But Roger Doiron has a better plan for eating the view of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. He's started a campaign to get a kitchen garden growing on the White House lawn.

Doiron works out of his small cape house in Maine, where I find him one summer day. A wasp-thin 41-year-old, he's part of the fastest growing -- I used the word literally -- movement in the country. His organization, Kitchen Gardeners International, is one link in a loose chain of partisans who are neither conservatives nor liberals but locavores.
They want to think global, eat local. Very local. As in their front and back yard.

He shows me the lawn sign that expresses his politics: "1,500 Miles, 400 Gallons, Say What?" It's a reference to the average miles food travels to your plate and the gallons of fuel used in its migration. It's not the sexiest slogan, but kitchen gardeners are probably as passionate about vegetables as Republicans are about tax cuts.

Doiron spent a decade with a grass-roots environmental group in Europe. Weekdays he worried about mad cow disease and weekends he ate happily out of his Belgian mother-in-law's garden.

After returning to his homeland and hometown the week before 9/11, he became a lettuce-roots environmentalist. As head of KGI, he also walks the walk, showing me 50 varieties of vegetables he grows for his family of five on about a sixth of an acre. Memo to other amateurs: You will be pleased to know that Doiron's garden also has weeds.

The appeal of kitchen gardens -- food you grow for the table -- has been increasing pretty steadily. Taste bud by taste bud. But this year, a harmonic or maybe disharmonic convergence of factors led to a giant leap in the number of grow-it-yourselfers.

For one thing, there's the rising cost of food -- 45 percent worldwide in two years. There's also the rising consciousness about the carbon footprint on your dinner plate. There is, as well, recognition of an international food shortage and moral queasiness about biofuels, growing corn to feed cars while people are going hungry.

Meanwhile, we've had more uncertainty about food safety, whether it was spinach in 2006 or this year's tomatoes. And the floods that ruined millions of acres in the Midwest have undermined our easy sense of plenty.

"When people feel they are living in uncertain times, they turn to things that give them a sense of security," says Doiron. "There are not many sure things but if you put a few seeds in the ground and you don't muck it up too much you'll get a crop." As proof he stands beside a neat patch of potatoes.

He adds, "Don't do it because it's the cheap thing to do or because Al Gore said it's the right thing to do. Do it to make a small yet concrete step. You may not be able to single-handedly take on Exxon and Chevron but you can take on your backyard."

In that spirit, Doiron is pushing for edible landscapes everywhere from schoolyards to governor's mansions to empty urban plots. But Doiron set his eyes on everybody's house, the White House.

He wants the candidates to pledge they'll turn a piece of the 18-acre White House terrain into an edible garden. Or rather, return it into an edible garden.

After all, John Adams, the first president to ever live in the White House, had a garden to feed his family. Woodrow Wilson had a Liberty Garden and sheep grazing during the First World War. And, of course, the Roosevelts famously had their Victory Garden during World War II, a time when 40 percent of the nation's produce came from citizen gardeners.

Washington's "Farewell Address" to the new nation was a warning about the threat of American imperial ambitions and a declaration of his high expectations for a republic of free men: "In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism ... "

We are drowning in the "impostures of pretended patriotism," used to cover the lies that got us into Iraq, the defense of torture and the violation of our basic liberties. In the name of patriotism, we presume a God-given American right to reorder the world to our liking, masking the vice of unfettered greed as an obligation of national security.

Any doubts as to this later governing impulse of our imperial ambitions were shattered with the recent news that U.S. advisers to our puppet government in the Green Zone of occupied Iraq have worked out agreements for American oil companies to gain control of Iraqi oil fields. But, then again, what did we expect when we elected a Texas oil hustler, and a failed one at that, to be our president?

Only in an America dumbed down by constant propaganda about our innate moral superiority will anyone any longer believe that we didn't invade Iraq for the oil, even though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came to the Bush administration from the board of directors at Chevron, where they named an oil tanker after her. Like Vice President Dick Cheney with those Halliburton contracts, Rice has stayed true to her corporate sponsors.

That's what the U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished -- for the first time in more than three decades after Iraq joined a worldwide trend of formerly colonized nations gaining control of their own resources, Big Oil is getting it's black gold back. It was always about the oil -- that's why "we" invaded Iraq -- only "we" aren't getting any, at least not at a reasonable price. The oil companies are.

I know it's difficult for the corporate media and politicians, both fueled generously by energy money, to grasp the distinction, but we the people and they the oil companies are not one and the same. While we suffer at the pump, they make record profits, which is the way they like it.

