2 Onions
2 Bulbs of Garlic (about 20 cloves)
2 Tablespoons Sea Salt
½ Cup Olive Oil
¼ Cup Oatstraw Tea (you may need to go to a health food store to get this)
2 Tablespoons Flax Seed
¼ Cup Red Raspberry Leaf Tea
½ Cup Quinoa
1 Cup Brown Lentils
½ Cup Sprouted Brown Lentils
2 Potatoes
10 Large Carrots
1 tsp Cumin
10 Whole Coriander Seeds
Essential Oils of Thyme and Oregano
Dried Herbs of Thyme, Oregano, and Parsley
Cook onions, garlic, and olive oil in a pot.
Add in chopped potatoes, carrots, and one Tablespoon of the sea salt.
Let this cook for a few minutes, then add in the Quinoa, and sprouted lentils. (Sprouted lentils have the highest concentration of vitamin C of any food).
To sprout lentils just cover a half cup of them with water over night. Drain in the morning and keep them wet until a ¼ inch tendril of sprout is detected. (This takes about 35 hours)
Fill a separate pot with two quarts of water to make soup stock.
Add in the peels from the garlic, flaxseed, the oatstraw, raspberry leaf tea, and the peels from the carrots and potatoes.
Bring the stock up to a hard boil for twenty minutes.
Cover the cup of brown lentils with water in a bowl.
After soaking them for a few minutes, add the lentils and the water to the soup.
After the stock is finished boiling, strain the liquid into the soup pot.
Recover the stock vegetables with another 2 quarts of water, and bring to a boil.
Once again, strain the stock vegetables and add that liquid to the pot of soup.
This ensures that the maximum amount of nutrients from the herbs will be included in the stock.
This stock is chock full of essential fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals.
Add in the ten whole Coriander seeds.
Cover the pot and let simmer for three hours.
To finish the soup, add in the drops of Essential oils of Thyme and Oregano (one or two drops of each) – Therapeutic grade oils are best, and then toss in the dried herbs.
“Don’t get absorbed in the Washington finger-pointing and intrigue,” the president told his senior advisers during a recent meeting, according to one top aide.
He “certainly let us know that we should keep our eye on the ball here and not get distracted by the games of Washington,” the aide said.
The season of turmoil, which has erupted just as Obama is pushing for final health care votes that could determine his domestic legacy, is the most vivid example of how the discipline of the campaign — which prided itself on a tight-knit culture and aides who stayed aloof from the who’s-up, who’s-down obsessions of the press and the Washington political class — has frayed under stress.
“This is what Washington does — it gets itself into a tizzy,” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said, adding that the president’s team is determined to “stay tight.” “We dismiss it for what it is. There aren’t 10 people outside of Washington who give a rat’s ass about any of this. They’ve got bigger stuff to worry about, and we’re trying to worry about that. The same people who are all in a tizzy right now are the same people who called us idiots for the better part of two years.”
Yet for all their brio, Obama’s team has been proven just as susceptible to Washington’s favorite parlor games as anyone, in a way that’s caused more tension and drama inside the White House than any particular policy or political differences.
The reason these questions have exerted such a powerful effect on the Obama story line is that much of the outside critique is grounded at least partly in reality.
Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gets criticized for biting off more than he can chew. And in fact, he manages political, policy and congressional portfolios that compete for his attention. Axelrod gets criticized for being so close to Obama for so long that he sometimes fails to appreciate and anticipate when the president’s approach isn’t resonating. And in fact, the message, which Axelrod often crafts, has been badly muddled at key points, primarily on health reform.
After the president’s historic win in 2008, his close aides might have been forgiven for thinking that the usual rules of politics didn’t apply to them — that they could rise above the Washington ways merely by saying they would. But upon taking office, they, too, quickly lapsed into old Washington habits, with several senior staffers sitting for flattering profiles and photo shoots that made them star players in Obama’s world.
