bigmagic’s posterous

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

That may be the case, but apparently sustainable by any other name makes you sound like a dirty hippie. And our government doesn't want no stinkin' dirty hippies.

A few weeks ago, Obama Foodorama posted that sustainable is now the USDA's #1 adjective of choice. Well, if they are serious, that's a good thing. But keep in mind that everyone from Coke and Pepsi to pesticide maker DuPont thinks they are sustainable (judging by their attendance at the upcoming Sustainable Brands conference). And there's the Sustainable Agriculture Summit in Chicago with attendees like ConAgra, Sara Lee, and Subway. And don't forget Monsanto, who claims it's also sustainable (just like Fox News is "fair and balanced").

In other words, go ahead and use the word sustainable. It's been adopted, watered down, and all but ruined by the big guys, so nobody is going to think you're actually threatening them with real sustainability. But what if you used the word "agroecology" instead? Rumor has it that that's not so good.

More via a cool food-politics blog lavidalocavore.org

LaVidaLocavore is worth a bookmark for those inclined.

h/t Mark Bittman (The Minimalist) NY Times

Welcome to the Right-Wing Forward Museum

MyRightWingDad.net is a museum dedicated to following the course of American history through a unique lens -- the emails "Red-America" forwards worldwide. Take a look around the archive using the keywords below, and leave a comment or two.

This museum displays unedited, often offensive and untrue material with no endorsement intended by curators or contributors.

More via myrightwingdad.blogspot.com

h/t to Jef in Seattle

For all you philosophy majors and others appreciative of rhetoric.

As I read this I thought about every Rethugliclown on every useless talking-head show ever and I heard this .. word for word. Hilarious.

The Onion - America's Finest News Source - once again

Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!

I…I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and—oh, no! For the love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!

Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!

Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!

More via theonion.com

Hilarious, yes, and very sad that this describes perfectly the entire sum total of what passes for "argument" on the Tee Vee.

h/t to Jef in Seattle

Charles Blow totally nails it in his NY Times Op-Ed column.

The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”

This is rich.

More via nytimes.com

You knew the monsters who ordered this stuff would be found out eventually but still, having it appear in black-and-white is pretty stomach-churning stuff.

Seymour Hersh, God bless him, wrote about this years ago when he revealed the first batch of Abu Ghraib pictures and has been on the story ever since. Now the UK press has a new chapter.

Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape' - Telegraph

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Sadly, much more via telegraph.co.uk

They were the most powerful people on earth, they ran the government of the United States of America, and they are evil monsters, wicked sadists and criminals. As long as this country exists, we'll never live this down, nor should we.

Sad - but really funny.

The 83 Waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah | The New York Observer

The following is a transcript of notes taken at the interrogation of Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. It was released by the C.I.A. at the request of Vice President Dick Cheney in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques approved by the president.

More via observer.com

Holy guacamole! Wingnutville is one crazy-ass place. Mustard on a burger? Suspiciously un-American. Like rice and beans? “It’s pretty disturbing.” Especially if those rice and beans are arroz y gandoles. What the hell is in that wingnut Kool-Aid anyway?

Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork — that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.”

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ feet with chickpeas — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.  

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Levey. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial ... allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.

"But it’s almost like she’s proud that her biases and personal experiences will cloud her impartiality.”

More via thehill.com

The Onion could not have written this better.

Wow - that's all you can say - Wow

The Rethugliclowns are really letting their blood pressure get waaay too high over Obama's pick for La Corte Suprema. This ongoing wingnut train-wreck is just too entertaining for words.

It Sticks in My Craw - Mark Krikorian - The Corner on National Review Online

Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English ... unlike my correspondent's simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to.

Because if we pronounce an Hispanic name correctly the terrorists win.

This was a long time coming, 30 years exactly. Following is the best one-stop piece on why California, eighth-largest world economy, is scrambling like 1990's Argentina to find a way back from the brink, or maybe back to the brink, having had that Wiley E. Coyote moment over the chasm when the running stops and you look down. For 30 years the political class of California managed to keep the state one step ahead of fiscal disaster, banking on Golden State prosperity, or a facsimile thereof, to keep the mighty eighth-largest economic engine clanking along. Then the music stopped and we find ourselves in the economic meltdown of our lives, unless you are at least 80.

Calitics:: Things Fall Apart

The victory of Prop 8, the dire economic crisis, and the looming collapse of our public services are all the product of a singular failure: the inability to respond effectively to the rise of a political movement bent on destroying the fabric of postwar California. I am referring, of course, to movement conservatism. California's politics, dominated by a centrism determined to uphold the status quo, felt it had tamed the right-wing beast. It was wrong, and we are suffering the outcome of that massive miscalculation.

Since Howard Jarvis's 1978 victory, the unavoidable armageddon that Prop 13 initiated was frequently postponed through a series of short-term financial gimmicks as well as an unprecedented era of cheap credit that enabled prosperity to be offered to the middle-class in spite of wage stagnation. When the cheap credit vanished and the toolbox of gimmicks was exhausted, we were left with our present crisis, and the fundamentally right-wing nature of state government could no longer be masked or ameliorated.

More via calitics.com

Calitics is a new favorite blog and, not surprisingly, dedicated to California politics and with a progressive viewpoint. Things have gotten very interesting lately and we're about to have those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for Change We Can Believe In right here in the Golden State. We'll see if we can make the most of it.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Margaret and Helen are two of the sassiest and smartest cookies on the Web-O-sphere. Check 'em out.

Margaret, I am here to tell you that Dick Cheney is a bitch – a big one too.  I mean I thought that Sarah Palin was a bitch, but even she can’t hold a candle to this guy.  Have you been listening to him recently?

I would say that it takes some pretty big balls to go on national television again and again to justify torture, but Dick was too much of a wimp to serve his country in the military so I’m pretty sure there ain’t much hanging between his legs.   But being a bitch myself,  I can assure you that you don’t need balls to be a bitch.  You just need to not give a damn what other people think of you… and Dick doesn’t even care what his family and friends think about him much less the rest of us.

More via margaretandhelen.wordpress.com