I was lucky enough while commuting to catch an interview with Michael Pollan on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Science Friday (highly recommended) discussing his new book, In Defense of Food. The 35 minute interview can be listened to here or here. This looks like another terrific offering from a wonderful author.
I first learned of Mr. Pollan and his food-based investigative journalism, during another interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air. He discussed the lengths he went to for a New York Times Sunday Magazine article entitled “Power Steer” on the life of meat cows. He set about to steward a cow through it’s short life-cycle in the meat industry and the results were, well, listen to that fascinating broadcast here (51 minutes).
A blurb promoting the United Plant Savers non-profit organization was on a flap of the verbosely printed box of Golden Ginger tea I recently finished. These folks are doing a wonderful thing. Their mission is to “…preserve, conserve and restore native medicinal plants and their habitats in the U.S. and Canada.” Check out their site for media, articles and links to sources. Very cool.
(OT: I very highly recommend Traditional Medicinals’ ginger teas, esp. Ginger Aid. Get em at your locally owned health food store or websites such as VitaCost.com which I found through Google’s Product Search.)
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — In more than a decade of presiding over this state, Mike Huckabee produced a legacy like few other Republican governors in the South, surprising even liberal Democrats with his willingness to upend some of Arkansas’s more parochial traditions.
A review of his record as governor shows that, beginning in 1996, he drove through a series of changes that transformed education and health insurance in Arkansas, achievements that were never tried by most of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton.
But he is also remembered in the state for a style of governing that tended to freeze out anyone of any party who disagreed with his plans. He did not, for example, seek Mr. Clinton’s conciliatory middle, or try to court skeptical state lawmakers. Though he was considered as persuasive a speechmaker as he had been a pastor, Mr. Huckabee largely kept his own counsel — in politics, ethics and a singular clemency policy that continues to haunt him.
Against the political advice of his party and his aides, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of hundreds of convicts, including murderers, sometimes over the heated objections of prosecutors and victims’ families. He was cited five times by the state ethics commission for financial improprieties, and unapologetically accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of clothes and other gifts while he was governor.
Republicans in Arkansas, a beleaguered minority, gleefully greeted his ascendancy but wound up embittered, in many cases, over a governor who “sided with liberal Democrats,” as one put it.
Mr. Huckabee is a son of small-town Arkansas, yet he deeply angered many in his rural constituency, touching the third rail of the state’s politics by shutting down money-draining, redundant school districts in the hinterlands. Protesters rallied at the state Capitol, fearful of losing schools, football teams, and age-old identities, but the governor insisted his way was the best and the schools were closed.
He proclaimed himself a fiscal conservative, but startled legislators with his proposals to raise taxes — for roads, in 1999, and for schools, prisons and other services three years later. He sought the electoral defeat of Republicans who opposed him, according to some in the party.
A constant throughout was his presence at the microphone, the former television preacher delivering his word from the pulpit though hardly mingling in the Capitol’s marble halls.
“He would go out and stump and do his shtick and tell his jokes and charm you,” said State Senator Jimmy Jeffress, a Democrat and critic of the former governor. “He has the gift of gab. He’s the only person I know, other than Bill Clinton, who can pick up a rock and give you a 10-minute talk on it.”
This guy really deserves some props for being the only one to hold up a filibuster of the new FISA bill. This bill would have given immunity to telecomm companies for committing illegal and unconstitutional infringements upon U.S. citizens’ privacy or helping government agencies do so.
Why weren’t more of our representatives – on either side of the aisle – adamant about protecting the Constitution in this case? Do the phone companies have so much power that everyone wanted to protect them more than the people of the U.S.? Where are the congresspeople who work for us (the people)?
This seems an issue that should have been dear to conservatives. I have always understood the Republican party to traditionally be the party to protect citizens’ privacy and curb government intervention in our lives. Where are the Republicans in fighting this injustice? If the perception of what happened in the Senate is accurate, then there was only one person, a Democrat (and without much help from the other Democrats, either), who kept this bill from being passed at this time. It’ll come around again in January.
This fascinating presentation aired on the “It’s Your World” radio series released by the World Affairs Council:
Originally publishing “The Israel Lobby” as an essay in the London Review of Books in March 2006, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s analysis of the Israel Lobby and its influence on U.S. foreign policy was one of the most controversial articles in recent memory. Having deepened and expanded their argument to confront recent developments in Lebanon and Iran, Mearsheimer and Walt join the World Affairs Council for a public exchange in San Francisco, where they will discuss their contention that the material and diplomatic support provided by the United States to Israel is due largely to the political influence of a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. They argue that this lobby has a far-reaching impact on America’s posture throughout the Middle East-in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The discussion is available in streaming video via RealPlayer and in downloadable MP3 format. Note that the MP3 doesn’t have the correct file extension and the filename must be appended with “.mp3″ (without the quotes). The entire show is just over an our long and counts as college credit somewhere, I’m sure. It’s getting a bullet point on my resume no matter what. Either way, please take my word for it, it’s worth the time.
