YumSugar

Robert Pattinson Hits The London Premiere Of ‘Remember Me’ While His GF Kristen Stewart Prepares To Debut ‘The Runaways’ In NYC!

huntedvampire — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:45:05 -0700

How sad! R-Patz and K-Stew aren’t together on their big nights! Wouldn’t you want to be there to support your respective other?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day indeed, Robert Pattinson. You may be one lucky boy most days – but today your own personal pot of gold – Kristen Stewart - can’t be by your side!
While the 23-year-old British hunk cozied up to his gorgeous Aussie co-star Emile de Ravin at the London premiere of Remember Me March 17, Kristen, 19, is preparing to strut her stuff at the NYC debut of her Joan Jett biopic, The Runaways.
But while Rob and his lady love do have competing premieres, somehow we can’t help but think the Twilight co-stars would much prefer to be together drinking green beer in some British pub this St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe if you wish really hard, you two, a leprechaun will grant your wish!

Do we have the making of a "Brown" revolution in Illinoise senate race? I hope so

Grandpa — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:41:44 -0800

Is There a Real Fight in GOP's Illinois Senate Primary? Eh, Not Quite Yet.
The Illinois primaries occur on February 2; insert "Groundhog Day" jokes here.
On the Republican side, there's been some discussion of a serious challenge from the right to Rep. Mark Kirk, widely considered the frontrunner for the nomination and a strong competitor for the 2010 general election. I say "discussion," because the evidence is iffy.
P.R. folks backing Patrick Hughes sent this notice my way this morning:

The Patrick Hughes for U.S. Senate campaign recently did a snapshot survey of 1,104 statewide likely Republican primary voters on January 21^st and 22^nd. The data shows a massive jump in support for Patrick Hughes over the last few weeks and a minimal amount of movement in the number of Mark Kirk supporters. While being aggressively outspent by the Kirk campaign, Hughes’ campaign has managed to cut Kirk’s December Chicago Tribune Poll lead in half and caused his support to stall. Furthermore, the support that Mark Kirk does have is very weak.
· 21% of likely primary voters strongly or moderately support Hughes
· 15% of likely primary voters strongly or moderately support Kirk
· 27% of likely primary voters are undecided
· 32% of likely primary voters are leaning towards a candidate
This data set shows that Illinois Republican primary voters respond very positively to Patrick Hughes’ message of Conservative values; when voters hear his message they more likely to strongly support his candidacy than the candidacy of other individuals in the race, including Mark Kirk. It also shows that while we are almost one week away from the primary 59% of likely voters remain undecided or swayable on the race.
In early December the Chicago Tribune released a poll showing Mark Kirk at 41% and Patrick Hughes at 3%. Despite being outspent considerably in the weeks following, the Hughes campaign has managed to jump 19% while Mark Kirk has not moved. Voters are not engaged by his message of moderate to liberal Republican values and his supporters are not committed to supporting him. Voters are looking for another option because they want a Conservative option.

A jump in the polls is good news for Hughes, and he appears to be emerging as the most serious alternative to Kirk. But I'm always a little skeptical of polls commissioned by candidates, and today a new Chicago Tribune poll doesn't see the race as all that competitive: "On the Republican side, Kirk, a five-term North Shore congressman, holds a commanding advantage over Hinsdale businessman Patrick Hughes, 47 percent to 8 percent. None of the four other contenders in the GOP race - Kathleen Thomas, Don Lowery, John Arrington or Andy Martin - had more than 3 percent."
Could Hughes win? In a world where Scott Brown is a senator, we can't count anything out. But I wonder if a vote for a cap and trade bill that looks dead, along with deviation from conservative orthodoxy on a few other issues, will be enough to surmount a lead that is, even by the Hughes poll, almost 20 percentage points. (It also doesn't help to have four other candidates on the ballot, each one touting themselves as "the real conservative alternative.")
Since 2000, Kirk represented a pretty Democratic-leaning district and was always a top target of Democrats, and any GOP candidate who survived the Obama onslaught in Illinois in 2008 has got some campaigning skills.

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/

Obama thanks himself

cine_lover — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 11:36:10 -0700

It amazes me how much the media does not report on Obama. Could you imagine what would have happened if Bush had done the same thing? There would be endless video coverage, talk shows making jokes, skits on SNL, etc. But not for President Obama. The hypocrisy, double standards and lack of coverage is not only shameful, but frightening.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Barack-Obama-Thanks-Himself-...

Top Stories
Obama In St Patrick's Day Teleprompt Blunder
12:26pm UK, Wednesday March 18, 2009
A teleprompt blunder has led to Barack Obama thanking himself in a speech at the White House in a St Patrick's Day celebration.

Barack Obama(R) and Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen

Obama and the Irish PM share the joke during their joint address

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar.

It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: "That's your speech."

