sisu

"The ladders are put away for the winter"

"The ladders are put away for the winter," Tuck announced triumphantly this morning after the hell of oiling the gutters at the southwest corner of the house yesterday (above at the top of a 30-foot ladder in the high winds of the second story of our Greek Revival house). Now on to washing windows from inside. The old boy has EARNED it.

"A Mexican migrant to the U.S. is five times more productive than one who stays home. Why is that?" asks Ronald Bailey in a Wall Street Journal commentary, finding the answer in a World Bank study, "Where is the Wealth of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century." A few meaty excerpts from Bailey's commentary (available to WSJ subscribers only) and then a few comments about why Pope Benedict XVI should read the study:

[The study] began by defining natural capital as the sum of nonrenewable resources (including oil, natural gas, coal and mineral resources), cropland, pasture land, forested areas and protected areas. Produced, or built, capital is what many of us think of when we think of capital: the sum of machinery, equipment, and structures (including infrastructure) and urban land.

But once the value of all these are added up, the economists found something big was still missing: the vast majority of world's wealth! If one simply adds up the current value of a country's natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there's no way that can account for that country's level of income.

The rest is the result of "intangible" factors -- such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."

Bailey's words stirred up the embers of something worrisome that had been smoldering on the back burners of our mind of late re Papa Ratzi, the Pope who loves cats and Mozart and has been the subject of dozens of awestruck blogposts here. We had been getting a lot of Google Alerts (having put ourselves on a list to receive notice of news and blog commentary on Pope Benedict) asserting the Holy Father had been articulating a moral -- or more accurately, an immoral -- equivalence between Marxism and capitalism. We were put in mind of something The Anchoress had said awhile back about taking anything the MSM says about Benedetto with a grain of salt. But of course. We take everything the MSM says about anything with a grain of salt. In the case of the Holy Father, we had reveled over the apoplexy of the dictatorial relativist Left upon his election to the Throne of St. Peter back in April of 2005. Poking around in cyberspace this afternoon, we lucked upon Robert A. Sirico's May 7th essay "Does the Pope Blast Capitalism?" Sirico is president of the Acton Institute -- among the exalted ones listed on the WSJs "Our Favorite Sites" -- whose mission statement avers its aim "to promote a free, virtuous, and humane society" by integrating "Judeo-Christian truths with free market principles" [via Against the Grain]: Unless you're a Jihadi, what's not to like?:

“Pope's New Book Criticizes Capitalism” said the Associated Press. It was speaking of Jesus of Nazareth, the hot selling book that Pope Benedict XVI began writing before he was elected Pope. Now it is big news and selling in the millions.

The Boston Globe, MSNBC, Fox News, Miami Herald, and a hundred other outlets repeated the claim that the book knocks capitalism. He reportedly says that capitalism inflicts a kind of cruelty on people.

Now, in reading these stories, my first reaction was: What is meant here by capitalism? If by capitalism we mean a system where the elites own the wealth and the poor exist in a servile condition, yes, that sounds cruel. But if we mean the free economy, it is another matter entirely. The free economy (and you can call it capitalism if you want) has been the number one source of material liberation for the poor the world over.

Try telling that to the journalistas. As with military science, the gatekeepers whose self-appointed task is to put the feet of the powers that be to the fire know next to nothing about economics. Truly there is something rotten in the state of American public education.

Update: Dr. Sanity links with Carnival of the Insanities.

"What it is like to be a lady"

Girls just wanna have fun. Get over it. Miss Grimke, proprietress of something unpleasant called Drew Gilpin Faust Fan Club presumes to be our better.

"Drew Gilpin Faust is a Girl Scout and a lady," writes Miss Grimke re the new Harvard President in snide comments to our post "I love watching Harvard sink into the swamp of mediocrity," our initial response in the deep dark gloom of a New England winter to the pc feminazi gal who rode in on the tattered coattails of Larry Summers's "voluntary castration" last year. Miss Grimke, proprietress of Drew Gilpin Faust Fan Club, is pleased to instruct us re our own inadequacies:

She understands better than you Yankee women what it's like to be a lady. You are just reading her writing so that you can pick it apart and try to show that you are smarter than she is. Bless your hearts you try.

