Awesome Toffee

I thought I'd share my awesome toffee recipe in time to make it for the holidays. My mom's ex taught it to me about 20 years ago, but since she had to email me recently to get a copy of it (and I didn't even get a 'thanks for taking the time to write it down for me') and I have made it so many times that I can now make it from memory, I'll call it my own.

A pound of butter
Three cups of sugar
24 ounces of *good* chocolate - Ghirardelli at minimum. If you use Nestle or Hershey crap on this recipe, you will be wasting your time.
A bag of walnuts

Cut a piece of the butter off and use it to grease a cake pan or cookie sheet - something with walls high enough to hold the toffee. An 18x11 inch pan is a good size.

Melt the butter in a heavy pan. When it has melted, as it starts browning, add the sugar, stirring to mix. Continue gently stirring over medium to medium-high heat until the toffee has cooked to a dark brown. If there is a puddle of butter on the top, use a paper towel to soak as much of it as possible up. Pour the toffee into the cake pan. Sometimes at this point I add the walnuts so the walnuts help hold the chocolate and toffee together, sometimes I just add it to the chocolate.

Wait for the toffee to cool and harden, then rub the top with paper towels until any excess oil from the butter is gone. (If you added enough sugar in the above steps, there won't be any to mop up.) Melt the chocolate in a double boiler (or in the microwave, but be careful not to burn it). Spread over the top of the toffee. Cool until the chocolate hardens. It may have to be refrigerated.

Chicken or the egg?

On the front page of Fox News. Unsurprisingly, CNN is not leading with this either.

A roundup of Gallup health polls over the past four years finds that Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to report having excellent mental health.

The survey found that 58 percent of Republicans polled reported having excellent mental health. Only 38 percent of Democrats and 43 percent of Independents reported the same.

The question is, does this mean that insanity leads a person to liberalism, or does liberalism lead to mental illness?

From my personal experience, my mental health improved greatly when I started taking personal responsibility in my life - sure, bad things had happened to me, but that didn't mean it had to continue to affect me and my behavior. With that realization came a movement toward conservative thought, i.e. the government wasn't responsible for taking care of me and the government wasn't responsible for legislating my behavior. Those two principles go hand in hand more than I think most libs realize; if one expects the government to not tell them what to do, one must show that one is responsible enough to not be told what to do. I think most people learn this in their teenage years, I'll admit it took me a few years longer.

Can we please invade Venezuela now?

From CNN, I don't know why this isn't the lead story:

President Hugo Chavez on Friday wrapped up his campaign to push through broad constitutional changes with a broadside attack against adversaries at home and abroad -- including a threat to cut off oil exports to the United States.

If the economy is so vital to our security, and Hugo Chavez is threatening our economy, wouldn't it just make sense to get rid of Chavez now? It's certainly more politically correct than invading Brazil for its new-found oilfields, not to mention Venezuela is closer and smaller.