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the "teleprompt president" over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

The Obama 100
The Obama 100 red chevron
Follow Sky's Adam Boulton as he covers the new President's first 100 days in office.

Earlier in the day, the president claimed an Irish ancestry, saying his mother's family could be traced back to Ireland.

He joked to Cowen: "We may be cousins. We haven't sorted that through yet."

Speaking in the Oval Office, he told the Irish premier:"Not all Americans are Irish but all Americans support those who stand on the side of peace and peace will prevail."

The fountains at the White House were dyed green for the day at the request of the First Lady and guests at the cocktail reception drank green sparkling wine from a Californian vineyard.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon from Northern Ireland and Maggie McCarthy, a traditional Irish dancer and musician from Cork, and the vocal group Celtic Thunder all attended.

Mr Obama joked about the free-flowing bar and warned his guests not to wear lampshades on their heads in front of the cameras.

Delilicious: Make a Kid Friendly St. Patrick's Day Spread

LilSugar — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:00:00 -0700

Convincing tots to eat their greens is typically a pretty laborious process, but St. Patrick's Day may be an exception. Charged up on green celebrations and tales of St. Patrick your children just might get their dose of vegetable vitamins today. Here are some simple ideas for infusing your family meal with a little festive flare.

Dinner Menu: PartySugar suggests a delicious dinner of Green Goddess Dressing, Warm Spinach and Artichoke Dip, Pesto Pizza and Creamy Broccoli Soup. If that's far too much green for your family, make your tots the pizza with the pesto on the side. They can add the color it to their liking or choose to keep their slice plain.
Treats: Make a simple and low sugar Irish Soda Bread and decorate it with green royal icing for kid appeal. If you don't have a ton of time pick up some shamrock Sugar cookies from your local bakery or grab unfrosted cookies and frost them with your children.
Green Non-Alcoholic Beer: While the adults chug delicious beer cocktails make sure to have some equally attractive non-alcoholic beverages (we call those EANABs) on hand for your little leprechauns. Add natural green dye to Sprite, mineral water or apple juice for a virgin cocktail.
Wear Green: Don't forget to have your whole family wear a spot of green so no one gets pinched at school.

Source

Obama and his Telepromter

cine_lover — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:14:40 -0700

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jromano/2009/03/19/why-the-obama-gaffe...

Why Obama’s Teleprompter Gaffe Tape Matters
by John Romano

When George W. Bush was President, the Democrats and certain press outlets hammered every little mistake he made as evidence of him being “the dumbest President ever.” They did this not to hurt Bush, that was an awesome side benefit. The main intent was to cripple the GOP. It worked. This approach began with Nixon and Ford, but took a much-hated hiatus during the eighties, when Reagan turned the remaining southern Democrats into Republicans and created the last great party boom.

Alleging Bush’s supposed idiocy day after day was designed to put the idea in the head of the general populace that the GOP was inept. They decided to nominate Bush, the dumbest person in the world, how can they ever be trusted again?

Sarah Palin’s appeal to middle America almost derailed the whole thing. The media took care of her in short order by portraying her as, you guessed it, dumb. Obama is now our President. The plan was a masterpiece.

The GOP, in not fighting back forcefully enough, was played like a fiddle. The media is biased toward liberalism no doubt; however, I do remember seeing Bush, Cheney, Frist, et. al. on the Sunday talk shows for all eight years of the Bush presidency. The opportunity to fight was there. Blaming the media for the travails of today’s GOP is like former World Series champs blaming a bad season on the fact that the other teams had better training facilities.

This brings me to the teleprompter gaffe. As of this writing, the video of the event with President Obama and Brian Cowen has not been released. By some reports, the video shows that Obama oftentimes has no idea what is on that teleprompter before he reads it and therefore, as he did on St. Patrick’s Day, ends up doing things like thanking himself for inviting everyone to the White House. An endearing gaffe between two national leaders or President Obama sincerely thanking President Obama for inviting everyone to the White House? The fact that the video has been suppressed may be very telling.

Where is the media on this story? Where are the demands for the video? Of course one would expect the AP, CNN, MSNBC, and others to ignore or play down this story, but FOX News? Bill O’Reilly? Ingraham? Hannity? Even Rush Limbaugh glossed over this story today, treating it as a humorous piece instead of a hard news story.

Democrats would’ve added this story to the many deserved and undeserved images of GWB as dunce and Wolf Blitzer would’ve done a ten minute piece on it. Heck, David Shuster did a four minute segment last night on George Bush using the word “authoritarian” when “authoritative” was logically called for.

John McCain time and time again repudiated Republicans who went after Obama in the way the Democrats went after him. McCain lost. The only chance for a GOP comeback is to fight as nastily as the Democrats have fought and nastier if possible. A big if.

