly, blatantly, opposed to bipartisanship.  They say the word “bipartisan” a lot, but everything they actually do makes it clear that that word simply doesn’t mean the same thing to them that it does to everyone else.  When a Republican talks about “bipartisanship,” he or she just means “doing what Republicans want, and not what Democrats want.”

Ugh.  It’s tiring, belaboring this point; I don’t really know what the point is of my trying to emphasize it further.  What could I, or anyone, conceivably say to persuade anyone not already convinced by the past month and a half that the Republicans have no interest in bipartisanship, compromise, progress, or indeed trying to fix the collapsing economy?  It’s simply not on their radar screen — the only thing that matters is making the Democrats “lose”.

I don’t know if there’s any audio or video of Sessions’s remarks.  I sincerely hope there is, and that the Democrats get hold of it.  After eight years of hearing the right wing scream at the top of their lungs that the Democrats were traitors and on the side of the terrorists, the chairman of the NRCC holding up the Taliban as a model for the Republicans to emulate is something that ought to be hung around the neck of the whole party.

After all, if in 2005 Rahm Emanuel had made a similar statement, we’d still be hearing about it twenty years from now.

Democrats: nail them to the wall on this.  They richly deserve it.

Iä! Iä! Bruuuuuuce Fhtagn!, or, Tramps Like Us, Baby We Were Born to Summon Unspeakable Doom from Beyond the Stars

The Device of the Sinister Magician in Lovecraft and Springsteen

Fair warning: I’m about to be a huge nerd right here.

First of all, what I’m not claiming.  I am not claiming that the writings of H.P.  Lovecraft have had any significant direct, or even indirect, influence on Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting; much less that Springsteen has consciously based any lyrics on Lovecraft.

What I am claiming is that both Springsteen’s song “Magic,” from the last year’s record of the same name, and Lovecraft’s iconic short story “Nyarlathotep” draw on a literary trope I’ll tentatively call the Device of the Sinister Magician, and that if present in such disparate works, the Device can reasonably be surmised to predate them both, and with a bit of looking can probably be found in other texts.

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Nouning Considered Harmful*

Note: I’ve taken the opportunity of Melissa McEwan’s generous offer of a guest post at Shakesville to revise this post to clarify some phrasing and expand on some areas I didn’t feel I’d covered sufficiently.

Here’s the thing: using adjectives as nouns obscures meaning, harms discourse, impairs communication, and ultimately reduces our ability to think in a careful and nuanced way about controversial issues, let alone effect social progress.  Anyone who wants to see our society become less divided rather than more, and in particular anyone who wants to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of prejudice and modes of oppression, should try hard to avoid the practice. Don’t call anyone a sexist, or a racist, or a homophobe. Here’s why.

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Bottling Day Pt. II

Got the “Dark Roast” Coffee Porter bottled — a big yield, 54 bottles, which I’m pleased about — and a friend came over to help, and brought a hydrometer, so I know the final gravity for this one: about 1.016, which is right around what I expected.  So with the standard assistance fee of a six-pack, I’ve got 100 bottles conditioning in the basement now: always a good thing.

Bottling Day Pt. I

The Grove St. Amber III is in bottles now — 52 bottles, which is a pretty good yield.  I meant to get started bottling yesterday, and get both the amber and the coffee porter done this weekend, but the porter will have to wait until tomorrow.  Also need to get labels printed up, but for now I’ve borrowed a friend’s method of just marking the caps with a Sharpie.  Although there’s something appealing about the idea of just not labeling any of them, and making it a game of chance.  Perhaps next time I bottle two batches in a row.

That’s all for now.  My hydrometer broke last weekend, so I wasn’t able to take a final gravity reading, but that’s not really terribly important.