I have updated the complete restaurant listings for each of the following towns – with many new links – (well worth bookmarking)
and lots of new listings in
These are the most comprehensive listings, with links, available anywhere.
Jonathan Kantrowitz
Political activist, health nut
Archive for August, 2011
Right Wing Lies Exposed
Great post from Daily KOS: Three Charts To Email To Your Right-Wing Brother-In-Law
Here are two of them (see all 3, with explanations, further right-wing lies exposed, and links here)
Messages from God?
Michelle Bachmann says it’s “cut spending”:
“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’
Glenn Beck says it’s “store food”:
How many warnings do you think you’re going to get, and how many warnings do you deserve? This hurricane that is coming thorough the East Coast, for anyone who’s in the East Coast and has been listening to me say ‘Food storage!’ ‘Be prepared!’ […] If you’ve waited, this hurricane is a blessing. It is a blessing. It is God reminding you — as was the earthquake last week — it’s God reminding you you’re not in control.
Why can’t these conservative nut-cases get their messages straight?
Pat Robertson also knows a thing or two about messages from God:
“It seems to me the Washington Monument is a symbol of America’s power. It has been the symbol of our great nation. We look at the symbol and we say ‘this is one nation under God.’ Now there’s a crack in it … Is that a sign from the Lord? … You judge. It seems to me symbolic,” Robertson said.
He cited Matthew’s Gospel, which mentions an “upheaval in the earth” as a sign of the End of Days. The earthquake is just a “birth pang” of the world to come, Robertson explained.
It’s not the first time Robertson has gone all religious over a natural disaster. He said the earthquake that rocked Haiti and killed 200,000 people in 2010 was a result of a “pact to the devil,” and he suggested Hurricane Katrina was sparked by legal abortion.
In the wake of 9/11, Robertson had a now (in-)famous exchange with the late Jerry Falwell in which the two religious leaders suggested that the United States “deserved” the attacks for its tolerance of secularism, gays, abortion, feminists and pagans.
New Restaurants – Fairfield, Westport, Stratford
Fairfield
Bon Appetit Creperie
Chipotle Mexican Grill Whole Foods Center
Mandarin Restaurant Black Rock Turnpike near Pizza Palace
Chili 2445 Black Rock Turnpike replacing Lucy’s Kitchen
Tabouli Grill 3381 Post Road Southport, replacing Ole Mole
Westport
Pane e Bene 1620 Post Road East, Westport. 203-292-9584
My wife and I ate here last week (outside, which we love). A little pricey, but great food, service and ambience.
Angelo Capponi and Henry Lopez have a concise vision for what they want their new Westport restaurant, Pane e Bene, to be about: fresh and seasonal.
Located at 1620 Post Road East, Pane e Bene is a tiny treasure box of a restaurant, tucked in at the end of a strip of stores. To be honest, there have been more than a few restaurants in this spot, which some would say is a cursed location. The last restaurant to occupy the space was Vietnamese. Before that, Mexican. But Capponi and Lopez aren’t daunted by the locale’s past and are ready to breathe new life into the eastern end of Westport.
“We had the opportunity to bring our mark to this side of town,” said Capponi. “This is a beautiful dream come true.” Both men previously worked at Tarantino’s, near the Westport Railroad Station, for over a decade.
Stratford
Parker. Eatery & Bar: 7365 Main St. (203) 212-3200
Whizzing by on Route 110, you might not notice the name Parker among a long list of businesses in the Stratford Oronoque Plaza. But, owner Patrick Fahey made sure upon walking in, customers will have an unforgettable experience.
“We are the diamond in the rough,” Fahey, 32, of Trumbull, said of his restaurant — Parker. Eatery & Bar — that opened last November.
Fahey started with a design on a napkin and after watching a lot of DIY network, gutted the former Grille & Bar Restaurant and rebuilt it himself.
With vintage Thomas Edison light fixtures, concrete bar and exposed pipes the American-style eatery gets a modern industrial twist. “Since we opened, people are constantly coming in and they’re shocked with what we did with the place,” Fahey said. “It’s fun to see their reaction when they walk in.”
Vazzy’s of Stratford 3355 Main St , Stratford , CT 06614 | 203-375-2776
A special ceremony was held Tuesday to celebrate the newly remodeled Vazzy’s of Stratford.
What began as a deli in 1997 before switching to a full-service restaurant two years later now features a new bar and three flat-screen TVs. Forty-five seats have been added to bring the total capacity to 120. The restaurant has expanded into a space that was formerly used as a chiropractic facility and offers a completely remodeled interior.
Mr. Obama, with 25 million Americans hurting, will you fight — really fight! — to put jobs at the top of the national agenda?
From two time Pulitzer award winning journalist NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, in The New York Times:
….Unless more people are working, paying taxes and making mortgage payments, it’s difficult to see how we revive the economy or address our long-term debt challenge. While debt is a legitimate long-term problem, the urgent priority should be getting people back to work. America now has more than four unemployed people for each opening. And the longer people are out of work, the less likely it is that they will ever work again.
President Obama is saying the right things lately about creating jobs. But he is saying them far too meekly, and his jobs agenda seems anemic — while the Republican Congress is saying the wrong things altogether.
There are no quick fixes to joblessness, but Washington could temporarily make federal money available to pay for teachers who are otherwise being laid off. We could increase spending on service programs like AmeriCorps that have far more applicants than spots.
We could extend the payroll tax cut, which expires at the end of December. Astonishingly, Republicans in Congress seem to be lined up instinctively against this basic economic stimulus. Could the Tea Party actually favor tax reductions for billionaires but not for working Americans? Could we have found a tax increase the Republican Party favors?
Mr. Obama, with 25 million Americans hurting, will you fight — really fight! — to put jobs at the top of the national agenda?
Answer to The American President Trivia Question
Posed here:
Ridiculous Rick and The American President
By the way, at the end of the movie, the last line of dialogue is seasonally inappropriate. Can you explain why?
The president has been trying to give his girl friend flowers for some time. at the end of the movie, just before he goes in to give the State of the Union speech he gives her a huge bouquet of long-stem roses. When she asks how he manged it, he says “it turns out i have a Rose Garden.”
However the State of the Union speech is given in January, when roses are not in bloom in Washington, DC.
Chris Shays and Abu Ghraib
Great essay at Connecticut Political Junkie by Sarah Darer Littman on Chis Shays:
Remembering Why CT Ousted Chris Shays
Here’s how Shays “lost it” according to Ms. Littman:
Frankly, I think it was Iraq that did it. The cognitive dissonance required for a former conscientious objector to become such a fierce, unwavering supporter of a pre-emptive war against another sovereign country clearly proved too much.
Shays became obsessed with Iraq – visiting the country 21 times at taxpayers’ expense…
By October 2006, Shays appeared to have totally lost it, when he claimed at a debate that Abu Ghraib was not torture, it was a “sex ring”. He went on to assert that the US was following the Geneva Conventions (um, “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” anyone?) and even more bizarrely, blamed the media for covering the story. Darn that pesky old First Amendment! So inconvenient for one’s political narrative in a tough election battle.
Read more about the “sex ring” here, if you have the stomach for it:
The Non-Recovery Recovery
More words (and a picture) of wisdom from Paul Krugman:
I usually illustrate the unrecovery using the employment-population ratio, but here’s an alternative, the ratio of real GDP to the CBO estimate of potential (which is the level consistent with stable inflation, not the absolute maximum the economy can produce):
Does that look like a solid if slow recovery? Of course not.
Ideally, the realization that the economy is not healing would spur the Fed to take the kind of action Bernanke recommended a decade ago when Japan was similarly in a long-term trap.
