It's springtime in DC. Michelle Obama and the Bancroft Elementary School students are busy:

_{Daily Mail Photos}

The London Daily Mail takes note:
"First lady Michelle Obama got her hands dirty has she planted the first fruit and vegetable seedlings in the new White House garden.
She pulled on brown gloves and a red waterproof and trainers and got down on her knees to help plant alongside a group of 25 eager fifth-graders from a local school.
And she said the Obamas could be enjoying salads fresh from the garden within weeks.
Designed as a year-round kitchen garden, the L-shaped plot on the South Lawn will produce herbs such as oregano, sage and rosemary, vegetables including lettuce, chard and peas, and blueberries and raspberries."  Read more…

The whole thing is very good.

This goes to the other side of how this nation is changing radically - with a series of programs conceived largely by executive fiat that weakens civil liberties protections and subverts the plain letter of the law. This includes illegal wiretapping of American citizens, indefinite detention of prisoners without charges, and the dehumanizing practice of torture, which is ineffective and deeply dangerous to the lives of our troops, as this senior interrogator in Iraq explains.
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However, unlike many of the populous blogs I don't think things will go quite as planned. While our country has been dominated by the extreme right, it does not necessarily follow that we will move hard left. The pendulum will swing more left but no more than the vast proportion of our country is comfortable with.

The movement left will undoubtedly move the Senate and the House into Democratic territory because that is our only current choice when we seek to oppose. This movement will begin to fracture in 2010 and 2012.

Go on over and read her firsthand.

SOME OF MY regular readers (I do not, at this point, necessarily refer to the bran-eating amongst us, though they are a well-stirred crew, I'm sure) remember the day back in August I casually (you should have seen me, I was sipping a mint julep as I typed) posted on the MTV Choose or Lose '08 Vlogger competition.

You've gotten the email, or heard about it in the checkout line, or around the water cooler. "Don't Buy Gas On May 15!!" it sez, with much ranting and pent-up fury and a, sadly, entirely fictitious claim that "this was done in 1977 and gas dropped 30 cents the next day!!" and the like.

Hey, I'm all for it. Not because it will bring down the price of gas though. Nothing will bring down the price of gas except a reduction in the consumption of gasoline in this country. But the call to arms for the Ides of May is still possessed of some merit if only because it gets people talking and thinking about the subject.

Boycotts are not as hopelessly eye-rollingly futile as people would like you to believe. Collective action is never wasted.

Not a fan of the Sun Bull? Well, why the hell not? Everybody knows that He's the bedrock of our society:

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