With powerful friends like Mr. Cantor, a Virginia Republican and one of the highest-ranking members of Congress, the Israeli government was viewed by some as one of the big winners of the midterm elections.It depends on how you define "friends," and it depends on you you define "winners." Winning what, exactly? More rounds of the same? If the "friends" you want are those that tell you you're perfect in every way, when you're also part of the problem, than that's what you got. Don't you know that your real friends are those that tell you to, say, stop smoking? To put down the donut, if you've just had a heart attack?
"Thanksgiving 2003," says Kori Schake, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and big sister to Kristina, Michelle Obama's new communications director. The Schake family is so political that Kori's mother once gave her, as a birthday present, three months where she promised not to mention the Israel-Hezbollah war. In 2003, Kori went home to her liberal sister and liberal parents. "I was exhausted. And everyone wanted to talk about Iraq."I have definitely begged my mother to just let things go--sometimes, politics are exhausting even when you agree, and we rarely do. And her aggressive, ad hominem style takes it from exhausting to intolerable.
Finally Kristina ran interference, saying, "Listen, if you all want Kori to feel like she's at work, then you're achieving that. If you want her to feel like she's among people who love her, then we need to talk about something else."
“We’ve had 10 years to be desensitized; I’m not sure why people are freaking out now,” said Dr. Janice Manjuck, 50, a physician from San Francisco who was traveling with her husband and 11-year-old son to Norfolk, Va. Dr. Manjuck said she doubted the efficacy of the pat-downs and body scanners, but did not particularly object to them.
“We’re from San Francisco, so we’re used to nudity,” she said.
"...tea partiers understand that "there is a global agenda to actually abolish private property and abolish the Constitution for that matter." If sustainable development is fully implemented, she says, "This basically will turn us into a Soviet state."
In the tea partiers’ dystopian vision, the increased density favored by planners to allow for better mass transit become compulsory "human habitation zones." They warn of Americans being forcibly moved from their suburban dream homes into urban "hobbit homes" and required to give up their cars and instead—gasp!—take the bus to work. "
It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.Evan Marc Katz has said the same thing: it's about the home remodeling and such, not the astrophysics. But I can bore the $hit out of myself with all that by myself. I can run my own household. I'm not saying I wouldn't be able to run it better with another person, if that person were helpful; I'm saying it wouldn't be worth putting up with the wrong person in order to better run the household. To me, marriage is absolutely about whom I want to go on vacation with: vacation is a major priority in my life; redecorating is not. And I know all of that changes with children, and that's largely her point, but those women she describes--and some that I know--don't sound all that enviable to me.
Already, the Big Ag and Beltway media are buzzing with stories of how the new Congress, particularly the Republican House, will square deficit hysteria with farm subsidies. The general consensus: "No one knows yet."
But this recent Associated Press article provides some insight. Reporter Mary Claire Jalonick identifies several card-carrying Tea Partiers in the new House who both thunder against government spending and belong to families that have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in farm payments over the years.
For some in the sustainable-food movement, this is a delicious contradiction with the potential to force real reform in the next Farm Bill. For these people, the key federal policy underpinning the industrial food system and all of its evils are federal farm subsidies. Take them away, and a good-food renaissance will bloom.
But as I argued so strenuously and so often during the last Farm Bill fight (see here, for example), subsidies are a symptom, and not the cause, of a food system geared toward the maximum production of corn and soy, and, by extension, industrial meat. Absent other reforms and measures, if you take them away, you'll cause plenty of hardship in the Farm Belt, stiff a few high-profile millionaires who receive subsidies, and leave the incentives for maximum corn and soy production largely in place.
Indeed, House deficit hawks are already taking aim at the few federal farm programs that act as checks against mindless overproduction. According to the above-linked AP story, incoming Rep. (and Tea Party favorite) Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) is calling for the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep ecologically fragile land idle.
Really taking on the corn-soy-meat colossus that's fouling our waterways and ruining our diets means creating new incentives in the Farm Belt. That means beefing up, not eliminating, conservation programs; and shifting payments -- not slashing them -- to reward farmers for things like crop diversity, cutting fertilizer use, and building up soil.
