"If you're serious . . . step up."

from http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/209395

BARRY: Well, on the economic front, [the Republicans'] only agenda seems to be tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. If you ask their leadership what their agenda will be going into next year to bring about growth and improve the job numbers out there, what they will say is, "We just want these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which will cost us $700 billion and which we're not going to pay for."

Now what they'll also say is, "We're going to control spending." But of course, when you say you're going to borrow $700 billion to give an average $100,000-a-year tax break to people making a million dollars a year, or more, and you're not going to pay for it; when Mitch McConnell's overall tax package that he just announced recently was priced at about $4 trillion; when you, as a caucus, reject a bipartisan idea for a fiscal commission that originated from Judd Gregg, Republican budget chair, and Kent Conrad, Democratic budget chair, so that I had to end up putting the thing together administratively because we couldn't get any support — you don't get a sense that they're actually serious on the deficit side.

. . .

When I talk to Democrats around the country, I tell them, "Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable." I came in and had to prevent a Great Depression, restore the financial system so that it functions, and manage two wars. In the midst of all that, I ended one of those wars, at least in terms of combat operations. We passed historic health care legislation, historic financial regulatory reform and a huge number of legislative victories that people don't even notice. We wrestled away billions of dollars of profit that were going to the banks and middlemen through the student-loan program, and now we have tens of billions of dollars that are going directly to students to help them pay for college. We expanded national service more than we ever have before.

The Recovery Act alone represented the largest investment in research and development in our history, the largest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower, the largest investment in education — and that was combined, by the way, with the kind of education reform that we hadn't seen in this country in 30 years — and the largest investment in clean energy in our history.

You look at all this, and you say, "Folks, that's what you elected me to do." I keep in my pocket a checklist of the promises I made during the campaign, and here I am, halfway through my first term, and we've probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we said we were going to do — and by the way, I've got two years left to finish the rest of the list, at minimum. So I think that it is very important for Democrats to take pride in what we've accomplished.

. . .

Over the past two years, what I probably anticipated but you don't fully appreciate until you're in the job, is something I said earlier, which is if a problem is easy, it doesn't hit my desk. If there's an obvious solution, it never arrives here — somebody else has solved it a long time ago. The issues that cross my desk are hard and complicated, and oftentimes involve the clash not of right and wrong, but of two rights. And you're having to balance and reconcile against competing values that are equally legitimate.

. . .

Having Paul McCartney here was also incredible. He's just a very gracious guy. When he was up there singing "Michelle" to Michelle, I was thinking to myself, "Imagine when Michelle was growing up, this little girl on the South Side of Chicago, from a working-class family." The notion that someday one of the Beatles would be singing his song to her in the White House — you couldn't imagine something like that.

. . .

One closing remark that I want to make: It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election. There may be complaints about us not having gotten certain things done, not fast enough, making certain legislative compromises. But right now, we've got a choice between a Republican Party that has moved to the right of George Bush and is looking to lock in the same policies that got us into these disasters in the first place, versus an administration that, with some admitted warts, has been the most successful administration in a generation in moving progressive agendas forward.

The idea that we've got a lack of enthusiasm in the Democratic base, that people are sitting on their hands complaining, is just irresponsible.

Everybody out there has to be thinking about what's at stake in this election and if they want to move forward over the next two years or six years or 10 years on key issues like climate change, key issues like how we restore a sense of equity and optimism to middle-class families who have seen their incomes decline by five percent over the last decade. If we want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties, we'd better fight in this election. And right now, we are getting outspent eight to one by these 527s that the Roberts court says can spend with impunity without disclosing where their money's coming from. In every single one of these congressional districts, you are seeing these independent organizations outspend political parties and the candidates by, as I said, factors of four to one, five to one, eight to one, 10 to one.

We have to get folks off the sidelines. People need to shake off this lethargy, people need to buck up. Bringing about change is hard — that's what I said during the campaign. It has been hard, and we've got some lumps to show for it. But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place.

If you're serious, now's exactly the time that people have to step up.

Please visit http://wikispeed.com/

Tutti a tavola!

