Take your pick.  The first is now-confirmed Treasury Secretary (yes, the guy who is in charge of the IRS and Treasury for the entire nation) Tim Geithner’s tax bill that he says he forgot to pay and the second is Tom Daschle’s tax bill that he says he forgot to pay.  Daschle is the soon-to-be new Health and Human Services Secretary.

$50,000 lapse of memory

In a country where many people don’t make $50,000 per year, let alone $100,000, these guys owe taxes of these enormous amounts?  How much did they have to earn to miss paying this much?

$100,000 lapse

No matter, they are being confirmed and heralded as the Captains of Change that we have all been looking for.  They are not change for the better but rather either incredibly naive when it comes to money or greedy and deceptive.  Either way they are not the men that should be running our country, but both of them are, chosen by President Obama for these leadership roles in his new administration.

Whether Democrat or Republican, I want leaders who are honest, just, courageous, and selfless; we’ve had them before, and we as American citizens must act with our votes to truly change things and demand virtuous men and women to serve us.

Hat tip to Sheila Liaugminas.

Update 2/1/09: It looks like Daschle’s bill has increased upon more scrutiny to $128,000 and now even to $140,000–but hey, what’s a few tens of thousands of dollars between friends?  Geithner’s I recall was $35,000 originally before increasing to $50,000.

Update 2/2/09: It is now up to $146,000 for Daschle.

This year Katie and I are getting serious about our garden.  Last year it was a flop, excepting the herbs, garlic, cucumber (thanks Trimborns) and okra (thanks Kingsleys).

I realized that our current seed-starting method, directly sowing outside in the garden, is not the best way to germinate seeds.  It is the easiest, which I like, but many never germinate because conditions are not favorable enough (light, water, heat), and even those that do often succumb to “damp off”, where fungi attack the little plant and kill it.

I did more research and am now going to with the “baggy + coffee filter method” to germinate seeds, then transplant them into small seed trays with a “grow-light” I am making myself from some Home Depot lighting materials, then hardening them off by setting them outside for a while each day before finally transplanting them into the garden.

Additionally, we are going all in with the homesteading idea and I just bought some awesome-sounding heirloom seeds from Baker Creek farms, which I had read about in my Countryside journal (the magazine for modern homesteading).

They have things that most of us have never heard of like yellow and purple tomatoes that have been grown in a family’s garden in Italy for 500 years–these seeds aren’t the commercial varieties that are hybridized for common size and appearance and production and taste but rather have lots of unique characteristics that make them fun for home growers.

Here are the seeds we ordered:

Under Herbs:
Lavender
Blue Hyssop
Parsley-Giant of Italy
Common Thyme

Under Peppers:
Corno di Toro Rosso
Quadrato d’Asti Rosso

Summer Squash:
Striata d’Italia
Tatume

Tomato:
Red:
Pantano romanesco
Principe Borghese
Yellow:
Plum Lemon yellow tomato

Yellow tomato

Melons
European:
Charentais

My Melon

Cucumber:
Thai Green

Winter Squash:
Butternut Rogosa Violina Gioia

Tell me that doesn’t sound cool?

My friend Kennon tipped me off to some pork in the stimulus package, which, if passed, I need to get in on:  Honey Insurance.

$150 million for something called “honey insurance,” which is described as money to “provide emergency relief to eligible producers of livestock, honey bees and farm-raised fish to aid in the reduction of losses due to disease, adverse weather or other conditions, such as blizzards and wildfires, as determined by the secretary”

Testimony before the committee: “We had adverse weather last year with a drought in the central Texas area, resulting in a harvest of zero pounds of honey from our apiary and, quite frankly, bringing us to the point of starvation.  Mr. Secretary, I humbly request that Pointe 17 Acres be eligible for a modest portion of this $150 millon.”

It appears that, this time, our Holy Father is working toward unity with the Traditional Anglican Communion.–that’s 400k Anglicans, folks.  What a week, with an invitation to the SPX bishops into full communion and now this!  Unity within the Body of Christ!  Hurray.  Check out the full story on American Papist; it’s the post titled “Rumor.”

