brainiac conspiracy

Why Newspapers Suck

Few folks on the planet can cut through the crap like Atrios can.

---Vitelius

If It's Tuesday, It Must BeYou Are What You Blog Day

• This is rich: Michelle Obama plants an organic garden at the White House. What wingnut could possibly be so crazy as to object to that? You'd never guess! And no, it's not Michelle Bachmann.

Yep, it's a lobbying group for Big Ag with a little too much time on its hands:

Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an "organic" garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama's and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result, we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire U.S. economy.

Jesus. Imagine, a garden without fertilizers or pesticides? What will we tell the mutants children?

• Looks like the Baron's pistachio-crusted sea bass recipe goes on the back burner for awhile. Let's at least give credit where due to the Giant Food Conglomerate™ for actually doing things that the FDA isn't so adept at anymore.

The FDA learned about the problem last Tuesday, when Kraft Foods Inc. notified the agency that it had detected salmonella in roasted pistachios through routine product testing. Kraft and the Georgia Nut Co. recalled their Back to Nature Nantucket Blend trail mix the next day.

Now that's quality control we can believe in.

• On the subject, there appear to be some serious health concerns about The Other White Meat. And no, not the usual fat or triglycerides, either:

An effective way to say there isn't a problem is never to look. That seems to be precisely what most U.S. government food-safety agencies are doing when it comes to determining whether the livestock in our food supply is contaminated with MRSA and if so, whether the often-fatal bacterium is being passed on to consumers who buy and consume that meat.

We know that some strains of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) are extremely dangerous. Dr. Monina Klevens, of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, examined the cases of the disease reported in hospitals, schools and prisons in one year and extrapolated that "94,360 invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2005; these infections were associated with death in 18,650 cases."

Earlier this year, Dr. Scott Weese, from the Department of Pathobiology at the Ontario Veterinary College told those attending the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases at the CDC that there was a problem. He and his colleagues had found MRSA in 10 percent of 212 samples of pork chops and ground pork bought in four Canadian provinces.

So? Canada, schmanada, who cares? We only eat USDA Choice American meat in the Baron's household. Unless, of course, we don't . . .

Tara Smith, an assistant professor for the University of Iowa department of epidemiology, and her graduate researchers have done what is apparently is the first testing of swine for MRSA in the U.S.

They swabbed the noses of 209 pigs from 10 farms in Iowa and Illinois and found MRSA in 70 percent of the porkers.

Today, in Boston, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, Abby Harper, one of Smith's graduate assistants, presented the results of a study that she and Michael Male did on 20 workers at the Iowa swine farms. Harper reported that 45 percent of the workers carried the same MRSA bacterium as the pigs.

Okay, fine. The USDA's on the case, no?

The FDA is aware of Weese's study, but "we do not yet have similar data with regards to the MRSA situation among food animals and retail meats," [FDA spokesman Mike] Herndon said.

There is no indication that FDA has tested meat for MRSA.

But the FDA and USDA eagerly pointed to a group called the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System as the protector of food and humans from foodborne bacteria. The coalition of scientists from several federal agencies primarily target salmonella, campylobacter and E. coli.

But the group does not currently screen for MRSA.

Sounds like another invitation to more meddlesome government intervention, if you ask me. Who needs more socialism when you have assurances from the experts?

The National Pork Producers Council in Washington is sure there's no problem. They told me "there is nothing to worry about; MRSA (in pigs) has not been found this side of the border" and "USDA and CDC has given our pigs a clean bill of health."

Good to hear! And the CDC confirms:

A CDC spokeswoman told me that she could find "no indication we made that statement."

As it turns out, It's still pretty difficult to catch MSRA from eating pork, so long as it's thoroughly cooked. But it looks like we'll need to handle pork products like chicken these days, cleaning it thoroughly and washing our hands and cutting boards after contacting it. And for a minute there, I thought would have to give up prosciutto!

Thankfully, at least there's someone in Washington who cares about this. Drop her a line to express your gratitude (and try not to chuckle over her name, please), then contact your local Congresscritters and tell them to get behind the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical treatment Act. It may not have a dramatic title, but if passed it could revolutionize industrial farming practices across America. And not a minute too soon.

