Archive for May 2009

Tom Philpott on food & class

The sustainable-food movement has a class problem.
Slow Food, for example, is an essential organization, with its declaration of a universal “right to taste” and its mandate to …
“… oppose the standardisation of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and […]

Toll Booth Economy

Today, the financial sector is translating its affluence (at taxpayer expense), into the political power to pry yet more public infrastructure away from state and local communities and from the public domain at the national level, Thatcher- and Blair-style as it is sold off to absentee buyers-on-credit to pay off public debt (while cutting taxes […]

McChrystal & Pelosi

May 14, 2009
a ramble
Yesterday, I was loading salvaged warehouse shelf uprights onto a truck at Cary Towne Center, a mall in Cary, North Carolina. Across the road in the parking lot, I scanned the bumper stickers on a silver Toyota RAV4 L, license plate XZF-7063 (North Carolina). A Ranger Tab. A Combat […]

Why Obama & the Dems are soft-pedaling on torture

Top Pelosi Aide Learned Of Waterboarding in 2003
By Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 9, 2009
A top aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended a CIA briefing in
early 2003 in which it was made clear that waterboarding and other harsh
techniques were being used in the interrogation of an alleged al-Qaeda
operative, according to documents the CIA […]