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What happened on Election Night was, in a sense, unremarkable. The white working class, long a constituency at the very heart of American politics, simply found its way into the spotlight once again. Exit polls indicate, with about as much confidence as the entire enterprise of political polling can be held to indicate anything these days, that Donald Trump is President today because Hillary Clinton lost working class whites by an astounding margin. She was beaten by Trump among whites without college degrees by nearly 40 points. And, as the New York Times' Nate Cohn has pointed out, she lost a significant amount of support from whites in this category who not only supported Obama, but likely comprised over a third of the coalition that brought him back to the White House in 2012.
Clinton's atrocious performance among working class whites was, of course, reflective of a long-established trend. The Democratic Party has not won the white working class vote since 1996. Every Democratic campaign since Bill Clinton's victory that year, save Obama's 2008 run, has done worse with blue-collar whites than the last. Al Gore lost the white working class by 17 points. John Kerry lost them by 23 points. Obama lost them by 18 points in 2008 and by 25 points in 2012. Even against the Party's dismal record, Hillary Clinton's 39 point loss in November stands out. But although she lost the category by an unprecedentedly large margin, Clinton only needed to hold onto a small proportion of white working class voters in the swing states Trump narrowly won to eke out a victory. Given this, it would be absurd to suggest the Party not try to make up some of the difference moving forward.
The question, of course, is how.
The Left has been unanimous in its recommendations. Trump, a buffoon, a charlatan, and a racist, won they say because, in spite of everything, he spoke to working class pain with a full-throated populism. They rejected Clinton's neoliberal prescriptions for their economic anxiety for a candidate that spoke out forcefully about the effects of NAFTA and globalized capitalism on American manufacturing. They flocked enthusiastically to a candidate that literally wore a message about how far behind they'd fallen as a piece of clothing and turned away from a candidate that insisted, despite lost jobs and lower wages, that things were mostly fine. If the Democrats want to win the white working class again, they argue, they will have to mount campaigns that not only speak to working class angst, as Trump did, but advance an agenda that promises to undo the economic havoc that neoliberal policy and the Democratic Party's centrism and indifference has wreaked upon them. "A good chunk of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table," Naomi Klein wrote in The Guardian. "An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal."
This was one of the lines of thinking that led many on the left to insist, during the Democratic primaries, that Bernie Sanders stood a much better chance of defeating Trump than Clinton ever did. After all, Sanders won in some of the heavily white working class states where Trump eventually won—Michigan, West Virginia, and Wisconsin for instance. Last May, Jacobin's Connor Kilpatrick wrote that the potential impact of Sanders' progressive agenda on struggling white workers was key to his appeal in those regions and offered a model for winning them moving forward. "The Sanders program is a recognizably working-class one: higher minimum wage, free college for all, labor unionism, and a re-regulation of finance with steep taxes on the one percent," he wrote. "And his actual politics go far beyond that. He preaches the necessity and righteousness of class war, calls out our oligarchs by name and — in the case of his Immokalee farmworkers— asks us all to question 'who benefits from this exploitation?'"
Are these the prescriptions for winning back the downtrodden white workers in the Rust Belt that Trump ran away with? During the primaries, liberals marshalled counterevidence against this line of argument. It was pointed out in Vox that same month, for instance, that survey and polling data showed Hillary Clinton was beating Sanders with the kind of older, low-income white factory workers that commonly come to mind when one considers the white working class. Moreover, researchers have questioned the extent to which economic anxiety was responsible for driving white workers to Trump in the first place. In a widely circulated analysis of survey data from 125,000 Americans, Gallup's Jonathan T. Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found "mixed evidence that economic distress has motivated Trump support." "His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue collar occupations," they wrote, "but they earn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration."
Now, no bits of information that have emerged since the election have truly disproven the notion that a Democratic Party willing to toss out centrism or "elite neoliberalism," in Klein's words, in favor of the kind of ambitious progressivism of Sanders' agenda and the Democratic Party of old could make real inroads among white working class voters. But an assessment of Democratic presidential politics in the latter half of the last century suggests the prevailing narrative on the Left about how white workers and the Democrats have gradually parted ways is flawed.
The Left's story of the split between the white working class and the Party goes something like this. The white working class has, over the past several decades, seen a devastating decline in stable, well-paying industrial work. The Republican and Democratic parties have both proven unwilling to address their plight in part because both have been captured by neoliberalism—the valorization of free market principles and supply-side logic across all areas of public policy—with the GOP naturally falling a bit harder for it than the once progressive Democratic Party. Both parties have cooperated in making matters worse by hacking away at the social safety net and further empowering multinational corporations and the wealthy through deregulation, passing tax cuts, pursuing free trade and undermining unions—all policy aims that have effectively redistributed wealth upwards and significantly deepened economic inequality. What's more, Democratic liberals have spent years responding to the racist and bigoted attitudes of many white working class voters by calling them racist and bigoted, which has alienated them.
The white working class, dismayed, has responded to all this, and the lack of a truly pro-worker party, by either dropping out of the voting pool entirely or voting for Republicans who unlike the Democrats, are, refreshingly, nicer to them than they are to African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and LGBT people. Right-wing populist appeals, it is argued, have been the only truly populist appeals for decades. Consequently, white working class voters have swung right, in the direction of the only politicians that seem to acknowledge their pain—politicians who have, in fact, been deepening it even more than the liberal politicians who have ceased paying attention. The white working class, in short, has responded to the horrors neoliberalism has inflicted upon them by doing either nothing at all or voting for the more neoliberal party.
None of this, the Left says, was inevitable. Liberals have erred, they argue, in casting all working class whites as politically and perhaps morally irredeemable for the undeniable bigotry and xenophobia of some. And in pushing a narrative of the white working class' exodus that centers their historical resistance to civil rights and identity politics, they say, liberals have ignored the class dynamics that have been the real driving forces behind their disillusionment—dynamics exacerbated by the Democratic Party's decision to face right and commit itself deeply to neoliberal economics, as exemplified by the ascendancy of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). It was their move to the center, coupled with their disdain for white workers they see as marked by a kind of original sin that finally pushed those voters away and continues to do so. Blue collar whites have abandoned the Democratic Party simply because the Democratic Party abandoned progressive policies that spoke to the needs of workers and came to loathe the working class itself.
It's a story both simple and substantially untrue. In fact, the decline in white working class support for the Democratic Party at the presidential level began well before the party's retreat from progressivism and pro-worker politics. Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, and Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who presciently identified the disenfranchised white working class as a force to be reckoned with nearly 20 years ago in America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters, laid out the timeline of their departure from the Democratic Party's coalition in a 2008 Brookings working paper called "The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class". According to Teixeira and Abramowitz, the Democratic vote among whites without college degrees fell from an average of 55 percent in the 1960 and 1964 elections to 35 in the 1968 and 1972 elections—a decline of 20 points in just over a decade. What happened during the 1960s? Had the Party moved substantially to the center? Had the Party become less committed to progressive social programs that would help struggling whites? To the contrary—the 1960s and two Democratic administrations brought the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the expansion of Social Security benefits, the revival of food stamps, minimum wage increases, the launch of the Head Start early childhood education program for lower-income children, increased federal funding for public education, the creation of the Job Corps youth employment program and other vocational education programs, and a dizzying array of other government initiatives that constituted the most expansive array of progressive successes since the New Deal. None of it mattered.
Perhaps, as the labor researcher Penny Lewis has suggested, the white working class was more perturbed by the Vietnam War than popular accounts of the antiwar movement—which commonly frame blue-collar workers as having been hawks pitted against young, relatively well-to-do college students—have portrayed. But most of the drop in support, as nearly every historian surveying the period has agreed, can be attributed to the Party's full embrace of not only civil rights, but also social liberalism more broadly. The Party emerged from the 1960s championing both economic and social justice and believed it could continue to do so without losing the downscale white voters it had relied on for years. As the election of 1968 made clear, it could not. Those voters fled to Richard Nixon and the segregationist former governor of Alabama George Wallace, who together won 64 percent of the white working class.
Those voters never really looked back. The theory that they would have had the Party offered up truly economically progressive candidates has to contend with the failed candidacies of George McGovern in 1972, whom Nixon trounced with 70 percent of the white working class vote and the staunchly pro-labor and union-backed Walter Mondale, whom neoliberal archdaemon Ronald Reagan trounced with 65 percent of their vote in 1984. Since 1968, two Democratic presidential candidates have done well with the white working class: Jimmy Carter, who dramatically outperformed George McGovern in the demographic by running as a conservative Democrat against Ford in 1976, and the DLC-anointed bubba neoliberal Bill Clinton. Ross Perot's insurgent populism and his warning that NAFTA would produce a "giant sucking sound" as blue-collar jobs were lost to Mexico failed, ultimately, to prevent the man who backed and signed NAFTA from winning narrow pluralities of the white working class vote in 1992 and 1996.
This is not a voting record that inspires confidence that the white working class has been itching, deep down, to cast votes against neoliberal economics upon hearing the right progressive pitch. But looking at general election results offers only an incomplete picture of the white working class' exit from the Democratic fold. They largely tell a now-familiar story about Democratic collapse among blue-collar and other whites in the south that masks the gradual erosion of white working class support in northern states where Trump won. It's the Democratic primaries in the wake of the New Deal coalition's final rupture in 1968 that provide the clearest picture of how even the portion of the white working class presumably most sympathetic to left-of-center politics—northern blue-collar whites—has moved rightward.
In 1972, South Dakota Senator George McGovern and George Wallace, now running as a Democrat, were the most formidable challengers of former Vice President and 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey—a standard bearer for post-war expansionary liberalism and a booster of organized labor. In the eyes of many white working class voters, these bona fides were irrelevant. Humphrey was perhaps the leading member of a Democratic establishment still discredited in the eyes of many by the Vietnam War and the aggressive push for civil rights then playing out in the battle over integrative school busing.
There had been a third Humphrey opponent at the beginning of the race. Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a liberal pro-busing Democrat, had risen to frontrunner status in 1970 with a speech that decried the disingenuity of Nixon's law and order rhetoric and slammed the effects of the administration's economic policies on workers who had been robbed of the guarantee, he said, "of a constantly rising standard of life—which was his only a few years ago, and which has been cruelly snatched away":
Their policy against inflation requires that unemployment go up. Again, it is the working man who pays the price. In other fields the story is the same. They have cut back on health and education for the many while expanding subsidies and special favors for a few.
They call upon you – the working majority of Americans – to support them while they oppose your interests. They really believe that if they can make you afraid enough, or angry enough, you can be tricked into voting against yourself.
In the early Florida primaries, Wallace shocked the party by winning Florida with 42 percent of the vote. Muskie, maimed perhaps by a speech over scurrilous reporting he'd given in New Hampshire where it was widely reported that he'd broken into tears— came in fourth with under 9 percent. His candidacy never recovered. In his speech on the night of the Florida primary, he responded to his loss by castigating Wallace voters for having deplorably succumbed to "some of the worst instincts of which human beings are capable."
The Washington Post's Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that Nixon aides were giddy about Muskie's perceived attack on the "Archie Bunker" white working class vote and assessed the myopia that had lead to Muskie's defeat:
From the beginning, Muskie's operatives and Florida party leaders supporting him grossly underestimated Wallace's popularity, resulting from ferocious opposition to school busing and hostility to the political establishment. Despite the intensity of this protest vote, brilliantly courted by Wallace-style populism, Muskie's men believed to the end the anti-busing candidates, Wallace and Sen. Henry M. Jackson, would get only a minority of the vote. On election day, they prepared a "victory" statement for that night. In fact, Wallace-Jackson totalled 56 percent.
"I think Muskie's falling into the liberal trap of thinking that the Wallace vote is strictly a hate vote," one unnamed Muskie supporter told Evans and Novak. The two agreed. "Wallace's winning total was surely not exclusively a hate vote as Muskie suggested," they wrote. "His share of the black vote was close to 10 percent. He carried Tampa's Spanish speaking areas, astonishing regular party leaders who assumed they were safe for Muskie."
But despite Wallace's ability to attract some support among non-stereotypical constituencies, the main threat of his candidacy lay obviously in his sway among traditionally Democratic working class whites. George McGovern, whose Vietnam opposition-driven candidacy was thought to mainly appeal to younger and more affluent Democrats, unlike Muskie, refused to minimize or write off those voters. Instead, he would spend the remainder of the campaign trying to win them over. In Wisconsin, he did so in part by campaigning heavily on the injustice of tax breaks for the wealthy—another key issue of Wallace's—and downplaying his support for busing. "I don't know of any place in this state where either blacks or whites have asked for busing," he told the Washington Post. "So why raise the issue here?" This strategy won him enough blue-collar white votes to carry the state.
