Author: David

Just caught Charles Schumer commenting that “[Alito] is considerably out of the mainstream on a number of cases…”

*sigh*

Cluebat #1 for Chuckie: that’s why federal judges/justices have life apointments, you know, so they won’t feel pressured to decide cases according to the latest poll but rather according to that strange thing you apparently never consider (except, perhaps, in the “what can I get away with” sense), you know, the law.

Cluebat #2 for Chuckie: ya ever think that YOUR “mainstream”… isn’t? No, of course you haven’t. Why would I even ask…

Glad I wasn’t physically present when Chuckie was proving his stupidity, cos I am constitutionally unable to suffer a fool gladly.

Chai Latte-esque

heh

Lately, I’ve been drinking some chai latte drinks. (For those who need a translation, “chai” is just the latest faddish way to say “tea”—yeh, I know all the linguistic gobbledegook. It’s still just a faddish way to say “tea”). And “latte” is the la-di-da way to say “milk”.

But the chai lattee drinks I’ve been introduced to by Lovely Daughter are a tad more complex than the old milk-in-tea (or cream-in-tea) I used to drink. Kind of a “la-di-da” version of my mom’s old spiced tea recipe with a few twists.

But the mixes and pre-mixed liquids all seemed just a little too “not me,” if you will . So, I’m sipping my first effort at approximating a chai latte drink from scratch.

Ingredients

• 6 individual serving bags of green tea
• 12 cloves of, well, cloves
• 6 cardamom pods
• 1 stick of cinnamon, ground finely (about a tablespoon or a little less)
• milk
• honey
• water (12 “coffee cups” or 12X 6-oz~ Just 2 quarts and an 8-oz measuring cup)

Doing the deed

• Opened the bags and dumped the tea into the filter basket of our drip coffee maker. Added the ground cinnamon on top.
• Crushed the cardamom pods to release the seeds; crushed the cloves.
• Tied (well, stapled) the cloves and cardamom in some of the emptied paper tea bags and dropped them into my coffee carafe.
• Brewed as for coffee.
• When the brewing was done, I let the cardamom/clove bags steep a bit (5 minutes?) and removed them.
• Nuked about 4-oz of milk in a mug for 30 seconds
• Added a tablespoonful of coffee creamer (I like the texture of CoffeeMate, and its no-fat version is as smooth as the regular, so… )
• Topped off with spiced tea from the carafe, sweetened to tste with honey.

Not bad. Needs something citrus, though.  Maybe dried lemon peel or dried orange peel. Maybe a tad more or less on the spices. It’ll be fun experimenting.

As it is, though, good enough for a warmer-upper on a fall day/evening. It’s not coffee, but it’s… nice.

Update: Second cup tried no milk, just creamer. Hmmm, a tad better. Maybe I should try it with cream sometime. Still needs some dried lemon or orange peel, I think.

Update #2: Oops. Forgot. Added just a pinch of nutmeg to the top of the tea leaves before brewing. Nutmeg just seems to enhance the high notes the cardamom adds.

(A Precision Guided Humor Assignment from The Alliance of Free Blogs.)

(Talk about amphibolous… )

Join the blogbursts to help FREE Kerry’s 180 every Tuesday!

We’ve formed a blogburst group and here are the bloggers who are contributing so far. If you want to join the blogroll for Free Kerry’s 180, click here to email me, include the url for your blog. The blogburst is every Tuesday, so don’t forget to blog about it. All you have to do is encourage Kerry to set his 180 FREE, I’ll send you the code for the blogroll.

The more people we have, the merrier!

Jerry Pournellediscovers that “educators” in California think they can do better than King Canute.

“…the State of California officially insists that all children in the public school system be educated to above average. I will explain and do a short essay on that, but I am not making it up. The D.Ed. types in Sacramento apparently were so deficient in their math education that they do not understand that this is impossible.”

Heh

Stolen outright *s* from iHillary.com (Forgiveness is easier to ask than permission, Pete.)

😉

Now, it only remains to be seen if Republican’t Senators have anything elephant-sized save their… uhm, trunks.

[Throw some sand in various moonbat gears, eh?]

So, Alito’s next. The big question: will Republican’t Senators do a pants check and find—to everyone’s amazement—the stones to carry the nomination through?

For those who aren’t familiar with “Scallia Lite” try the Wikipedia entry for Samuel A. Alito Jr., which includes this comment in a section on opinions he’s authored”

Alito wrote the opinion for ACLU v. Schundler (1999), holding that a holiday display on city property did not violate the Establishment Clause because it included secular symbols, such as a large plastic Santa Claus, in addition to religious symbols.