---Vitelius

Monday Motorhead Open Thread

• I am officially over mourning the demise of Rick Wagoner now that we know he's entitled to a $20 million retirement package.

• Looks like a few other folks are posing the question that the Baron posited yesterday. We can only hope.

• And the new career GM guy who's replacing the old career GM guy seems to have figured out the handwriting on the wall pretty quickly.

• On a related note, Hummer fans---all six or seven of you---fear not: reports of the death of your company would appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

• A post from Joseph Szczesny at a terrific new auto-blog poses a question that had crossed my mind as well: How is it that this bozo, who did such a bang-up job at his last gig, wasn't afforded the same hatchet treatment that Rick Wagoner got? Unless the Obama people already know that a management fix is in, that is.

• Apropos of nothing, the Baron really likes this car. Where they'll find the money to build it, who knows? But after so much Bad Reality, let's dream for awhile. Anything else?

---Vitelius

Question of The Day

Which front page will be the first with this headline?

Obama to Detroit: Drop Dead

Just asking.

---Vitelius

The Wagoner Debacle

One has to wonder what sins against the commonweal were committed by Rick Wagoner that required his immediate dispatch from his post as the CEO of General Motors. Troubled as GM has been in recent years, it is a company that actually manufactures fungible assets, that employs American workers, and which has compensated those workers---many hundreds of thousands of them over several decades---with livable wages and decent benefits. You know, an exemplar of the American manufacturing sector that Obama says he wants to expand and rejuvenate. Yet for a $15 billion bridge loan, the executive board of General Motors is told it must offer up its head as just propitiation.

Compare and contrast to the Masters of the Universe, multinational investment firms which have manufactured little of consequence over the past 10 years but billions of dollars in compensation for a few thousand employees and investors, and trillions of dollars in toxic paper for the rest of us. Yet the boards of Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and the rest, recipients of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, and over a trillion dollars in future loan guarantees, are told to sacrifice from their executive boards in return for our assistance . . . nada. Except for those taxpayer-subsidized bonuses, of course, if they'd only be so kind as to give them back because we can't force them to, now can we.

What I smell here is some pretty rank political calculation. Bailing out the Detroit automakers is even less popular than bailing out Wall Street, and I suspect the Obama administration is demanding Rick Wagoner's head on a platter as a sweetener of sorts to make the latest bridge-loan package more palatable to the voters. It's a knee-jerk brand of scapegoat populism, and coming from the Obama team, it strikes me as neither authentic nor heartfelt, nor even particularly well thought-out. And as a special added bonus, the talk-radio fruitbats will have a field day with this tomorrow.

It also chooses, again, to ignore the root cause of Detroit's present troubles. It's the same thing that has crippled Toyota, and Honda, and every other automaker for the past seven months. When the Masters of the Universe chose to gamble away the GDP of the entire planet by betting on housing prices in Riverside County, credit dried up and buyers couldn't get car loans. Now, even with credit markets easing a bit, we're losing a million-plus jobs every 60 days, financial stocks have lost 90 percent of their value, and two trillion dollars' worth of equity have been sucked out of the economy. Is it any wonder folks are postponing big-ticket purchases? In the current economic climate, you could summon the ghost of Alfred Sloan to man the helm, and Harley Earl to design the cars, and things would be no different at GM right now. When a company like Toyota decides that it needs to ask the Japanese government for $3 billion in loans because they're not selling enough Priuses in North America, you know the problem affecting the auto industry is systemic in nature, and not the cause of any one guy on GM's senior management team.

Maybe Rick Wagoner was not the right person to run General Motors. The company was in trouble when he took it over, and it's in trouble now that he's stepping down. But by cherry-picking scapegoats in secondary industries while allowing the culprits who precipitated the meltdown in Motown (and Tokyo, and Munich, and Seoul) to run free, the Obama administration continues to show that it prefers to dispense fistfuls of Tylenol to a patient that's suffering from a case of financial gangrene rather than prepping for the radical surgery that's needed---still treating a symptom, and not the disease, that's suffocating the global economy. It's also shown, more troubling yet, that it's capable of cheap populist grandstanding. Maybe some other shoe will drop tomorrow that will make more sense of this and provide some needed context, but for now, that's what it looks like from here.

