jmowreader
jmowreader's JournalDarrell Brooks files appeal in Waukesha Parade Massacre case
https://www.wisn.com/article/darrell-brooks-files-notice-to-appeal-christmas-parade-conviction/42103778?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%20-%20Local%20Breaking%20News&utm_source=63878d537fe8cd789e1b2e5796e3e55a&brzu=3908f787cbfc45b06a9ff892dc714fff37161c2a5bf44d056f53b8ccae04014c&lctg=5cef2fc7014dc16d0adea62aMr. Brooks, who was recently sentenced to six consecutive life sentences plus 762 years in prison for driving his car through the 2021 Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing six people plus injuring many more, has not only appealed his conviction but applied for the assistance of the Public Defender's Office.
His grounds for appeal haven't been released yet; maybe judicial animus? I mean, the guy DID get placed in time-out many times during the trial. It certainly can't be because of the facts of the case, because there are thousands of eyewitnesses to say he did what he was convicted of.
Since the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun...
…is an unarmed veteran and a trans woman in nice shoes, it is incumbent on all of to prepare for the eventuality some asshole will decide to shoot up the place you are.
Not all of us can be unarmed veterans, but we all can wear heels if our feet and legs will let us.
What's the weirdest thing you ever heard of anyone smoking pot out of?
The Army used to issue the M1 Resuscitation Tube for reviving gas attack victims. It had one end that plugged into the outlet valve of your mask, and the other end would cover the victim's mouth for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
The Official Reason they got rid of this thing was that it wouldn't work as advertised - since you had to lift the victim's mask to get his end of the tube over his mouth, the poison gas that got him would still have access to his bony face.
The Real Reason they got rid of it was they discovered too many people were smoking hash out of them.
Uhh...folks...
That asshole Elon Musk reinstated Marjorie Three Affairs' Twitter account. Unlike Trump, she's using it.
How to REALLY cook a turkey
Thanksgiving has fallen upon us once again.
Every year, newspapers from coast to coast run a delightful creative-writing exercise for elementary school children entitled “how to cook a turkey.” It’s been a few years since I was in elementary school – I graduated from high school in 1981, do the math – but I thought it might be fun to participate in the festivities this year.
So, without further ado, “how to cook a turkey you can serve with pride.”
We all learned in elementary school that the First Thanksgiving happened in November 1621, when the Pilgrims and the local Wampanoag Tribe feasted on wild turkey, venison and seafood. We didn’t learn that the “traditional Thanksgiving meal” as we know it today really dates from March 6, 1942, when Norman Rockwell’s famous painting Freedom from Want graced the cover of the influential Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell was inspired by President Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address, in which he described the Four Freedoms that all people should aspire to – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Inspired by this speech, Rockwell created one painting for each freedom, which ran in consecutive weeks beginning February 20, 1942. He felt the first two paintings were the most successful of the set, but Freedom from Want has become the most beloved of them all.
Let’s start with the proposition that turkeys are basically uncookable. I mean, look at the thing. They’re huge. There’s about seven different thicknesses of meat on one of them. They’re hollow in the middle so the heat is flowing all around them. Add to that the twenty relatives you’ve got in your house who are prepared to judge your culinary skills on how well you cook this dish that you might make twice a year… It’s no wonder that every family has a story they tell every year about the biggest disaster of a meal they ever endured, and the centerpiece of that meal is always a turkey. It’s even less of a wonder that Modern Technology has developed hundreds of ways to try to make turkeys easier to prepare, including brining, big plastic bags to cook them in and deep fryers you can stick way the heck out in the yard so they don’t set your house on fire. There are also ranges on the market with “perfect turkey” settings that use computer power to decide when your bird is to the exact family-pleasing shade of doneness, and if you have a spare three to five thousand dollars sitting in your bank account, go for it.
But do what I tell you, and you’ll be fine.
You are going to need:
One completely-thawed turkey.
A jar of poultry seasoning. You could buy jars of thyme, rosemary, oregano or marjoram, and sage, but let’s be real: very few things you might want to cook outside the holiday season use sage, so by next Thanksgiving your jar of sage will have lost its special goodness. If you get one of those little jars of turkey seasoning that’s about an inch high, you’ll use half of it on Thanksgiving, the other half on Christmas, and buy a new jar for next year. Besides, sage ain’t cheap.
Salt and pepper.
A pound of butter. Go for the gusto and get the real thing. You’ll use half a pound now, and the other half on Christmas.
About a pound of onions.
A head of celery.
Three or four carrots.
A good roasting pan with a flat rack. If you choose a disposable foil pan, please put it on a cookie sheet before you put the turkey in it.
A roll of aluminum foil.
A basting brush.
A big platter to put it on for serving the Norman Rockwell Way.
A chef’s knife to carve with. Because you are going to prepare a tender, juicy, easy-to-carve bird this year, you won’t need electric knives, Sawzalls, chain saws or other implements of mass destruction.
A meat thermometer is also necessary if the turkey you got doesn’t have one of those pop-up meat timer things stuck in its thigh.
Start by preheating your oven to 325°F.
Before you remove the turkey from your fridge to prepare it for its trip to the oven, you need to prepare the stuffing – but not the traditional bread or cornbread stuffing. You need to stuff the turkey to get moisture up into its body cavity. You do not want to use traditional stuffing because it has eggs in it, which are a potentially hazardous food. If potentially hazardous foods are kept in the food safety danger zone between 40°F and 140°F for more than two hours, dangerous microorganisms can and will grow in them. And, unfortunately, because of how turkeys are constructed they come complete with a nice little danger zone. You need a non-potentially-hazardous stuffing and that’s where all the veggies come into play. Chop the onions, celery and carrots and mix them together to make a mirepoix. Melt a stick of butter, add salt, pepper and a teaspoon of the poultry seasoning to it, and stir it into the mirepoix before stuffing the turkey with it. Because butter isn’t a potentially hazardous food, it’s safe to use it for this.