A Modern Italian Master: Reviewing Del Posto

by Sam Sifton

from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/dining/29rest.html

GREAT restaurants may start out that way. But an extraordinary restaurant generally develops only over time, the product of prolonged artistic risk and managerial attention. An extraordinary restaurant uses the threat of failure first as a spur to improvement, then as a vision of unimaginable calamity. An extraordinary restaurant can transcend the identity of its owners or chef or concept.

And of course an extraordinary restaurant serves food that leads to gasps and laughter, to serious discussion and demands for more of that, please, now. The point of fine dining is intense pleasure. For the customer, at any rate, an extraordinary restaurant should never be work.

Consider Del Posto, which opened in 2005 on a wind-swept corner of that grim Manhattan neighborhood that is neither Chelsea nor the meatpacking district, in the shadows below what is now the High Line park. The restaurant’s owners, Joseph Bastianich, Lidia Bastianichand Mario Batali, and its chef, Mark Ladner, envisioned a temple to Italian cooking to match any ever built to honor a European cuisine in New York, a 24,000-square-foot palazzo of mahogany and marble devoted entirely to the pleasures of Italian food and customer satisfaction.

Five years later Del Posto is that and more, a place to sit in luxury and drink Barolo, while eating food that bewilders and thrills — an abalone carpaccio to start your meal, perhaps, and absolutely a celery sorbetto to end it, as well-played Gershwin and Kern tinkle in the background.

Del Posto’s is a pleasure that lasts, offering memories of flavors that may return later in a dream: a tiny cup of spiced gazpacho, say, rimmed with a salty dust of dried capers; or a plate of the square-cut whole-wheat pasta known as tonarelli, with fiery little chickpeas, fried rosemary and bonito flakes in place of the more-traditional bottarga; perhaps a nectarine cooked into slow and amazing submission, with a savory grilled lemon cake and intense basil gelato. And, oh, that wine!

The road to the restaurant’s success was bumpy. It was not short. There was no precedent for Del Posto in Manhattan, no polished-brass, soft-carpeted Italian restaurant that dared to out-French the French in service, formalizing a simple cuisine, while at the same time urging casual excess on its customers. (Del Posto translates, literally, to “of the place.” You will not find its like in Venice or Berlin, Los Angeles or Miami.)

Early on, however, the restaurant’s service seemed strained, almost theatrical. (Now it is warm and practiced: French-trained and Italian-accented, which is to say American.) Some disliked the room, with its central staircase leading to undulating balconies, its lobbyish feel. (Some still feel this way.) Others loathed the piano, thought it suburban and twee. (The playing improved, the repertory deepened.)

Meanwhile, fine dining of the sort exemplified by Del Posto began to suffer in the marketplace, as the food-obsessed turned their attention from white tablecloths to wooden tabletops, from toques to full-sleeve tattoos, from ties and cocktail dresses to T-shirts and A.P.C. jeans.

There have never been complaints about Del Posto’s huge and deeply comprehensive wine collection, with its whale-bait Piedmontese nebbiolos and surprising values from up and down the peninsula. But there was a period there when the desserts were lame. The service in the dining room improved then faltered. In 2009, the faceless inspectors of the Michelin guide stripped the restaurant of a star.

For roughly the last year, however, under the close guidance of Mr. Ladner, who was the Puckish brain behind Lupa, a trattoria in the West Village also owned in part by Mr. Batali and Mr. Bastianich, Del Posto’s kitchen has been operating at the very highest level. The restaurant’s less expensive cafe section, near the bar, was removed, along with a number of tables on the balcony. With the help of a brilliant new pastry chef, Brooks Headley, and a revitalized and enthusiastic service staff of Italian nationals and veterans of the Batali-Bastianich empire, Del Posto is now among the very best restaurants in New York City.

What was designated a three-star restaurant by Frank Bruni in this newspaper in 2006 has become a four-star one. It is the first Italian restaurant to receive a four-star ranking in The Times since Parioli Romanissimo, reviewed by John Canaday in 1974.

Dinner is served in three formats, all of which highlight Mr. Ladner’s careful interpretation of Italian cuisine, in which brilliant technique renders incredible ingredients as art. Diners may simply order off the menu, as at the corner bistro. There is a five-course option for $95, in which each diner picks an antipasto, a main course and a dessert, and the table shares two pasta preparations in the middle. And there is a seven-course menu tradizionale for $125, in which the table is introduced to the length and breadth of Italian cuisine, from Sicily north to the Alto Adige.

