For the record

Just wanted to clarify something about my last post.  I absolutely 100% DO believe that John McCain was tortured as a P.O.W. in Vietnam.  I wasn't at all trying to discount that by posting the blog.  It was more a comment on the Bush Administration, who McCain seems to have closely aligned himself with for some odd reason as his campaign has progressed.  Just for the record.

Worth noting

Happened upon this facinating blog post yesterday at The Daily Dish called Does Bush Believe McCain was Tortured? when it was linked to on my favorite liberal blog Daily Kos.  The author Andrew Sullivan noted that the torture John McCain endured as a POW in Vietnam would not be defined as torture by the Bush Administration.  Text posted in full below.

In all the discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts. It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?

According to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was therefore not tortured.

Cheney denies that McCain was tortured; as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet. In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing" that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These torture techniques are, according to the president of the United States, merely "enhanced interrogation."

No war crimes were committed against McCain. And the techniques used are, according to the president, tools to extract accurate information. And so the false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the "intelligence" we have procured from "interrogating" terror suspects. Feel safer?

The cross-in-the-dirt story - although deeply fishy to any fair observer - is in the realm of the unprovable. But the actual techniques used on McCain, and the lies they were designed to legitimize, are a matter of historical record. And the government of the United States now practices the very same techniques that the Communist government of North Vietnam once proudly used against American soldiers. When they are used against future John McCains, the victims will know, in a way McCain didn't, that their own government has no moral standing to complain.

Now the kicker: in the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

These are the prices people pay for power.

Very interesting.

Rainbow bright

They say you should strive to eat many different colors of produce, something about different colors containing different nutrients and antioxidants.  I find that variety in my diet makes a huge difference as if I'm not careful, which I wasn't for the past 12 months or so, I can lose all interest in a former favorite and lose out on its particular health benefits.  So as I was unpacking my groceries recently, I was pleased to discover something from each shade of the rainbow:

Red bell pepper and carrot for Spicy Chicken with Snow Peas recipe found here.  (It was delicious).

Roma tomatoes for my new favorite Melted Cabot Cheddar* on Whole Grain Toast with Tomato and Avocado and also BLTs. (*I don't care what anyone says, the funky orange cheddar that is most common out here is not the same.  Thanks Grandma for always sending us Cabot cheddar as a gift!). 

Bananas, strawberries and blueberries just to eat plain or in my cereal.

Cucumbers and clover sprouts for salads and sandwiches. (Plan to try growing my own sprouts sometime and will surely document it here if I do, it's supposed to be incredibly easy.)

Red grapes just because I love grapes.

And our hot sauce collection just for show.  Just in case you're curious, my favorites are Cholula and the green jalapeno Tabasco.

I love food and have been trying to cook more lately.  Recipes are kind of like books to me...there are just so many out there and I sometimes like to keep some of them just hanging out there, anticipating the day I finally get around to them.  Next on the list to try are:

Lemon Spaghetti (will use Whole Foods' 365 Brand Whole Wheat pasta which is amazing, try it!)

Turkey and Artichoke Stuffed Shells with Arrabbiatta Sauce (yes I love Giada)

Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup (using jarred peppers and canned tomatoes, of course)

I can be a little experimental too, I found and modified to my liking an amazing turkey chili recipe and have been making a really nice mustard vinaigrette lately (white balsamic, shallots, dijon mustard, herbes d'provence, salt, pepper and olive oil).  All of this food talk is making me hungry!

What are your favorite recipes?

A little support

I was pleased to discover that Time Magazine agreed with the closing sentiments of my last post, that checking tire pressure is a totally reasonable suggestion when it comes to dealing with the energy crisis.

The Tire Gauge Solution: No Joke

I think this stuff's really important so I am going to copy some of the text below:

Politics ain't beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse
smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is
that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the
best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest,
cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil,
reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming. It's a pretty
simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance
on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought
to use less.

The RNC is trying to make the tire gauge a symbol of unseriousness, as
if only the fatuous believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign
oil without doing the bidding of Big Oil. But the tire gauge is really
a symbol of a very serious piece of good news: we can use significantly
less energy without significantly changing our lifestyle. The energy
guru Amory Lovins has shown that investment in "nega-watts" — reduced
electricity use through efficiency improvements — is much more
cost-effective than investment in new megawatts, and the same is
clearly true of nega-barrels. It might not fit the worldviews of
right-wingers who deny the existence of global warming and insist that
reducing emissions would destroy our economy, or of left-wing
Earth-firsters who insist that maintaining our creature comforts would
destroy the world, but there's a lot of simple things we can do on the
demand side before we start rushing to ratchet up supply.

