Gluten-Free Pretzel Coated Chicken Bites:

The combination of the seemingly endless winter and writing about the complete shit-show that is American politics has given me a serious case of the blues. I figure that one way to combat this is to take a break and share a new recipe. I’m not a gourmet by any stretch of the imagination, but I do enjoy tinkering around in the kitchen. This is a recipe that I came up one day when a bit of inspiration struck me.

I know that gluten-free dieters finally have access to things like breaded chicken tenders, but so far I haven’t really found any that I’m crazy about. I came up with this idea when I realized that if you crushed up a bag of gluten free pretzels, they would make a decent batch of bread crumbs. This isn’t really a replacement for the deep fried nuggets that I grew up with, but I think it turned out pretty well.

Ingredients:

-3 chicken breasts cut into medium sized pieces 
-1 bag of gluten-free pretzels crushed (I used the bowtie variety, but I think that pretzel rods would actually work better. Also the Live-G Free pretzels at ALDI are really reasonably priced, especially compared with other gluten-free bread crumbs or attempting to make them yourself from a loaf of gluten free bread) 
-1 cup of Greek yogurt with honey
-2 TBS of yellow mustard
-2 TPS of Lawry’s Seasoning Salt

Crush a bag of gluten-free pretzels (I’ve found that placing them in a freezer bag first works pretty well). Coat cut chicken pieces with mixture of yogurt, mustard, and seasoning salt. Place coated chicken pieces into the freezer bag of crushed pretzels and shake until chicken is covered with pretzel coating. Cover a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and spray with non-stick cooking spray. Place chicken pieces on cookie sheet and bake for 30 minutes at 425 degrees. I’ve found that the chicken pieces go really well with a honey mustard dipping sauce.

If Parody Isn’t Dead, It’s Certainly Endangered:

Yesterday I mocked New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s pandering to the anti-vaccination movement. Later that same day, Republican, Kentucky Senator, Presidential aspirant, dangerous charlatan, and follower of Aqua Buddha Rand Paul went a step further by saying that vaccinations should be a parent’s choice and that vaccinations could lead to mental disorders. If you thought that was the bottom of the barrel when it comes to bat-shit Republican political grandstanding in service of deregulating everything in this country that isn’t a woman’s reproductive system, then clearly you must be new here.

While Paul and Christie were busy arguing for policies to reduce the herd immunity of the American populace, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was working on setting back health and sanitation in this country by about a century. During a question and answer session on Monday, Tillis reminded the audience that he favors allowing restaurants to opt out of requiring their employees to wash their hands after using the restrooms, because nothing screams FREEDOM quite like contracting dysentery. At the rate that these guys are going, sometime in mid-March some Republican official somewhere is going to start publicly advocating bloodletting as a key aspect of their proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act.

How Does The Onion Even Keep Up?

One of my favorite skits from the first season of Comedy Central’s Key and Peele involves President Obama meeting with Republican leaders and sending them into a complete tailspin complete with wild hysterics as he proposes policies they would be expected to agree with only to have them reflexively oppose him. It’s looking as if the President may actually be forced to do something similar, as even the most common sense suggestions from the White House continue to face reflexive opposition by the Republican Party.

The latest example involves an interview the President gave which aired Sunday night, in which he urged parents to vaccinate their children. This call comes on the heels of a measles outbreak, which has spread to 14 states, connected to unvaccinated children visiting Disneyland. With that as background, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to wake up Monday morning and read this headline—Chris Christie breaks with Obama on vaccines. While Christie's actual remarks don’t exactly call for parents not to vaccinate their children, he does stress “balance” between “whatever the perceived danger is by vaccine” against “what risk to public health is.”

While it is almost comical that a presumptive presidential contender is entertaining a debate on this topic in an effort to pander to some theoretical base, it does speak to a deeper problem in our culture. Many of the problems facing us such as climate change, rebuilding our infrastructure, and promoting public health rely on trust and faith in institutions. If something as basic as vaccinating our children against deadly infectious disease receives this type of pushback, what does that say about the prospects for other issues that will involve trade-offs and sacrifices? So yes, Chris Christie probably just sunk his election prospects (to the extent that they ever really existed), but this is also just one more data point in a trend that honestly has me worried/depressed/disgusted.

The Case For The Establishment

Salon’s Bill Curry article on Sunday makes the argument that progressives need their own version of the Tea Party. He claims that progressives can currently be divided into four camps: Democrats that are “ready for Hillary”, people that work with the Democratic Party and view Hillary as somewhere between a “flawed candidate” and “spawn of Satan”, those who back third party candidates because they view the Democratic Party as hopelessly compromised, and those who have given up on politics all together. He goes on to state that Democrats have become too resistant to change and that the groups need to have a debate about the way forward and hopefully return to a time when “progressives made the policies that Democrats made into laws.”