Oh my. What a lady you are, Miss Grimke. In our day, the definition of a lady was someone who would never insult another person unintentionally* Oh, we get it.

*Thanks to Barry in the comments for correcting our original misspelling of "unintentionally," which gave the opposite meaning to that intended.

A spider's work is never done

While we were having breakfast early morning, so was this European garden spider (x3), AKA Cross Spider (Araneus diadematus). She was just finishing up the arachnid version of Jimmy Dean Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick -- prey nabbed earlier and packaged in silk for "a hearty breakfast or snack that's not only filling but easy to eat and enjoy" -- when we caught this image of her hanging upside down from a rather large web about 15" in diameter suspended over a 3' span between the Rosa multiflora just outside our back door and a potted indoor Hoya that is still outside enjoying the lingering summerish weather.

"Misidentifications by non-arachnologists are the source of a very large number of false spider reports and 'scares' in the news media," writes "Seattle's renowned spider expert" Rod Crawford [via My spiders!] of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, proprietor of the multiple-eye-opening Spider Myths Site:

Why, why do people waste their time worrying about spiders? It is not spiders that are dangerous to your children; the dangerous ones are other humans!

"Spiders are not miniature vampires," declares an indignant Rod Crawford, busting the myth that "spiders do not literally eat the insects they kill" but "only suck the 'juices' or blood." Instead, the spider will "bite the prey, wrap it in silk, wait for it to die, then begin to eat," vomiting digestive fluid over the prey and chewing with the jaws' (chelicerae). Then "the fluid is sucked back into the mouth, together with some liquefied 'meat' from the prey." A chacun son goût? 

False reports and "scares" in the news media, whether of spiders or anything under the sun -- from Al Gore's "emergency" call for a "global Marshall plan" and Crisco's early-20th-century smearing of lard to George Soros's insidious funding of groups like MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion -- are, in fact, our species' stock in trade, one of the ur-themes of this blog. But that's not important right now.

A post-prandial nap in the curl of a Hoya leaf. We would never have known where Araneus diademitus spends the day had we not happened to be watching at just the moment when she finished the last mouthful of her morning meal and hurried off stage left along one of the anchor threads of her web for some shut-eye.

You may have noticed the broken threads and general disarray of the orb web in the top photograph. Apparently that's par for the course, as arachnologist Samuel Zschokke, whose research focusses on the structure and construction of orb webs, explains:

The spider usually replaces the web every night or every other night.

When it stays at the same place it reuses large parts of the anchor and frame threads, but it replaces all radii and the sticky spiral. The old web is ingested and recycled into new silk.

It turns out our spider is a film star. Four spinnerets to Zschokke's informative and awe-inspiring movies and animation iillustrating Araneus diadematus's web-construction methods and materials.

Waste not, want not. It's nature's way, not just with materials, but with labor too:

When the spider has finished the auxiliary spiral it rests for about one minute.

It is thought that this rest is required to switch silk production from the tough, non-sticky silk (which the spider has used for all parts of the web so far) to the sticky, much more elastic silk used for the sticky spiral.

After this short break, the spider turns around and starts with the construction of the sticky spiral.

A spider's work is never done.

Update: Modulator's work is never done either. If it's Friday, it's time for another Friday Ark, #158.

Suddenly last summer

In the countdown to supper, Tiny and Baby keep cool in the shade of the fence at the top of the eastern drive this afternoon as record high New England temperatures for this date -- 88.9° in Chelsea-by-the-Sea -- remind us of summer, even as we're already three days into fall.

The Full Harvest Moon had crossed the southern sky in the wee hours but disappeared behind the mountain range of salt across the street before dawn, just as the Chelsea Grays were bringing up the rear in their campaign for breakfast.

Mirroring each other's pose, they "bookend" for the cameras.

How many minutes did you say till supper?