We can use those twisty carbon fluorescent lightbulbs. We can unplug
our televisions, computers and phone chargers when we're not using
them. We can seal our windows, install more insulation and adjust our
thermostats so that we waste less heat and air-conditioning. We can use
more-efficient appliances, build more-efficient homes and drive
more-efficient cars, preferably with government assistance. And, yes,
we can inflate our tires and tune our engines, as Republican governors
Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Charlie Crist of Florida have
urged, apparently without consulting the RNC. While we're at it, we can
cut down on idling, which can improve fuel economy another 5%, and cut
down on speeding and unnecessary acceleration, which can increase
mileage as much as 20%.

And that's just the low-hanging fruit. There are other ways to reduce
demand for oil — more public transportation, more carpooling, more
telecommuting, more recycling, less exurban sprawl, fewer unnecessary
car trips, buying less stuff and eating less meat — that would require
at least some lifestyle changes. But things like tire gauges can reduce
gas bills and carbon emissions now, with little pain and at little cost
and without the ecological problems and oil-addiction problems
associated with offshore drilling. These are the proverbial win-win-win
solutions, reducing the pain of $100 trips to the gas station by
reducing trips to the gas station. And Americans are already starting
to adopt them, ditching SUVs, buying hybrids, reducing overall gas consumption. It's hard to see why anyone who isn't affiliated with the oil industry would object to them.

Yeah, that's what I meant.

Taking responsibility

Time for a politics post.  I have kept these to a minimum recently because I get extremely worked up about it all and I know everyone doesn't agree with me.  Even though that shouldn't matter since it's my blog and I can write whatever I want!  But I've found that it is one of those topics that it is best to keep to myself for the most part.  I do a lot of assuming when it comes to who believes what and have gotten myself in a bit of trouble, or at least an uncomfortable conversation, a few times recently because of it.  Anyway.

John McCain has turned into a monster.  How's that for an inflammatory opening statement?  He used to be his own character, conductor of the straight talk express, someone who told it like it was and wasn't afraid to go against the grain of his own party to support something he felt strongly about.  But he seems to have lost sight of that over the past couple months while going head to head against Barack Obama in the presidential campaign.  The more I listen to him, the more turned off I am by his negative campaign tactics and smug attitude.  I think it's mostly a result of his campaign not having a whole lot of ideas or answers when it comes to what the nation needs, so they are reduced to attacking Obama on such trivial things as his "celebrity status" and patriotism.  Not that patriotism is a trivial topic, I just think there's no basis to attack Obama on his patriotism whatsoever.  Most recent case in point, from CNN.com:

McCain Camp Mocks Obama's Comment on Inflated Tires

In a nutshell, the McCain campaign took a minor comment in a talk Obama gave about his energy plan, that people should make sure their tires were properly inflated as it can make a difference in gas mileage, and they just ran with it like the village idiots.  They handed out tire pressure gauges with "Obama Energy Plan" on them to the press corps, implying that this was Obama's answer to the energy crisis.  Well this just infuriated me.  For one, THAT IS NOT HIS ENERGY PLAN.  Yes, he wants to decrease dependence on oil, foreign and domestic (offshore drilling).  In my mind, forcing innovation is not a bad thing.  People don't really look for alternatives unless they absolutely have to and I truly believe that expensive gas will force innovation into clean energy sources that will have long and far reaching benefits for us all.  Secondly, do they really think the American people are ignorant enough to fall for ridiculous statements like this and the Paris Hilton/Britney Spears commercial (which McCain defended and claimed to be proud of)?  Obama says inflate your tires and that'll solve the gas crisis.  He's a brainless, vapid celerbrity and nothing more.  If McCain would just put out some ads that talk about what HE stands for and what HIS plans are, instead of just attacking every other thing Obama says, maybe I could take him seriously.  As we all do, I respect his service to this country, both in the military and in the Senate.  But I have zero respect for the way he's run his campaign to date. 

The point I intended to make when I started this post, was so what if Obama suggested that people check their tire pressure?  That is a completely legitimate thing for people to do if they want to make sure they are maximizing their gas mileage!  It doesn't add up to much, my (new) tires were quite underinflated recently and it knocked my gas mileage down by about 2 miles per gallon, but it's still something.  I don't think it's unreasonable to ask Americans to take some responsibility and make sure they are doing everything they can for themselves instead of relying on the government to come to their rescue and bail them out for their irresponsible, entitled attitudes and behaviors.  Don't even get me started on the housing bailout...

Only in Vegas

I have had a handful of "only in Vegas" experiences in the 5 years that I've lived here. Two immediately come to mind. First, the drag queen P.R. temp who took a liking to me and showed me the glamour shots from his Cher impersonation show (he did his own makeup!). And then there was the time that I was at a stoplight near the Stratosphere, it turned green and the car in front of me didn't move. I looked around to the driver's side to see if I could see anything and a hand popped out of the window and dropped a pair of purple ladies' underwear out onto the ground. Someone wasn't where they were supposed to be last night! And then, there's this:

Yep, pledge $250 to Nevada Public Radio during their "Summer of Extraordinary Experiences" (I can't tell you how sick I am of hearing that phrase) and you can choose a thank you package that includes a wedding at Treasure Island! Gotta love Vegas.