Frogs for Snakes

Ingredients:

• 2 cups pinto beans;
• 2 fresh jalapeño peppers
• 1 medium onion
• olive oil

Soak the beans overnight. Really. Dice the onion and peppers and sauté in olive oil until the onions turn transparent. While that’s happening, rinse the pintos and put them in a crock pot. Resist the urge to use a “slow-cooker”. Add the onion/pepper mix to the crock pot with enough water to cover everything with a couple of inches to spare and cook for 8-10 hours, until the beans smoosh easily between your fingers.

Heat some olive oil (2-3 tablespoons, a big glurg) in a big heavy frying pan-like thing, then spoon some beans into the pan with a slotted spoon. Smash the beans with a potato masher, then add some more beans and smash them and keep doing that, adding liquid from the crock pot when the beans get too dry.

When all the beans are mashed eat some rolled up in a flour tortilla with some cheese–tomato and avocado too, if you have them. Save the rest for later or give some to your kids.

I just now got an automated phone call from the election committee of Boulder City Council candidate George Karakehian, which followed by a week or so a similar call from Barry Siff’s committee.

Mr. Karakehian’s funds roughly equal the amount raised by the next two most successful fundraisers [chart table] (Mr. Siff being the second most successful), and none of the three are abiding with a voluntary program in which they agree to limit spending in exchange for matching funds.

So there we have two good reasons, an annoying phone call and an implicit statement that they think they can buy an election*,  to eliminate Mr. Karakehian and Mr. Siff from among the 13 candidates competing for our votes.

Thank you both so much for simplifying my decision.

* Just as a point of reference, in the 2007 City Council election, Ken Wilson received 9,815 votes, the most of any candidate. Mr. Karakehian has raised (so far) enough to buy 9,815 votes at $3.15/per–not that he ever would, of course, I’m just sayin’.

From the BPD Website:

Blotter – Oct. 21, 2009

Officers responded to routine calls.

Another great day in Boulder.

I make semi-regular visits to 5 thrift stores in Boulder because I can get most of my clothes there if I’m patient and also pick up occasional deals on other stuff: $3 for a weather-alert radio, $2 for a crank-powered emergency radio, $4 for a 500 ft. spool of 14AWG copper wire, $7 for a Calphalon sauce pan, another $7 for a Farberware pressure cooker–and on and on.

In the last few months, though, the shelves have gotten bare, and I can hardly imagine a better illustration of how low our confidence has gotten. The clerks tell me (let’s consider this just anecdotal proof, but the folks who clerk the thrift stores might be able to read the moods of the population better than anybody) that it’s a simple matter of people hanging on to their own stuff and looking hard for deals on the stuff they need.

And if that isn’t a sign of low consumer confidence, nothing is.

The Washington Post covers the significance of a trip to Japan by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates here. While we, the people, not the government, was paying attention to other things, Japan voted what for 50 years had been their opposition party into power, who then began to change the way Japan does things to try to work the country out of an economic and social “malaise” that has been going on for two decades.

Japan now is far less willing to defer foreign policy (meaning strategic) decisions to Washington and in that, and in a general trend towards independance from the U.S., are making themselves an issue the needs to be actively dealt with to ensure a continued strong alliance.

What we really don’t want, whether we know it or not, is to one day look up from our granola, or the most recent article on the demise of Pakistan or the rise of religious militants, or this year’s “American Idol” finale, to see that people who have been our good friends for a long time aren’t anymore, because we have been taking them for granted.