The garden is finally producing.

We are harvesting heirloom green zebra tomatoes and heirloom summer squash… Yumm…  We got a late start this year due to moving to our new house.  I expect next years garden or gardens will be much bigger and better.

I suggest starting a garden.  It’s lots of fun and you’ll get some extra vitamin D.

Republicans embrace Ron Paul on domestic policy

By DANIEL LIBIT

“He hasn’t bombed Iran yet,” says Ron Paul, when asked to assess the best and worst characteristics of President Barack Obama’s six months in office.

“The worst thing is he is probably still thinking about it.”

No sooner does the representative from Texas’ 14th Congressional District, nicknamed “Dr. No” by his detractors, find himself embraced by mainstream Republicans (and even some Democrats) on domestic policy issues, then he pivots his focus to foreign affairs.

Obama, Paul told POLITICO during a sit-down in his office this week, “has talked a little better than his action, but he has already expanded [the number of troops] in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He became the peace candidate: ‘Yeah, we’re going to end that war in Iraq.’ But it’s not sincere. I don’t think they had any intention, never did.”

It’s a unique time for Paul. With the economy in the tank, the same cable news shows that spurned him during the election now keep asking him on to talk monetary policy. Republican House members are finally voting with him on spending measures.

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Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions

Ann Jones and Tom Engelhardt, July 17, 2009

Writing on the phenomenon of escalation, journalist Norman Solomon begins a recent piece this way: “The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now. That’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.” Then he adds: “[N]o amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren’t already far along at the Pentagon.”

Well, be astonished no longer. Right now, unsurprisingly enough, it’s not looking good in that country. Roadside bomb (IED) attacks are spiking (with an “all-time high” of 465 in May alone), and American and NATO deaths have jumped by 40% since 2008, 75% since 2007. And so, despite a major Obama administration expansion of the war and a significant commitment of new troops and money, fast on the heels of Solomon’s piece came the first trial balloon — the first leaks in a Washington Post piece from those unnamed, if ubiquitous, “senior military officials” — for what may be the next round of escalation.

In an ongoing assessment of the devolving situation in Afghanistan, due to be delivered to the White House next month, the new U.S. commander General Stanley A. McChrystal has supposedly already concluded “that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama’s strategy for winning the war is to succeed.” Here’s the catch (and you knew there would be one, didn’t you?): the only way to make that force larger is to pour billions more dollars and thousands of new American soldiers into the country as “advisors” and “trainers.” As if he had read Solomon, National Security Adviser James Jones was already talking about those ceilings. (“It would not surprise me if the ceiling for the Afghan army request was raised…”)

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Comic Relief: Tim Hawkins, The Government Can!

Peter Schiff: Warren Buffett Is Dead Wrong

It is Well by The Emperor Has a Body featuring Ryan Feister

Nice Work, Ryan Feister.

Baby Bush: The Worst President in History?

by Doug Casey

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I recognize that I’ve antagonized many subscribers over the years with “Bush Bashing.” In January, just after OBAMA!’s election, I said I wouldn’t mention Bush again, his departure having made him irrelevant. I only feel bad that he and his minions will apparently get away scot-free with their crimes; better they had all been brought up before a tribunal and tried for crimes against humanity in general and the U.S. Constitution in particular. But that is objectively true of almost all presidents since at least Lincoln.

Most of our subscribers to The Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals – i.e., people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic freedom for the individual. The next largest group are “conservatives.” It’s a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone who atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things (either now, or perhaps as they perceived them 50, or 100, or 200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative someone who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means suppressing things like sex, drugs, outré clothing and customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to support economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)? It’s unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on.

Which leads me to the question: Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it’s because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere. Bush’s tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted to Clinton’s eloquence, which made him look “slick.”

I’m forced to the conclusion that what “conservatives” like about Bush is his style, such as it was. Because the only good thing I can recall that Bush ever did was to shepherd through some tax cuts. But even these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests, rather than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale cut in rates.

Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I’d say he’s a strong contender. He started out with a gigantic lie – that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars – and things got much worse from there. Let’s look at just some of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.

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Oklahoma Highway Patrol pull over ambulance and fight with EMT

Paulson & Goldman Sachs, The Plot Thickens

Burn your sneakers! – Lancaster County man advises runners

By CINDY STAUFFER, Staff Writer

Look, Christopher McDougall knows it sounds bizarre and downright hippieish.

It looks like it, too, truth be told.

Just take a gander at the 6-foot-4-inch McDougall, padding down Peters Creek Road in rural Peach Bottom in nothing but running garb and his size-13 bare feet.

That’s right. There’s nothing but fresh air between his naked soles and terra firma.

That’s just how nature intended it and how the human body works best, McDougall believes.

McDougall, 47, wrote a book advocating barefoot running, called “Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen.”

Now he’s taking his message to bookstores and local running clubs.

Like any good messiah, the Harvard-educated, former Associated Press foreign correspondent, writer and dad of two is hoping maybe, just maybe, to spark a movement and lead others to a way of running that he says erases injuries and also — dare we say it? — cultivates fun.

He dreams of a day when people run for joy, and not as a punishment for eating cheesecake.

“We could be in store for a real golden age,” he said of running. “There is a perfect storm of influences.”

When times get tough, people get running, he said. It happened during the Great Depression, the 1970s recession and after Sept. 11. And we are ripe for it now because of our current rough economic times.

And what if people who started running could keep running? What if they didn’t develop Achilles tendon problems, Plantar fasciitis or cuboid syndrome?

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