Laundry night

I hate TV on Thursday nights these days. Nothing grabs me. Good time to do laundry. I'm almost out of undies and low on socks. The cat box will also get some needed attention.

[Later] All chores done. Lucas loves lying on the warm, fresh laundry.

Settling in now, watching a new "House Hunters." Next, I don't know what. I recently saw the next "House Hunters" (in Singapore)."Man v. Food"? "Beyond Scared Straight"? "Extreme Chef"? I think I'll read on the computer. With "Man v. Food" in the background. (I'm hungry.)

Phaal curry at Brick Lane in NYC. The hottest in the world. (The cook is wearing a gas mask in the kitchen as he prepares it.) Adam Richman has milk to drink on the side. Reminds me of a meal I had years ago at a Thai restaurant on S. Dixie Highway. It was so hot I needed something to quench the fire. I asked for a glass of milk, but they didn't have any. So I was chugging ice water.

[Back to "House Hunters."]

From the wordy Glenn Greenwald here:

In fact, so dominant was the Bush White House over Congress that Dan Froomkin, in 2007 -- when Democrats controlled both houses -- memorably observed: "Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed."  In sum, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- was talking about how weak the presidency supposedly is before Barack Obama was inaugurated: neither in the domestic nor foreign policy realm.  To the contrary, just a few years ago, the power of the Presidency was typically conceived of as far too robust, not too limited.

[I rarely read Glenn Greenwald's columns in their entirety, but then, it's Thursday night, so I might.]

But to the point -  while I'm no Obama apologist and am also disappointed in his leadership, I have to say that the parties back then were not nearly as polarized as they are now, owing to the intransigent Tea Party faction on the Republican side.

However, since the Teabaggers in effect precipitated the downgrading of U.S. credit, which in turn saw the stock market go crashing again, the Teabaggers are now widely despised. See a Salon article from yesterday here - "Tea Party people less popular than many other hated minority groups" (e.g., Muslims and atheists). They're almost as widely hated as the "Christian Right." (Who knew?) See here.

[Later] I never did finish Glenn Greenwald's column.