But in Michigan, where Detroit area voters expected the carrying out of a fall busing order in the fall, McGovern thrust his busing stance back into the spotlight. "I can't believe that the people of this state see the school bus as a greater enemy to their future than the war in Southeast Asia," he said in a press conference opening his campaigning in the state. He'd repeat the sentiments later in a speech to supporters and United Auto Workers retirees, during which he called busing, "one of the prices we have to pay for long years of neglect of our educational system and the problems of equality in this nation."
Wallace won easily in Michigan with around 51 percent of the vote, beating McGovern nearly two-to-one and even winning half of United Auto Workers households. These results alarmed Hubert Humphrey's union backers who belatedly recognized the anti-establishment mood propelling Wallace and McGovern. For a surprising number of voters, the two seemed largely interchangeable as protest votes despite McGovern's liberalism and Wallace's racism. Over 40 percent of Ohio primary voters who said they would be willing to cast a vote for George Wallace in the fall, for instance, voted for McGovern in that state's primary. Despite defections, Humphrey managed to hold most of the Rust Belt. McGovern's dominance in the west and on the upper east coast, however, won him the nomination.
The expected frontrunner in 1976's primary was Congressman Mo Udall. Udall like Humphrey, was a staunch progressive. In fact, Udall had been a backer of Humphrey-Hawkins, an ambitious full employment bill that, as Humphrey proclaimed in 1974, was aimed at securing "every adult American's right to useful job opportunities at fair rates of compensation" through making the federal government an employer of last resort and allowing Americans to sue over being deprived of their right to a job. Udall was also less of an establishment figure than Humphrey and given to proposals like the breaking up of General Motors. "Economic concentration is un-American," he said in one primary speech. "Not what we teach to our kids."
Udall's major opponents for the nomination were an unknown Jimmy Carter and, yet again, George Wallace.
Early in the primaries, Carter strenuously avoided committing to any particular set of economic principles and even said that February that he wouldn't outline a number of his positions until he won the nomination. But a definitive economic mindset did, eventually, emerge. "I'm a businessman and an engineer, and I believe in scientific principles," he said that April. "I would opt for equality of the state and local governments [with the federal government], and would go with the private sector where I could before relying on the public sector."
"The image Carter tries to project, the Washington Post's Hobert Rowan would write, "is that of the scientifically-oriented pragmatist who will cut through waste and put together an efficient operation." The image Carter tried to project, more precisely, was the image of a technocratic neoliberal years before the term acquired currency. And the policies he promoted during the campaign exemplify the rightward turn the Left argues the Party must reverse if it wants a chance at winning back white working class voters. Against Udall's support for a new federal "income maintenance" program, Carter campaigned on a welfare reform proposal that would move 1.3 million people from the welfare rolls into "temporary unemployment" and subject the rest to work incentives. Against Udall's support of Ted Kennedy's universal healthcare bill, Carter offered a moderate plan partially subsidized by the government. Carter campaigned against a bloated federal bureaucracy, but insisted that defense spending would inevitably have to rise. Udall, in a March interview on his positions with the Washington Post, said he would cut defense spending and that the public sector more broadly, while due for cuts to waste, had been "starved."
Post: What's the evidence that the public sector in the United States is being starved?
Udall: Well, the evidence is in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in South Bronx. The evidence is in a medical care system that's a disgrace and doesn't get care to people who need it.
Post: It's a disgrace?
Udall: It really is. You've got two systems: You've got one for the middle and upper-income people -it's the best in the world – and you've got one for poor people that's the worst among the industrialized societies. The evidence is all around us, in the way we treat old people, and poor people, and what we've done to our cities.
Carter, many reasoned, didn't stand a chance. Udall, like Humphrey, was a union-backed progressive that could expect wide elite, middle-class, and working-class liberal support without the weariness and baggage brought about by Humphrey's long career. Carter was a conservative Southerner without any of Wallace's name-recognition or raw demagogic appeal. With Wallace in poor health and Carter a non-starter, surely the white working class would uniformly back the clear progressive choice this time around.
They did not. The white working class swung for Carter who swept the entirety of the Rust Belt and most of the country. George Wallace racked up double digit shares of the vote as well in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Horrified by the prospect of Carter's victory, union leaders launched a last ditch effort to block his nomination by backing the anti-busing liberal Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the hopes of forcing a contested convention that could nominate Hubert Humphrey. Idaho Senator Frank Church and California Governor Jerry Brown launched campaigns also aimed at stopping Carter. All failed.
What did Carter offer, precisely, that so galvanized his white working class backers? The parts of his economic program that weren't opaque to voters were regressive by Democratic standards. And he wasn't the kind of fiery populist Wallace had been. It's commonly observed now, as it was then, that Carter's folksiness, religious faith, and gentle charm stood in stark and attractive contrast to the dark, skullduggerous politics Watergate exposed. This was undeniably a factor in his success. But Carter staked his victory on more than relatability and a clean image. On civil rights, Carter tried to triangulate his way out of offending blue-collar whites.
He supported, for instance, the desegregation of private schools. He also said, during one spring campaign stop in Connecticut, that he was baffled by federal court efforts to require "every single school" to admit applicants of all races. He opposed mandatory desegregation by busing but stated that he would enforce federal court orders imposing it and would oppose a constitutional amendment banning it — a shift from his cautious support for a busing ban amendment while he was the governor of Georgia. As the Washington Post's David Broder observed in a column about Carter's tour of Wisconsin, Carter altered his messaging on civil rights for black and white audiences:
He had been asked, he said, his views on 'school integration…and I'll give you the same answer I gave in Jackson, Miss., and Biloxi, Miss., and Montgomery, Ala., and Ashville, N.C., and in New Hampshire.
But the truth is he did not give the same answer he had given in those cities. He did not even give the same answer he had given three hours earlier to a predominantly white audience at Marquette University or would give an hour later, to another white audience, at a fundraiser at the Red Carpet Inn.
In his speeches to black audiences, Carter would praise civil rights unreservedly and wax lyrical about his daughter's attendance of a school with more black than white students in the second grade. In his speeches to white audiences, Carter said the same with a critical addition—he opposed mandatory busing. "Was it misleading or not," Broder asked, "for a candidate who has pledged 'never deliberately to mislead you' to say to a black audience, 'School integration, I'm for it,' and to a white audience, 'Forced busing, I don't like it?'"
Carter's civil rights stances would come under additional scrutiny after a series of comments made while campaigning in Indiana. Regarding the question of neighborhood segregation, he said at a news conference, he would not, as president, "use the federal government's authority to circumvent the natural inclination of people to live in ethnically homogenous neighborhoods." He went on to say that he had no problem with the maintenance of the status quo at "churches, the private clubs, the newspapers, restaurants, all designed to accommodate members of a particular ethnic group." "I see nothing wrong with that as long as it's done freely," Carter said.
His comments proved immediately controversial and his attempts to clarify his stance, as the New York Times' Christopher Lydon wrote, did him no favors:
"In making the point, he used unusually blunt language about social differences—about "black intrusion" into white neighborhoods for example. He spoke of "alien groups" in communities and of the bad effects of "injecting" a "diametrically opposed kind of family" or "a different kind of person" into a neighborhood.
Carter had backed open housing in Georgia and had famously shocked the state in his inaugural address by proclaiming that "the time for racial discrimination is over". Substantively, his position on neighborhood segregation specifically was the same as Udall's—both opposed using federal government power to diversify ethnically homogenous neighborhoods for diversity's sake. But the episode was widely considered to have tainted Carter—at least among the African-American community, which he tried diligently through the remainder of the campaign to make amends with. If his comments damaged his reputation among the working class whites, it didn't show. In fact, Udall and others openly speculated that Carter's gaffe had actually been a ploy to draw voters from a fading George Wallace.
In 1980, an utterly failing economy and collapsing faith in Carter gave the Democratic Party's progressives a golden opportunity to try unseating him. Ted Kennedy took it. "There may be more ideologically pure Democratic liberals the New York Times' B. Drummond Ayers Jr., wrote that March. "But in the minds of a great many party members, probably a great majority, the name Senator Kennedy is a definition of Democratic liberalism. He is seen as the ultimate champion of the party's hard-core constituency of blue-collar workers, minorities, and the aged."
But his nomination was not to be. "As the Senator has discovered in a series of caucuses and primaries," Ayers continued, "that perception does not automatically translate into overwhelming support from members of his party. Other perceptions of Mr. Kennedy, particularly doubts about his character, appear to have cost him dearly at the polls."
Kennedy hemorrhaged white working class voters throughout the primaries even in the kind of blue collar Catholic communities that had been a solid base for the Kennedy family for years. Most reasoned that Chappaquiddick ultimately mattered more than Kennedy's progressive critiques of Carter's efforts to balance the deficit with cuts to social programs and Paul Volcker's efforts to curb inflation through Fed-led economic contraction. Just before the Pennsylvania primaries, Evans and Novak took stock of the scandal's overbearing impact:
The unenthusiastic Carter voter favors mandatory wage and price controls, a view shared by a 8-to-1 margin of the voters interviewed. They therefore endorse the main economic tactic advocated by Kennedy, who is seen by these voters as better than Carter at handling unemployment and about the same in fighting inflation.
[…]Why, then, do only one out of four voters interviewed express support for Kennedy? Chappaquidick, of course. These voters find Carter more trustworthy than Kennedy by 6-to-1. Only 17 of the 64 voters say they believe the Senator's account of Chappaquidick (and only nine of his 16 avowed supporters.
Chappaquidick was undoubtedly a factor. But by this point, the Democratic Party's white working class voters had proven more and more willing to defect to right-leaning candidates even with highly-viable progressive alternatives available to them. It's not clear, given George Wallace's surprising success in the demographic in 1968 and 1972 and Carter's own victory in 1976, that another less damaged progressive candidate would have performed better. Part of the problem was that the influence of labor unions on their increasingly individualistic members continued to wane.
"We're middle-class people now, not working–class people the way we used to be," a Peoria union leader told Cokie and Steven Roberts of the New York Times ahead of Illinois' primaries. "Our members pay more than their share of the tax burden. When someone says the Federal Government should throw money at problems, we realize most of that money is coming out of our pockets.'" Jerry Toler, another local union member, exemplified the dilemma organized labor now faced:
"I'll tell you what," he said. "I might vote Republican for the first time in my life." Part of the reason was economic. "Hell, I was better off five years ago than I am now." And part of it was Ted Kennedy's backing of gun-control legislation. "I don't want anybody telling me whether I can own a gun or not.
"But I'm a Democrat," Toler insisted. "I'm a workingman. I believe in labor unions." Well, then, did he know that his union has endorsed Kennedy? "Nope," he replied, "but it doesn't matter anyway. The union don't tell me how to vote.
Kennedy managed slim Rust Belt victories in Pennsylvania and in the Michigan caucuses. Carter would win nearly everywhere else.
In 1984, Walter Mondale, Carter's Vice President, launched a bid largely focused on the negative effects of neoliberal Reaganomics on the American worker. During the campaign, Mondale would actually inadvertently prompt the coining of the phrase "Rust Belt" after a line on the impact of Reagan's policies on American industry from a speech he'd given— "Reagan's policies are turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl"—was picked up by the press and made to jibe with "Sun Belt," a phrase used to describe the South. A speech to the UAW delivered in January further outlined the themes of his campaign. The Democratic Socialists of America's Michael Harrington, he told those gathered, had recently found that 8 million Americans had fallen out of the middle-class due to deindustrialization under Reagan. "[M]anagement is using King Kong tactics to make American workers take Hong Kong wages," he said. "Mondale also said Reagan had shifted tax burdens, 'making the middle class pay more so the rich can pay less,'" the Washington Post's David Broder reported. "Finally, he accused the administration of 'disrespect' for 'working men and women' and 'the organizations that protect them,' saying it was not until Reagan came to office that businesses used bankruptcy laws to escape union contracts or to avoid compensating workers for job-related illnesses".
Union leaders, for their part, had backed Mondale early in a panic not only over the pattern of rank and file defections over the last several Democratic primaries, but of the wave of white working class defections to Ronald Reagan in 1980's general election. Mondale's reputation, to be sure, took a hit in his joining of the Carter administration. But he was obviously a safer choice for workers than his only viable opponent, Gary Hart.
Hart, a young Senator from Colorado, entered the 1984 primary much like Carter did in 1976, affably campaigning on the promise of almost comically vague "new ideas"—a phrase he repeated often. Famously, Mondale would skewer him on his lack of specificity during a March debate by asking "Where's the beef?"
To the extent that the actual substance of his ideas were known, they put him to the right of Mondale and within the burgeoning pack of technocratic "Atari Democrats" who insisted that new technology and efficiency gains would point the way forward for the American economy.
One of Hart's economic advisers at the time, Perry Quick, had worked in the Carter administration and would later add stints in the Reagan administration and the DLC to his resume. His obituary in the Washington Post from 2007 contains an illuminating anecdote about a memo Hart had written when he began working for him in 1981:
"He was setting up the neo-liberal program right there," Dr. Quick once said. "Under new approaches, he listed the consumption tax, a tax imposed only on the income people spent, designed to encourage savings, and a tax on industries that allowed prices or wages to exceed an established maximum, I guess because those were the things he knew about at the time. And he said to me, 'Do for the economy what we've already done for the military. Take all this, put some economic theory behind it and give me a plan that is workable.'"
Publicly, Hart specifically pushed little more for industrial America than retraining programs for laid off blue-collar workers and infrastructure spending. He also hit Mondale repeatedly for his closeness to labor, which he identified as one of the many "special interests" the Democratic Party and Mondale were unduly loyal to. During one debate, Hart pointedly asked Mondale to name a single issue where he disagreed with unions. Mondale took four days to respond.
In one speech, Mondale hit back hard against Hart's attacks and messaging on this front. "If you fight for better schools, you're old," he said. "But if you fight for big oil, you're new. If you fight for civil rights, that's a special interest. But if you buckle to the hospital lobby, that's a new idea."
It was this kind of framing—Mondale as the loyal warrior for workers and the disadvantaged, Hart as an empty suit dissembler for big business—that Mondale and his labor backers hoped would keep white working class voters securely in the fold. It didn't. Early in the primaries, Hart won union members in New Hampshire and also Vermont where he beat Mondale among members three-to-one. He would go on to win Ohio and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt. Mondale would ultimately win the primary, but it was a much closer race than many expected largely because Hart, whose candidacy had been thought to appeal mostly to younger, more affluent, and more educated voters, won a significant number of white working class votes. In the general election against Mondale, so would Ronald Reagan.
1988 was the last election before the full capture of the Democratic Party by the DLC and the Clinton years. If a strong progressive had been nominated to face George Bush in the general election—if a strong progressive had actually managed to beat Bush thanks to the return of white working class votes—the party would unquestionably have gone in a different direction. Most of the leading candidates that year, though, offered an odd kind of toothless neoliberal and superficially working-class populism that was eerily Trumpian. "Senator Albert Gore Jr., says he would 'make America competitive' again," the New York Times' Peter Kilborn wrote in March. "Gov. Michael S. Dukakis calls it 'making America No. 1 again'". The hardiest of the pre-fab populists was Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri, who railed loudly against the abuses heaped upon the working class with a conviction that amused careful watchers of his career. "[R]eflecting ever-widening ambitions," the Wall Street Journal's Dennis Farney wrote, "Congressman Gephardt moved in stages. He began as a moderately conservative Democrat, opposing creation of the Consumer Protection Agency and championing a Human Life constitutional amendment; became a Neo-Liberal or 'Atari Democrat,' searching for bold 'new ideas' to spur economic growth; moved on to moderate-to-liberal Democrat, jettisoning the Human Life amendment. Now he's a Populist Democrat, scourge of The Establishment." Gore's efforts to blue-collarize himself were even less convincing. Unlike Gephardt, who'd grown up in a middle-class union family, Gore was the son of a Senator and had attended Harvard.
Substantively, however, the two shared both an approach and an ideological perspective. Both were members of the DLC and thus committed to taking the party rightward in a chase for ever-more reliably conservative white working class voters. Gore would pursue them in the south. Gephardt would pursue them in the Rust Belt. Michael Dukakis, who had been listed in Esquire with Gephardt and Gore as a member of The Neoliberal Club in 1982, would pursue them too, anywhere he could. Naturally, their efforts were image and not policy driven. Blue-collar whites, they hypothesized, would be won over with ads, not agenda-driven politics. In stark contrast to this approach stood a fourth candidate—the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Jesse Jackson had actually mounted a campaign in 1984. Though his prominence as a civil rights leader, electrifying charisma, and registration drives brought African-Americans to the polls in large numbers across the country and especially in the South, he never pulled within striking distance of the nomination. Jackson was expected to run away with the black vote in 1988, but it was widely assumed his lack of broad appeal would again make him an also-ran. Jackson had other ideas. A broad and viable electoral coalition capable of winning the nomination and the presidency, he reasoned, could never be built on the expansive identity political commitments of his Rainbow Coalition and his record of anti-poverty advocacy alone. He too would have to win white working class voters. In 1988, he attempted to do so with class-based politics—advancing a message and an agenda that, in Jackson's own words, advanced "worker's rights beyond civil rights" and spoke to the common interest blue-collar and rural whites, urban minorities, and struggling middle-class Americans of all races shared in toppling the exploitative neoliberal capitalism that had been enabled by Reaganomics.
"He has broadened his cast of victims to include family farmers and blue-collar workers who, he says, share common ground with his traditional constituents—the poor, the black, and the rejected," the Washington Post's David Maraniss wrote. "The villains are multinational corporations, corporate raiders, and the Reagan administration, all of whom he has accused of inflicting "economic violence" on the rest. Twenty years after the assassination of Jackson's mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., social justice has been achieved in the south and elsewhere, but economic justice has not."
An effusive editorial endorsing Jackson in The Nation, where Andrew Kopkind had previously praised Jackson for "running that unspeakable anomaly, that horror of all horrors, a 'class campaign," surveyed the staggering breadth of his program:
Electing Jesse Jackson means endorsing an increase in the minimum wage; measures to end gender pay inequities and reward work on the basis of "comparable worth"; an attempt to reverse the systematic destruction of family farms by corporate agribusiness; Federal action to halt factory flight, of both the offshore and Sun Belt varieties, and ameliorate its consequences among workers and their communities. Jackson's Justice Department, free at last of the Meese curse, could begin to enforce and extend antitrust laws to deal with mergers, takeovers and acquisitions and their baleful effect on economic growth and employment.
In time, under such a presidency, the war economy that has defined the American Century for fifty years might begin to give way to a peace economy. Jackson's first step, one that could be taken quickly, would be to freeze the defense budget, beginning to weaken apace the ideology of militarism that it has produced … More ambitious still, substantial new investment in education, housing, transportation, community services and infrastructure would lay the foundation for a full-employment society, promised and postponed by Democrats since the end of World War II. Jackson asks that the national education budget be doubled. He proposes job training (and retraining) and a national child-care program to help people stay off welfare. And he seeks a complete revision of the social welfare system as a concept: assistance to the needy not as a necessary evil or noblesse oblige but as a matter of human rights. Finally, alone among presidential candidates now or in the past, Jackson proposes a national health-care plan that would end America's disgraceful attitude toward its sick and make preventive medicine and long-term treatment universally available.
This was the agenda that Jackson took directly to blue-collar whites across the country. By March 1988, the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne wrote, Jackson had already "walked more picket lines than any other Democratic candidate". And soon, evidence seemed to mount that his message was resonating. In striking contrast to his 1984 campaign, thousands of blue-collar white voters came to Jackson's rallies across the Rust Belt and elsewhere. It was those white voters, with the help of African-American turnout and a rhetorically and literally absent Michael Dukakis, that brought Jackson a shocking two-to-one victory in Michigan, which, given earlier victories in the South and the flagging Gore and Gephardt campaigns, put him well within reach of the nomination.
The future of Jackson's candidacy would be decided in Wisconsin, a heavily white working class state with few black voters and a state where Carter had narrowly defeated Mo Udall in 1976. A Jackson win there would signal the solidity of his new coalition and deal a perhaps fatal blow to the Dukakis campaign. And in the days leading up to the primary, a win seemed not only possible, but probable. Cheering all-white crowds greeted Jackson everywhere he went. A rally in Sheboygan brought 1,500 attendees to three standing ovations, including an '84 Reagan voter from Manitowoc who told the New York Times he believed Jackson would "think about the small guy" in office. Ken Muller, a Reagan and Nixon voter and Sheboygan resident, told the Washington Post's Haynes Johnson and Gwen Ifill that he'd been one of the first in his town to acquire a Jackson sign because Jackson had reminded him of another populist Democrat he'd once backed—George Wallace. "He was for the underdog; he was a fighter," he said of Wallace. "He cared about the little guy, not the big shots. That's the way I feel about Jackson. I like his charisma, I like the way he handles himself. He's the champion of the underdog. He's no puppet to nobody." "If there's a stereotype that people in these white, 99 percent Democratic working-class neighborhoods don't go for a black man in the White House, consider it shredded," the Milwaukee Journal proclaimed.
Against the Jackson tide swam a hapless Michael Dukakis. Nancy Schwerzler of the Baltimore Sun wrote, just days before the primary, that "SWAT teams" of consultants had been brought in to fix what they imagined the critical gap between Dukakis and Jackson was—a lack of charisma. With little time to spare, new stump speeches were tried and Dukakis borrowed heavily from the rhetoric of Gephardt's failed campaign in an attempt to match the strength of Jackson's populist messaging. The results, by all accounts, were mixed. "[W]ith the governor's droning delivery, Schwerzler wrote, "condemnations of 'merger maniacs and sharp operators on Wall Street' sounded more like a mild rebuke than a battle cry."
Jackson, it seemed, was poised for a victory that may well have transformed the Democratic Party. Turnout on primary day was a full 50 percent higher than in the last election, reflecting a surge in participation one might have imagined Jackson's barnstorming campaign brought about. But as the results came in that Tuesday in April, it emerged that Wisconsin's working class white voters — the voters who had flocked to see him at factories, and plants, and union halls across the state; the voters to whom he'd squarely directed a message about rapacious neoliberal capitalism and the importance of class solidarity —- had, in the privacy of their voting booths, developed a strange new enthusiasm for Michael Dukakis.
Jesse Jackson lost Wisconsin to Michael Dukakis by 19 points. He won only a quarter of the state's white voters. He lost working class whites to Dukakis two to one.
It is difficult, in hindsight, to see what exactly Jackson had done wrong. He advanced the most progressive agenda the party had ever seen. He adopted a class-first message without surrendering his identity politics. Over and over and over again he'd met blue-collar white voters where they worked and picketed and addressed them not only as equals, but as vital partners in a common struggle against exploitation. He'd certainly had baggage. His offhanded use of an anti-Semitic slur had hindered his 1984 campaign and still lingered, as did his mismanagement of funds at his Operation PUSH organization, and the criminal activities of his brother Noah Robinson, Jr. He also, obviously, lacked experience in government. But none of these issues loomed large enough to derail his campaign. In fact, Dukakis, Gephardt, also-ran Paul Simon of Illinois, and Democratic Party leaders had been careful to treat Jackson with kid gloves, a reticence that a flailing and frustrated Al Gore, in the lead up to Wisconsin, would call "ridiculous" and a "subtle form of racism".
Moreover, recent events have suggested that personal baggage and inexperience may be less than fatal to candidates with populist appeal.
Signs that all was not well with Jackson's working class outreach had actually accumulated before campaigning in Wisconsin had begun in earnest. "With 32 of the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses over," the Los Angeles Times' Robert Gillette wrote in March, "there are gathering signs that the Rev. Jesse Jackson is failing to win broad support from blue-collar, lower-income white voters—a major segment of the working poor whose cause is the heart and soul of his populist campaign." According to polling from the then recent Illinois and Texas primaries, the whites backing Johnson were younger, more educated, and more affluent than the Democratic electorate. Students, it seemed, were willing to cast votes for Jackson and against the horrors of neoliberalism. So too were sheltered liberal elites, presumably including many culturally, empathetically, and literally distant from the struggling white workers Jackson spent most of his time addressing. White workers themselves, however, largely rejected Jesse Jackson, who failed to win a single industrial state, save Michigan, in the entire primary.
It is obvious that the Democratic Party must substantively move left regardless of whether the white working class in particular takes to a new agenda—the policies the failures of contemporary American society demand of us are left policies and there are millions of Americans likely already inclined towards left-liberalism and leftism that can be galvanized by a new approach even if the white working class cannot. But the particular circumstances of Donald Trump's victory and the sense that white working class voters ought to be a natural constituency for progressive policy will center the white working class in debate about the party's deeply needed transformation for some time to come. Again, the pro-worker party the Left rightfully insists should be crafted out of the ashes of the current party is, to a large extent, the strongly pro-union, unapologetically pro-redistribution, and deeply economically progressive Democratic Party of old — the party that white working class voters suddenly began abandoning in droves for the Republican Party and the party that the white working class voters who stayed influenced by rejecting progressive candidates.
The white working class is far from being entirely to blame for the immersion of the party and its leaders in rentier politics. This intellectual evolution of the party's elites took place largely out of the public eye and voters can't be held responsible for the concentration of economic power and influence over the party that followed. But it remains an inescapable fact that the white working class, largely over race and social issues, has, for decades, helped sink progressive candidates that may have stalled or prevented the party's full capture by neoliberal centrism and the moneyed interests their move to the center has benefited. In doing so, they've not only voted against their interests, as the cliche goes, but also voted against the interests of those worse off than themselves—poorer whites hurt even more acutely by the cuts to programs and middling policy solutions pushed forward by the Republican and conservative Democratic politicians the white working class has taken a shine to, as well as minorities doubly impacted by regressive economic policy and racism.
This isn't a call for pessimism. It's not 1988 anymore, and it's plausible that Jesse Jackson's model of engaging disenfranchised whites without relinquishing identity politics would work substantially better now. But the success of Donald Trump's xenophobia-driven campaign suggests this isn't a given. We ought to give Jackson's approach another real try anyway—again, shifting the party's margins with working class whites even slightly would have a significant electoral impact. The case for a new liberal agenda, though, does not ultimately rest upon whether it improves the party's prospects with them.