All deliver pleasures, from a simple, elegant Kindai tuna belly simmered in olive oil on the menu tradizionale to a regular-menu order of lamb cooked in the Roman style, salty and rich, with a tangy lemon yogurt and cloud-light Swiss chard ragù. But among New Yorkers used to sharing their bounty, the deepest joy may reside in a fiddle to the five-course option, one that throws a third pasta preparation into the middle of the meal.

Mr. Ladner’s pastas are insanely good. After a wintry appetizer of warm, soft cotechino in a lentil vinaigrette, his spaghetti with Dungeness crab, sliced jalapeño and minced scallion arrives like the sun. It is a dish that speaks directly to Mr. Ladner’s genius, to a view of Italian cooking that allows for both jalapeño and Dungeness crab. His cooking is not about recreating Italy on a luxe scale so much as it is about recreating the Italian spirit on the grandest scale imaginable.

Spinach garganelli, for instance, might follow a sweet lobster salad with intense little tomatoes and a celery crunch, the pasta tubes glistening beneath a Bolognese sauce of incredible delicacy, the result of an all-day preparation that recalls more than anything else monkish devotion to flavor and beauty. It is the illuminated manuscript of cooking.

And a small bowl of anellini, robiola-stuffed pasta rounds the shape of World Series rings, comes with a black-truffle sauce that tastes of earned wealth and deep satisfaction. But you eat the dish with your fingers. It feels like skinny-dipping at the Lido, and is as enjoyable.

Main dishes are luxurious and well suited to occasion dining. For the celebration of business deals, for instance, there is an enormous rib-eye, cooked to rosy perfection beneath a dusting of salt and pepper, with a pile of fried potatoes, a tangle of Italian arugula and dots of tomato raisins that are worth almost literally their weight in gold. (The dish is $130 à la carte.)

Mr. Ladner offers a complicated plate of grilled pork and head cheese with peas and mint, with a light drizzle of the Neapolitan wine known as Lacryma Christi (the Tears of Christ), and a simple one of salmon beneath a wheat dressing made from simmering pasta not for minutes but (once more!) for hours, then reducing the result almost to syrup. He rolls veal loin in pulverized hardwood charcoal before slow-roasting it, then serves the result with luscious hand-ground polenta and a sticky, intense sauce made from osso buco. This last is wildly flavorful — a bass line for baby beef, an alimentary subwoofer.

Mr. Headley’s desserts follow dinner in the manner of a rondo that extends the pleasures of the meal far into the night — and often dangerously deep into the restaurant’s superb list of amari and grappi.

Mr. Headley was a punk-rock drummer who came to professional cooking late, and who bears precisely none of the marks of a new-century New York pastry chef. There is no architecture to his work, no foam. There is instead deep respect for, among other things, vegetable sugars, and for the accidents of art. (For birthdays and other celebrations, he creates a dessert tree by pouring molten chocolate into an ice bath. The result is three-dimensional Pollack.)

And so there are sfera di caprino, little goat-cheesecake balls rolled in salty olive oil and bread crumbs, accompanied by celery and fig agrodolce, with celery sorbetto. There is butterscotch semifreddo, not at all sweet, and a sour orange sauce made with rehydrated dried cantaloupe and cookie crumbs. And, to finish: a cheese-grating box filled with candies high in acid, dusted in salt, as amazing and wonderful as inspiration itself.

All that is missing from Del Posto at the moment are the New Yorkers who came early and then stayed away. The room fills late now with business travelers and visiting rock bands. But all are welcome. It is time to get a reservation and tell everyone you knew this would happen all along.



Del Posto

★★★★

85 10th Avenue (16th Street); (212) 497-8090; delposto.com.

ATMOSPHERE Italianate opulence that is formally casual, casually lavish.

SOUND LEVEL Moderate, though tables near the bar can be loud.

RECOMMENDED DISHES Cotechino, tuna ventresca; spaghetti with crab and jalapeño, agnolotti, garganelli, anellini, orecchiette; lobster, rib-eye, lamb alla Romana, salmon with wheat dressing; sfera di caprino, butterscotch semifreddo.

WINE LIST Enormous and comprehensive Italian list (with an extensive exception of Champagnes) allows you to spend as much as you like. Still, there are many deep pleasures available for under $100 a bottle.