(For Windows computers, I highly recommend Real Alternative in place of the invasive RealPlayer, and Foobar2000 for playing all audio files. Mac OS-based systems will receive my enlightened recommendations once someone donates a MacBook Pro with 15.4″ LED LCD, 2.4GHz CPU, hologram projector and flux-capacitor at 1.21 Jigawatts.)
Okay/O.K. has an unexpectedly colorful history for such a simple word, springing so often from my lips and fingertips. It first appears in the northeast U.S. in the early-middle 19th century. Mostly the fault of journalists and politicians (surprise, surprise), and their wordplay antics, this word spread through our culture to eventually infect me and everyone I know.
According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, okay comes from “oll korrect,” a conscious misspelling of “all correct,” coined by Boston journalists in the late 19th century.
Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of Congress, including Utah’s entire congressional delegation, and to much of the mainstream media: “You have failed us miserably and we won’t take it any more.”
“While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss.”
“You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law.”
“You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of the sort never before countenanced in our nation’s history as a matter of official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental blunder.”
“We are here to tell you: We won’t take it any more!”
“You have acted in direct contravention of values that we, as Americans who love our country, hold dear. You have deceived us in the most cynical, outrageous ways. You have undermined, or allowed the undermining of, our constitutional system of checks and balances among the three presumed co-equal branches of government. You have helped lead our nation to the brink of fascism, of a dictatorship contemptuous of our nation’s treaty obligations, federal statutory law, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
“Because of you, and because of your jingoistic false ‘patriotism,’ our world is far more dangerous, our nation is far more despised, and the threat of terrorism is far greater than ever before.
It has been absolutely astounding how you have committed the most horrendous acts, causing such needless tragedy in the lives of millions of people, yet you wear your so-called religion on your sleeves, asserting your God-is-on-my-side nonsense – when what you have done flies in the face of any religious or humanitarian tradition. Your hypocrisy is mind-boggling – and disgraceful. What part of “Thou shalt not kill” do you not understand? What part of the “Golden rule” do you not understand? What part of “be honest,” “be responsible,” and “be accountable” don’t you understand? What part of “Blessed are the peacekeepers” do you not understand?
John C. Bogle appeared for an interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal this evening to discuss the state of capitalism in general and in the U.S. in particular. (I’ve seen this guy before somewhere, perhaps on NOW. Searching PBS.org brings up many hits, so apparently he’s been fairly active on public television.) This interview was really excellent. It’s a wonderful thing to see someone as skilled a businessman as Mr. Bogle, with his ethics and morals to all appearances fully intact and healthy, dissect and disseminate his analysis of the state of capitalism in the United States. And that’s what he did, though fairly briefly as it’s a 25 minute spot and the subject is damn complex.
A focus of the interview at the outset is this recent story about private equity firms buying nursing homes, “reducing costs”, and then selling them at a profit. Then when things go wrong, there’s no one to account for the mismanagement. They’ve taken the money and run.
And this is happening everywhere. Mr. Bogle says “My estimate is that the financial sector takes $560 billion a year out of society.” Of course, Bill Moyers asks “Where does it go?” and Mr. Bogle replies that it’s going straight into the pockets of the top 1 percent, or the top 1/10th of a percent. Those are the people who already have all the money in this county but just can’t get enough; and they get it by taking it from nursing homes, or by taking it from our soldiers in Iraq or from the Iraqis themselves, or from airline employees, or wherever. I can’t pretend not to be rabidly pissed about this or to not believe that these executive assholes own us all and run our gov’t, but I won’t mention it here in the interest of keeping this post lighthearted and factual.
According to John Bogle this is standard, modern financial practice, which I think is pretty clear. He also says it’s not sustainable - also clear. So, I found some of the most interesting things he had to say to be about the philosophy of capitalism, such as this:
“…the job of capitalism is to serve the consumer. Serve the citizenry. You’re allowed to make a profit for that. But, you’ve got to provide good products and services at fair prices. And that’s the long term, that’s what businesses do in the long term. The businesses that have endured in America have done that and done that successfully.”
I realize now that I just haven’t ever heard anyone speak of capitalism in any terms other than those waxing wank over the ideal of free markets or defining greed and selfishness and attempts to exploit others to a financial advantage, which, of course, is usually what it’s all about. I could go on, but John Bogle puts it better. Check out the video at the link above.
