Cheers and Jeers: Monday

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

A View from the Clouds

She describes herself as a "software geek by day, crazy cat lady by night." She's writing a book on food policy that will be published next spring. And she heads the netroots advocacy site Recipe for America, whose goal is "to restore democracy to America's food system in order to improve the health of our nation's citizens, family farms, communities, healthcare system, and environment." In our continuing series, Yes, We're All Staring At YOU!, Jill Richardson takes a turn under the C&J klieg lights. You may know her better as one of Daily Kos's favorite Recommended-diary denizens, OrangeClouds115:

How long have you been blogging and what brought you to Daily Kos?
McJoan told me I signed up January 2006. I got into blogging on LiveJournal about a year before that out of frustration at George Fucking Bush and a desire to get others to live a greener lifestyle as a way of resisting the Axis of Oil. It was probably Sam Seder's show that got me onto DailyKos, but I know for sure what got me truly into blogging about politics beyond Livejournal. I heard that bloggers outed Jeff Gannon and I was determined to find the rest of the hookers in the White House Press Corps. If blogging was the way to do it, well, I'll be a blogger then.

Your website is Recipe for America. What, in your opinion, is the #1 problem with our food supply today?
Lack of democracy, to quote Frances Moore Lappe. There are a few people with a lot of power and the majority have very little. Every other problem comes down to that and little else.

Me, I'm a low-carb fella---pay no attention to the Oreo ice cream I'm having for breakfast. What kind of diet do you recommend for optimal health?
To quote another food hero, Michael Pollan: "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much." When he says eat food, he means real food. If your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't put it in your mouth. That means ice cream is fair game but Oreos are out, Bill. I'd add to that advice that any animal you eat (or whose products you eat) should also eat real food. Your great great grandmother would recognize beef and milk as foods, but if a cow was eating chicken litter, rendered animal byproducts, hormones, and antibiotics for dinner instead of grass, then that cow and its milk aren't food.

What kind of music makes you feel invincible to the GOP horde?
I love all of the stereotypical liberal stuff. "Eve of Destruction," "For What Its Worth"... or for something written during my lifetime "Let's Impeach the President" and "Not Ready to Make Nice." The Republicans might have their own TV channel and they might own the entire talk radio medium (almost) but compared to us, their music sucks. Those songs keep that in perspective.

Looking into your crystal ball, do predict improvements in our food supply under a president Obama?
Yes, but not drastically like we need. Taking on the fight that needs to be won involves an enormous shift in the entire power structure of our country. He's not interested in that fight. But he has voiced support for some reforms, like the "packer ban"---a ban on meatpackers owning livestock, which will make the very consolidated meat industry just a little bit more competitive. It's not a total fix but it's something our side has been fighting for for a long time, and we haven't won it yet. The Senate was ready to give it to us this year but the House flat-out refused. So Obama means some hope.

What's the one book every Kossack must read?
Is it fair to say Crashing the Gate? If we're talking about food-related books, I'd say The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. But I think Crashing the Gate is the most relevant to all of us, even those who don't give a rat's ass about food, and it's the best statement on what we're really doing here and what direction we need to move in.

You recently took the USDA to task in a column published on AlterNet. What grade would you give the USDA under President Bush?
The USDA hasn't gotten its own Grade A rating for many decades now. It's a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Cattleman's Beef Association. Yes, they get a big fat F under Bush (as do most other agencies... FEMA, I'm talking to you) but that doesn't mean they were better under Clinton. There's a fantastic book called Mad Sheep by a woman named Linda Faillace. Under the Clinton USDA, her family worked with the government to legally import European sheep. It was a brilliant business venture because European sheep breeds can produce 10 to 25 times more milk than American ones and Americans import a lot of sheep's milk cheese from overseas. Once her family had the sheep, the USDA got some heat about mad cow and they decided to take it out on the Faillace family, claiming their sheep had mad cow disease and needed to be destroyed. The government did over 400 negative tests for mad cow on the sheep until they were finally able to come up with a false positive or two using some year-old freezer-burned sheep brains and an invalid testing method in a later discredited lab. It was Bush's USDA that finally took the sheep and murdered them because the fight lasted beyond the Clinton administration, but Clinton's USDA was just as bad in that story.

Finish this sentence: In the kitchen I make a mean...
Hot chocolate. I don't mess around. I'll add Cointreau, cayenne, vanilla, all kinds of things. And always make your hot chocolate with milk or soy milk. Anything that comes in a mix and directions to make it with water isn't good hot chocolate.

What do you do for fun when you're not workin' the blogs?
Hiking. Although usually I'm composing blog posts in my head while I hike.

No waffling here: dogs or cats?
Cats! If you haven't seen pics of my three furry daughters yet, let me know and I will correct that problem immediately.

What are your favorite blogs besides Daily Kos and your own?
I don't do too much blogging outside of Daily Kos and my own blog, La Vida Locavore.

I have one question left, but I need to retire to my forensics lab---I think I'm close to proving that Lincoln actually died of scurvy.  Please ask and answer the final question yourself:

Oh boy... you already let me identify myself as a cat person. What else is there? OK, I got one. What are the most memorable diaries I've read on this site?

Well, Bill, great question. One of the diaries I go back to again and again is Dallasdoc's Guide to Stop Smoking and not because I'm a smoker or ever was. I basically offer it to every smoker I meet, with the caveat that I obviously don't know what it's like to quit. But as someone who totally can't empathize it looks like great advice to me.

Up next: the Incredible Hulk of the Rec list.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Cheers and Jeers for Monday, August 25, 2008

Note: John McCain is also a celebrity.  Just not a very good one.

