Two Crabapple Sourdough Loaves

This will be a little rushed because I have some errands to run.

After rising for about five hours in the pans, the two crabapple loaves went into a 350 degree (F) oven for 35 minutes. I scored each loaf with a razor blade, lengthwise along the top. The loaves switched places in the oven and turned halfway around after fifteen minutes of baking (well, they didn't do it themselves: I did it).

The bread smelled great almost as soon as it went into the oven: sweet, sour, toasty, fermented. When it came out, I did the thump-check (tapping the bottom of the loaf to see if it sounds hollow, which supposedly means it's done), took the loaves out of the pans and wrapped them in a cotton cloth on a wire rack to cool. After half an hour (well, twenty minutes... maybe fifteen) I took the more beautiful of the two loaves and cut five slices off for my lunch: one plain, one with butter, one with butter and cherry tomatoes, one with cheddar and cherry tomatoes, and one with butter and maple syrup. VERY GOOD. The bread was still pretty hot, and moist enough inside that I'm not sure it was really all-the-way cooked. I've never quite trusted that thump-check. Also, I was pretty careful to keep the scores shallow-- around a quarter-inch-- and I think that was a mistake; one score never really opened, allowing the bread to tear while baking along a side corner, and the other opened WIDE along the score line, tearing more than I wanted it to.

On the campaign-finance thing: of course, it's more complicated than I thought (and almost certainly still more complicated than I now think, having educated myself on Wikipedia). As far as I can tell, the basic argument against reform is this: restrictions on how much money people can give to political campaigns, and on advertising for political causes, infringe on those people's right to free speech. I suppose that's true-- but in effect, it means that most people are denied a "right" granted to anyone with enough cash. That is, the right to speak one's mind isn't quite the same thing as the right to speak one's mind on prime-time national television. Is it?