Oh Heather, I know just how you feel. I sit in my garden on a warm, early spring day and I wonder if that rumbling sound in the distance is a tractor-trailer on the highway, or the Visigoths coming down Main Street. I wish I could make you fell better, but I cannot, after the last ten, awful years, I am pretty wrung out myself. Everything feels very fragile as if it could go south very fast and in the blink of an eye, I am not sitting in my little garden but instead picking turnips in some evangelical, re-education work farm. We keep plugging on, but the sense that we’ve screwed the pooch this time is omnipresent. I can’t help you Heather, not with the awful chickens (thought you’d like the reference) that are coming home to roust, but I can help with some hints on bean soups.

I’m not big on recipes, I focus more on process so use whatever step-by-step recipe you like and just throw in variations.

You don’t have to soak your beans all night, just boil them for a few minutes and let em sit on a low heat until tender which should be around an hour. Soaking over night does take out some of the sugars that cause gas, but who cares about farts when western civilization is taking the final taxi right. Oh and don’t salt your beans until near the end, premature salting toughens their little skins and they’ll never soften.

Smoked pork i.e. ham hawks or bacon or even country ham add a lot of flavor and are cheap, also bacon of course, get it going in the pot with a little oil, onion, garlic, cumin, jalapeños, green peppers, cilantro, whatever you have access to.

Consider making you own stocks, veggie stocks are cheap and easy and they make your kitchen smell nice as well. If not (and I know you have a lot of TV to watch), canned stocks are fine, though try the ones with low salt. When the onions et al, are soft add stock, beans, maybe some canned tomatoes, hot sauce, what have you, and cook until it smells very good and the beans are nice and tender, you may have to skim the top a few times, don’t be afraid. Now put half of this mess in a blender or FP and blend, you can also run an emersion blender through it as well and this will thicken it up nicely. You could also blend in left over tortillas, corn meal, hominy, whatever other thickening agents you have at hand. Remember using leftovers is what soup is for here in the twilight days.

This is a good time to sauté a little chorizo or some left over chicken, pork, beef, lamb, or whatever, and add that, also a little cream or milk to taste.

When you serve it, try topping it with some sour cream or guacamole to lighten it further.

As prices go up and food and the energy to cook it become intermittent, feel free to subtract ingredients as you see fit. Remember that mashed up black beans wrapped in day old bread is also a meal of sorts.

Enjoy the Gotterdammerung while it lasts.

What is even more bizarre to me is McCain’s apparent 1 to 1 conflation of our presence in Iraq with our presence in Europe and the Far East. Who in their right mind can see Iraq in the context of those other operations?

Six years after the defeat of the Hitler’s Germany, my U.S. Army father married my German mother, much to the joy of both families. How many Iraqi war brides/husbands does the Senator see coming home from this conflict? The attempt to equate our largely welcome presence in one country with our utterly unwelcome presence in another is proof positive of the delusional state of the GOP in general and of their candidate in particular.

That the press continues to allow the right to link FDR’s “good” war with their own failed adventure, is just another example of how the so called ‘liberal media” rolls over on it’s back when ever the flag or the bloody shirt of 9/11 gets waved in it’s face. Deplorable!

To the McCain camp, good luck. As a matter of fact, I encurage you to continue to poke Jim Webb with a sharp stick, although you may not be that happy with the results. Perhaps you can ask George Allen for some advice on how that's done, I understand he's available.

When I worked in D.C. I had occasion to meet Helms several times and he was always a polite even courtly man, with that in mind, my condolences to his family.

That said, the man was a monster who stands out as one of the worst political leaders of the last quarter of the 20th century. Helms did enormous damage to the tenor of public debate and he gave comfort and aid to some of the most reprehensible elements of our society.

While I ascribe no real significances to it, I am struck by the fact that two of the GOP's strongest advocates for ignorance and anti-intellectualism (Ronald Reagan of course being the other), passed the final years of their lives in states of full-blown dementia, literally without a thought in their heads. Rough justice indeed.

I see some of the letter writers are suspicious of the Dog Whisperer and his methods, but his ground breaking work with young Eric Cartman of South Park Colorado should change a few minds.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155251