"What killed lard was Crisco"

We scraped every precious bit of crust and filling out of the pie plate after serving the last full piece of Sunday's Perfect Apple Pie for dessert last night and used it tonight as topping for a dish of Rum Raisin ice cream. Babe wanted to know where the food was.

"What killed lard was Crisco, billed as a healthy and hygienic alternative," writes Matthew Amster-Burton in "The Real Thing: Nothing beats lard for old-fashioned flavor." Kim Severson has more in The Trans Fat Solution re the partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (AKA trans fat) that came to dinner three generations ago -- introduced to home cooks and commercial bakeries, restaurants and hotels in 1911 -- and transformed the way America cooked, unwittingly contributing to a nation of lardbellies. In an online "book preview" Severson writes:

At the turn of the nineteenth century liquid fats were useless in a European-based culture where butter and lard were the fats of choice. But then a scientist named William Normann discovered a way to turn that relatively healthy liquid vegetable oil into something that stayed solid at room temperature . . . The result is so stable -- meaning it won't easily go rancid -- that it improves the shelf life of any food made with it.

"It will be fairly easy for restaurants and bakeries in New York to create tastier foods; it’s going to be tough for them to create foods that look good without using trans fats," writes Michael R. Eades, M.D. in Health & Nutrition, noting that "Proctor and Gamble from its earliest days touted Crisco for this very virtue," citing a book published by P & G in "1913 when Crisco was first marketed. This little book was distributed far and wide to cooks and housewives all over the country in an effort to get them to switch from butter and lard." Advertising works. Here's Crisco's own blurb re The First Crisco Cookbook: "Created to accompany the introduction of Crisco into American homes," it "helped launch an educational [propaganda?] campaign to market Crisco to homemakers who were familiar with lard and butter cooking methods, but new to the use of vegetable shortening."

It was cheaper than butter, "and, of course, Crisco is a whole lot easier and cheaper to come by than good, rendered lard," observes Severson, noting that Marion Cunningham herself, current editor/reviser of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, "swears by Crisco for pie crusts":

She's well aware of the dangers of trans fat, but she thinks the small amount one might consume in a pie crust is well worth the fool-proof nature of working with it -- especially for cooks without much experience.

After years of study, a process was discovered which made possible "the ideal fat," Crisco's 1913 promotional cook book assured housewives, "a purely vegetable product" that "solved the problem of eliminating certain objectionable features of fats in general, such as rancidity, color, odor, smoking properties when heated."

What would Fannie have made of such a development? We think she would have understood. Her classic, commonsense "Plain Paste" in the last edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book authored entirely by herself (published in 1918 and available online) called for 1/4 cup of lard and 1/4 cup of butter. Crisco was the new kid on the block back then. In later revisions like our own venerable Eleventh Edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook edited by niece-in-law Wilma Lord Perkins and published in 1965, vegetable shortening was listed alongside lard and a combination of lard and butter as a suitable fat to use in making plain pastry. Wilma Lord Perkins in her Preface explains:

Chiefly that in making any changes Aunt Fannie's own words have been the inspiration. "Could it be better?" was a regular phrase of hers . . . I have tried to take account of the many new products and techniques which make the cook's task easier. But chiefly my aim is to maintain the high standards which have characterized the book since its first edition in 1896.

New recipes have been added with caution, since many are passing fads, and my purpose is to keep the cookbook the clear and dependable basic it has always been.

We don't know whether trans fats are really as bad for our health as they say or just the latest fad to facilitate nanny-state interventions in the marketplace like Mayor Bloomberg's ban on trans fats in NYC restaurants. The "ideal fat" fad started in 1911 by Crisco's invasion of American kitchens lasted for decades. As it progressed, the national waistline, facilitated by the unstoppable advance of the fast-food phenomenon, larded up alarmingly. Severson again:

Fast food and convenience foods started to hit the market in the late 1960s and '70s, and a key ingredient in everything from TV dinners to french fries was partially hydrogenated oil. Demographic and social changes saw more single-parent families or families with two working parents, which meant less time to cook. Convenience foods and eating out became a bigger part of the American diet . . . Portion sizes increased too, leading to even more trans fat in our bellies.