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By the Numbers:
Days 'til the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech: 3
Days `til Barack Obama's acceptance speech in Denver: 3
Increase in credit card penalty fees between 2003 and 2007: 50%
Amount of those fees: $18.1 billion
(Source: Parade)
Amount the OPEC cartel members made in the first six months of 2008: $645 billion (as much as they earned in all of '07)
(Source: Financial Times via The Week)
Admission fee today at the Denver Art Museum in honor of the Democratic National Convention: $0.00
(Source: Denver Art Museum and Target
Year Louis Ballast of Denver's Humpty Dumpty Barrel Drive-In received a patent for the cheeseburger: 1935
(Source: magazineUSA.com)

Final U.S. Olympic gold medal count: 36

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NEW! Monday Brain Droppings by George Carlin:

Traditional American values: Genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.
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I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete.  It's so fuckin' heroic.
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You know what would be fun? Drop acid, smoke PCP, and then take the White House tour with Jim Carrey.

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Puppy Pic of the Day: Dog days

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CHEERS to our new attack dog.  Ladies and gentlemen, here's my take on Joe Biden, historically speaking.  I feel like, for the first time since Lyndon Johnson, we've got a veep candidate who can sink his teeth into the Republican hiney and come away with a substantial amount of buttmeat.  When Biden sits down for that veep debate October 2nd, his opponent might as well put a photo of himself on the desk and leave.  And if the press hasn’t dubbed him "Soundbite Biden" yet, they should:

"Ladies and gentlemen, your kitchen table is like mine. You sit there every night after you put the kids to bed and you talk, you talk about what you need. You talk about how much you’re worried about being able to pay the bills.  Well ladies and gentlemen, that’s not a worry that John McCain has to worry about.  It’s a pretty hard experience---he’ll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at."

Happy?  Moi?  Deliriously.  Sic 'em.

P.S. How perfect: Instead of taking a call at 3am, Obama was the one making the call at 3am.  "And the Tony Award for best choreography goes to..."

CHEERS to being the first person on your block to with a coolness quotient of Obama to the Bidenth power.  Donate $15 to the Obama campaign and you'll get a first-edition Obama-Biden car magnet!  It's also a first-edition eyepatch, first-edition yarmulke, first-edition hotplate, first-edition Frisbee and first-edition gerbil sumo wrestling mat!  When your Republican neighbors see it and get that inferior look on their faces, remember: a titter cuts deeper than a guffaw.

CHEERS to a pleasant little soiree.  With the primaries over and summer winding down, it's time to focus, people—[clap clap]---focus!  Tonight's lineup at the opening of the Democratic National Convention includes: Nancy Pelosi; Sen. Claire McCaskill, Barack Obama’s sister Maya Soetero-Ng, Michelle’s older brother Craig Robinson, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Michelle Obama and...Ted Kennedy???  The stars...they is alignin'.

JEERS to the weekend wanker.  There's one thing I love about watching the Sunday talk shows now.  In the old days, when a jerk like ABC News's Mark Halperin put his jerkitude on display, all we could do is throw our shoe at the teevee.  But now, when a jerk like Mark Halperin put his jerkitude on display, I can hear the progressive movers and shakers in Bloggerland blasting his jerkitude across the tubes.  And that's what happened yesterday when he made the claim---during which his fellow roundtable bobbleheads on This week couldn’t even keep a straight face---that McCain's house-counting gaffe was "one of the worst moments in the entire campaign...for Barack Obama."  Mark Halperin is Time magazine's "Senior Political Editor."  Which apparently means he edits out all the stuff that makes sense.

CHEERS to today's lesson in money management.  If you're a presidential candidate---say, Hillary Clinton---and you claim you'll be a responsible steward with taxpayer money, it's not a good idea to rack up so much debt during your campaign that you can't possibly get out from under it.  That would be bad, so don’t do it.  Tomorrow: how to break into an ATM with nothing more than a pair of tweezers, a piece of chewing gum, and a bulldozer.

CHEERS to throwing the bums out.  Nine weeks after D-Day, on Aug. 25, 1944, Paris was liberated by the Allies during World War II.  However, in his famous liberation speech Charles de Gaulle barely mentioned America or our allies.  Gee, thanks a lot.  (But please don’t tell that to the Republicans in Congress or they'll go back to freedom fries.)

CHEERS to beautifully warped minds.  Director Tim Burton turns 50 today.  `Ed Wood' and `Beetlejuice' remain two of our all-time favorites.  And those Mars guys just keep getting better with age. Ack Ack!!

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C&J Flashback---2004 Democratic National Convention, Day 1:

Convention speakers include: Rep. Tammy Baldwin, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe

CHEERS to Convention Fever!  It's either the beginning of the end or the beginning of a new  beginning.  Now that we got that deep thought out of the way, where's the bar?

JEERS to Republican snakes.  C&J wonders what the GOP will pull out of its ass to distract from the convent...  Ohmigod!  This just in: Osama bin Laden paraglides onto White House lawn in pink tutu!  Dialysis machine lands separately!

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And just one more...

CHEERS to switching sides for the right man.  People often walk up to me and, after they pinch my cheeks, ask, "Bill, is there any Republican you'd vote for?"  And I look 'em in the eye and say, "Yes---this one right here, I think."  But only if Wilford Brimley is his running mate.

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Oh, and one more thing: Pirates!!!  Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?

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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:

Cheers and Jeers can reduce hot flashes and night sweats among women going through menopause, and also appears to sharpen their mental function, researchers from India report.
---Reuters

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