Todd Zywicki at The Volokh Conspiracy flags this New York Times Magazine story from last weekend on how our agricultural policies are making us fat, and bless him for it. This is one of my policy pet peeves. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, took to The Times to argue:

the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Zywicki concludes:

Rather than the many silly ideas for combatting obesity that we often hear today, one would think that getting rid of farm subsidies for less-healthy foods would make sense, not to mention the budget savings.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I’ve been arguing since the fall that if feminists want to help women with body issues, they should leave the fashion industry and women’s magazines alone and go after the real culprit: Big Ag.

I forsee a heart-warming ‘tween flick about the closing of the last riding stable in Manhattan, featuring a young girl who loses her fight against big developers but learns valuable lessons before tearfully sending her old horse off to pasture in Maryland.

I’m surprised we haven’t heard more about this, but apparently the decade-long quest by Wiccans to get pentacles onto the gravestones of Wiccan military veterans has come to successful conclusion. Women’s E-News reports:

Even before she learned the good news earlier this week, the Rev. Selena Fox was upbeat.

“We’ll win,” Fox told Women’s eNews in an interview last month. “We have two goddesses on our side; we have Lady Liberty and Lady Justice.”

Fox is the leader of Veteran Pentacle Quest, a campaign based in Barneveld, Wis., that has been working since 1997 to persuade the Department of Veterans Affairs to allow the pentacle, an encircled five-point star that symbolizes the Wiccan religion, to join the list of 38 emblems allowed on markers in veteran memorial cemeteries.

This week the VA agreed to comply with that request.

“People are ecstatic and joyous,” Fox said. “There is such a sense of relief and celebration for all those involved, and I’m happy because this is a major victory. Not just for Wiccans, but all people who practice nature-based religions”

To celebrate, festivals will be held on the ancient Gaelic holiday of Beltane, around May 1, and may feature traditional Beltane activities such as dancing around a bonfire.

Via AMERICAblog, The Independent reports that Britain may, thanks to global warming, finally experience a summer like the ones Washington was having ten years ago:

The possibility is growing that Britain in 2007 may experience a summer of unheard-of high temperatures, with the thermometer even reaching 40C, or 104F, a level never recorded in history.

The likelihood of such a “forty degree summer” is being underlined by the tumbling over the past year of a whole series of British temperature records, strongly suggesting that the British Isles have begun to experience a period of rapid, not to say alarming, warming. This would be quite outside all historical experience, but entirely consistent with predictions of climate change….

Average maximum temperatures at the end of April in southern England are traditionally about 13C or 14C. This weekend in London and the South-east, the thermometer may hit 26C or even 27C – 79F to 80F.

An air temperature of 80 in April seems to belong to fantasy land. In the childhood of anyone aged over 40, it was a rare enough temperature in August.

Even with its end not yet here, this month is certain to be the hottest April ever recorded.

Things are hot all over.

Gnarls Barkley is the writer of what is fast becoming Campaign 2008′s theme song. The fact that an African-American and a woman are running for president is just bringing out the craaaaazy. Talking Points Media was kind enough to put together a little YouTube of the latest from Rush Limbaugh.

There’s a big difference between a conservative Southern white man — in this case, Rush’s regular contributor Paul Shanklin, from Tennessee — doing these kinds of parodies of Al Sharpton and Barack Obama and, say, Kenan Thompson‘s affectionate parodies on SNL. In addition to “Barack the Magic Negro,” Shanklin is also responsible for such tasteful Rush Limbaugh Show ditties as “Osama Obama.”

Lest you think such things are limited to brief moments on the radio, Shanklin’s “Magic Negro” song has already been turned into a YouTube clip which makes its highly offensive lyrics even more apparent. It’s like a slap in the face, nothing but pure racial insult against Obama, who is charged with being inauthetically black and pictured in a Klan robe.

As Greg Sargent notes, “it still never ceases to amaze that top officials of the Republican Party — including the Vice President — go on a show that traffics in this sort of thing.”

Shanklin has been at this game a long time. A song on his 1999 album “Simply Reprehensible” was described thusly on Amazon.com:

“Rev. Jackson’s Jailhouse Vote” is racist dross. Set to the tune of “Jailhouse Rock,” the track features someone imitating Jesse Jackson on vocals. The lyrics reduce Jackson’s voter registration campaign to a plea for the voting rights of crack dealers, rapists, and murderers. A sample of the sarcastic lyrics: “That man’s not in jail for sellin’ tons of crack / I think we all know it’s because he’s black,” intones the Jackson mimic.

Nor is this just “comedy” without electoral aim. In 1996, Shanklin performed at a Patrick Buchanan rally in Memphis. In 1997, he did statewide radio ads in California for G.O.P. lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Richard Mountjoy. In 2000, he headlined the Idaho Republican Party state convention. In 2005, he performed at an Orange County, Calif., G.O.P. dinner headlined by Mitt Romney. And just this April, Shanklin was brought onstage by Republican hopeful Mike Huckabee at the Iowa G.O.P.’s annual Abraham Lincoln dinner in Des Moines. Shanklin, according to his biography, has even won a Pollie award from the American Association of Political Consultants.

Shanklin’s brand of toxic racial humor barely raises an eyebrow on the right, where it’s not an uncommon approach. Conservative cartoonist Chris Muir, for example, just depicited Hillary Clinton in blackface — the very same thing that caused a huge hue and cry on the right when blog firedoglake did it to Joe Lieberman last summer. So far, however, Muir’s move has been met with thundering silence on the right.

It turns out the tariff system is worse than drycleaners when it comes to gender-neutral pricing. Reports Michael Barbaro:

Congress, it turns out, plays fashion favorites.

Take bathing suits. It slaps a 28 percent tax on men’s imports, but just 12 percent on women’s.

Or overalls. The government imposes a 14 percent tariff on women’s, but only 9 percent on men’s.

Woven wool shirts? Men’s are hit with an 18 percent duty, more than twice as much as women’s.

There is no apparent pattern to the tariffs, which penalize men in some instances, and women in others. But the fees tacked onto clothing, shoes and swimwear as they enter the country’s ports may be the last legal form of sex discrimination in the United States, approved year after year by lawmakers and passed on to consumers.

Now some clothing manufacturers are contesting the seemingly arbitrary tariffs, led by Manhattan attorney Michael T. Cone.