Since 2006 food manufacturers in this country have been required to list trans fats along with other fats and calorie counts and such on their packages, but is the average "consumer" really paying attention? Will Crisco's misfortune be a window of opportunity for "the great misunderstood fat," non-hydrogenated lard? Amster-Burton in "The Real Thing" is on the case:

It produces flakier and tastier pie crusts than vegetable shortening, with no trans fats.

For frying, there's nothing better: chicken, potatoes or doughnuts emerge from the oil perfectly crispy, with no greasy flavor or texture . . .

Lard can be rendered from two kinds of pork fat: back fat or leaf (kidney) fat. Leaf lard, with its milder flavor and softer texture, is the best type for pie crust and pastry.

But if you're determined to make the very best lard pie crust and don't want to render your own . . . the best source I've found is Dietrich's Meats in Pennsylvania (610-756-6344). Their freshly rendered leaf lard is $2.50/pound. Shipping is about $10 for anything from one to five pounds, so go ahead and order five pounds, because the holidays are coming up, and fresh leaf lard (or a pie made with it) makes a great present.

We rendered our own batch of lard for the first time last week and were thrilled with the result but wouldn't want to get into the habit so we called Dietrich's and placed an order for 8 pounds this morning. As our sis commented during one of our recent talks, "Everything that was old is new."

Comfort food

As we quoted our crust consultant yesterday, "eye-appeal-wise, yours was the most beautiful pie I have ever seen." 321 delicious, rib-sticking calories per serving.

Following Fannie Farmer's recipe for Plain Pastry [portions and instructions available at link] yesterday morning, we cut the butter into small pieces and sliced butter and lard into the flour until the mixture was "in even bits about the size of peas," then sprinkled ice water over the mixture and stirred with a fork "until just enough has been added so that you can pat the dough lightly into a ball":

Mixing equal parts of butter and lard into the flour using the two-knives method.

We wrapped it in wax paper and chilled in the fridge a couple of hours before rolling it out and assembling our Apple Pie (See "Pie Making" and "Apple Pie" -- on pages 407-8 and 412 in our venerable 1967 Eleventh Edition pictured here -- in Miss Farmer's chapter on "Pastry and Pies" for easy-as-pie instructions on rolling out the dough, preparing the apples and baking at 425° for 50 minutes). Fannie notes that "old-fashioned cooks use their fingers and work very quickly so that the shortening does not soften." Our sis adds to the mix with her own flaky lore:

You can't mix it with your hands, like a meatloaf. You have to get that ridiculous mixture into a recognizable ball, without touching it with human hands. HAND HEAT is the enemy of a flaky crust.

I use two dinner knives to cut, set at cross purposes, but, if you have a pastry blender doo-hickey, it would probably be awesome.

Williams-Sonoma Stainless Steel Pastry Blender

Close-up of the chilled ball shows butter (golden yellow) and lard (pure white) bits maintaining their separate identities within the dough, the secret to sublime flakiness. Instead of forming a spherical ball, next time we will flatten the doughball -- as our sis does -- to allow easier breaking apart for upper and lower crust and a head start in rolling, as well as quicker chilling (and thawing if dough is to be frozen for later use).

We cut the chilled ball into two pieces for upper and lower crust but were informed later by the Mother of All Pastries that you NEVER cut your dough. You break it apart. 'Course that would require the forbidden "touching with human hands." At any rate, it didn't seem to compromise the finished product (see finished pie above and detail of crust and diners' comments in previous post).

Why on earth didn't we take a picture of the bottom crust (above) filled with the awesome mound of sliced Cortland apples from the Randall Orchard & Cider Mill in Standish, Maine "since 1906" -- recommended by Hannaford's produce man for their firmness and tartness, ideal for baking -- sprinkled with brown and white sugars, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and lemon juice and then dotted with butter? It was gorgeous. We had planned to use our Progressive Apple Peeler to prepare the apples but succeeded only in turning a test pome into a pile of apple scrap. Running out of time, we turned to Goomp's old-fashioned vegetable parer, followed by the apple corer/slicer, which gave us 8 medium slices per apple. We further sliced each of those into three, giving us a total of 24 thin slices per apple.