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SK Flashback: Sachin Tendulkar scores his 100th international hundred
It was on 12 March 2011 when Sachin Tendulkar scored his 99th international ton. It was a blazing innings of 111 off 101 deliveries but it still wasn't enough to win the match for Team India.
What this innings did, though, was start a countdown to his 100th international hundred. Every time Sachin went out to bat, fans waited with bated breath to see if this would be the historic day when their "God" finally became the first cricketer in history to score 100 international hundreds.
The wait became longer with each passing day, and eventually, fans had to wait for over a year – 34 innings to be precise – for that glorious day to finally arrive. Tendulkar did come agonisingly close to the milestone on a couple of occasions – he amassed 91 against England at the Oval and 94 against West Indies at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, but the wait ended at Dhaka, in the Asia Cup of 2012.
Also read: SK Flashback: Sachin Tendulkar's 155* against Australia in Chennai
The date was 16 March and India were playing Bangladesh in the 4th match of the tournament. Let's take a look at how the day panned out:
The Master Blaster and the Modern Master make the home team toil
First, there was the "Little Master" – Sunil Gavaskar, then the mantle moved onto another little Mumbaikar who became renowned as the "Master Blaster" – Sachin Tendulkar, and now, it's the "Modern Master" – Virat Kohli, who is holding the flag of Indian batting aloft.
On this day, the duo came together in the 6th over at the fall of Gautam Gambhir's wicket with the score at just 25, and stitched together a partnership of 148 in 30 overs to set a platform for the likes of Raina and Dhoni to unleash their fury later in the innings.
Sachin overshadowed Kohli by scoring 75 runs in the partnership. The current Indian skipper scored a slightly uncharacteristic 66 from 82 balls with just five fours but gave ample support to Sachin en route to his much-awaited milestone.