---Vitelius

Losing Our Minds Freedom, One Euro at a TIme

From behind enemy lines, the latest update on the looming economic non-threat to the Republic:

Bachmann: As you know, Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, many nations have lined up now and have called for an international global currency, a One World currency and they want to get off of the dollar as the reserve currency.

Beck: Most people don't understand, Michele, what that means.

Bachmann: What that means is all of the countries in the world would have a single currency. We would give up the dollar as our currency and we would just go with a One World currency . . . If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom. And then we are no more, as an exceptional nation, as we always have been. So this is imperative.

This must come as news to the hundred-million plus citizens of Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and a few other places in western Europe who all gave up their lire, francs and deutschemarks in favor of a common currency several years ago. Which, if macro-economist Michelle Bachmann is correct, has transformed these countries from thriving multi-party democracies into totalitarian hellholes on a par with Zimbabwe. Which is kinda funny, since the Baron has traveled extensively through all those places over the last six years, and I hadn't noticed anything radically different from the days when these countries all had their own discrete currencies. Except, maybe, that the cost of goods and services is a little more expensive, and it's a heckuva lot easier to figure out the exchange rates if you travel or do business in Europe nowadays.

Now I can understand (sort of) Michelle Bachmann's rants. I think she's actually a pretty astute tea-leaf reader for a conservative politician, and she's doing her best to muscle out Sarah Palin for the coveted leadership position as the GOP's Most Telegenic & Inarticulate TV Spokesmodel. And I even understand guys like Glenn Beck constantly feeding this kind of trollery---it pays him handsomely, and who knows, maybe he actually believes this crap. But what I will never understand is how millions of our fellow citizens take the fever-dream pronouncements of these cranks seriously for even a minute. And that's what keeps me up at night.

---Vitelius

Playing With Fire

I know it has been easy for some of us in the left blogosphere to ridicule the genuinely ridiculous statements emanating from certain GOP political and media figures of late, but I'm really, really glad that Steve Benen has weighed in today with sober words of caution and concern, which mirror my own exactly:

This is obviously madness, not from some right-wing blog, but from elected federal officials. But I worry it's more than that. Incendiary rhetoric like this leads strange people to do strange things.

I'd really like it if the Michelle Bachmanns, the Glenn Becks, and all the other psychotics of the right who have all but called for an armed insurrection against the Obama administration would stop for a moment and contemplate the message conveyed by this image, a handbill that turned up on the streets of Dallas the morning of November 21, 1963.

Maybe I've been spending too much time reading Rick Perlstein's Goldwater book, but I can't help but be struck by the eerie similarities between the tone of political discourse among conservatives today and that of conservatives in the early 1960s. Both groups were convinced that the nation was being sold out to a secret cabal of Marxist stooges who planned to confiscate all their guns, suspend their civil liberties, and sell their country's birthright to the UN, or the ICC, or to the caprices of some common One World currency. Breathless hyperbole bordering on hysteria was their intellectual stock in trade, and the target of their wrath, then as now, was a young, charismatic and widely popular President who generally followed a measured center-left political path---getting some things right, and screwing up others, but generally looking to make incremental, rather than radical, changes to the political landscape during their terms in office. We already know how Act 1 of this saga ended, which is why I'm growing more concerned for Obama every day.

Paraphrasing Goethe: Words convey thoughts and have meaning. They can move people to accomplish seemingly superhuman feats of valor, or to commit unspeakable depravities. And the words of our elected officials and talk-radio chatterers carry a great deal more weight and significance than others since they're amplified, hourly, through the echo chamber of our national media, and recycled ad infinitum through the many layers of the blogosphere.

Simply put: play with matches long enough, children, and someone's going to get burned, as this video clip from the night of November 22nd reminds us:

By the way, the "national magazine" Chet Huntley was referring to was this one. Plus ça change. (H/t Barth at TPM for the video.)

