The American Spectator

Time

Time magazine gives its invaluable Person of the Year award to the man who will lead America for the next four years from the White House’s official John Deere D140 48-inch 22 HP Hydrostatic Front-Engine Riding Mower, complete with utility cart:

Obama says he long ago decided that he should not compare himself to Lincoln. But he nonetheless begins his second term with a better sense of what is possible in his job as well as what is not, something Lincoln struggled with as well. “You do understand that as president of the United States, the amount of power you have is overstated in some ways,” Obama says. “But what you do have the capacity to do is to set a direction.” He has earned the right to set that direction and has learned from experience how to move the country. After four of the most challenging years in the nation’s history, his chance to leave office as a great president who was able to face crises and build a new majority coalition remains within reach.

December 31, 2012/January 7, 2013

CounterPunch.org

Ken Knabb, editor of the Bureau of Public Secrets, muses nostalgically on the late Occupy movement and endeavors to explicate a peculiar American fetish, just before the cops sweep him away on yet another charge of shoplifting and evacuating in public:

The Occupy movement already had the implicit goal of “reclaiming the commons”—occupying public squares or parks played on this theme, since regardless of quibbles about permits it was obvious that such spaces belong to the public and are, or at least originally were, intended for public use. But these more recent actions have the merit of challenging the fetish of private property in a more direct manner. That fetish has always been extremely strong in the United States, and the police responses to its transgression have always been more immediate and brutal. But I like to hope that these types of actions will eventually weaken the fetish, just as happened in the days of the civil rights movement.

November 20, 2012

NPR.org/blogs/thesalt

Gourmand advice offered with a clear conscience in an age free of D.D.T. by the culinary nuts at National Public Radio:

Want to eat sustainably? Then eat bugs.

That’s the word from the Dutch, who are doing their best to make a scientific case for the environmental benefits of insect proteins. Reduce greenhouse gases? Check. Produce more edible protein while using less land than more traditional livestock? Check.