It's the sincerest form of flattery. When we asked Goomp and Tuck about supper, perhaps a few leftovers from our midday cookout of the usual suspects -- grilled beef and dogs, potato salad, corn, cauliflower soup -- they skipped formalities and both went straight for the pie.

Update: The News Junkie at Maggie's Farm links, pairing a photograph of his "New Hampshire chipped beef on English muffins" and home fries with our own "perfect apple pie":

As our mornings get cooler, it seems like time to begin to think about hot, heart-warming and artery-clogging All-White Breakfasts (food white in color - nothing racial). And speaking of comfort food, SISU makes a "perfect apple pie," with lard, of course. In Yankeeland, Apple Pie is traditionally for breakfast, not dessert.

If only there were some pie left over for breakfast. The first seven pieces were gone before sundown the first day. The eighth we saved for dessert the following evening. We did scrape off every last bit of crust clinging to the pan and set the bits of flaky goodness aside in an airtight container in preparation for the coming monsoon season. Waste not, want not.

Pie in the sky

"Best  pie I ever ate," says Goomp. Hats off to Miss Farmer.

The eyes have it. Apple of our eye, easy as pie. It doesn't get any better. Update during imail this evening with our pastry consultant:

We: Can you tell the difference between Crisco and lard/butter?

She: To be honest, taste-wise, no, BUT . . . eye-appeal-wise, yours was the most beautiful pie I have ever seen.

We: Does it have to do with not putting the brown paper over the crust at the start?

She: I NEVER put the brown paper bag (with eye-holes cut out :-) ) at the very start. Once the pie has been baking for about 30 minutes, and the edges of the crust appear to be browning too soon . . . That's when I go for the brown paper bag.

We had used strips of aluminun foil during the last 15 minutes or so to the same effect.

"It is satisfying to have a ball of pastry in the refrigerator"

Babe gives paws down to our first full batch of homemade lard (lower left) . . . He went in full throttle but recoiled once he had a taste. Cruelty to animals?

"My advice would be to check out Fannie Farmer," counsels our pie-crust consultant, Mother of All Pastries and Keeper of the Secret Recipes. Which we did, and how sweet it is. "Perfect pastry is a triumph . . . It is satisfying to have a ball of pastry in the refrigerator, ready for hurry-up desserts, cocktail snacks and meat or chicken pies," counsels Fannie:

Plain Pastry

Measure accurately until you can judge by the "feel." Work very quickly and with a light touch. Sift into a mixing bowl

2 cups pastry flour or 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp salt

Add 2/3 cup vegetable shortening or lard or 1/3 cup lard and 1/3 cup butter. [YES!!!]

Mix (cut in) with a pastry blender, blending fork or two knives (one in each hand) until the mixture is in even bits about the size of peas. (Old-fashioned cooks use their fingers and work very quickly so that the shortening does not soften.)

Put in a cup 1/3 cup ice water

Sprinkle it over the flour by tablespoonfuls, stirring it in with a fork until just enough has been added so that you can pat the dough lightly into a ball. Handle the dough as little as possible and do not knead it.

Wrap the dough in wax paper and roll and chill it. Enough for a 9-inch two-crust pie or a one-crust pie and some tarts.

It took hours, running back and forth between computer and stove when the timer went off every 10 minutes, and now we are wicked proud of our totally awesome mound of pure, unhydrogenated lard. Tomorrow the world pie.

Some tarts? Yes! Girls just wanna have fun. We've got the lard (above photo) in the larder. A pie -- either apple or pumpkin -- is in the offing. Words and pictures and calorie counts to come.

Update: Pajamas Media links.

Some pigs are more equal than others*

"Lard: The New Health Food?" The skinny re the layer of fat found along the back and underneath the skin of a hog is coming soon to a Cold Turkey Cookbook near you. Watch this space. Pictured above, our first trial batch -- water-filtered drippings from a pan of fried bacon -- of what food writer and lard fan Corby Kummer calls "The great misunderstood fat."