---Vitelius

Making a Hash of Afghanistan

Looks like the US isn't the only place that needs to re-think its drug policies these days.

And once you've stopped laughing, convince me that this really isn't South Vietnam all over again.

And no, forget about the Hashishin myth. It's mostly bullshit. Stoners are stoners, regardless of era. There is no pony in the hookah lounge. (H/t Juan Cole.)

---Vitelius

Thursday Open Thread

It's been a pretty hectic week at the Baron's estate, hence the paucity of posts of late, but a few points of interest for general discussion here:

• I'm of two minds about the thinking behind Obama's Webcast "peoples" press conference. In one sense, it's obviously somewhat stagey, the questions are cherry-picked, and the President gets a couple of hours to polish up his answers. On the other hand, it's a great example to follow for keeping the citizenry engaged in an ongoing dialogue with its elected officials. And you get to filter out the Ed Henrys and the dead-tree whiners too.

• Then again, Obama may need to start providing more blunt answers if he holds any more of these confabs.

• Things like this have me finally convinced that we no longer live in Bushworld anymore.

• And things like this have me fully convinced that the Republican Party is still being run by crazy people.

• If you are not a devoted student of US history, it's almost impossible to describe, much less quantify, the importance of John Hope Franklin in helping all of us to reach a richer understanding of race relations in America. If you've never read From Slavery to Freedom, I hate to say it, but your knowledge of American history is sadly incomplete until or unless you do. It's an essential part of any personal library.

• I had forgotten that Franklin spent his boyhood in Tulsa, which the Times obit cited above describes as the site of a "race riot" in 1921. That's a truly piss-poor, borderline-dishonest description of what really happened, and emblematic of the kind of glib and casual reliance on cliche that would have left Professor Franklin shaking his head. Nowadays, we would refer to what happened in Tulsa as something akin to ethnic cleansing, in which the entire black community of a major American city was put to the torch, systematically over a series of day, with the aid and abettance of local government.

It began on Memorial Day 1921, in downtown Tulsa, a boomtown flush with oil money, and by the time the three-day massacre was complete, a well-armed white mob, some of them deputized by the police department, had ruined Tulsa's prosperous black neighborhood Greenwood--"the black Wall Street"--had razed thirty-six square blocks, burned to the ground more than 3,000 homes and killed as many as 300 people, many of whom were buried in mass graves or simply dumped anonymously into the Arkansas River. By the end of the onslaught, Tulsa's thriving black community, which numbered some 15,000 people and was famous for its cultural and financial achievements, rivaling New York City as a national center of urban black life, was destroyed.

Sleep well, Professor. It is now up to the rest of us to continue your life's work.

• A couple of sad notes from the Baron's hometown. It's going to get a little harder soon to find good music in this town, and we're on the verge of losing yet another priceless indy bookshop. If you live in LA, kindly consider going out and sharing a little green with these folks before they close up their doors. They deserve it, both of 'em, richly.

---Vitelius

Snark of The Year

It will be hard to improve upon our 44th President, who more or less announced tonight that henceforth stupid questions are and will be subject to ridicule. Not a minute too soon.

---Vitelius

Those Damn Reaganite Liberal Activist Judges!

Submitted without comment.

---Vitelius

Pure Conservatism, or Bovine Flatulence?

Comments galore today from Juiceman and Hilzoy over the true definition of Conservatism, inspired by one of those godawful self-serving pieces of pseudo-intellectual twaddle that only a guy with the patience of Andy Sullivan could wade through without hurling:

Conservatism is "formless" like water: it takes the shape of its conditions, but always remains the same. This is why Russell Kirk calls conservatism the "negation of ideology" in The Politics of Prudence. It is precisely the formlessness of conservatism which gives it its vitality. Left alone, the spirit of conservatism is essentially what T.S. Eliot calls the "stillness between two waves of the sea" in Little Gidding of his Four Quartets. Conservatism is both like water and the stillness between the waves---the waves are not the water acting, but being acted upon; stillness is the default state of conservatism:

People who write this kind of crap have usually watched too many episodes of Kung Fu. Either way, Hilzoy remarks:

Seriously: I think it's always dangerous to write something like "conservatism is formless like water": it invites responses like: well, I think that conservatism is more like motor oil, or peanut butter. If one must compare conservatism to water, it would be a good idea to acknowledge that water is not always benign. (Think of the fisherman whose boat founders in the North Atlantic, the lobster thrown into the pot, the child lost in the freezing rain.)