With EFCA, amnesty and the Rahm Emanuel Census Bureau coming down the pike, the GOP better take the gloves off or be prepared for permanent minority status. That wouldn’t be good for anyone, including the Democrats.

The GOP thinking it is above a street fight will relegate the party to history. Wake up.

New Jersey: In a Tough Sell, Corzine Works to Connect

tdsollog — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 05:16:29 -0700

Courtesy of the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/nyregion/10corzine.html?th&emc=th

In a Tough Sell, Corzine Works to Connect
By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: March 9, 2009

HOBOKEN, N.J. - As Gov. Jon S. Corzine ambled down Washington Street during the St. Patrick’s Day parade here on Saturday, hundreds of people greeted him by waving, barking his name or asking him to pose for photos. But once Mr. Corzine passed by, some of those same people began blurting out the kinds of things that one might use to describe an unpopular neighbor, behind his back.

“You’re messing up my state!” yelled one.

“Put on your seat belt!” someone else shouted.

“Hey, is that Codey?” joked another. “We want Codey!”

Three years into the job, Mr. Corzine is still a tough sell or an acquired taste to many New Jersey residents, even in a Democratic stronghold like Hoboken, the place he now calls home. And as his poll numbers deteriorate, with an increasing plurality of people unhappy with his job performance, there is no shortage of people blaming Mr. Corzine for the state’s fiscal woes, singling out his 2007 car accident as the defining event of his tenure, or pining for a more popular politician like the State Senate president, Richard J. Codey.

Mr. Corzine is unlikely to win many new friends on Tuesday, when he is expected to propose a series of difficult steps to help the state close a $7 billion budget deficit: raising income taxes among the wealthiest residents, demanding that state workers agree to a wage freeze and take 12 unpaid days off, and reducing spending by billions. Small wonder, then, that Republicans are optimistic that they can win their first statewide election since 1997; one leading contender, a former United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, is already ahead in at least two polls.

Mr. Corzine, 62, may in part be a casualty of anxieties about the economy, as are elected officials around the country. But what complicates his second-term aspirations is the fact that Mr. Corzine, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, has never been particularly popular. His highest approval ratings in Quinnipiac University’s poll, 51 percent, came shortly after his car accident, a figure that political analysts now attribute to pity, and Mr. Corzine’s public service announcement urging seat belt use.

Yet now, with the political clock ticking fast against the backdrop of a national recession, Mr. Corzine, a lumbering public speaker, must do something that he has always struggled with: connect with the average resident.

“Personally, I like him, but I can’t relate to him,” John DellaFave, a retired police officer from Hoboken, said during Saturday’s parade. “I think it’s hard to connect when you’re a billionaire. The only thing he’s got going for him is he’s a Democrat.”

Mr. Corzine (who is, for the record, just a multimillionaire) knows that he needs to do more to make an impression on voters. Part of the problem, he says, is a dearth of media coverage in New Jersey. But part of the problem, he concedes, is himself, since he is hardly Bill Clinton, Barack Obama or even former Gov. James E. McGreevey when it comes to the gift of feel-your-pain retail politics.

“I do get frustrated,” he said during an interview in his state vehicle Friday as he traveled between a conference on child abuse in East Brunswick and a funeral in Manhattan. “But I’m not Jim McGreevey. That’s got both good and, I presume, it’s got some negative elements from the standpoint of pure politics.”

Mr. Corzine is proud of his record, especially in the areas of health care, children’s issues and public safety. And he is confident that, come November, voters will recognize his accomplishments and his attempts to grapple with serious problems.

But in two recent polls, from Quinnipiac University and Fairleigh Dickinson University, Mr. Corzine recorded job approval ratings of 41 and 40 percent, respectively, while the state was viewed as being on the wrong track by 68 and 59 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, households with public employees - a group that typically supports Democrats - disapproved of Mr. Corzine, 56 to 31 percent.

That hostility toward Mr. Corzine can be explained, labor officials say, by his frequent criticisms of unions and his clumsy dealings with a prominent labor leader, his former companion Carla Katz, during contract negotiations. And now there is trepidation over his budget.

On Tuesday, Mr. Corzine is expected to recommend raising income taxes 5 percent on those earning more than $250,000, at least temporarily, and eliminating property-tax rebates for all but the elderly. He may also increase taxes on cigarettes and alcohol.

Mr. Corzine’s standing is not helped by the fact that his relationship with the Legislature, and many in his own party, has often been distant or frosty. At the same time, his initial aura as a Wall Street wizard has faded considerably.

“Corzine came in as a reformer, the guy who’s going to fix everything, but I suspect a lot of people are saying, ‘Why haven’t you fixed it?’ ” said Peter J. Woolley, executive director of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll. “And now that Wall Street has been tarnished, it’s tarnish by association.”