"Your editorial is a breath of fresh air in the overwhelmingly repressive atmosphere of elite opinion that prevails in academia, but . . ." we wrote in the comments to a Harvard Crimson editorial [via Pajamas Media] that rightly criticizes UC-Davis's recent snub of Larry Summers but seems to be in denial re Harvard's own climate of fear lite that led to then President Summers's humiliation and resignation -- termed "voluntary castration" by Dr. Sanity -- last year. Citing our own "Chomsky, Moore, Fisk: Pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant" post of last year, we pointed out the error of their ways:

I do have to disagree with your positing a moral equivalence re thought control on the part of "progressives" vs. those on the other side of the political spectrum. The left has infiltrated academia up to its ears. President Summers's kangaroo court and ouster from Harvard itself was a travesty worthy of the Maureen Stantons [Stanton is the professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at UC-Davis who started an online petition drive "to put the kibosh on Summers’s impending speech"] of this world.

"More generally, the quashing of Summers’s speech points to a troubling trend in academia," wrote the Crimson editors sensibly, getting the first part right:

Increasingly, the unrestricted marketplace of ideas that must form the heart of any university worth the name is being poisoned by a perverse pressure to conform truth to political agenda and stifle any speaker who espouses uncomfortable or inconvenient opinions.

So far, so good, but then they put their denial caps back on:

In the present case, the culprits are academics who fashion themselves as progressives eager for social justice and tolerance, but the other side of the political spectrum is no less guilty in others.

Say what? Everyone knows academia leans heavily left, routinely intimidating into silence those who don't toe the party line, even as it flirts with tyrants. Crimson Commenter Stephen W. Stanton detects another blind spot in the editors' world view:

Focusing on Summers' credentials as a progressive only panders to the troublemakers. Don't try to make Summers more palatable because he is "one of your own" on the Left. Focus on your main point . . . Academic "freedom" does not exist where opposing views cannot be heard.

Another commenter, haha, perhaps unwittingly exemplifies the mindset:

As a university president it's your JOB to be politically correct and not offend a subset of people -- it makes the university look bad.

Haha's blind acceptance of patent nonsense calls to mind that punchline of all punchlines from the 1940 Bob Hope classic "Ghost Breakers":

Richard Carlson character: A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.

Bob Hope character: You mean like Democrats?

Watch the video here.

**Blogtitle taken from Orwell's Animal Farm, "a comment on the hypocrisy of governments [and by extension, academic communities] that proclaim the absolute equality of their citizens but give power and privileges to a small elite."

"At the intersection of vanity and liberalism"

"A snail fisking (red noses say it all) from our dead-tree files," we captioned this archival clipping of "a New York Times photo series of Bubba, Hillary! and Newt on the two-for-the-price-of-one couple's second inauguration day in January of 1997." As we've written here before, "Blogging is nothing new. Before the glory of the internet, we were madly clipping and underlining and annotating the margins of tree-based publications.

"Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life [In her case, Bubba comes to mind. --ed], Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer," wrote the late Michael Kelly in "Saint Hillary," a May 23, 1993 NYT Sunday Mag cover story dubbed by Peggy Noonan a decade later as "the first and still definitive Hillary Clinton take-down":

Do you remember it, with Mrs. Clinton posed all in white, ethereal and serene? Her people must have been sure it would be a Timesian puff. It was instead a hard-eyed look at the intersection of vanity and liberalism. No one denied it was brilliantly reported and written with sly spirit, but it was controversial in high end journalistic circles because it did not exactly reflect the reporting of a liberal mind at work.

The same artist -- Anita Kunz -- who apparently illustrated that NYT mag cover of "Saint Hillary" back in 1993* created the above illustration, "Girls will be Girls," for the July 30, 2007 cover of The New Yorker (via Tennessee Guerilla Women). “Based on their clothing, none of those women are physically free," Kunz told The Phoenix. “I’ve had lots of reaction that baffles me. I’ve been called anti-woman, a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American, you name it!” Like old age, moral relativism is not for the faint of heart.