And, some naysayers predicted he would be a stuffy Pope.  Shows what they know.

The Democrats are passing their pork-barrel stimulus package giving unfathomable billions of our dollars to the most ridiculous and immoral activities.

E.g.

$2.7B in NIH grants which would be targeted to among other things embryonic stem cell experimentation. (Page 56)

$3 Billion for Prevention & Wellness Programs, Including $335 million for STD Education and Prevention — Recent government expenditures in this area include a transgender beauty pageant in San Francisco that advertised available HIV testing and an event called “Got Love? – Flirt/Date/Score” that taught participants how “to flirt with greater finesse.”

$4.19 billion open to ACORN. The Pelosi-Reid bill makes groups like ACORN eligible for a $4.19 billion pot of money for “neighborhood stabilization activities.”

This is just the tip of it.  Welcome to the Change you have been hoping for.

President Obama nixed the hundreds of millions of dollars in the “stimulus” package that was intended to fund contraception for Americans.  Devin reported on it earlier, here.  I still feel sick inside thinking about the hundreds of millions of dollars we are giving ourselves in debt–and giving to our children–but, thanks be to God–our new President heard loudly from conservative forces assembled on Capitol Hill.  Democracy (well, republic, actually), you work.

…one giant leap for a Tobias.

Tobias crawled for the first time today!

It was not really repeated, so it can only be called the first step toward crawling, but there was an object out of his reach, and he went up on his knees and then move-lunged forward and advanced several inches, netting him enough distance to grab the object.

Leo has been crawling for a month and a half, so we have been anxiously awaiting Tobias accomplishing the same feat, as only nervous first-time parents can await.

In Tobias’ defense, he has skipped over the “army crawl” that Leo perfected over the past month and has jumped right into the “real crawl” on hands and knees.  Hopefully he will build on his success in coming days.

I treat myself these days by reading farm blogs.  I think about our farm all the time.  I dream about looking out the kitchen window at pasture.  I long for fresh milk and homemade cheese and butter and ice cream.  Devin and I are becoming more and more serious about our timeline, God willing, especially now that we have two boys who will definitely need acreage on which to run when they begin running.  Because, wow, they are such boys.  For now, I have to be content to “farm on paper” but can’t wait for the day when I will be able to farm in earnest.

My favorite farm blogs for now: The Beginning Farmer, Nature’s Harmony, and Franciscan Family Farm (they have a dog named Brother Bernardo–how awesome is that?).

Pandora music blasting Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.  Parchment paper chilling my shortbread dough.  Arbonne RE facial products.  It’s the little things that help me feel like I’m still an woman whose seen the world and received an education.  I can’t leave the house very often these days, so thanks be to God for bringing the world to me.

“Let those poor go to the prisons and the Union workhouses.  And if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

You may be puzzling over who made this statement.  Was it Scrooge or was it Sen. Nancy Pelosi?

Well, you would be right in either case, as you may know if you have been following the latest news about what Democrats want to put in the $800 billion (or is it over $1 trillion now?) “stimulus package”.

Sen. Pelosi boldly proclaimed her idea about some $80 billion going to “family planning”, that euphemism that we all know means Planned Parenthood, abortion, contraception, and sterilization, especially for poor people.  Why?  Because, you see, people are expensive and when you can finally come to view human beings as a good utilitarian, you will realize that they are a big drain on people like us who happen to be the ones alive right now and who get to make decisions to kill or let live the unfortunate unborn human beings or useless elderly persons that take our money and prevent us from buying our second vineyard in California.

We need to give $80 billion of our money to Planned Parenthood (and ACORN by the way), like we need a hole in our head.

There has been backlash by many faithful people against Sen. Pelosi and this nefarious idea of hers, so much that even Pres. Obama seems to be fearful of endorsing it, so we must hope and pray that this money does not get into the stimulus, and if it does, that the stimulus package be roundly rejected.  It already is suspect from what I have read is going into it.

Pray that Scrooge and those that think like him have a conversion.