It has not helped matters much that Mr. Corzine has reinforced the suspicion that he has more of a New York state of mind. After all, his current companion lives on the Upper East Side. He is spotted frequently at restaurants and movie theaters in Manhattan. And he has been photographed several times in the New York Social Diary, and is occasionally mentioned on Page Six of The New York Post.

“Instead of seeing him at the beach or picking pumpkins, we see him at charity balls,” said Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science at Montclair State University. “And instead of going to the Jersey Shore or Long Beach Island, he’ll go to the Hamptons. So people feel, ‘He’s not one of us.’ ”

The paradox, even Republicans say, is that the governor is quite down-to-earth and personable in a smaller setting, like a diner. And his passion for social issues seems genuine, as evidenced by his comments on Friday to a conference on child abuse in East Brunswick: “I’ll go to my grave saying this is one of the great accomplishments of my life,” he said, to sustained applause.

Yet Mr. Corzine’s attempts to raise his public profile have not always succeeded. After all, one of his biggest failures was his attempt in 2007 to refinance the state’s toll roads to generate billions of dollars to help the state pay down debt - an attempt that included an aborted town hall-style tour of the state’s counties.

The trouble was, he was all about PowerPoint, while the audience was all about raw emotion, almost all of it in opposition.

“You’ve got to somehow break through on all these things, and the only time that people saw me break through was actually at the town hall meetings, and we ended up having a less-than-an-overwhelmingly-positive reaction because it was co-opted by the people who were opposed,” Mr. Corzine said.

St. Patrick's Day Dinner

Phasekitty — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:13:31 -0700

This past weekend I decided I wanted to make a home cooked St. Paddy's Day dinner, so I pulled some Yum recipes together that had been hanging out in my favorites for a while, invited a few friends over, and busted out the crock pot.

Yum's Irish Soda Bread
Posted last year as part of the 52 Weeks of Baking, I preferred this recipe to the one posted this year which had raisins and caraway seeds in it. I like to keep things simple, and my boyfriend, the bread lover, wants nothing in the way of him and his bread. But if you're not into working and kneading bread dough, the new recipe is probably better for you. The one I used is described in the post as "hard to mess up" and it couldn't have been more true. There was no time listed as to how long to bake it, just "bake until golden brown," so I just popped it in and cleaned up. Then I checked it, decided it wasn't done and hopped in the shower. I was dressed and applying makeup before I realized -"Oh shoot, the bread!" I ran to the oven and bam - it was perfect. So if asked for a bake time, I'd have to say close to an hour, but you could probably just eyeball it like I did . . . and then forget about it and it'll still be okay

Also in these pictures, black and tans, my bf's favorite. Luckily we had a bartender in attendance and he did something weird by tipping the glass and using an upside down spoon to get them to look good. Normally I would have just poured it on top, but I suppose that wouldn't have worked as well.

My bf's bartender friend, Javier, also brought over that Chimay Ale from Trader Joe's. He described it as a "beer wine," but it tasted more like a "beer champagne" to me as it was very bubbly. The boys loved it, but I stuck with my typical Chardonnay.

Yum's Guiness Beef Stew
Posted last year, I'd been dying to try this recipe out for a while. I considered Yum's Irish stew recipes posted this year, but my boyfriend recently developed a love for Guiness, so I thought I'd give this one a whirl instead. It was delicious. I'm more used to a traditional beef stew, but this one had such unique and distinct flavors from the Guiness that it blew it away. Everyone loved it and it paired perfectly with the soda bread.

We forgot to take pictures of the stew right away and before we knew it, it was gobbled up. These are our leftovers - there was actually a lot more broth last night, but I didn't proportion it out very well, I guess. It was still very yummy just like this, though

Yum's St. Patrick's Day Peppermint Pie
I had this recipe printed and ready to make last year, but just never got around to it. I figured it would be the perfect way to top off my Irish dinner, but it just didn't turn out as well as it could have. First of all I think I could have used a lot more chocolate wafers for the crust, and I even added more than was required after seeing it didn't quite line my pie pan. Second, I filled the pan a little too much because I still had filling left over and I was convinced it would all fit in, but instead it spilled over onto the sides and looked very unpretty. Finally, the recipe calls for it to chill for at least 4 hours, but mine was in the fridge for about 5 or 6 hours and was still very melty. I took a look at our leftovers in the fridge this morning and it was a little bit better after being in there all night, but not by much. Perhaps my whipping cream wasn't whipped enough. I've always had issues with whipping cream. Anyway, it was a shame that I ended an awesome dinner with a lackluster dessert, but everyone still ate a piece (it was a minty, chocolatey, but still a yummy, mess) and we were so stuffed from bread and stew that it didn't matter much.

All in all our Irish dinner went pretty well! Now I just have to figure out what I'm doing for Easter dinner next Sunday!