subset: commoncrawl


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Happy National Coffee Day my caffeine lovers! I for one don't know where I'd be without my morning cup of Joe. It's crazy to think I went 23 years without a single cup of coffee. Yep, I made it through two-a-day swim practices and four years of college without it. Now my mornings consist of a Starbucks run for my PSL or dirty chai, or making a fresh cup from my Keurig. No matter how I get my caffeine fix, I use one of my favorite mugs to drink from. Above are just a few I love!
Happy Monday friends!


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Then hollow bead is made on a small blow pipe with a very small hole on the side. These blow pipes must be handled with care. Coat the blow pipe with
" Bead cream" as shown in the video clip. Make sure that the blow hole is free and let dry a few minutes. Beads are made on both end of the hole. So that a flattened ribbon of glass can be placed over the two beads. So making a ring of air around the blow pipe, with the hole acting as the" ventil of the bead"
All the bead is heated and small puff of air each time . Please look to the video clip. Hollow beads


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With the wealth of information at our fingertips, it is sometimes hard to see the ''forest for the trees''. In this Strategic Briefing we will give you a current perspective on many of the trends that shape our world and their relevance to Biblical Prophecy.
Now, more than ever, we need to stay informed about what is really going on.
- What is REALLY going on in Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt?
- Who is going to deal with the nuclear Iran?
- Will Israel go it alone?
- What about America's political future and what is on it's 2013 horizon?
- Most Americans are totally unaware that the sacred Bill of Rights has been essentially eliminated; how, when and by whom?
- Europe - The State of Dis-Union and its Islamization.


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It's Austria's official birthday today. The Austrian National Day marks the birth of the Second Republic in 1955. Although the Austrian State Treaty was signed in May and came into force on the 27th July, it was the 26th October that was chosen to mark the start of the new independent, democratic state. On the day before the last foreign troops had left Austria, ending ten years of occupation, and so the 26th October 1955 saw the Austrian 2nd Republic enjoy its first day as an independent and sovereign state.
At the end of the Second World War, Austria was occupied by the Allied powers and divided into four zones overseen by the Soviet Union, Great Britain, United States and France respectively. The ten year occupation lasted much longer than most people had expected due to the deterioration of relationships between the allies and the struggle for whether the new Austria would become part of the Eastern or Western block.
Bring us back to the present day, I note that der Standard has an article (on its website) in which a national survey suggests that only 34% are 'very proud' to be Austrians compared to 42% respondents a year ago. This may in part be connected to the number of high profile scandals that have been enveloping the political parties over the last twelve months or so.
On a lighter note, I have to agree with the 86% who are proud of the scenic beauty of the country and the 66% who highlighted the high quality of life. As a vegetarian I'm less inclined to concur with the 68% who mentioned the quality of the local cuisine – this is a very meat orientated country and vegetarianism outside Vienna can be challenging at times – but they are probably right none the less 🙂


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24890-24990 kHz
- Details
- Category: Spectrum
- Published: Sunday, 15 March 2009 17:53
- Written by Hans Blondeel Timmerman
- Hits: 9989
The 12 meter band
IARU Spectrum Requirement
The needs of the amateur and amateur-satellite services would be best served by an allocation of 250 kHz in this vicinity.
The band 24890 – 24990 kHz was allocated to the amateur service at WARC-79, but full implementation was delayed for several years pending re-accommodation of fixed service stations. Now, most administrations permit amateurs to use this allocation. It has proven to be very popular, particularly at those times when the MUF is below the wider and extremely popular 28-MHz band. Monitoring indicates that amateur utilisation of this band is higher than the utilisation of adjacent bands by other services.
Norway allows amateur operations in a wider range. 24740-24890 kHz is allocated to the amateur service on secondary basis, 1kW (6 kHz max bandwidth)


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If you are looking for the best florist in Port Washington, NY, shop online at Port Washington Florist and Gifts. We offer beautiful floral arrangements, unique house plants, home accents, and more. We offer flowers for every occasion from long stem roses, traditional floral arrangements, modern floral arrangements to orchids. If you don't see the flowers you want then give us a call directly and one of our floral specialists can help.
When you choose our florist, you can easily shop online knowing that we are 100% committed to your satisfaction. We also offer personalized service directly with our flower shop in Port Washington, NY by calling (516) 767-0088.
Beautiful flower arrangements NY and home decor that can be delivered to that special person. See our monthly flower specials.
Port Washington Florist • 59 Main Street, Port Washington, NY 11050 • (516) 767-0088


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Leaving London on a cloudy September morning, I wasn't sure how excited I was about visiting the islands of Guernsey and Herm. The weather was looking bleak (mostly cloudy), temperatures were on the turn (goodbye summer) and islands are usually colder and more blustery, aren't they? Especially in the English Channel.
Well, I was wrong. My early flight out of grey Gatwick was greeted in Guernsey one hour later, with sublime sunshine pouring through the propeller plane windows. Out on the tarmac, the sun was scorching and the skies were clear. This looked promising…
The history of Guernsey
At just 30.1 square miles and located in the English Channel, Guernsey is 31 miles west of Normandy. A part of Duchy of Normandy from 933, the islands were passed to the English Crown in 1066 when William the Conqueror became King. In 1204, England lost Normandy to France but the islands remained loyal to the Crown, with Guernsey and Jersey becoming two separate bailiwicks. Today, Guernsey is a self-governing nation with its own parliament, and not a member of the European Union, although it has a special trade relationship. The surrounding islets of Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jethou, and Lihou are a part of its bailiwick.
Fast forward to the Second World War, Guernsey was occupied by German troops. Many children were evacuated to England and sadly, some remaining families were sent to German camps. Guernsey's citizens happily teach those curious to learn about its complex history – and the best places to start are at the German Occupation Museum, or the incredibly unique Guernsey Tapestry, which tells a historical tale in ten embroided panels.
Exploring Guernsey and Herm
Over on the south coast (a short drive from the airport), I find the crystal blue waters of Le Portelet beach and Petit Bot bay. As I take in the gorgeous turquoise expanse, several passers-by offer a friendly 'hello'. It's warm and welcoming.
I notice a real sense of community here – not least because of the famous 'Hedge Veg' system, which sees locals putting their home-grown veggies in a little box by the side of the road for others to pick up. There's also a little 'honesty box', so residents can pay their way. How wonderful.
Outdoor wonders
Later I go for a walk, starting at the cliffs above Saint's Bay. Bluebells and daisies poke their heads out of the grassy bank, glistening under the setting sun. There are benches along the way; some empty, others filled with couples silently watching the world go by. The calm sea goes on for miles and miles, waves idly splashing against the rocks. It's a scene of raw beauty and romance; the air feels fresh and light.
Getting around
Being such a small island, Guernsey is easy to navigate by car. Although getting used to the narrow lanes can be tough at first. I take the popular Cobo Bay on the west coast to Fort Grey (a real-life fort transformed into a Shipwreck Museum), the Little Chapel (the littlest Chapel in the world, made out of broken china) and L'eree Bay which is the gateway to the mysterious Lihou Island (accessible only during low tide and part of the Marine Nature Reserve).
The speed limit here is 35mph and the only traffic seems to be during rush hour at Saint Peter Port. It's here I stop for dinner at Mora – a restaurant overlooking the harbour. It's every bit as mouth-watering as it sounds.
Sea kayaking in the English Channel
Day two is spent with Ant Ford Parker from Outdoor Guernsey as we explore by kayak. Meeting at Petit Bot, we navigate between the rusty-red rocks, exploring coves and nooks. With the water so clear, it's easy to see right to the sea-bed. Ant explains how quickly the heavy granite sand sinks, which is why the water is like crystal.
My final venture is by Travel Trident ferry from Saint Peter Port to the island of Herm, three miles away. At just a mile long and a mile-and-a-half wide, there are no cars allowed here. Just the occasional tractor and plenty of horses and cows. My favourite spot is Belvoir Bay, where I stop for a sandwich, burying my feet in the silky white sand. In land, the village school and Church stand proud.
The walk around the island takes a leisurely two-and-a-half hours, with a few steep ascents and descents along the way. But it's absolutely stunning and well worth investing in hiking boots.
Back on Guernsey, I settle for a night at La Barbarie hotel, where I've pre-ordered the house-speciality seafood platter. Lobster, oysters, king prawns and crab, along with salad and new potatoes – and all for £38. Impressive? Yes – the perfect end to a refreshingly adventurous trip.
For more information on Guernsey, visit visitguernsey.com
Aurigny flies from London Gatwick to Guernsey from £77 return. aurigny.com
Rooms at La Barbarie Hotel start from £118 per night including breakfast. labarbariehotel.com
Kayaking with Outdoor Guernsey is £30 per person (under 16s, £15) for 2.5 hours outdoorguernsey.co.uk
MORE How to travel on a budget
MORE Going solo in New Zealand
EVEN MORE Why should you visit Kangaroo Island in Australia?