Ah, but water is benign compared to my definitions. Conservatism, to the Baron, is formless like . . .

• An oil slick: Contaminates everything it touches, costs a ton of money to clean up, and was probably caused by Dick Cheney's friends.

• Smog: Byproduct of toxic fumes; thrives on outdated infrastructure, wasteful energy consumption, and lax environmental regulations.

• Crystal meth smoke: Makes you feel mighty good at first, but inhale it long and deeply enough, and you’ll be a stark raving paranoid.

• Bovine flatulence: Contributes to global warming, and smells funky, too; the province of radio talk-show hosts.

And for what it's worth, I'll stick with my original:

• Hanta virus: Wherever there’s shit, it’s lurking in the vapors.

Got any alternatives to offer?

---Vitelius

If You Need to Answer That Question . . .

It's official: Geither's doing a heckuva job.

---Vitelius

Snark of The Day

The Geithner Plan has many wide-ranging applications. Consider anti-terror policy, for instance:

Signaling Sharp Break From Bush,
Obama To Revise Detainee Policy
Yoo, Addington Appointed to Co-Chair
Task Force on Gitmo Torture, Abuse

Perhaps I should write for The Onion instead.

---Vitelius

Random Thought of The Day

If we take away anything from the housing bubble, maybe it's the idea that selling really expensive crap to people who can't afford it for no money down does not make a terrific business model. So why are we going to sell off really expensive crap for no money down to people who have no obligation to pay anything for it? Is this really the best plan that Geithner could come up with?

Our upcoming lost decade is going to be a whole lot of fun. So is our one-term Presidency.

---Vitelius

What Digby Said

Okay, now I've used it too. But I do have to agree with her, this is the first truly historic act of the Obama administration. Selah.

---Vitelius

Gambler's Hunch of the Day

If this is even remotely true---and there's little reason to believe that it isn't, considering the correlation between everything that is lined out in the story and everything we have learned about Tim Geithner over the past few months---then I'm throwing in my hat with Atrios. You cannot salvage the casino until the crooked players who bankrupted it have been banished from the gaming tables for good.

Update: Nobel prize winners agree:

The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won.

Update II: Here's our track record to date with the biggest welfare recipient player:

See that little horizontal strip running clear across the graph? That's money to back up state and municipal bonds---you know, those things your government sells off, then buys back with interest, to kick-start projects such as road construction, school renovations, water reclamation, high-speed rail, etc. You know, stuff that might actually help pay for jobs in your community. Up to now, you're getting seven cents on the dollar back, and only if you're living in a handful of states. The rest of it? Down the sinkhole. Would you gamble against odds like these? (H/t Rapp via Ritholtz.)

---Vitelius

Still So Funny, We Still Forgot to Laugh

Obama humor: Degrading and offensive.

Bush humor: Family fun.

Just a little reminder to commemorate the six-year anniversary of American history's greatest fraud.

And honestly, it's beyond ironic that someone such as Sarah Palin, devoted mother and spokesmodel for special-needs children everywhere, would choose to speak to this issue now, considering what happened in Juneau this week:

The biggest single chunk of money that Palin is turning down is about $170 million for education, including money that would go for programs to help economically disadvantaged and special needs students. (Emphasis added.)

(Cue the laugh track.)

Update: It's good to see that some folks are taking it all in stride.

---Vitelius

Food for Thought, of a Different Sort

Matt Taibbi's gotta-read commentary in Rolling Stone this week on the ongoing Wall Street putsch contains plenty of keen insights, not the least of which is this takeaway at the end, where he notes how the current co-dependent Geithner-Summers-Goldman-AIG self-help group is squandering a golden opportunity for some genuine economic stimulus, at the grass-roots level using the levers of private enterprise, and which wouldn't cost the taxpayers any additional money:

This cozy arrangement created yet another opportunity for big banks to devour market share at the expense of smaller regional lenders. While all the bigwigs at Citi and Goldman and Bank of America who had Paulson on speed-dial got bailed out right away---remember that TARP was originally passed because money had to be lent right now, that day, that minute, to stave off emergency---many small banks are still waiting for help. Five months into the TARP program, some not only haven't received any funds, they haven't even gotten a call back about their applications.

