The Taliban are being targeted in the latest push.

A presidential code is unlocked!

July 4th will see the reopening of this national treasure.

Happy birthday, Malia!

If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you're missing the forest for the trees--literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.

The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as "real food," or "good food," or "slow food", and total estrangement from Mother Earth--who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.

Do you have no idea what you're actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that's not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep?

Perhaps you'd buy the new wearable feedbag that lets Americans eat more and move less, or sample Taco Bell's new green menu with no ingredients from nature, if these products existed outside the fertile imaginations of the Onion's writers.

If we weren't so divorced from nature, we'd give a rat's ass--make that a double rat's ass--about all those freaky deformed frogs that have been sprouting extra legs in recent decades, and the sexually deformed fish that started popping up in the Potomac a few years back.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his column last Sunday and again on Thursday's Colbert Report, scientists increasingly suspect that "a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products," may be contributing to a scary hodgepodge of health problems in people as well as the disturbing rise in anatomical anomalies in frogs and fish.

Kristof cites a 'landmark' 50-page statement from the Endocrine Society which presents "evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology." The statement adds:

I wrote back in 2006 that the EPA had identified endocrine disruption as one of its top six research priorities in 1996. But, a decade later, they had yet to begin testing any candidate chemicals for their endocrine-disrupting potential. Kristof notes that "for now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed."

Sure, you could try to minimize your exposure to these apparent toxins by growing some of your own food without using pesticides and chemicals. But as our farming First Lady's recently discovered, the ground you're cultivating might be tainted anyway, because the chemicals and contaminants we've thoughtlessly dispersed into our air, soil and water in recent decades have a way of lingering.

Our obliviousness to the hazards of a chemically dependent food system have allowed these toxins to accrete in our environment--and our bodies--for far too long. But now, growing tomatoes has replaced throwing tomatoes as a form of protest; millions of Americans are looking to opt out of our toxic food chain by trying to grow some of their own food this year, many for the first time.

If we truly hope to create an alternative food system, though, many more of us will have to roll up our sleeves and get digging. As urban ag pioneer and McArthur genius Will Allen told Elizabeth Royte in next Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "We need 50 million more people growing food on porches, in pots, in side yards.”

Royte notes the inherent challenges for advocates of urban agriculture:

But the edible landscaping trend is taking root wherever there's soil, and even where there isn't, with the help of exhibits like the New York Botanical Garden's Edible Garden, which just opened last weekend and runs through September 13th.

The Edible Garden exhibitions include a Good Food Garden, a Seed Savers Heirloom Vegetable Garden, and a Beginner's Vegetable Garden, along with a half dozen other edible landscape-related exhibits. Rosalind Creasy, whose essential but long-out-of-print book Edible Landscaping has a new edition coming out in 2010, thankfully, designed the Heirloom Vegetable Garden. Other homegrown heroes like Kitchen Gardeners International founder Roger Doiron and Slow Food USA's new president Josh Viertel will be among the featured speakers at events taking place over the course of the summer.

If I may borrow from Stephen Colbert, I'd like to give a tip of the hat to cookware company Anolon, a major sponsor of the NYBG Edible Garden exhibition whose own Creating a Delicious Future campaign seeks to remedy kitchen illiteracy by fostering "a return to eating delicious foods prepared simply at home using fresh, seasonal, local ingredients."

The exhibition's other major sponsor, Scott's Miracle Gro, gets a wag of the finger: hey, guys, great way to greenwash the profits from all those pesticides the EPA's ordered you to take off the shelves.

Another wonderful edible gardening program to which I'll gladly give a shout-out is the Giving Through Growing campaign sponsored by Robert Mondavi's Woodbridge Winery in partnership with The American Community Gardening Association. Woodbridge is donating $40,000 this year to the ACGA to help provide "educational tools, leadership training, and community building strategies to participants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles." As the Giving Through Growing website notes, the ACGA estimates that over 2,000 new community gardens will be established this year, on top of the 20,000 existing community gardens.

The Giving Through Growing program encourages you to send virtual "eSeeds" to your friends, and for every eSeed that's planted, Woodbridge will donate a dollar to the ACGS. It's a pretty painless way to show support for the folks who are greening our urban spaces.

Those of us who garden understand that food waste can either become "black gold," i.e. soil-enriching compost, or be shipped off to the landfill where it rots and generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Animal manures, too, can be a blessing to a farmer who raises his livestock on pasture, where the manure returns fertility to the soil as it has for centuries.

But when you crowd farm animals into what Jon Stewart aptly dubbed "an Abu Ghraib of animals" on Thursday's Daily Show in his interview with Food, Inc.'s Robbie Kenner, the massive quantities of manure that result become an environmental disaster.

And when you saturate the soil with synthetic chemicals to grow resource-intensive commodity crops, you deaden and deplete it.

This, then, is the fundamental difference between sustainable agriculture and intensive industrial food production. The first method enriches the soil; the other ultimately ruins it. Destroy the soil, and you destroy your civilization.

Will Allen predicts that 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But, as he told Elizabeth Royte, "two million of them will eventually drop out," when they get discouraged by pests and insufficient rain--or too much.

That's OK; 8 million new gardeners still adds up to a revolution. So grab your trowel and start digging for democracy. Let's overthrow the cornarchy this 4th of July!