And as the waters have grown choppy, some of the key players have taken to defending their actions in the press — which also contributes to a sense that Obama’s White House is getting pulled into the minute-by-minute tit-for-tat it swore to avoid.
Axelrod, a Chicago Tribune reporter for 10 years, said he can see reporters and pundits trying to detect tension between himself and Emanuel, which he maintains is nonexistent.
“Everybody’s on the same page,” Axelrod said in a telephone interview. “We’re determined not to allow ourselves to be distracted, but, rather, to do what we’re there to do. I probably spend three or four hours a day talking to Rahm. I talked to him this afternoon. There’s no back-channeling — we discuss openly our cut on things. And the truth is that 80 percent of the time, it’s the same. The best thing to do in any organization is to be open with each other.”
“…Thus the convoluted scheme the White House has mapped out. The House would first pass the Senate bill, and then pass a reconciliation bill that addresses these objections—in effect converting the process into a makeshift and unprecedented vehicle for amendments. Mrs. Pelosi can’t rope in the 216 votes she needs without an iron-clad promise of another round of Senate action.
Iron-clad promise—or double-cross? After all, the White House would much prefer the Senate bill, because by its lights the cost-control programs are tougher than what the House prefers. And from a political perspective, a bill that can be signed immediately and that the press will portray as an historic achievement is far better than the drawn-out and gory battle that would be reconciliation. Republican Senators will have many procedural knives at their disposal, and the process will force Democrats to cast further votes and spend more months debating a deeply unpopular bill.
In other words, perhaps Mr. Obama has embraced this reconciliation two-step only to renege as soon as the House gives him what he wants. While some House Democrats would be furious, they’d soon be defending the Senate bill by necessity against the GOP. The moderates who vote for it might be collateral damage, but the White House has already concluded that this is the price of building its cradle-to-grave entitlement citadel.
Mr. Obama’s closing arguments are lending credence to rank-and-file fears that they’re getting played. Democrats are telling reporters that Mr. Obama has been telling them in private meetings that his Presidency, and the party’s claim to any achievement, rests on passing a bill. With barely any mention of substance, the right bill is any bill, by any political means necessary.
The White House also announced that it now wants the House to pass the Senate bill by March 18, before Mr. Obama departs for a foreign tour in the Pacific. But this barely leaves any time for the Congressional Budget Office to score Mr. Obama’s reconciliation fixes. Then there’s House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s far-fetched suggestion to Mr. Stupak and the antiabortion bloc that Democrats can take care of their concerns in a third bill, which everyone knows will fail in the Senate if it even comes to the floor.
In this wilderness of political mirrors, anything is possible. Spooked Democrats shouldn’t be surprised if they wind up being double-crossed for the ostensibly greater good of Mr. Obama’s legacy.”
“Embattled Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) lashed out in an emotional radio appearance Sunday, accusing Dem leaders of what he suggested was an orchestrated campaign to force his resignation.
“There’s a reason that this has all happened, frankly one that I had not realized,” Massa said on WKPQ radio on Sunday. “Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it’ll pass.”
Massa addressed rumors circulating on blogs about his personal behavior, including incidents during an informal Navy ceremony in ’83 on the USS New Jersey and one that occurred in a state room later during his Navy career. He insisted he had done nothing uncommon, insisting his sin was foul language.
A complaint before the House ethics committee, he said, stemmed from a wedding Massa attended over New Years, when he made an inappropriate comment to an aide, according to Roll Call, which first reported the radio program.
Massa maintained his comments were inappropriate, but he blamed “political correctness” and accused Dems of a setup. Massa voted against health care legislation in Nov., and he has not been a reliable vote for Dem leadership. That, he said, has put a target on his back.
“When I voted against the cap and trade bill, the phone rang and it was the chief of staff to the president of the United States of America, Rahm Emanuel, and he started swearing at me in terms and words that I hadn’t heard since that crossing the line ceremony on the USS New Jersey in 1983,” Massa said. “And I gave it right back to him, in terms and words that I know are physically impossible.”
