Good morning, Everyone. We had rain last night--nothing like the East coast with post-Irene flooding. But enough that I won't have to water the gardens. It no longer resembles a jungle. I hadn't planned on it but I transplanted the mini-roses into one of the large containers where they are keeping company with the mums. The spearmint cuttings are doing very nicely though I will move them over onto the table/potting bench sometime today because the temps over the next two days are predicted to be in the 90s tomorrow and Friday. I don't want them cooked in the pots. I will pick some of the green beans today and we will have some with the pork roast tonight. The rest will go in the freezer. The verbena and rosemary are doing well--so far. I found new growth on both when I put them outside for a while today. But I have a long winter to go before I will know if this experiment will work. I have threatened for the last week to take out the Juliet and yellow cherry tomatoes. It is time to follow through on the threat.

I decided to grow strawberries here next spring and this article simply reinforces that decision. I read articles several months ago about this but the topic simply disappeared from my normal alerts and other reading. The issue illustrates both the need for government regulation (contrary to the pie-in-the-sky notion of the Repthuglican anti-government fringe that industries can reliably self-regulate) and the need for that regulation to consider health and safety first and company profits last. Unfortunately, it seems that the California regulators were far more concerned with profits and too willing to risk health and safety.

Vertical gardens are increasingly popular if the increasing number of blog space devoted to them is any indication. I found this by way of the Facebook group for container gardeners. All three are ingenious but I especially like the second one which incorporates a fish tank into the gardens.

I agree, Kay. If Jesus returned tomorrow a lot of Christianist hypocrites would be confused as he denied them. They are suffering from an old malady--conflating their will into God's. We aren't much for Wal-Mart either. We only go when price is the major consideration and the higher priced goods aren't of any better quality than the low. But the last few times we found their prices way too high for the items we were looking for. I can understand why Wal-Mart has been taken to the cleaners by the dollar stores. Much of what we used to buy at Wal-Mart is much cheaper at the dollar store we frequent. We had been doing pretty well on the grocery front until the last couple of years. We eliminated all of the high priced prepared foods (except for the dried fruits we added to our diet) and all of the high sugared cereals which are the most expensive in the aisle. But lately we have noticed the prices on everything is going up--sometimes by an incredible amount. The oatmeal and farina both went up by nearly 80%. We give the store brands and generics a try--if we don't like them we simply don't buy them again.

Terry Newell at Huffington Post has an interesting article this morning on the 'misrepresented majority.' I don't know how often I have seen a news story where some poll is presented in which the vast majority favor (or oppose) a given policy, bill or whatever followed by some politician favoring the position the majority rejected claiming that 'the American People demand' his position. I sit here and scream 'which American People, you (choose your own epithet--mine are quite raw)?' Well, Newell explains how it has come to pass and how these political hacks can ignore the will of what may be a majority. And, if he is right, we will need a massive revolution in voter attitudes to break the lock the respective parties seem to have on the 'safe' districts to shake things up. And if the news surrounding the redistricting, largely in Illinois, the number of safe districts are likely to grow.

Evidently NY Attorney General isn't the only state AG to resist white-washing the mortgage mess. According to David Dayen at Firedoglake Nevada's AG has filed papers to pull the state out of a multi-state agreement with Bank of America concerning the morass they took over when they acquired Countrywide on the grounds they have repeatedly failed to abide by the agreement. And she has added the charge that Bank of America has illegally foreclosed on homes they had no standing to foreclose on because they had failed to properly securitize the mortgages thereby breaking the chain of title.

Helen at Margaret and Helen has summed up the problems with at least two of the Repthuglican field. And with about as much respect as those buffoons deserve.