In fact, some on the right seem to be doing with the race issue what they’ve done with the climate-change issue: denying the basic facts and muddying the waters around them until no one can see clearly enough to have an honest discussion or develop thoughtful solutions.Gail Collins makes some interesting parallels, too. Ooh--andtea partiers might even learn about the Constitution. Spoiler alert: There's separation of church and state.
But censorship officials were seeking to control a message that had already spread widely.Satire, however, only gets you so far; not powerful drunk and distracted drivers kill people, too.
On Oct. 20, a female blogger in northern China nicknamed Piggy Feet Beta announced a contest to incorporate the phrase “Li Gang is my father” into classical Chinese poetry. Six thousand applicants replied, one modifying a famous poem by Mao to read “it’s all in the past, talk about heroes, my father is Li Gang.”
Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.
When it comes to Palin specifically, there is the fundamental problem that some of us don’t want to see or hear any more of her than we have to. And there are those whose objections have a physiological basis as well as an ideological one: the pitch and timbre of her voice, the rhythms of her speech, her syntax, and the way she coats acid and incoherence with cheery musical inflections join together in a sickening synergy that distresses the listener, triggering a fight-or-flight reaction. When Palin talks, my whole being wails, like Nancy Kerrigan after Tonya Harding’s ex-husband kneecapped her: “Why? Why? Why?”
The kabucha with white beans was also lost in 'translation.'
by the time the contents of the skillet were ready to serve, they were also more elusive. 
fried brown rice mochi in nori and fried plantains with mustard
“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.”
"Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, records and interviews show. The campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers — one paid by Dairy Management itself — found no such weight-loss benefits."
In 2007, the department highlighted Pizza Hut’s Cheesy Bites pizza, Wendy’s “dual Double Melt sandwich concept,” and Burger King’s Cheesy Angus Bacon cheeseburger and TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. “Both featured two slices of American cheese, a slice of pepper jack and a cheesy sauce,” the department said.
Dairy Management, through the “Got Milk?” campaign, has been successful at slowing the decline in milk consumption, particularly focusing on schoolchildren. It has also relentlessly marketed cheese and pushed back against the Agriculture Department’s suggestion that people eat only low-fat or fat-free varieties.
In a July letter to the department’s nutrition committee, Dairy Management wrote that efforts to make fat-free cheese have largely foundered because fat is what makes cheese appealing. “Consumer acceptance of low-fat and fat-free cheeses has been limited,” it said.
Agriculture Department data show that cheese is a major reason the average American diet contains too much saturated fat.
[By 2004,]...Jean Harvey-Berino, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont...had found no evidence of weight loss. She said Dairy Management took the news poorly, threatening to audit her work. She said she was astonished when the organization pressed on with its ad campaign.
“I thought they were crazy, and that eventually somebody would catch up with them,” she said.
Her study was published in 2005, and at scientific meetings she heard from other researchers who also failed to confirm Dr. Zemel’s work, including Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, an obesity unit chief at the National Institutes of Health.
But in late 2006, Dairy Management was still citing the weight-loss claim in urging the Agriculture Department not to cut the amount of cheese in federal food assistance programs...
The campaign lasted until 2007, when the Federal Trade Commission acted on a two-year-old petition by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an advocacy group that challenged the campaign’s claims. “If you want to look at why people are fat today, it’s pretty hard to identify a contributor more significant than this meteoric rise in cheese consumption,” Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the physicians’ group, said in an interview.
...Meanwhile, Dairy Management, which allotted $12.4 million for nutrition research in 2008, has moved on to finance studies on promising opportunities, including the promotion of chocolate milk as a sports recovery drink and the use of cheese to entice children into eating healthy foods like string beans.
On Oct. 13, Domino’s announced the latest in its Legends line of cheesier pizza, which Dairy Management is promoting with the $12 million marketing effort... A laboratory test...found that one-quarter of a medium thin-crust pie had 12 grams of saturated fat, more than three-quarters of the recommended daily maximum. It also has 430 calories, double the calories in pizza formulations that the chain bills as its “lighter options.”
Working with some of the largest food companies, Dairy Management has also pushed to expand the use of cheese in processed foods and home cooking. The Agriculture Department has reported a 5 percent to 16 percent increase in sales of cheese snacks in stores where Dairy Management has helped grocers reinvent their dairy aisles. Now on display is an array of sliced, grated and cubed products, along with handy recipes for home cooking that use more cheese.
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