PRICE RANGE Antipasti, $16 to $25; primi, $16 to $26; secondi, $33 to $130. Five-course à la carte menu, $95; seven-course tasting menu, $125.

HOURS Monday to Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; 5:30 to 11 p.m. Saturday, 4:30 to 11 p.m.; Sunday, 4:30 to 10 p.m.

RESERVATIONS Call exactly one month in advance.

CREDIT CARDS All major cards.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS A separate, accessible entrance on 16th Street and accessible restrooms on same level as dining room.

WHAT THE STARS MEAN Ratings range from zero to four stars and reflect the reviewer’s reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration. Menu listings and prices are subject to change.

Abalone carpaccio, with grilled asparagus and charred scallions, is enough to lead to questions like: Why don’t we eat abalone carpaccio all the time?

Spaghetti with Dungeness crab, sliced jalapeño and minced scallion manages to be fully American and deeply Italian, all at once.

Fonduta annellini are meant to be eaten with your fingers, the soft dry pasta rings filled with robiola and perfect for dragging through the black-truffle sauce, or dipping in a snowdrift of Parmesan — or both.

Follow with a delicate lamb chop with a swab of lemon yogurt, chickpeas and a Swiss chard ragu.

Or a huge and phenomenal ribeye steak, aged 28 days and dusted only in salt and pepper.

But make sure, whatever you do, to order Brooks Headley’s celery and fig agrodolce, which comes with his sfera di caprino, little goat-cheesecake balls rolled in salty olive oil and bread crumbs, with a celery sorbetto. They argue that celery is the new chocolate.

Vandalizing ourselves

There is both the death and life of great American cities, and maybe that is the most apt title. I am wholly pessimistic about American society, I believe The Wire is a show about the end of the American empire. And I believe that we all or our kids are going to live that event, and how we ended up at the end of it and where we end up and whether we can survive and on what terms is going to be the open question from now on.

But having said that, there will be cities. We are urban people, the world is an increasingly urban place. And what kind of places they will be are wholly dependent on how we behave to each other and how our political infrastructure behaves in regards to all of us.

Here's the great conceit of The Wire---and I think it's the great question that is in front of the entire world. The Third World has encountered this long before we did and increasingly we're finding Third World conditions in some of our major cities, and here's the reason why: Every single moment on this planet from here on out, human beings are worth less---not more, less. We are in the post-Industrial age. We do not need as many of us as we once did. We don't need us to generate capitol, we don't need us to secure wealth. We are in a transitive period where human beings have lost some of their value.

Now whether or not we as a nation or as a city or as a global community can figure out a way to validate the humanity of the individual while at the same time accepting that our need to exploit that individual is less and less, I don't know. I have great doubts. And since we began somewhere in the middle of this century as the most affluent and powerful nation on Earth, we've not figured out the answers to those questions. I have doubts whether anybody is going to be able to do it. Certainly there are some societies in Europe that have become more attentive to their most vulnerable populations---certainly more than us. But that is what we have been arguing about on The Wire. And anyone who thought they were watching a cop show couldn't understand why the cops didn't catch the bad guys at the end and make everyone happy, there's your answer.

On The Wire knowledgeable police officers, the political individuals who begin with some form of sincerity and move on from there, longshoremen who knew their jobs and their world and by extension people in the industrial world who once made stuff in this country and sold it to other people, corner boys who sell drugs and are really expendable in west and east Baltimore, all these people, their lives are less and less necessary. They are more and more expendable. The institutions in which they serve or are supposed to be served by are more and more indifferent to their existence.

I came from one of the better newspapers in the country where I got to learn my trade. There are 300 people in that newsroom where there used to be 450. And they are providing less news coverage about our city, they are attending to government less than they ever were. Their buying power has been denied, their medical has been cut---knowledgeable reporters. We don't need as many to fill the stuff around the comics and the ads as we once did. And we can take The Wires.

You name me an institution in American society, I'll show you where they basically betrayed the people they were supposed to serve or be served by.

