Cornbread Stuffing

Dice and fry a couple of strips of bacon. Add 4 tbsp. of butter. (Don’t drain off the bacon grease. Are ye daft!) In this wonderful mixture of my two favorite ingredients, sautee:

2 cups diced celery
2 cups diced onion
sage
rosemary
salt and black pepper to taste

Pour in chicken or vegetable stock.

In a large bowl, crumble a batch of home made cornbread. Note: reduce the liquid ingredients of the cornbread somewhat so it comes out dry. Ironically, that will improve the texture of the stuffing. Knead in by hand the sautee/ soup stock mixture.

Use the stuffing in a bird or bake in a pan at 400 degrees for 40 minutes before serving.

Candied yams

For four large sweet potatoes or yams

1. Melt one stick of butter
2. Stir in brown sugar until it’s a thick sauce (approx 1/2 cup).
3. Add maple syrup making sure not to thin the sauce too much (approx 1/4 cup).
4. Sprinkle in cinnamon.

Boil, cool and peel the sweet potatoes. Slice lengthwise to between 3/8 and 1/2 inch thick slices. Place in a baking dish and pour sauce over them. Bake for 50 minutes at 300 degrees.

Sweet Potato Pie

Boil 3 sweet potatoes until they are extremely soft. Cool and peel. Mash with a stick of butter until soft. Add:

4 beaten eggs

1/2 cup of milk

1/2 cup of sugar

1 tsp. cinnamon

1/4 tsp. allspice

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

dash of clove (optional) blech!

Mix well and fill a pie shell. Bake at 325 for 45 minutes. Test with a toothpick.

It's been 604 days since Barack Obama didn't become a Muslim.

It's been 603 days since Barack Obama didn't become a Muslim.

It's been 602 days since Barack Obama didn't become a Muslim

Tuesday and Wednesday

The first event we made it to was the reception sponsored by Microsoft for the Washington State Delegation. This was our first experience with the updated campaign finance reform. The hors d’oeurves and drinks were flowing. The most intoxicating thing, though, was the atmosphere. Everyone realizes the importance of this election, but the air had a lightness, like they were coming out for the first warm day in the spring. My mother was worried about getting in but any civil rights activist gets a free pass in Democratic circles. There were four or five people I met from the caucuses. I ran into the guys who did a video for Obama that got some play on youtube, “Fired up and ready to go”. They even got to talk about it at the Obama rally in February. They pulled the governor aside and took my picture with her.
My friend, Chris, took us to a party for the national black caucus but we didn’t get there until 2 when it had ended at midnight. We didn’t get home until four, though, because the car we borrowed wouldn’t start. Mom was such a trooper.

Wednesday was a good day, when we finally got up. We had lunch downtown in the zoo of milling democrats. An acquaintance from my speech audition was on a committee handed my two tickets at the convention center. I was flying high. I was so worried that I wouldn’t get my mother into the stadium and now, 24 hours before we had to show up at Invesco, it was all fine. There was more to come at the convention center. Incidentally, that’s not where the convention took place. That was at the Pepsi Center, the hockey/basketball arena. We saw a display of some original documents including a photo of Franklin and Eleanor and an 1844 copy of the Declaration of Independence. We made our way to the auditorium where we watched the role call vote. This was an emotional tug of war. It moved ponderously slow yet had high drama. Each state was called by name and each one had a short but completely ridiculous speech before announcing their ballot totals. Almost every state tilted for Obama even the states that Clinton won. I had a hard time believing what I was seeing. The outcome hadn’t been in doubt for months but after all this time and hard work; after all of the political in-fighting, it was finally going to happen. California and Illinois passed on their turn which we wondered about. It was a tear-jerking moment when Kennedy’s Massachusetts went unanimously for Obama. Then New Hampshire did the same. Both these state were important for Clinton in the primaries. Then Hillary Clinton had a great moment. New Mexico yielded their time to Illinois. Then Illinois yielded that time to New York. The camera cut to New York to show Clinton was making her way to the front. She moved to suspend the roll call voting and nominate Obama by acclimation, an acclimation that was a roar in both the convention hall and the auditorium. It sounds almost bland as I write it, but there was pure joy in the crowd.

We took a break from the auditorium to get dinner with our hosts, Kiran and Michael. On the way, we saw a march up ahead. There were gaggles of riot police down the street. One sheriff stopped my mom and told her that she shouldn’t go that way. The march could get violent. The funny thing was that he didn’t think to mention that to Michael when he walked by. What wasn’t funny was the police presence. I wanted to yell at him, “What is so dangerous about peace protesters? They’re the ones who are unarmed.” Fortunately, I held my tongue.
When I travel to other countries, one of the little things I notice that remind me I am in another country are guards, police, and military in public armed with automatic weapons. In Denver this week, it was common to see police with machine guns, tear gas rifles and 42” batons. What’s more, Michael noticed that many of them were not Denver police. They came from other places. I don’t know of any incidents occurred like in St. Paul and New York but the effect to me was chilling.
My mom seemed to take the sheriff seriously so she sat on a bench while Michael and I went off to take pictures of the marchers. I made a show of saying it couldn’t be any worse than when I watched the Mexican police tear gas a protest in Oaxaca. I was still mad about the sheriff’s comment. The marchers were lively but very tame. I took some shots of the riot police preventing them from making a “wrong turn”.
We came back to the convention center auditorium after dinner. We missed Bill Clinton’s speech but got to see John Kerry’s excellent tongue in cheek attack on the Republican record. Wednesday evening was dedicated to burnishing the Democrats credentials on foreign policy and national defense. Patriotism and service are easy points to make. Despite being quite jaded, I found the video narrated by Tom Hanks and Tammy Duckworth’s speech quite moving. The more important thing, however, is linking that to policy. For years, the Republicans have been able to push their patriotism so far, that it really didn’t matter that their policy was bad. This time, the Democrats have taken some of that, but they made some good points about veterans’ affairs and dealing with Georgia. My personal view is that there is still too much testosterone in rhetoric about Afghanistan and terrorism. The things that will bring lasting peace in Kabul are the same things that will solve the violence in New Orleans or Detroit. Joe Biden gave a good speech as well; a sliding triple, but no home run.
Let me go on a tangent here and say that the convention was extremely well orchestrated. You could see that by how cohesive the major speeches were. Messages and turns of phrase were embedded very cleverly throughout. Still, it seemed like Biden and Obama didn’t get the best lines. They got what might get the most appeal out of the national television audience, but to me, the best ideas came from elsewhere. Does that mean that these ideas will take a back seat in January or will they rise to the surface when it’s politically safer? The message that I have carried away from this is that for all my jokes about being a political tourist this week, it is important to make it here and see behind the curtain, even if it’s just a peek. The political process is more accessible to the public than we think.

Review of the Democratic National Convention

I've broken this up into three posts. Hopefully it will be easier to read that way.

Note: like Tolkien, I could use a good editor. Some of this you will find long winded and you should skip to something more interesting, like reading the phonebook. I am keeping this format as a story so in ten years, I will remember all that happened. Just be glad that I'm not including every detail about navigating the Denver public transportation system.

Being in Denver at the time of the Democratic National Convention was a fantastic experience. It was deep, but not very broad and there are many moments that you have seen on TV that I missed completely. Before I go into the nuts a bolts of what happened and what I think, here is a personal context of my visit that may help you understand some of the things we said and did.

Originally, I had run to be delegate for Obama in the caucuses with the intention of going all the way to Denver. Those hopes were dashed in the spring and I didn’t think much more about going after that. When the Obama campaign announced that the acceptance speech was to be thrown open to the general public, I still thought, no way. In comes my mother. She determined that she was not going to miss this opportunity to see history firsthand after she had missed the march on Washington in ’63 because her job was to organize a sit-in at the same time. She watched King’s speech from the Mall from a jail cell in Milwaukee. I saw a lot of people from that generation with that determination on their Obama bling and on their faces. My mother told me that she would sleep on a park bench for the chance to see his speech live (one Republican friend noted that if she did try to sleep on a park bench, the police might let her see this moment in history from a jail cell again). I sighed and set out to get tickets. Here, serendipity smiled upon me. I shamelessly used my mother’s story to get the promise of one ticket from an acquaintance (now friend). He later got me into a party for the Washington State Democrats in Denver which allowed me to shamelessly use her story again to obtain not two but four tickets. I also found a friend who set me up with her cousin for a place to stay.

It's been 601 days since Barack Obama didn't become a Muslim