(There’s more, of course)

I have several problems with the opinion, but at least it has the virtue of slapping the ACLU in the face (even while giving it a “mini-win” in framing the argument about religious expression in the public square*).

Alito’s nomination may well be the raw meat some on the Right have wanted. Donnybrook coming? Or tempest in a teacup (dunno: if Teddy slurs in with something,  it may become a dark and stormy night in Chappaquiddick. Mary Jo Kopeckne could not be reached for comment)? Expect some attempt to spray metrosexual demoncrapped Republican’t Senators with some artificial testosterone so that they’ll uncharacteristically attempt to act like a majority party.

Will this nomination demonstrate that Karl Rove really is channeling Niccolo Machiavelli? No, but it may fuel that sort of speculation among the Demoncrappic Underpants, the Daily Kosoverians and other podpeople, moonbats and speech-impaired piscines (Oh my!).

*Allowing the ACLU to have their “mini-win” by framing the religious expression in the public arena as a “religious v. secular” cultural balance issue is problematic. And not at all within the Framers’ thinking. Less of an originalist than I’d ideally want on the court, but then aren’t all the viable options in that vein? *sigh*

Open Trackback/Linked at Euphoric Reality’s comments at DROP ZONE Open Post: Samuel Alito Is Next, Stop the ACLU’s Bush Nominates Samuel A. Alito for Supreme Court and TMH’s bacon Bits’ grinning WaPo: Alito To Get SCOTUS Nomination.

“There are probably about 12,000,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S. How do you round up this many people? How many cops would it take?”

Dafydd ab Hugh makes some troubling observations… and talks some hard sense about how we need to Guard Our Borders. On some minutiae, I can find points to quibble with him (processing 12 million illegals—or 20 million—for deportation need not “take more than 37 years” for example… still, I’d hate to entrench the bureaucratic army it’d take to do it more quickly *sigh*), but he has the broad picture roughed in well. Unless the U.S. does first stop the flood of illegals and then make a way for those who want to enter our country (or are already here, in some cases) for otherwise lawful and decent behavior to do so—and be assimilated into our culture!—we are in very serious trouble.

A fence and gates. Get rid of those who are here to wreak havoc in our society; expel those who refuse to actually become Americans and contribute to a healthy American society. Let me modify that to “Get rid of those illegal aliens… ” since otherwise the statement above could as easily apply to Teddy Kennedy, Jean Fraud sKerry and their ilk. heh.

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This has been a production of the Guard the Borders Blogburst. It was started by Euphoric Reality, and serves to keep immigration issues in the forefront of our minds as we’re going about our daily lives and continuing to fight the war on terror. If you are concerned with the trend of illegal immigration facing our country, join our blogburst! Just send an email with your blog name and url to kit.jarrell at gmail dot com.

Blogs already on board:

Carnival of the Recipes #63—enough good eats to scare the pants off dieters…

Check the delish stuff out here.

“Testing… testing… 1… 2… “

Lovely Daughter just brought me this. She’d been checking a friend’s Xanga notes (the friend attends the church noted in the article below) and found this.

A good argument for having trained sound techs and better mic-ing.

*sigh*

The site linked above requires registration, so here’s the meat:

WACO, Texas – A pastor performing a baptism was electrocuted inside his church Sunday morning after grabbing a microphone while partially submerged, a worker at the church said.

University Baptist Church Rev. Kyle Lake, 33, was standing in water up to his shoulder in a baptismal when electrocuted, said Jamie Dudley, wife of UBC community pastor Ben Dudley and a business adminstrator at the church.

Hmmm… another contributing factor:

“…doctors attending the service did chest compressions for 40 minutes before Lake was taken to Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center.”

Looks like I’m glad I live in America’s Third World County™ instead of Waco, Texas. When my own Wonder Woman’s heart stopped one day seven years (three weeks and six days) ago, the EMTs were HERE in well under 15 minutes, and by the time 40 minutes had gone by, she’d already had another episode of SCD in the hospital… 15 minutes away.

He leaves a wife, three children and a grieving congregation behind.

“…we know that all things work together for good to them
that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose…”

Update: In comments, a virulent, pustulant leftist spews some hate, offering himself as an example for an expanded version of Michelle Malkin’s new book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild.

God must be punishing him. He must have been gay. (toad734)

I’m not giving the hatemonger any front page linkage… and if he wants to play this kind of game, he may discover that what he wants will give him a rash…

Yes, the left really is populated by people who openly slander and rejoice in the death of someone just because they are a Christian. Sounds kinda like an Islamic jihadist murdering savage, eh? At the very least, it seems “toad734” shares the values of those who celebrate whenever an Islamic jihadist murdering savage SOB kills someone who doesn’t share their moon god religion. Islamic jihadist murdering savage.

Sick bastard.