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A beautiful fully furnished house in Exopolis village for sale. Boasting breathtaking sea views and a superb location in Exopolis, only 2km from the sandy 10 km beach of Georgioupolis. This amazing 43m² house with 1 bedroom, one bathroom, living room with kitchen and a storage of 43 m².This house is fully furnished In a modern style as you can see in the pictures. This house is situated in a project with other houses and in the center of that, there are swimming pool, reception and some other facilities. It is already advertised for locations with great success!
Special features:
- Unobstructed views
- Balconies
- Open Garage
- Energy Fireplace
- Solar heating
- All furniture are including in the price
- EOT license
If you are looking for a house in Crete, not only for holidays but for an investment also, this is the perfect chance!!!


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Alison is an experienced and trusted adviser focusing on M&A, private equity, venture capital, startups, day-to-day business matters, and corporate governance matters.
She is also the firm-wide chair of the food & beverage and consumer products industry group. Having started her practice in the Silicon Valley with the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Alison continues to run a similar fast-paced Silicon Valley style practice working with companies of all sizes ranging from a single founder to fortune 100 public companies in a broad range of industries including food & beverage, consumer products, health & wellness, e-commerce, SaaS, biotechnology, agtech, edtech, consulting, and financial services. She also represents a number of venture capital firms and angel investors investing in companies throughout the nation.
Alison is licensed to practice in California and Idaho.
Represented Purely Elizabeth, a leading natural foods company in connection with a minority investment of $3 million from 301 INC, the General Mills new business development and venturing unit.
Unless you are a current client of Holland & Hart LLP, please do not send any confidential information by email. If you are not a current client and send an email to an individual at Holland & Hart LLP, you acknowledge that we have no obligation to maintain the confidentiality of any information you submit to us, unless we have already agreed to represent you or we later agree to do so. Thus, we may represent a party adverse to you, even if the information you submit to us could be used against you in a matter, and even if you submitted it in a good faith effort to retain us.


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These days professional titles and certifications have been manufactured to obscure the inconvenient truth about how financial service providers are getting paid. It shouldn't take a detective or lawyer to figure that out. Download our free guide and learn whether your so-called "advisor" is an independent professional or just a skilled salesman.
At Exchange Capital Management, we approach every engagement with humility and a deep sense of responsibility. We are asked to untagle complex financial knots involving spending habits and compensation; job change and conflict; struggles with parents and issues with children; taxation issues; and retirement options. We'll ask you difficult questions. We'll hold your answers close. And we'll build an authentic relationship based upon mutual trust and respect.


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Local Mental Health and Addiction Resources
Local Mental Health Agencies:
Resources >
Quick Links
Emergency Resource Cards - For Emergency and Non-Emergency Services; available for download.
Warm Line/Help Line & Mobile Crisis - Click here for contact information in your area.
Catchment Area Councils (CACs) - Local councils that study and evaluate existing mental health services; participation is welcome.
Regional Consumer Advisory Council (RCAC) - A mental health consumer council that is led and driven by people in recovery.
A Day in the Life Project - A project featuring interviews of people with mental illness.
Resources >
Local Behavioral Health Links
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News and Events
A Fine Country Pub with Rooms
Considered by many to be some of the finest 'hidden gems' for short breaks, country pubs with accommodation are seeing a huge rise in popularity. And what's not to like? Bracing country walks on the doorstep, rounded off with a glass of something refreshing from the bar in front of a warming fire. Finish your day with a delicious meal before climbing the stairs to relax in a beautifully appointed en-suite bedroom.
A charming traditional country b&b
Here at the George & Dragon, our visitors often tell us that we are one of the best pubs in Hampshire. We pride ourselves on offering all our customers exceptional service that goes above and beyond what they might expect from a small independent concern. We aim for quality in everything we do, which is why we choose the finest ales, the choicest wines and the finest local produce to tempt your palate.
A dining experience not to be missed
Many country pubs are branching out with gastro pub menus to provide customers with an excellent meal along with their chosen beverage, be that a local ale or beer, or a fine wine, but we don't think the majority of them go to the lengths that we do. We believe in offering our guests a tempting and varied menu of the freshest seasonal ingredients, which we endeavour to source locally if we possibly can. Our Head Chef has built up a supply chain of ethically sound producers, and we also include locally foraged items wherever possible. The end result is a menu that offers tantalising choices, expertly cooked at affordable prices.
A great place for a short, romantic or family break
There are literally dozens of pubs near Andover and Newbury, but we think that we have the edge. As a former coaching inn, the George & Dragon is packed with original features and rustic beams. Coaching Inns played a hugely important role for around 200 years from the middle of the 17th century, offering travellers and horses a chance to eat, drink and rest. Nowadays the horses may have gone, but the principle still remains. Travellers can stop for refreshments on their journey and rest for a day or two before continuing onwards. The difference now is that now many coaching inns have become destinations in themselves, with people coming to stay for a few nights in order to explore the local area.
A stunning location
Once again the George & Dragon is able to offer its guests that little bit more. We are situated within the boundary of the North Wessex Downs, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It's worth taking a stroll through the village of Hurstbourne Tarrant to see the quaint thatched cottages, and keen walkers will want to venture even further afield. There are plenty of routes around the North Wessex Downs offering everything from easy walks of a mile or two through to more arduous treks of several miles. For those undertaking the Test Way long-distance footpath, the George & Dragon is a convenient stopping-off point, offering the chance to kick back and relax for a day or two before venturing onwards. What's more, the George & Dragon welcomes dogs, so you can bring your canine friend along with you to explore the surrounding walks.
A lovely happy relaxed atmosphere awaits you
The North Wessex Downs isn't just a great place for walkers, though. Cyclists and horse riders also enjoy the many routes that weave their way through the countryside. The less physically inclined will find that a drive through the countryside offers spectacular views. The countryside is astonishingly diverse, offering high chalk downs, sheltered river valleys, impressive scarp slopes, low-lying heathland, pasture and woodland. Beech knolls and prehistoric monuments offer the chance to step away from modern life for a while and contemplate the countryside's rich heritage.
A little over six miles to the north of the George & Dragon you will come to Walbury Hill, the highest point in south-east England, which offers spectacular views on a clear day. This area is a walker's paradise, with the start of the Test Way and the Wayfarer's Walk. The Test Way is a 49-mile route to Eling in Hampshire, whilst the Wayfarer's Walk is a 70-mile footpath leading to Emsworth, also in Hampshire. Even if you don't fancy a walk, Walbury Hill is a great place to take a photograph or two before heading onwards.
An area full of attractions
Visitors with children should take time to visit the iconic Watership Down, which is just a twenty-minute journey by car from the George & Dragon. This is the setting for the Richard Adams novel, where children, and adults too, will enjoy seeing where Fiver and Hazel made their home. Another big attraction for children will be the famous white horses of the chalk downs. Download the app at whitehorsewalk.co.uk, and you can choose which horse to visit and find walk details and a soundscape giving you background information.
If staying in a country inn gives you a taste for history, then you'll probably want to pay a visit to one of the most well-loved historic houses in the country. Highclere Castle is just a fifteen-minute drive from the George & Dragon, and is better known to television viewers as Downton Abbey. Visitors flock to see the place that they have grown to know and love from the television series, but do check opening times before you visit, as the castle and grounds are not open throughout the whole year.
Art lovers will want to head for Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, just a few minutes' drive from the George & Dragon. Here you can find a number of murals by Sir Stanley Spencer, a renowned artist who painted his memories of the First World War, in which he served as a soldier and medical orderly. Favourably compared with the Sistine Chapel artworks, the murals took over six years to complete.
And if art is your thing, then you'll be interested to view the works on display at the George & Dragon. All artwork on display in the public areas is created by local artists and available to purchase on request – just one more detail that makes us stand out from the crowd.
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3315 Co Rd F30
Cañon City, CO 81212
(719) 269-9028
Fees: Free up to 72 hours
Wow! What a great find this spot was! First off, this isn't a full hookup campground. In fact, this is a no hookup campground. Literally not much more than a glorified boondooking spot. It's a little bit off the beaten path, but totally worth it for the location and the views it presents. This park does have a 72 hour maximum but due to the off-season time we arrived, we planned on staying at least a week (We got permission for this from the rangers). We did end up having to cut our stay a few days shorter than we expected (darn wildfires threatening!), we thoroughly enjoyed this spot!
Notes: Be VERY careful as there is a crest of a hill as you approach the campground that if you have a rig with low ground clearance, you may either drag or seriously damage your equipment! At the crest of the hill, take a left instead.
|Not a bad spot for a few nights! Quiet and overlooking Cañon City.
There are no hookups at this campground - it's completely dry camping but there are some pit toilets so you don't have to worry about filling your black tank. With a short stay of the normal 72 hours, you shouldn't have that problem anyway! There is hiking around the area as well as the Royal Gorge Bridge just down from the campground as well as the Royal Gorge Route train tour (we highly recommend this one!)
The Royal Gorge Bridge has an interesting story. In the early 20th century, two very rich men (from Texas) one being an architect and the other an oil tycoon, made a bet that a bridge could not be built across the Royal Gorge. The oil tycoon bet the architect that it couldn't be done. After a short period of construction with no injuries, the Royal Gorge Bridge was built at a cost of $350,000. The architect collected his winnings, as the story goes, of $1. Royal Gorge is also known as the bridge to nowhere as there no destinations that it connects! This is definitely worth a visit.
|Royal Gorge Bridge from below
The Royal Gorge Route railroad is a few minutes down the road from the campground. The railroad runs the length of most of the canyon alongside the river offering dramatic views upward, especially under the bridge! Get the least expensive seats. Once the train starts moving, people get up and move everywhere. Plus, there are a number of open viewing cars for taking pics, etc.
For the location and the price, this campground really can't be beat. It was so great, in fact, that it made the list of our top three campgrounds so far! Neither of us were really sure just how many campgrounds we've been to (including boondocking spots), but it's well over 100 now in just over a year and a half. If you get through this area, or are anywhere nearby, at least check out the Royal Gorge Bridge and/or the Royal Gorge Route. Either was was completely worth seeing!
|Enjoying the scenery!
|Bridge on approach
|Caretaker's residence
|From the viewing car
|Kids out for a run
|Old wooden waterline alongside the river
Another really cool thing to do (not for the faint-of-heart) is the Skyline Drive. Located just outside Cañon City, Skyline Drive is a narrow, one way road that snakes its way across the top of the ridge. Some amazing long scenic views can be had from one many of the stopping points along the 7.6 mile loop. But beware, they are small - especially if you're drive a one ton dually pickup truck!
Along the way, there a number of pull-offs with lots of history, etc. Be wary though again, especially if you are driving a large vehicle. Let's just say that one step too close to the edge might be your last!
|Fossilized Dinosaur Footprint
|View from the driver's seat - a bit precarious!
|Take a ride along the Skyline with us!
Did we get it right? Do you have experience or knowledge about this post? Please make yourself heard! Comment below and we will respond as soon as possible. As always, thanks for following us! Disclaimer: We are not paid writers. We write for enjoyment and to share information about our travels with our families, friends, and our followers. The information that we provide is based on our experiences with the products, services, etc, that we write about. It is 100% non-biased!


