The Sunday Paper

Charles Krauthammer's headline (from December 12 Washington Post) in my paper this morning is "Forget Centrism - Obama will use mandate, money to refashion society"
In the article, Krauthammer points out that Obama is appointing centrists for the conoomic and foreign policy areas, not to be a pragmatist, but so he can stabilize those areas and proceed to refashion society like a community organizer would.
Good - that's what I voted for!
Although I sense Krauthammer's contempt for and dismissiveness of Obama, I suspect much of his assessment of Obama's larger plan is correct.
I disagree that Obama doesn't care about foreign policy or the economy. Krauthammer must not understand that the changes we want are IN foreign policy and the economy. I want a new way to look at the world and our neighbors that values respect and mutual understanding and cooperation.

From the column:

"Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right - and has highly irritated the left - with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama's own beliefs remain largely opaque, his sppointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.
Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure.
Take the foreign policy team: hillary Clinton, James Jones and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about - his domestic agenda.
Similarly, his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstram. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.
A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veternas to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that obama can address his real ambivition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's."

Nicholas Kristoff (from Thursday's NYT) talks about changing the Department of Agriculture. Factory farms are given precedence over family farms and supporting a broken business model is given priority over making sure Americans have enough healthy food to eat.
I like the idea of changing the Department. I agree. Some excerpts from the column:

"A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 perent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.
Renaming the department would signal that Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhalthy - all while sosting taxpayers billions of dollars.
'We're subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket - high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil - and we're doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food, ' notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as 'The Omnivore's Dilemma' and 'In Defense of Food.'

The Agriculture Department - and the agriculture committees in Congress - traditionally have been handed over to industrial farming intersts by Democrats and Republicans alike. The farm lobby uses that perch to inflict unhealthful food on American children in school lunch programs, exacerbating our national crisis with diabetes and obesity.

But let's be clear. The problem isn't farmers. Its the farm lobby - hijacked by industrial operators - and a bipartisan tradition of kowtowing to it.

The Agriculture Department doesn't support rural towns...it bolsters industrial operations that have lobbying clout. The result is that family farms have to sell out to larger operators, undermining small towns.

Modern confinement operations are less like farms than like meat assembly lines. They are dazzlingly efficient in some ways, but they use vast amounts of grain, as well as low-level antibiotics to reduce infections - and the result is a public health threat from antibiotic-resistant infections.
An industrial farmer with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage system, the industrial farm isn't.

An online petition at www.fooddemocracynow.org calls for a reformer pick for agriculture secretary - and names six terrific candidates."

That's it from the Sunday paper this week.