Will Starting An Organic Garden Be Dangerous For Michelle Obama?

Spencer & Joe, Republicans with secret lists of reds

I'm reading this engrossing book by Russ Baker right now, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I'm always up for a good anti-Bush read. I guess if I had known the book was an attempt to connect George H.W. Bush to the Kennedy assassination I wouldn't have read it. I never read conspiracy theory books. So I'm really glad I didn't know. He's got me convinced-- convinced that at the minimum there was a conspiracy at the highest level in the U.S. power elite... and I still have a couple hundred pages to go. I'm not ready to review the book yet but I'm mentioning it today because I want to refer back to something I blurted out, in parenthesis, yesterday:

We voted for "change," right? And Obama wants "change," right? And even if the filibuster-mad obstructionists in the Senate can stop every single thing he tries, there seems to be something at work for the status quo even more venal and deadly dangerous than the tactics employed by McConnell, Kyl, Cornyn, Burr, Coburn and Isakson. Reading between the lines at Glenn Greenwald's Salon post this week, you can detect a mighty powerful CIA might resistant to any kind of substantive change. (And these are, after all, the forces that got away with assassinating John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, a President and a senator running for president.)

Obama's going to have to act fast, act smart and be lucky to not wind up like the Kennedys and Paul Wellstone. I think-- or at least I want to think, he's being pretty courageous so far. The post went on to talk about all the vested interests-- and the members of Congress they own-- lined up against change: banksters, war contractors, the "health care" industry, the Israel lobby, and AgriBusiness. In fact, the post was mostly about AgriBusiness' determination to maintain a very costly-- costly for the tax payers-- status quo.

This morning I definitely do not mean to suggest that the non-organic food industry is going to knock off Michelle Obama. I just want to use their expression of selfish ire as an example of what the president has to go through with this whole Change Agenda thing. It all started when the First Lady very publicly planted an organic garden on the White House grounds to help promote the idea of eating fruits and vegetables and to help young people understand that not all foods come processed in a Mickey D Styrofoam container. Chemical companies-- the ones that poison most food grown in this country with cancer-causing sprays and stuff-- are furious and "worried it may plant a seed of doubt in consumers’ minds about conventionally grown crops." The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) wrote her a letter insinuating she's anti-poor people for extolling the virtues of organic over conventional.

MACA is Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont Crop Protection and they're fuming that she won't be using any chemicals on her crops. (I'm not making this up.)

The group is worried that the decision may give consumers the wrong impression about conventionally grown food.

“We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents,” the letter states. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.”

My friend Jill at La Vida Locavore published the entire letter-- and puts it in perspective. It's very hard going up against vested interests, particularly vested interests with lots of money and power.

And, remember, these people bought the mass media. They get their message across. Yesterday Karl Rove, instead of sitting in a court trying to persuade a jury not to lock him up for the rest of his life, was oozing his poison and twisted deception on the editorial pages of the Republican Party's Wall Street Journal. The director of the Pew Poll that Rove cites as the basis for his thesis-- that Obama is the most divisive president in 4 decades (something repeated by another Bush Regime insider, Michael Gerson, also an exemplar of truthfulness and trustworthiness-- claims that Rove and Gerson are full of shit, and purposely so.

Along the same lines, Missouri's most corrupt political hack, Roy Blunt, who's running for the GOP Senate nomination, is also twisting reality beyond recognition, claiming Bush was actually a regulator and warned us about mortgage deregulations. Since Blunt voted for every single deregulation that every came up since he was elected, I guess he wasn't paying attention-- just like all the rubber stamp Republicans. It gets worse.

A few weeks ago we made the point that the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus (R-AL), is a shill for banksters and a horses' ass. He also seems to have decided that his career path will now follow that of disgraced and deranged alcoholic Joseph McCarthy (R-WI).

Not too long ago, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was on Hardball, calling for the media to investigate her Congressional colleagues to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America." Well, it turns out that someone has taken up Bachmann's call on a proactive basis! His name is Spencer Bachus and he has made a list -- a secret list! -- of the socialists in the House of Representatives. Or so he told the Birmingham News. Who are the seventeen socialists? That's the secret part, apparently.

It just goes on and on. But the public doesn't seem to be buying in-- at least not yet. Obama has sky high approval ratings (72% in New York State and even 57% in Missouri and 56% in Kentucky, 2 states he lost last year) and the whole country seems to hate the Republican congressional caucus and their obstructionist leaders. In fact one of the obstructionists, Jim Bunning (R-KY) has the lowest approval ratings ever recorded for a sitting U.S. Senator (28%). And although North Carolina obstructionist Richard Burr hasn't fallen quite as low as Bunning yet, his chances of winning re-election will now depend entirely on how badly the Democrats pick an opponent for him.