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Background Info
Last week, I set out to build an incline sit-up bench. My old model was more than ready to retire. Before deciding to build, I first reviewed several store models, but noticed that most were not as steep as I'd like, and the prices were outrageous for such a simple tool. Incline sit-ups are far from our primary source of core work, so I couldn't see spending so much money to perform the exercise. Prices ranged from $100+ to upwards of $500.
I am not an expert builder. I'm far from it. Build at your own risk. This design is VERY basic. I'm sure you could do much better. I'm not trying to win a design contest. I want a simple bench that gets the job done.
- A bench that could be set as steep as necessary
- A bench that could be stored on overhead shelves to save space when not in use
- A strong bench that could support a heavyweight fighter
- A bench that was easy to construct. I didn't want a week long project for a simple sit-up bench.
Design Specifics
2x4's were used to build the base of the bench. The bench is simply four 2x4's. The length of the bench is just shy of 7 feet. The back side of the bench looks like this:
The bench attaches to the wall by connecting eye hooks (from both the bench and wall).
A small piece of chain with a spring link end is used to make the connection:
Optional - The incline angle could be adjusted by repositioning the bench on the wall. You would simply need to secure eye hooks at various heights.
I used an old curtain rod holder and dowel as a foot holder on the bench. The curtain rod holder was screwed and set with a strong adhesive for added safety.
Note - If I did not have the old curtain rod holder on hand, I would have likely used a foot holder such as that seen within this article:
http://www.biancolo.com/articles/glute- ... -developer
Grip tape lines a portion of the bench via small strips. The tape helps to prevent sliding when the bench is set at a steep angle. This step is clearly optional, but I found it useful when testing the steeper angles. I have also stapled some old matting that I had on hand. This was used to increase comfort.
Styrofoam was used to create a leg support piece that conforms to the angle of the legs. I bought two blocks of Styrofoam and carved them to shape. The two pieces were then glued and taped to the bench. Ample duct tape was used. Surprisingly, this piece is well set.
Final Thoughts
That's it. This was definitely a simple build. The bench is strong, comfortable, and can adjust to any angle that we need. When not in use, I can detach it from the wall to free up space.


text: Lenfald Official Faction Thread Dec 31, 2014 16:55:33 GMT -8 Quote Select PostDeselect PostLink to PostMemberGive GiftBack to Top Post by Becheman on Dec 31, 2014 16:55:33 GMT -8 Well, this is embarrassing - we've had two months for this GC and here I am asking for more time My rendering program crashed out on me 13 hours into its runtime. Can I submit tomorrow??


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Canon has recently send out a new version of it's flagship 70-200 2.8 L USM IS now as version II.
The new EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM increases the speed, performance and optical quality of the previous EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS USM while maintaining all of the characteristics that have made it a legend for professionals and advanced amateurs alike.
The EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM features one fluorite and five UD elements for increased optical quality and reduced chromatic aberration. It has a minimum focusing distance of 1.2m/3.9 ft. at all zoom settings, which is useful for photographers in smaller spaces trying to get closer to a subject.
It features a next-generation Optical Image Stabilizer, providing up to 4 stops of correction at all focal lengths. And is dust/moisture-resistant and designed for use in the challenging environments typical of rigorous professional use.
Now that you know what you will get let's take a look at a side by side with the older model...
I do not wish to start here an extensive comparative test chart with all the good and bad specks about both lenses. There are a lot of good web pages out there who can do it better than me and also have the expensive equipment to do it, basically what I wanted to bring you here is a quick side by side page where you can see the most evident differences between both and decide if it's worth the upgrade for you or not.
I will make this as a 2 part set since the images I got from the shooting test will take sometime to process has I've been challenged by the fact that the Exif info file does not contemplate the IS feature On/Off, well at least I haven't found a way, yet, to know which ones are what (although I know some of them by eye contact has they were shot with a very low speed o they are easily targeted). If you care to have a software where I can read this info let me know in the comments.
So let's start with the Syde-By-Side tour:
First what you notice is that the box for the new 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II is much BIGGER than the previous one. As you can see at the beginning of the article the front view and now the side view it's a lot Bigger box.
Only when you put the 2 together you can see the minor differences between them otherwise they are almost the same.
On top you can see the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II and at the bottom of the image you have the older model 70-200 2.8 L USM IS. You notice the NEW one is a little bit thicker not much but a little I can tell you, the aspect is the same and has I told you before not noticeable at a distance. The same White shark Canon has used us to ;)
Here is a Side-By-Side with the lens hood mounted. Don't let the image fool you has this seems that the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II is taller than previous model, but it's just on the pictures has actually they are the same size even with the hood on.
Nothing much on the top of the lens except that the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II is a little greener, because of the fluorite, but they both use the same 77mm filter.
Ufff!! at least you do not have to buy another expensive filter if you are moving from the older model.
The buttons are placed on the same place and the only difference you see is that the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II now focus at a minimum focus distance of 1.2 m/3.9 ft prior to 1.4 m/4.6 ft on the older model.
Another noticeable feature is that the meter scale is now smaller either in size and number size. if you were having trouble reading the previous numbers then I think you will need a better glasses to see this ones.
Well but they are all there ;)
One of the most important things for me when working around this kind of lenses is it's weight. So I figure, when I saw it, if it's BIGGER than it should be HEAVIER!!
Well I can tell you that Canon had a great weight balance on the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II.
I took my kitchen scale and put the up to test with the Tripod Mount Ring on (as pictured above).
On this corner you have the 70-200 2.8 L USM IS weighting 1620g
And on the other corner the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II weighting 1660g
not big of a difference between them and it's not noticeable even when using it all day long.
Official numbers on the weight are NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II 1490g vs. 70-200 2.8 L USM IS 1470g. I believe that this has to do with fact that I had the collar ring to it and Canon weight only the lens, or maybe it's another marketing strategy... who knows...
As Per Canon Words:
"The enhanced magnesium alloy barrel design of the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens features added strength with a minimal 20-gram increase in weight compared with the previous model (1490g vs. 1470g)..."
The also New Lens Hood has a security button on it and it's the first Canon lens to have this kind of thing.
From what I've see here it seems more of a security reason than a fashion design. I believe that Canon has made this in case and for some reason the lens crushes into something very hard the Lens Hood will break by detach instead of the old model that could damage the front part of the lens.
The new Lens Hood has also 4 small screws that attach the Lens Hood collar ring to the Hood itself so when it breaks only the plastic Hood would be damaged. Nice move on this one Canon ;)
It's also noticeable that the Lens Hood of the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II is not shinny as the previous model (you can see it in the above picture) and the plastic looks more rigid and stronger than the older model too.
Here is a closer look to the Locking Button when you screw it all to the lens it gives a click and when you need to remove it just press the Locking Button and turn it to remove.
Very simple and practical.
Last but not least the carrying bag. It's made of the same material as the older one except that it's BIGGER to fit the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II, the Lens Hood and the Tripod Mount Ring inside.
Since a lot of Rumors been circulating about if the lens would come with Bag, Hood or what, here is the list of items that comes officially with it:
- Card Box for the NEW 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II
- Lens Hood ET-87
- Tripod Mount Ring B(W)
- Instruction Manual
- European Warranty
I believe this one Hell of a lens. I've been testing it out for a couple of days and it produce even cleaner images has previous model.
It's price is high but it's well worth it if you are searching for the ultimate quality to present to your clients.
We will talk more on quality and Image stabilization on Part 2 of this article.
Stay tuned...
SideBySide: 70-200 2.8 L USM IS vs 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II (Part 1)
SideBySide: 70-200 2.8 L USM IS vs 70-200 2.8 L USM IS II (Part 2)