There’s something to be said for his analysis. The dividing lines of the movement seem to be about where he has placed them, and there is some historical truth to the observation that policy ideas have tended to come from outside of the formal party structure, and that progressives have relied on the Democratic Party to do the working of transforming policy initiatives into legislation. He even states that “it offers the most direct path to progressive governance” (of course, that line is immediately preceded by describing the party as a “corrupt and empty husk of an institution”). Where I’m going to have to disagree with him is the viability or even the desirability of a bizarre world faction of the Tea Party.

What I think he gets wrong is the nature of the Tea Party and where they get their power from. First, the Tea Party owes its birth to the same powerful interests that it claims to stand against; it was (and in some respects remains) an AstroTurf organization. It is true that the organization has developed into a monster that threatens the life of its creators, but pretending that the organization sprung up organically hampers any analysis of the viability of replicating it on the left. Secondly, the great strength of the Tea Party and the accompanying reactionaries that share their politics (if not their branding) is in their ability to remain uncompromising, even in the face of potential disaster. This is illustrated by the inflexible stance they took regarding the debt limit negations. Mitch McConnell famously described the negotiations as a hostage taking, and in the face of potential economic catastrophe (and yes, defaulting on the nation’s debt would have been a legitimately unmitigated disaster), they held firm and managed to force massive cuts in spending that we are dealing with to this day. After the fact, comments by the Republican lawmakers leave little doubt that they were ready and willing to pull the trigger on a gambit that would have resulted in difficult to imagine suffering for millions of people. However, it is because they are reactionaries, looking to undue the success of the New Deal and Great Society programs (some would go so far as to say they are looking to repeal the entire 20th century), that they are able to remain so uncompromising. If your goal is to destroy, you have no need to negotiate because the disaster that would result in a failure to compromise serves your interests as well.

There is simply no effective way for progressives to credibly or responsibly maintain a similar posture. The debate on the left over the Affordable Care Act public option demonstrates this difficulty. It would have been ruinous to blow up the entire bill, and the real benefits that it has brought to millions of uninsured Americans, over an insistence that the public option be included in the final bill. That is the hard truth. It is much harder to create than to destroy, and a governing system that requires consensus building and deal making will always structurally disadvantage groups trying to build civil society. The emergence and rising prominence of the reactionary right-wing simply makes this problem more acute. 

It is true that as the Republican Party has careened ever further towards outright psychosis, the Democratic Party has been drug towards the center as a defender of the status quo. To those that are angry with the Party’s response, I would ask, what is your alternative? Remaining uncompromising, and furthering the non-function (as opposed to simple dysfunction) of government is no way to convert the people that have abandoned politics. Tacking further to the left and risking the fracture of the body politic would be an even worse outcome. To those that disagree, I ask, what is your theory of change? Is the collapse of the current order likely to bring about any of the progress that you seek? Keep in mind, that it is the opposition that is stockpiling firearms and food. As frustrating as the realization may be, it is quite likely that we are simply stuck playing defense in the intermediate term, attempting to limit the damage that the vandals that have taken over the Republican Party can accomplish (I know playing defense isn’t sexy, but no one ever said living in a democratic republic is always fun). That isn’t to say that there aren’t policy goals worth pursuing; improvements to the ACA, instituting maternity and sick leave, rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, establishing a higher minimum wage and promoting unionization are all worthwhile goals. None of those polices are worth giving up what we already have; a country relatively free of political violence, with functioning (albeit crumbling) infrastructure. The far right is perfectly willing to abandon that, and if what we have dissolves, it will be elements of those factions that stand to benefit. So to those that say that progressives need their own version of the Tea Party, I emphatically respond—No, we really don’t.

Return to TV Land

I’m going to take a short break from political writing and do my version of the happy dance. Wednesday night (Thank you, DVR) marked the return of FX’s critically acclaimed drama The Americans. Honestly, this is probably my favorite show on television right now, and when coupled with offerings like Justified and American Horror Story, I think it’s safe to say that Chuck Saftler’s crew at FX has successfully redefined what a show on broadcast cable can be. 

While The Americans hasn’t garnered the type of ratings that other juggernauts of television’s renaissance have attained, I would stack up its storytelling, acting, and production values with anything else out there. Also, Keri Russell has managed to effectively shed any of her remaining delicate flower baggage remaining from her stint as Felicity and stake a serious claim to being one of, if not the, most badass woman on television. It’s not the type of show that you can just drop into, but I would seriously recommend grabbing the first two seasons on DVD and playing some catch-up.