"There's definitely a feeling among community bankers that no one up there cares much if they make it or not," says Tanya Wheeless, president of the Arizona Bankers Association.

Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what should be happening, since small, regional banks are far less guilty of the kinds of predatory lending that sank the economy. "They're not giving out subprime loans or easy credit," says Wheeless. "At the community level, it's much more bread-and-butter banking."

Nonetheless, the lion's share of the bailout money has gone to the larger, so-called "systemically important" banks. "It's like Treasury is picking winners and losers," says one state banking official who asked not to be identified.

This itself is a hugely important political development. In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

Give the whole thing a read. Then tell someone about it.

---Vitelius

Greens We Can Believe In

It may be small potatoes in the overall scheme of things, but with folks looking to stretch their food budgets and embrace a more sustainable lifestyle, this strikes me as a great case of leading by example. And besides, gardening is fun, too!

The Obamas will feed their love of Mexican food with cilantro, tomatilloes and hot peppers. Lettuces will include red romaine, green oak leaf, butterhead, red leaf and galactic. There will be spinach, chard, collards and black kale. For desserts, there will be a patch of berries. And herbs will include some more unusual varieties, like anise hyssop and Thai basil. A White House carpenter who is a beekeeper will tend two hives for honey.

Total cost for the seeds, mulch, etc., is $200.

Hyssop? Boy, even for foodies, that's a pretty obscure culinary herb. You find it mentioned in Apicius, and it was a kitchen staple in Roman times, but you don't find a lot of recipes that call for it now. And Thai (a.k.a. “holy”) basil is notoriously delicate, difficult to grow, and requires a great deal of tending after. (Trust me, I've grown it, and found it more trouble than it was worth.)

As for Obama's disdain for beets, well heck, the Baron’s not too fond of them, either, but he loves the part of the plant most folks discard right away: The greens, which, to my palate, are among the tastiest and most succulent of all the so-called “bitter” greens. They’re filled with potassium, vitamin C and beta carotene, among other nutrients, and while they’re extremely perishable (cook ‘em the same day you buy ‘em at the market; they wilt quickly once separated from the root), they’re super-easy to cook. So, for our Unitary Gourmet and the First Gardener, a Baron-tested recipe fit for a preznit. It’s slightly hot and spicy, too, since we know Barack kinda likes his grub that way:

Baron's Spicy Beet Greens
1 tbsp mustard oil or extra virgin olive oil
2 dried red chiles (optional)
1 tsp whole black or yellow mustard seeds
1 onion, peeled and halved, cut into 1/8-inch half rings
4 medium bunches beet greens, washed and rinsed, tough lower stems removed, cut crosswise into 1-inch strips
1 tbsp turmeric
1/2 cup best-quality chicken or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste
1 pinch garam masala (optional)

In a stockpot or Dutch oven over medium-high heat, add the oil. When the oil begins to smoke, add the dried chiles and mustard seeds. When the chiles start to blacken and mustard seeds start to pop, add the onion and turn the heat down to medium, cooking until the onions turn a golden brown, approximately 5 minutes. Add the beet greens in batches to the pot (they may not all fit at once), stirring until all the greens have begun to wilt, approximately 3 to 4 minutes. Add the turmeric and stir thoroughly to combine. Add the stock, salt and pepper. Turn the heat up to boil, then reduce to a medium simmer. Cook, partially covered, for approximately 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until all of the liquid has evaporated from the pan. Remove the dried chiles from the pot, sprinkle with the garam masala, and serve hot. Serves 4 as a side dish.

Don’t like beet greens? This recipe works equally well for chard, kale, mustard greens or collards. (H/t Madhur Jaffrey.)

And Barack, please, please, get that woman some proper garden attire!

---Vitelius