What a fantastic idea! I came across this via Slashfood. Click the link for a mouth-watering photo.

I continue using my Zarafina to make tea—mostly white tea these days, with a little lemon juice. Just one cup of coffee in the morning nowadays.

Just cooked a wonderfully fresh large bunch of mustard greens. I boiled some eggs to go with it. I like boiled eggs with the very center of the yolk rare, so I use the little egg piercer to punch a small hole in the bottom, put the eggs in a pan of cold water, bring to the boil, and simmer for around 8 min 45 seconds. Then they go into cold water, to which I add a tray of ice cubes. I’ve read that the abrupt chilling pulls the cooked egg away from the membrane that lines the shell, and certainly these, though fresh, have been very easy to peel.

As I point out from time to time, the goal of the GOP is to make life easy for Business, even at the expense of the public—indeed, generally at the expense of the public, which the GOP seems to hold in contempt. Here’s the latest example, reported by Matthew Blake in the Washington Independent:

The EPA’s coziness with industry and the White House — at the expense of science — is hardly new. But firing the EPA’s Midwest Regulator for telling Dow Chemical to clean up a Michigan river could be so absurd that it signals the end for EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) compared Johnson on the Senate floor today with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Whitehouse said that like the U.S. Attorneys dismissed by Alberto Gonzales, Midwest regulator Mary Gade was let go because she wasn’t “a loyal Bushie.”

Whitehouse mentioned that the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee will hold an oversight hearing Wednesday on political interference at the EPA. The House oversight committee will hold a similar hearing Thursday where Johnson is scheduled to testify.

Johnson has been mostly silent in the face of nonstop criticism since December. With so much unchallenged evidence of inappropriate political interference, he may no longer be able to keep quiet.

The Pentagon spends freely, without results, realizing the worst aspects of the military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned us. Look at this report by Matthew Blake in the Washington Indpendent:

In 1995, Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales was playing war games in order to determine what military combat might look like in 25 years. In the process, he created “Future Combat Systems,” a weapons system made up of unmanned ground and air vehicles that would be directed by computers at an Army base.

Thirteen years later, the technology to realize Scales’ vision still isn’t available. That hasn’t stopped the Pentagon from spending more than $20 billion for Boeing, SAIC and 550 other contractors and subcontractors to work on “Future Combat Systems.” The original contract estimated the total cost at $15 billion.

Paul L. Francis, Government Accountability Office’s director of acquisitions, told The Washington Post in December that the weapons system is finally making progress. “They’re getting to the point that they should have been at in 2003,” Francis said.

Future Combat Systems is one of 95 Pentagon weapons programs that have resulted in $295 billion in cost overruns, according to a GAO report released last month. A congressional hearing Tuesday about the report made clear that uncontrolled Pentagon spending is a decades-old problem that may take just as long to reverse.

But the problem has grown worse over the past 10 years with the creation of of programs based on unrealized technology, like “Future Combat Systems.” These post-Cold War programs were based on still-undeveloped technology and were, until now, subject to little Pentagon or congressional oversight.

If the bipartisan frustration at the hearing affects this year’s defense budget, these programs could very well end. An oversight committee normally divided along partisan lines found common ground in blasting what Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Calif.) called “hope-based” weapons contracting.

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The NY Times has a story this morning on American soldiers being killed by faulty electrical wiring done by contractors. It includes this snippet:

… American electricians who worked for KBR, the Houston-based defense contractor that is responsible for maintaining American bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, said they repeatedly warned company managers and military officials about unsafe electrical work, which was often performed by poorly trained Iraqis and Afghans paid just a few dollars a day.

One electrician warned his KBR bosses in his 2005 letter of resignation that unsafe electrical work was “a disaster waiting to happen.”

Another said he witnessed an American soldier in Afghanistan receiving a potentially lethal shock.

A third provided e-mail messages and other documents showing that he had complained to KBR and the government that logs were created to make it appear that nonexistent electrical safety systems were properly functioning.

KBR itself told the Pentagon in early 2007 about unsafe electrical wiring at a base near the Baghdad airport, but no repairs were made. Less than a year later, a soldier was electrocuted in a shower there. …

You can read the entire article at the link, but I wanted to juxtapose that article with this little note from ThinkProgress:

Scandal-ridden contracting firm KBR reported today that its first quarter net profits more than tripled, from $28 million last year to $98 million this year. Despite at least a dozen former employees alleging they had been raped by coworkers in Iraq and other employees saying coworkers regularly stole gold, artwork, and weapons, KBR remains in the Pentagon’s good graces: In mid-April, it received a 10-year, $150 billion contract to support the military overseas.

The Pentagon is not doing its job. Is no one in charge? Or has the person in charge been bought off with the promise of a lucrative KBR job?

So says Joe Conason:

First let me confess that I am now and have for many years considered myself a friend of Sidney Blumenthal’s, the senior advisor to Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Salon columnist. I should also acknowledge here for the record that, like a number of his other friends, I receive daily e-mails from him on a wide variety of topics. Those e-mails, which have included everything from Doonesbury cartoons to YouTube videos, screen captures, poll results, right-wing screeds and the occasional scholarly article, must number in the thousands by now because sending those blasts has been a Blumenthal habit since long before he joined the Clinton campaign earlier this year.

If this were a more sane campaign, those mundane messages would be of little interest to anyone else. But now Peter Dreier, blogging on the Huffington Post, has suggested that Blumenthal crossed a line by sending out negative articles about Sen. Barack Obama that have appeared in the right-wing media. And Dreier, along with several other bloggers, also seems to believe that the recipients of those e-mails, especially the journalists, ought to have “exposed” Blumenthal for “spreading” the calumnies and criticisms that appeared in those articles — which included some far-fetched smears of Obama and his associates.

Dreier cannot cite any specific instance that shows Blumenthal’s e-mails influenced the coverage of Obama by anyone, let alone the writers who received them or the publications where they work. In fact, at least one of the regular recipients of those messages was an outspoken Obama supporter, and others were at least sympathetic to Obama. For my part, Blumenthal certainly knows that I have sharply criticized both Clintons and the Clinton campaign and haven’t endorsed any primary candidate.

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Not bad at all. I feel good today, but still will take the weekend off. And next week I’ll shoot for four days again.

Rivivage is really a great shaving soap—with the G.B. Kent BK4 I easily made a great lather. The Gillette 40’s Aristocrat with an Elios blade of some uses produced a very smooth shave. I could have skipped the polishing pass, but I do enjoy it, so a couple of drops of Gessato shaving oil produced a 9.9 finish. TOBS Bay Rum as the aftershave. I’m still feeling my face. Amazing.