Melt a second stick of butter and add salt, pepper and a teaspoon of poultry seasoning. This is for basting the bird.
Now for the fun part! Get the turkey out of the fridge. Pat it dry with paper towels. Put it breast-side up on the flat rack in the roasting pan, which you put a cookie sheet under if it’s a disposable aluminum one. Stuff it with mirepoix. Brush the skin with butter, then sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Put it in the oven and set a timer.
According to the Butterball people, these are the times you need to shoot for when roasting a stuffed turkey:
For “regular” ovens:
6-7 pounds: 2-1/4 to 2-3/4 hours
7-10 pounds: 2-3/4 to 3-1/2 hours
10-18 pounds: 3-3/4 to 4-1/2 hours
18-22 pounds: 4-1/2 to 5 hours
22-24 pounds: 5 to 5-1/2 hours
For convection ovens:
6-10 pounds: 1-3/4 to 2-1/2 hours
10-18 pounds: 2-1/2 to 3-1/4 hours
18-22 pounds: 3-1/4 to 3-3/4 hours
22-24 pounds: 3-3/4 to 4-1/4 hours
So…no getting up while it’s still dark and putting the turkey in the oven at 6 am, okay?
About once an hour, slide it out of the oven and baste it with more butter. You’re doing this for the benefit of the skin, which is the best part of the turkey. The butter you added to the mirepoix is going to season the meat.
While the turkey is in the oven, prepare a tent of aluminum foil. Easy task: just unroll about three feet of foil and fold it in half. About two-thirds of the way through the cooking cycle, open the tent up and set it on top of the turkey. This keeps the breast from overcooking. There are times to be fancy and creative, but this isn’t one of them: just pull the turkey out of the oven, baste it, set the tent on top of the bird and stick it back in. Simple and efficient.
If you didn’t get a turkey with a pop-up timer, you’re looking for a temperature in the mirepoix of 170*F and a thigh temperature of 180°F. Since most turkeys come with timers, when the timer pops up the bird is done. When you’re at temperature, remove the turkey from the oven right away. If you leave it in longer, all you’re doing is drying the poor thing out.
Immediately remove the turkey from the roasting pan and place it on the platter. Let it stand fifteen minutes before carving it. The mirepoix, which is now nicely turkey-flavored, works really well to jazz up your gravy. Some people like to eat it as a vegetable.
At this point you may be wondering, “what about turkey fryers?” I don’t endorse turkey fryers for three reasons. First, the casualty rate is way too high. The National Fire Protection Association states that turkey fryers are the cause of an average five deaths, 60 injuries reported to emergency rooms, and more than $15 million in property damage per year. They have no idea how many people got burned by these things but just soaked the burns in hot water, but it’s a bunch. Underwriters Laboratory, the people who test items for safety, refuse to certify turkey fryers because they are so dangerous. The second problem is that it’s really expensive. Walmart’s website lists three-gallon containers of peanut oil for $49.88 – and you need all of it. The third and most important problem is that you fry turkeys in peanut oil, which has a very high smoke point. If one of your guests has a peanut allergy, that poor kid is gonna have a vegan Thanksgiving whether he or she wants one or not.
I’m not really fond of the turkey bag method. It works, but because it seals in the moisture you pretty much wind up with a boiled turkey.
The other alternative method you might want to consider is a pellet grill, like a Traeger or a Pit Boss. Because these are basically ovens anyway, they work really well for turkeys and some people cook two or three turkeys in one load. If you have one of these, cherry and maple pellets are the best ones to use.
I've been thinking about the retired officers who did January 6th
There’s a common feeling here that people like Michael Flynn and the pilot who was convicted yesterday of entering the Capitol with flex cuffs on January 6th: they should be recalled to active duty and court martialed.
I don’t want that, and neither do you.
10 USC 1161(a) gives the President of the United States the authority to drop from the rolls of the service any commissioned officer who is convicted of a felony in a civilian court and sentenced to prison. The effect of being dropped from the rolls is to completely erase any evidence you were ever in the military. Civilian lawyers who specialize in Uniformed Code of Military Justice defense consider this an administrative death penalty. Rather than “you were a terrible person so we’re going to issue you a really bad discharge and send you on your way,” this is “you were a terrible person so we’re going to create a 30-year hole in your personal history.”
And here’s the best part: it’s an administrative action, and it can’t be rescinded. President Biden can sit at his desk on his last day in office six years from now and turn these pricks into unpersons without having to involve the highly overloaded military justice system whatsoever. Because it is so severe and unusual the President is the only one with the authority to do it.
Who would have ever expected before Tuesday...
…that the “red wave” would have been the one that washed Donald Trump out to sea?
More good news: Jason Crow reelected
Jason Crow, representing Colorado's sixth district, beat Republican Steven Monahan.
Rep. Crow was once known as Ranger Crow. He did three terms in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne and 75th Rangers. During the insurrection Ranger Crow took charge of locking down the chamber so the Trumpists couldn't get in before everyone got to safety.
Just as he served three terms in Afghanistan, in January he will begin his third term in Congress.
Wonderful news in Montana
This year Montana got a second House seat. The contest is between Democrat Monica Tranel and Republican Ryan Zinke, a well-known crook.
With 31 percent of precincts reporting, Tranel is beating Zinke 53.2/43.1.
While Montana is a screamingly-red state, they elect Democrats to high office on a fairly regular basis - one of their current senators is a Democrat, and they've had quite a few Democratic representatives and governors.
Folks, I think we're going to hold both houses. It's going to be a squeaker, but we'll be okay in the end. The Republic will be saved!
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