Various Thoughts

I picked up some Kaiser rolls with the morning papers, and had bacon on that. When I was a kid, that's how my grandmother would do it -- buy the rolls, cook the bacon, put them together. I used to particularly enjoy scooping out the doughy center of the rolls and eating just that -- reluctantly eating the rest of the roll, too, lest I get the look from my grandmother. But with bacon, there was no problem -- I enjoyed eating the whole thing. Oh, it dropped a little in my delight factor when the rolls became thinner -- I'm guessing that they started using a little less flour, a little more yeast -- but the rolls were still good enough, and with the bacon, they were superb. So I really liked it this morning, with the waffles and the coffee. Heck, I didn't even need to make the waffles -- though if I didn't, then my daughter couldn't have been delighted in her own way by slathering ice cream on hers. She had a bacon on Kaiser, too.

I see where David Plouffe is going to rejoin the messaging team at the White House. I think that's good, and I'm pleased to see it. I was a little surprised to read that he actually never left the OFA staff, because I thought they had gotten stale at the same time that the overall White House message did, but perhaps he was there in name only. Whatever, I'm glad that Obama's going to have the benefit of his drive and focused energy. I'm sure that he'll kick ass and take names -- which, okay, will translate into more frequent and more intense requests for donations, but, you know? That's okay with me. I won't give a lot -- Michelle won't be asking what I'd like in my coffee any time soon -- but I'll give what I can, because I believe in the overall message and mission of the Obama White House. All of it? No, not all of it. I think that they got so wrapped up in the onslaught of problems that they lost, or at least misplaced, the ability to take a deep breath and ask how important is it that we address this problem, right now? And certainly some of the solutions that they pushed weren't the best; though I unreservedly believe that they were better than anything that the Republican leadership would have come up with, they were not as nuanced and well communicated as they should have been. It's going to be hard for them to get people back who feel that they committed heavily and were let down. Even if their expectations were unrealistic (at least, from an outside perspective; your own expectations are, at worst, mildly optimistic), they needed to hear what was going on, and they didn't. I hope that Plouffe can fix that. If along the way he gets to whack some of the extreme Democrats alongside the head, and thereby knock some of their wilder dreams into bite-sized pieces, that would be okay, too.

Just finished reading a book of recipes by two guys who opened a fabulously successful bake shop in Brooklyn. How successful? Oprah raved about it. Martha Stewart, too. So I looked. And my conclusion was that sometimes it's not worth it to make fabulous baked stuff, because sometimes, all you want is A Nice Cookie.