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Purple & Green (II), 4.4.17
Month: June 2017
Another Photo On The Wall
There really is nothing like seeing one's work on someone's wall. It just makes the heart happy! Or at least that's how it works for me.
This is the second print I made for my sister's housewarming gift. I'm really happy with it, and even more happy with her wonderful place. (It took me over a year to get these to her … I'm slow. But had I not waited, she would have two other images on her wall, as these were made rather recently.)
The lighting was tricky, so the colors may be slightly off … funny how that goes. But I really like how these both worked!
Goodnight Flower
Pink Rose, 4.10.17
Goodnight Flower
Dark Tulip with Bright Stigma, 4.4.17
I hear that Tioga Road is opening tomorrow. I can't get to Yosemite for a while, but I do have memories of some fun times …
Yosemite Trees, 3.1.14
Goodnight Flower
(If I post my "First Shot" why not the "Final Shot" … right?!)
Final Shot: Agapanthus, 6.27.17
Goodnight Flower
Embracing Hibiscus Stigma, 7.26.17


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What exactly is a Maui Taco? I'm still not sure. All I know is that the place that makes them has a basement wtih a stage and a weekly gathering of New York City's unsightly's - including myself. For that one week, at least. Perhaps more in the future, but I'm still recovering from my first experience in front of that disheveled graffiti tin-roof background and duct-taped microphone.
The Maui Taco is indeed a taco eatery, although I did not partake in any of their menu items. I can't eat before I perform. Well, I can, but I've found that my time before getting on stage is best spent looking over my tentative set list than umm. . . well, you understand what I'm getting at. No need to be rude. Let's just say I still get a bit anxious before I perform.
I brought a few friends along for moral support in case the place turned out to be some kind of scary dive bar. In high school I did attend open mics at such places, but never by myself and always with my two 30-something trench-coat wearing bitter yet endearing male comedian friends. And, especially in the city, I was determined not to make a go of it alone at this juncture. My mom makes sure to relay every story about young college girls being raped and mugged in late-night Manhattan.
When we got to the outside of the "venue" -and I use this term loosely - I was confused. It looked like an indie version of a Taco Bell. I kept apologizing profusely to my companions, warning them that this wasn't a regular show, open mics are usually sucky, and not to be alarmed. I promised them that I would do whatever it takes to make up to them this possible several hours of torture. As a comedian I am used to such drudgery, and once once goes to an open mic one realizes why many comics are so bitter and "tortured" and angry by the time they make it. Go to one on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, and stay the whole time no matter what. You're bound to ooze frustration. But it's part of paying your dues and any performer should never complain if they're getting an opportunity to step on a stage. But I still believe it's okay to realize that watching one unfriendly yet unfunny and uncleanly performer after another drunkenly swagger onto a stage that barely sits six inches high off of the floor is a pretty shitty way to spend a night. Getting your own five minutes during which other breathing human beings are forced to listen to your words is definitely worth it, however. I think in a later blog post I will get all "deep" about how weird it is to be alone in front of people with only your words to woo them and get them to like you. The performer is basically in control of the audience's lives for however long they stand up there. But back to the Maui Taco.
The host was drunk, 80% of the other comics were at least a couple drinks in, and the friends I brought were the only non-performers in the dank, dark basement dungeon of forced, uncomfortable laughter. I felt right at home. When I first moved to New York City I had been afraid to perform here, even at the no-pressure open mics. I imagined that everyone would be very cold and snooty and look down on me as a young know-nothing loser who doesn't know a tag from a call-back. So wrong I was. The open mics here are E X A C T L Y like they are in Albany. Awkard but kind of exciting, small audience, small stage. I think it must be universal. It's an interesting experience; everyone pretty much keeps to themselves and talks to whoever they came with. They sit at tables alone while scribbling and clandestinely peering around. There's always one or two comedians that will come over and introduce themselves, and it turns out to be just a passing greeting or something "clicks" and you end up having a really long exchange about your crazy families until the event commences.
Here's a few realy embarassing pictures of me and a couple of my best friends from high school at various open mics around the Capital Region:
I would have just posted a couple here, but Blogger is being a douche.
It's nice to connect with other people who have similar inner-workings of the mind; others who are not afraid to share things about themselves at the expense of being considered Odd in "normal" situations. The reality is, once you find someone like that to converse with, you're not weird at all. You fit right in. I kind of befriended this one young woman who used to go to NYU just like me, and she told me some of the darkest, disturbing details of her life and how she got into comedy. I shared some similar stories -although I'm not sure I topped her long family history of debauchery and drugs. Still, I've always felt that in order to be a really good performer, you have to have some kind of burning sense of redemption and miscellaneous yearning working for you. That moment was the first time in a while that I thought, "Wow, this is it. This is where I'm supposed to be. (Not specifically at the Maui Taco, I think I'm at least ready for the Alaskan Enchilada). This is probably the only place where I won't consistently get that 'awww you're kind of funny but really weird and take it a little too far' look." Just ask me about performing at the sonic boom that was Gould Plaza. And any recitation or group hang-out with new people I've ever attended.
I'm so grateful for my friends who came to support me, but there was a point when I felt them getting bored and creeped out by the excessive and aggressively not funny dick/boobie/vagina jokes. I don't really hear them anymore. Whenever there's someone who's having a difficult time onstage, it's best not to dwell on it and I always make sure to laugh heartily at anything they say that might have some kind of potential. What I actually really liked about this particular open mic was that if you had good material, you got laughs. I've been to way too many places where the comics just sit there stone-faced, even trying not to laugh, just because they're too absorbed in their own stuff.
I do believe that mis amigas gained something from the experience. Not only did we "fuse like a family," as any emotionally harrowing experience spent in a beer-stained basement that reeks of sour cream and old salsa (just listen to Colin Meloy and his musical account of male prostitutes), but I think they learned a bit about why I am the way I am. Most importantly, they learned never to eat nachos constructed with a Hawaiian flare.
Here's the video from that night. Thank you Katy for posting it! I look pretty terrible but I'm willing to blame it on the poor lighting choices made by the interior designer of that classy cellar of a room. No, I don't know why I did a jig in the middle of my set, either. It's a compliment that the camera shook a bit at some parts because it means at least Katy was laughing.
Remember, similar to the disclaimer I fed my friends, it was just an open mic. But it's still somethin'.


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I love smoked salmon. Love, love, love it. But it's a luxury and so sadly I don't get to eat it as often as I would like. I have been eyeing up a recipe for ages, thinking I want to make this, but can I justify it? Ummm…ah…yes…..no….should I? Shouldn't I? Finally decision time! Hell yes, because every now and then you just have to do something special.
I saw this recipe first in the Good Housekeeping Christmas Collection magazine in 2011, it is for a Smoked Salmon and Mackerel Mousse Ring. I don't have a ring mould, and don't think I could justify buying one just to make this one recipe. However, I have a crazy number of ramekins, so I decided to make parcels instead of one large ring. Problem solved 🙂
The recipe is easy enough, line the ring mould (or ramekins) with cling film. Place layers of smoked salmon to line the mould, with the edges overlapping.
Mix together the cream cheese, crème fraîche, chopped parsley, flaked smoked mackerel, chopped capers and lemon zest. I added a bit more lemon zest than the recipe asked for and I really liked that extra zing it gave.
Spoon the filling into the mould and level off, before covering with more smoked salmon. Wrap tightly in clingfilm and refrigerate for a few hours.
Serve with some freshly ground pepper, a squeeze of lemon juice, a fresh zingy salad and thin crisp toast slices.
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I wish you a peaceful day 🙂


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It's been a chilly, restless week. I started and quit a couple craft projects. Got lazy about studying French (I'm using my middle/high school textbook and find it amazing that I could grasp tenses better then than I can now). Watched a lot of bad TV and wondered why I wasted so much time. This week, I'm going to do the self-discipline thing…
January 21: the Caroline Smith pages in 100 Years of Fashion Illustration– super rad style.
January 22: a foggy commute to work.
January 23: haha! Good one, Fortune Cookie.
January 24: my weekly trip to the library.
January 25: ah, Morpheus. He's always a howler but it's been real bad with James on vacation. At his worst, he woke me up five times in a seven hour period (no childless adult should be robbed of this much sleep, right?). I was ready to kill… but, as usual, his adorable cat cuddles mean I always forgive.
January 26: finished Making History with a Mighty O Donut and a soy latte.
January 27: treated myself to a five buck bouquet at the market. Instant cheer on a drizzly Sunday.