And no fair just listing right-wing propaganda pieces like An American Carol and October Baby.

I told you about Michael Ihler before. Ihler, of St. Maries, Idaho, is the guy who claimed his 597 pot plants were for personal use.(You may remember Ihler was the guy who tore part of the roof off his house so the weed growing in his living room would get natural light.)

He got 5 years fixed prison time, 2 years indeterminate time (meaning if he doesn't adequately reform in the first five they can leave him in there for two more) and a $15,000 fine.

Ihler is so fortunate I'm not his judge. This asshole went into his sentencing hearing with the standard "I put marijuana in front of my family, relationships and responsibility" canned line that everyone who majorly fucks up uses to try to sweet-talk the judge into a lower sentence. And if he had been busted with four or five plants I might believe it. But this asshole cut off the roof of his fucking house so he could run a commercial pot farm in his living room. He is the closest thing to a drug lord St. Maries will ever see, and I would have put him away for 20 years.

I live in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where conservative insanity runs deep. On Tuesday, we had a school board election.

In Cd'A our main right-wing political club is the Reagan Republicans. They have decided that all elections are partisan elections, including nonpartisan ones like the school board, hospital board and city council. So they endorsed a slate of candidates who put "Republican" on their yard signs. There was also a Libertarian candidate who the RRs wouldn't endorse because he hates the RRs more than he hates the government.

There was another group called Balance North Idaho, who investigated qualifications before endorsing candidates. In the five races on Tuesday's ballot, only one candidate was endorsed by both groups, and he lost.

The results: The Libertarian guy, who campaigned his ass off, lost by the biggest margin. The more he campaigned the worse he got. All the Reagan Republican endorsees lost. All the Balance candidates won. But the biggest winner of the night was a doctor running for a seat on the hospital board...he wasn't endorsed, barely advertised, didn't knock on doors himself...his patients got together and knocked on doors without being asked because they like him. And he is a good doctor.

The RRs will try the same shit in the November election. I don't know if the "partisaning" tactic will work then (there is a park construction project a lot of people are pissed about) but I'll let you know.

We run a "kids write" column in our Tuesday paper. We put a topic in the paper this Tuesday, and the next Tuesday print the responses.

The question being asked this week: What is the world's greatest treasure?

Second answer: "The world's greatest treasure is bacon."

...is that we pay Republican congressmen $165,000 a year to come to work and on the two days a week they actually do, all they want to do is attack the president and try repealing his health care law.

The quickest way to reform Congress would be to name the CEO of Labor Ready sergeant-at-arms of the House of Representatives. Labor Ready pays you at the end of each day you work; putting Congress on the same footing can't hurt.

Getting rid of all of them won't help. There are some good Congressmen, and we don't want to lose Alan Grayson or Keith Ellison just to get rid of Louie Gohmert.

Term limits are just a form of getting rid of all of them, and for every Michele Bachmann we lose, we also lose a Nita Lowery.

The only way to get rid of the shitty congressmen while keeping the good ones is to elect congressmen statewide.(No, this is not something the Founding Fathers did, but the Founding Fathers required voters to own land and have white skin and penises, and allowed slaveholding, and we fixed that shit...we can correct yet another of their horrible mistakes.)

How it would work: a panel of citizens who are registered voters but who have never run for any elected office higher than county commissioner would join to decide what is a midsize state. Say a midsize state has 27 electoral votes. This means it has 25 congressional districts. Anyone running for Congress in a midsize state, or smaller, will be voted on by everyone in the state. Anyone in a larger state will run in his or her own district plus the 24 closest to it. Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert can win in districts designed to elect anyone with a heartbeat and an R behind his or her name. They'd have a harder time winning in this system. It would also force the GOP to confront their unelectability problem...think back to all the postmortems of the Romney disaster. Not one focused on the real problems: their presidential candidate was less likeable than Richard Nixon, their vice presidential candidate scares people and their platform would have amplified the problems America has. Cleaning all the Republicans out of the House would force them into sober reflection. Maybe.

And yes, House candidates can campaign statewide. Senate candidates do it. Governor candidates do it. The representatives in Alaska and Montana do it. In the days when you campaigned in a horse-drawn carriage you couldn't do it, but we have TV commercials, cars, buses, planes and 501(C)(4) groups now...

It is obvious that this would never pass...consider the state of Washington. They have nine congressional districts. Most of them are solid GOP seats because most of Washington's land is rural and rural voters lean Republican. All those seats would swing Democratic if they had statewide voting because Spokane has Democrats and...well, let's say the Puget Sound isn't the bluest thing in King County.

While waiting for the showing of the new version to start at the theatre, I stopped by a video store...they had the Robert Redford version of this on Blu-Ray, so I snagged it...watched the film at the theatre, then went home and watched it again.

I've come to the conclusion you can't make a great movie out of this book. BOTH versions were only fair as movies. They were also very, very similar, as one would expect. DiCaprio is a great student of film history, and it's obvious he closely studied the Redford version; some of the things he did (like Gatsby's reaching out with his hand while he was standing on the pier) were almost identical to things Redford did.

(Spoiler alert) In the new version, Nick is a hopeless alcoholic in a sanitarium, and the story is a series of recollections and confessions to his psychiatrist - which he typed out into the form of the novel. The Redford version tells the tale straight out.

The hip-hop soundtrack in the new version really isn't as strange as you'd think it would be - not as strange as the 3-d effects. This movie was shot with 3-d cameras, so there's no reason for the actors to look like they were cut out and pasted on top of the backgrounds. When there weren't any people in the movie, the 3-d was very impressive; when people were there, it looked like "a 3-d movie." (Apparently this is what people expect 3-d movies to look like, and when you pay that extra $3.50 I guess you want proof you're at a 3-d movie.) Gatsby isn't really the kind of film 3-d adds anything to, and in this case it takes away - even though it shouldn't have. See it in 2-d.

I liked Nick's voiceover in the new one. The superimposed typing wasn't all that necessary.

My impression: the Redford one was good but not great, the new one was also good but not great (although the critics are gonna go "it sucked because it wasn't the Robert Redford version" to which I wonder, if all you want is the Redford version why not just watch that?), the book really was great.

A little-known secret of the media business: we do nothing unless we get paid for it. And what pays the bills is advertising.

Cumulus Media, iirc the second-largest radio network after Clear Channel, is about to dump Rush because advertisers don't want to sponsor him. People know this.
Now consider having to sell this program to stations that are already scheduled around the clock: "We would like you to take whatever you've got scheduled for the three hours in the middle of the day off and replace it with a show with declining Arbitron ratings and no national ad accounts, and that you can't sell locally to anyone except army surplus depots and cigar stores because the host is radioactive." It's not likely he'd find new stations.

I posted just a few minutes ago The World's Easiest Ice Cream Recipe. That's good for the kids, your 80-year-old mom who thinks the ice cream in gallon pails is just great, or other times when good enough ice cream is exactly what you need.

This is the good stuff.

One pint milk
One pint whipping cream
One pint heavy whipping cream
1-1/2 cups sugar
Six egg yolks
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
Flavoring, and use quality product for this - no cocoa powder, okay?

For strawberry - 12 oz organic, ripe fresh berries, half chopped, half crushed
For chocolate - 8 oz finely chopped chocolate
Chocolate in pieces - maybe 2 oz
Other fruit - 12 oz of chopped, quality fruits or berries. Half crushed. The other half...berries leave whole, other fruits chop up.

Put the dairy, eggs and sugar together and cook to 160 degrees over low heat, stirring constantly.(It is critical that you reach temp very, very slowly...go too fast and this will taste like scrambled eggs.) Add the chocolate or the chopped berries and cook to 180 degrees. Now add the vanilla and put in the fridge overnight.

Put this batter and any whole berries, chopped fruits and chocolate pieces in your ice cream freezer and churn as slowly as you possibly can.

One quart half-and-half
Two eggs
Sweetener equivalent to one cup sugar
One teaspoon vanilla extract

Whatever flavors you want to use (so far I have made batches of this with four ounces dark chocolate, two medium mangos, and half a pound of strawberries)

Put the half-and-half, sugar and eggs in a pot and cook to 160 degrees F. Add whatever you are flavoring it with (but not the vanilla) and cook to 180 degrees. Take off the heat and add the vanilla. Put in the fridge overnight to get cold, then freeze in your ice cream freezer.

This is a good recipe that produces a not-too-fatty ice cream, and it's reasonably priced - thanks to coffee fiends, they make so much half-and-half a quart of it is less expensive than a pint of whipping cream.