At the time the article appeared back in 1993, we snail-blogged it with much underlining and feverish scribbling in the margins and passed it around to friends for comments. Our original copy got lost in the shuffle, but the article was reprinted in Kelly's posthumous Things Worth Fighting For, and now -- despite apparent efforts by the higher powers that be to repress it -- meaty excerpts of the entire** "Saint Hillary" article is available online thanks to blogger Winston Churchill of Semper Fido, linked by The Anchoress, who reports:

Can’t seem to come up with it on the search engines, and it is not in Nexis-Lexis. While letters to the paper about the article may be found, it doesn’t seem to be in the NY Times archive.

We'd noticed the same thing during a febrile Google search yesterday -- not our first, as we've blogged about "Saint Hillary," working without tools, before. While an illustration by Anita Kunz of Hillary as Saint Joan of Arc that had appeared inside the magazine is available online [via, again, The Anchoress], the front cover image of Hillary "all in white, ethereal and serene" remains elusive.*** We've left a comment at the artist's website asking for a link to said image.* Meanwhile, speaking of letters to the editor about the article, we loved this comment from William B. Cullimore of New Durham, NH dated June 20, 1993:

The only people I've heard who talk like Mrs. Clinton are lunatics, religious nutcakes and aspiring dictators. A "unified-field theory of life"? The marriage of capitalism and statism? Making the Western world anew? And she doesn't even blink! Give me a break.

Mitt Romney said very much the same thing in his courtly, good-natured way in a WSJ Commentary on "HillaryCare Version 2.0" -- AKA "HillaryCare's New Clothes" -- this morning:

Some of the details have changed, but at the heart of Sen. Hillary Clinton's new health-care proposal are the same flaws that sunk her first version. They flow from her distrust of markets, from her distaste for profit-motivated private enterprise, and from her consequent faith that Washington knows best.

The Anchoress seems open to the idea of meeting Hillary halfway based upon the Michael Kelly portrait:

The Hillary here is so much more interesting than the Hillary we have come to know in that past 15 years of fluffy pieces in the mainstream press and the caricatures from the far right. Michael Kelly seems to have caught Hillary in all of her complexities.

Perhaps, but would you really want someone who gets excited about Michael Lerner's vapid "politics of meaning" to be Leader of the Free World? The News Junkie at Maggie's Farm quotes Hillary 2.0 and has the last word:

"We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can't take a sick child to the doctor?"

That is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, via Boston Globe via No Looking Backwards, glibly blowing off the foundations of the country. But heck, it's for the children. I guess children never survived until she decided to care about them. Is there a parent in America who "can't take a sick child to a doctor"? Show them to me, and we will have them arrested for neglect.

*Stop the presses! This just in, a poignant and informational response from artist Anita Kunz in her comments:

Hi Sissy. Well, the cover they ran was actually a photograph of Hillary in a white suit. My illustration was supposed to run on the cover, but they ran the photo at the last minute. Happens to me a lot! Best and thanks for the nice words. Anita

So, it wasn't a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy to prevent enquiring minds from seeing the cover image after all. Or was it? How come we still can't find the image -- let alone a NYT-sanctioned link to the article -- out there?

**Update: Winston Churchill of Semper-Fido emails with a correction:

I blog as "Semper-Fido," and I just wanted to make a note that the "Saint Hillary" article is not an excerpt, but is printed in its entirety. It is an excerpt from Mr. Kelly's book, "Things Worth Fighting For." As far as I know, [my blog] is the only place to find the article. Has been obliterated from all of the rest of cyberspace, go figure . . . can anyone say "Clinton" and "behind the scenes power"? Thank you for making note of how to find the article.

We can and we do say it often. Thank you, sir, for promulgating this important bit of anti-establishment journalism on the internet.

*** Update 12 years later on September 17, 2019:  Her loveliness, "all in white, ethereal and serene" has reappeared online: The Politics of Virtue: