BlatherMunch27: will blog for food, or vice versa

(BlatherMunch is our Sunday foodish respite from political bias, media dish, snotty intenuendo, and liberal glee. For more essays on food & dining click here or 'BlatherMunch' in Categories).

You can never know the lengths BlatherMunch goes every week to bring you the penetrating food & dining coverage you've never actually shown that much interest in reading.

Yet we keep going -- at great financial cost and physical harm, we lift those forks, push those spoons, flap those chopsticks to bring food to mouths and to you our canny observations and fine-honed critique.

 

That's why we're asking you to give us money this week. Nobody does what we do: and we do it just for you.

(I am a faithful Foodist; an avid supplicant to the cult of Foodism, an esoteric, hedonistic in-group that makes the Obama Cult look like Methodists. We worship at the Shrine of Fresh. We're found prostrate before the room temperature Godhead of Cheese. We chant the Mantras of Seasonal, the liturgy of Sustainable. We seek psychic universes in mouthfeel; climb steep flavor profiles; are reverential of 'warm, buttery things;" and ransack thesaurii for synonyms for "tasty." Food is more important and bigger than life, death, infinity, politics and world peace. Although we know more than you, eat better than you; and indeed, are better than you, our belief is that all good food is equal. According to our teachings, a perfect quesadilla at a Rainier Valley taco truck is as righteous as Chef Ethan Stowell’s scraping a white truffle over a hunk of wolf he's just cooked-up).   

We're very experienced at dining, actually having eaten food all our lives. Just last week, a waiter came to our table and said, "The chef would like to compliment you on the way you put that away..."

We do more than just dining and restaurants we do: weird meat; food porn; farm porn; ethnicities not often heard from; food politics; politics' food; celebrity recipes; cauliflower mathematics; man's inhumanity to ham and more. We're willing to do what we have to do, and take what we have to take: the Lipitor, the bitching from the readers who don't give a damn about this shit.

We do it just for you.

Sparing no expense, we've taken you to fancy, many-coursed feeds in gnarly restaurants; dragged you into fish & chips joints;
hot restaurants before anyone else knows they're hot. We plunged you into a thermal immersion circulator, took you to grunt trucks; fed you recipes; guided you through strip mall cuisine,  food radio; goat meat; Ethical Weddings, and food blogs.

Please, please, please help tide us over until we ask again. Anonymity guaranteed. Please use the PayPal Tip Jar in the right sidebar. For larger sums, or if you don't want to use PayPal, send to Michael Hood, PO Box18981, Seattle, WA 9811

Comments

[sparky]

I should send you the bacon bandaids I got at Archie McPhees.

I went to a Farmer's market today, Bla'M. I should send you the list of restaurants that sit off to the side..it was a glorious day to buy food...the honey crisp apples are in!

[Duffman]

Forget the 'should' and concentrate on the 'doing' Fork it over young lady. [smile]

[sparky]

Speaking of money

Check Your Tax Cut from Obama

ObamaTaxCut.com is a project of AlchemyToday.com and has no relation to the Obama campaign or any other organization whatsoever.

[Duffman]

I'm sorry but that just doesn't pass the smell test; but alas I'm sure many (such as yourself) will eat it up.
...and since you believe in it, whey don't you give 1/2 of your savings under the Obama plan and send to Bla'M

[sparky]

I forgot to add something from Time Magazine:

"Time magazine recently reported that Sen. McCain intends to tax employer provided healthcare benefits. To "compensate" people for this, he plans to give them a tax break of $2500 for an individual, and $5000 a family. However, on average, employees receive $12,000 a year in healthcare benefits from employers which don't appear on your paycheck.

John McCain's proposal would mean that someone earning $50,000/year would be taxed as though they made $62,000/year (on average), even if they did not consume any healthcare benefits.

While details of the proposal are still unclear, one can imagine being bumped into a higher tax bracket based on healthcare benefits being calculated as part of income. If this is the case, a person earning $32,000/year will pay in the 25% tax bracket instead of a 15% tax bracket. But even if citizens are taxed at the their current tax bracket, this amounts to a serious tax increase for non-disposable income received by millions of employees across the country.

The real goal here, of course is to incentivize employees to obtain healthcare on their own rather than through their employers. Unfortunately, the economic consequences of this choice may be to reduce access to healthcare AND increase our taxes. The argument put forth by the McCain campaign is that this proposal will end the "disadvantage" of getting healthcare on your own rather than through an employer. Translation: healthcare companies obtain more profit through individual healthcare plans than large employee plans both because they can charge more but also because they can discriminate based on health history better. And since those companies are financing his campaign, all the better.

Alan Greenspan critisized John McCain's tax cuts because, like most of his Republican counterparts, he plans to pay for these tax cuts with borrowed money, rather than a reduction in spending. In essence, if cutting taxes results in increasing the national debt, the people who are really paying for this "economic stimulus" are our children. We will saddle them with our $8 Trillion debt."

If I am going to be taxed for my health care like they do in Canada, I want the same kind of health coverage my friends get in Canada.

[vbv]

Did you hear Palin tapdance when Gibson asked her why she and Mccain kept saying that Obama would increase taxes when his plan has been vetted by all non-partisan watchdogs as lowering or eliminating taxes for people earning less than 250k? She gave won of her Calvalcade of Words answers she gives when she's pulling it out of her ass.

[Louis Higley]

I wish it was Palin on top of the ticket instead of the John McCain. She could win it for sure.

[Puget Sound]

"If I am going to be taxed for my health care like they do in Canada, I want the same kind of health coverage my friends get in Canada.

Posted by: sparky | September 14, 2008 at 03:22 PM"

You must mean the kind that the Canadians love sooo much that they end up coming down here for routine treatment.
Yeah, I want a lot of that.

[Puget Sound]

From the Dems will continue to throw stuff on the wall to see what sticks comes this gem from Slate:

"Slate posted an item by Noreen Malone asking why McCain’s North Vietnamese captors simply didn’t repatriate him from the Hanoi Hilton without his consent rather than ask him if he would accept early release. Malone answers: “Because they wouldn’t have gotten what they wanted out of his release.”

In addition to addressing that question, the item also insinuates why McCain and his fellow prisoners of war did not accept their captors offers to repatriate them: “Many were older than the average U.S. soldier in Vietnam and had hopes of further promotion within the military—which would have been destroyed by the acceptance of early parole.” Suggesting that POWs who were being tortured were worried about their military careers is preposterous, though perhaps understandable in light of one of the three sources consulted by Slate for the item: Rutgers University Professor Bruce Franklin, author of The Essential Stalin, who is himself a fan of Stalin."

Make sure you all broadly disseminate that one for the Heartland of America to hear. Will go nicely with your General Betrayus ads from 07.

[sparky]

Only when there is a shortage of doctors on hand for a specialty treatment, Puts. For the average citizen of Canada, the system works very well. None of my Canadian friends or cousins have ever had to come to the States for treatment or surgery. That includes the parent of one of them who spent 6 months in the hospital for various illnesses. Their hospital bill was zero. My friend in England has the same setup and she has everything she needs there too. And Denmark, and Sweden, etc. etc. etc. And in those countries, the taxation rate is very similar to ours.

Of course,McBush thinks we should all be on our own for medical coverage. Of course, he and his family will have a lifetime of free care for being a member of the Senate. Yes, that's John McCain, putting country first!

Now go do some more googling and find something else to be outraged about.

[Puget Sound]

I'm not outraged about that. Just never hear about Americans flocking to Canada except for the subsidized medicine pills. I just feel sorry for the Canadians and don't think they quite have the answer to the problem of Health Care. (Nor do we.) Interesting NY Times Article from last year discussing wait times -I'll excerpt-

"But most Canadians agree that current wait times are not acceptable.

The median wait time between a referral by a family doctor and an appointment with a specialist has increased to 8.3 weeks last year from 3.7 weeks in 1993, according to a recent study by The Fraser Institute, a conservative research group. Meanwhile the median wait between appointment with a specialist and treatment has increased to 9.4 weeks from 5.6 weeks over the same period.

Average wait times between referral by a family doctor and treatment range from 5.5 weeks for oncology to 40 weeks for orthopedic surgery, according to the study.

Last December, provincial health ministers unveiled new targets for cutting wait times, including four weeks for radiation therapy for cancer patients beginning when doctors consider them ready for treatment and 26 weeks for hip replacements."

[orcas]

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