I didn't start as a cynic. I have to say, I expected a lot more of the future twenty years ago. But at every given moment where this country has had a choice, even on a local level, this country, its corporations, its institutions, its government, its social framework, it's had a choice to exalt the value of the individuals over the value of the share price, we have chosen raw, unencumbered capitalism. Capitalism has become our god. And the fact that it is---and I accept that it is the only viable way to generate wealth on a large scale. You're not looking at a Marxist up here. But you are looking at somebody that doesn't believe that capitalism adds to a social framework and accepts that it is relatively easy to marginalize more and more people in this post-Industrial economy every day and that that has to be attended to, and that that has to be a conscious calculation on the part of society, that that is going to succeed. It's not going to succeed.

You're eventually going to have the gated communities and the people inside saying, "Isn't it a shame you can't drive downtown anymore?" That's where we're headed. And increasingly the gated communities are going to be farther and farther away from the maelstrom of our inner cities, and they're going to be better and better protected, and technology is going to be employed to utilize this idea of separate Americas.

I live in one Baltimore. The Baltimore I write about and the Baltimore you see on The Wire is a completely different Baltimore. They both exist. I think we're capturing the one with great accuracy, and yet it has no relation to where I live and no relation to the world in which I inhabit. And it's incredible that it's only blocks apart. But eventually I think America is going to become more like that. And at some point either more of us are going to find our conscience or we're not. And there's no reason to think that we are at this point. I mean, we can't even agree to raise the minimum wage after ten years unless we give a tax break to businesses. I mean, it's remarkable.

I see that, and the part of me that wonders whether I'll have material to write about five years from now, he's warm all over. That is the America that I've come to regard as almost metronomic in its ability to to make the wrong choice almost every time on behalf of its own people.

And the city is basically the victim of that in every sense. These imperatives---globalization, the death of union work, the death of the union wage, an unenforceable drug prohibition---these politics of division and of disregard for individual dignity---they don't come from the city, they don't come from the city council or the mayor or the greater Baltimore committee or the A. S. Abell Foundation, it's out of our control. And it's even out of our control in a democratic sense. Because everybody in here who might hear my words and agree with me---five or six of you---if you're going to go out at the next election and say, "I'm voting the way Simon says," your vote doesn't matter. You live in Maryland. Your vote doesn't matter. If you thought you were living in a democracy, if you bought into that, you've got to go to a dictionary and look up the world oligarchy, and you've got to think about what it means. Because we live in a country where 60 percent of the representation in our highest governing body, the Senate, represents 40 percent of the population. That's the way our Constitution has it.

Overheard: Sunday NFL commercial

"There's a couple'a things we do right in America—trucks 'n' freedom."

I will still try to f*%# your sister every chance I get; it's who I am, Baby

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I'll get the teacups!

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Update

Mid-term exams

today, before an audience of adoring baltimorons, david plouffffffthththththth said:

the republicans took the economy and drove us into a great recession. if they'd taken the election in 2008, they would have driven us into a great depression.

Time to Unveil the Democrats' "Covenant with America"

BrutallyHonestBabes wrote:
I know we didn't want to show our hand too early, guys, but it seems like the Republicans know all about our plan anyway.

COVENANT WITH AMERICA

America is more than a country.

America is an idea – an idea that gay sex-witches can govern the innocents, that government's powers are derived from the consent of Satan, that each of us is endowed by Lady GaGa with the unalienable rights to anal beads, kitten murder, and the pursuit of raves. America is the belief that any trannie can – given economic, political, and religious subjugation – advance the wearing of cut-off jeans that expose the ass cheeks.

The Democrats' Coven of Terrorism promises to you:

• We'll make it illegal to be a White man, because we're threatened by how much better than us they are.
• No more Christianity. Those little wafer things they make you eat in church are gross. Daily blood-drinking, however, will be required.
• Women will rule the coven, because they're already all witches.
• Ugly ladies will be held in the highest esteem of all, and will enjoy the added benefit of whipping Rush Limbaugh because he's always right.
• Free Tater-Tots to all terrorists.
• Marriage will be officially destroyed. Twinks and Bears, we're calling on you to spearhead this operation.
• July 4 will henceforth be known as "Hock a Lugie on the Flag" Day.
• Wal-Mart will be shuttered.
• All feminists will get their own decent, freedom-loving man to cook for them like a total pansy.
• No one will think of the children.

The city that never sleeps

In a different voice

To be viewed with Mary J. Blige's "No Drama" as the soundtrack

Shelley girlie