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Josh Bolotsky and I are seated in the auditorium at the Hotel Trades Council union hall, gearing up to cover the Working Families Party Mayoral Forum.

We'll be doing the live posting over at Open Left -- and you can also watch the forum for yourself at: http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/liveforum/

The rules and timeline are up; the forum should begin at 5:30pm.

Join us!

Elon James White just posted the second episode of season two of "This Week in Blackness."

I loved this video. He hits on the very issues that I always find with television channels aimed at specific minority groups. They pretend to represent that group in its entirety, yet fall prey to many harmful stereotypes. And beyond its potent and important political message, the video is just downright funny.

At 5:30pm today, the Working Families Party will be hosting a Mayoral Forum -- they'll be interviewing Democratic hopefuls Bill Thompson and Tony Avella, and incumbent Michael Bloomberg.

You can watch the live feed here.

Or tune back in for live blogging coverage.

• Mark Weisbrot of the Huffington Post wrote an article last night about Washington's reluctance to stand up for democracy in the wake of the Honduran military coup--while the US Government could and should be using this opportunity to overhaul its shameful reputation in the region, it instead seems to be succumbing to the same, dangerous elite-pandering it was infamous for during the last 40 years.
• The High Court in India overturned a ban on gay sex, stating that the existing law violated fundamental human rights. The historic court decision will likely fortify movements toward dissolving a 148-year-old colonial law which describes homosexual relationships as "unnatural offenses"
• A Gallup poll released today indicates that Iranians have doubted the US commitment to democracy in the region, and muses that the Obama Administration's endorsement of opposition candidates may in fact be a kiss-of-death to their movement for free, transparent governance.
• Russian President Dmitry Medvedev hopes that Obama's visit to Moscow next week will catalyze a new relationship between the former Cold War enemies, which remains on pins and needles 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall due to tensions surrounding stalled nonproliferation efforts, the construction of US anti-missle systems in Europe and a general history of distrust that needs to be reconciled before the two nations can convene and tackle important global economic and political issues.

After Mark Foley, David Vitter & Larry Craig,
the latest exploits of John Ensign & Mark Sanford
make "Republican family values" an instant punchline.

While Americans want healthcare & energy reform,
the Congressional GOP keeps saying everything's fine
...a strategy that's made them a national joke.

And every time Michael Steele opens his mouth,
Palin's on TV, or Rush pipes up again,
it's hard not to chuckle at the absurdity.

Sure the Left may have Senator Al Franken,
but it's the Right that's making us laugh.

But be careful, Dems - with 60 Senate seats,
we better see meaningful reforms out of DC
...or else, next election, the joke's on us.

Head into the holiday with reason to smile,
share that laughter as your share a few drinks
at your local progressive social club.

DRINKING LIBERALLY
Find - or start - a chapter near you.

Last Month Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor caught the brunt of conservative criticism for certain comments made regarding race and how it factors into a judge’s decision-making. Sotomayor said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Then Monday the Supreme Court ruled white firefighters in the New Haven Fire Department were victims of reverse discrimination when the city threw out a promotion exam after minority candidates categorically tested poorly. The measure was intended to promote diversity in the workplace. The Supreme Court overturned the decision previously upheld by Sotomayor and two other judges on a panel to determine the legitimacy of New Haven’s policy.

A quick read through our headlines shows desperate need for a new understanding of bias. The Right’s stubborn faith in the myth of the American meritocracy depends on an outmoded conception on how discrimination is exercised. They argue that because official channels of slavery and segregation ended generations ago, the field is level. But only rarely is racism explicit these days.

More frequently, racism continues to be exerted through inherited disadvantage, and conversely, inherited privilege. In order to counteract racial inertia, many liberals argue the need for corrective measures which temporarily give favor to minority candidates in the workplace/schools/etc. in service of long-term equality.

It is a common myth that after Brown v. Board of Education everyone was equal. While all became supposedly “equal” under the law, whites had a head-start--better-funded schools, inherited wealth, 200 years control of government--not to mention the failure of many states to comply with desegregation.

In yesterday’s Huffington Post, Mitchell Kapor, Freada Kapor Klein, and Martha Tae-Shin Kim address the need for creativity when it comes to deracinating institutionalized and structural discrimination.

“The [New Haven] case itself, while raising complex questions about workplace bias, involved civil rights law fashioned in an era that saw far more blatant discrimination. Back then, the urgency of segregation and widespread, institutional racism did not allow for a thoughtful undertaking of more nuanced forms of bias. Now, subtle bias has become more insidious.”

Check out the full article here.

This is an issue steeped in nuance and requires compassion for all parties involved. White firefighters don’t want to be discriminated against for their race any more than black, Hispanic, or Asian firefighters for theirs. No one wants to feel indicted for something they didn’t choose. But affirmative action is not about blame. It is about starting to amend past injustices that echo still today. It is not enough to eliminate the barriers; true equality requires a cathartic process of diminishing white privilege and providing access to beneficial social programs.

Now how do we make that a reality?
Groups like Racial Justice 911, the ACLU, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice are all currently involved in projects to counteract economic and social discrimination. For ways you can get involved in the fight against racism, sexism, and class antagonism, check out their websites.

Anyone with suggestions about involvement, links to groups that do anti-discrimination work, policy ideas, here’s your chance to sound off. I’m sure you liberals out there in the grassroots, netroots, and beyond have your fingers on the pulse of some great organizations. Let’s get a list going in the comments section.