Don't think for a second that U.S. oil companies are rushing into Iraq to expand production to help lower world oil prices, thus making their investments less profitable. They just want to be on the winning side, which is why the CEO of Halliburton relocated his office from Texas to the United Arab Emirates, where I am certain he and his fellow corporate expatriates are able to happily celebrate the Fourth of July.

So, take that American flag off your lapel and replace it with a button bearing the Exxon or Chevron logo. C'mon Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, be straight about what it is you are really pushing here. 'Fess up -- it's not the good old U.S.A. as represented by the sucker taxpayers conned by your patriotic blather. No sirree, what you would have Americans paying homage to is the majesty of the big multinational corporations that exploit American military power to rule the world.

But recognize that you have shamed the legacy of our first president. George Washington, who distinguished the promise of the new world from the corruptions of the old by shunning imperial conquest, said: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing."

If Barack Obama or John McCain were to offer such words of wisdom this Fourth of July, he would be vilified as "weak," and that is a fit measure of just how far we have descended from the high hopes of our first president.

The only notable difference this year is that neither the money nor the message has crystallized yet behind any "independent" effort to destroy the candidacy of Barack Obama. Whether such a campaign against him can be mounted effectively remains to be seen, but it will not fail for lack of trying.

Back in 2004, the Swift Boat group's attack on Mr. Kerry commenced in earnest with the August publication of Unfit for Command, a book purporting to prove that the Democratic nominee's decorations for courage as a Navy officer in Vietnam were undeserved and that he had fabricated his sterling military record. Those sensational charges won immense publicity for the authors and were soon augmented by a wave of national advertising, with millions in seed money provided by a group of wealthy Bush supporters based in Texas. Of course the fingerprints of Karl Rove, then the president's top political strategist, were all over that ugly episode.

The candidates have abandoned the playing field and are sucking down Gatorade while the trainers search for additional wads of cash to stuff into the hollow portions of their uniforms. And the score at halftime finds Barack Obama leading John McCain by about 15 points. Which should excite Democrats. I mean the last time they had this kind of a lead, at this point in the race, was way, way back, 4 years ago when John Kerry enjoyed a similar lead over George Bush. Oh.

Meanwhile, welcome to silly season. To demonstrate their unity, former sworn mortal enemies, Senators Obama (Crips) and Clinton (Bloods) met up in a New Hampshire town named Unity where back in January, both received 107 votes. Get it? They're not at each other's throats anymore. They're in Unity. You can't make stuff up like this. And no, I have no idea if Truth or Consequences, New Mexico or Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming were considered as alternates in case the civic fathers of Unity proved truculent.

We should relish these two months of campaign down- time before the conventions begin, and where just like now, absolutely nothing will happen. The only difference is then, that nothing will be reported upon at such a great length, that grown men are developing rashes on the insides of their thighs just thinking about it.

Who will be number 2? Nobody knows. And we might not for a while. This time around the VP picks are undergoing prodigious scrutiny due to the peculiar vulnerability of each of the nominees. John McCain is old and could nod off at any time and Barack Obama is black and will have to campaign in America, a country more comfortable with guns than library cards. No word as to whether that whole library card thing is scheduled for any future Supreme Court docket.

Both secondary races are wide open and the speculation is so thick you can hide small clusters of cherry tomatoes in the smoke coming out of Chris Mathews' ears. You got your public short list and you got your private shorter list and then you got your slip of paper with Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney's names on it, who only get the nod if every other politician in America co- incidentally trips and falls into an active lava tube.

Some people say that the Vice President doesn't affect the general election. Maybe not, but the choice of the Vice President does have an impact. Do the names Eagelton, Ferraro, and Quayle have any meaning here? How bout Admiral Stockdale, Ross Perots's running mate in 92. "Who am I? Why am I here?" A question never adequately answered. For him or for us. Or for our current presumptive nominees.

It's all over, folks. Except for the 17 Gloucester girls in the late stages of pregnancy or early stages of motherhood. And except, of course, for the 140,000 other American girls between 15 and 17 who'll be having their own babies this year.

Let us review the feeding frenzy that seemed to please so many palates. The natives of this Massachusetts town already knew there had been a bump in the number of baby bumps. High school pregnancies had quadrupled in one year. But this didn't get much outside notice until the high school principal told a Time magazine reporter that nearly half the girls "made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together."

Pregnancy Pact! "Sisterhood of the Maternity Pants!" "Jailbait Girls in Tot Pact!" Quick, ride your favorite hobbyhorse over to the nearest cable station, network or blog.

The tale of the pregnancy pact led all the usual suspects to cast all the usual blame. It was because the state rejected abstinence-only funds. No, it was because the school couldn't dispense condoms. It was because the celebrity culture bred Jamie Lynn Spears wannabes. No, it was because the town was in the economic dumps. It was because the school had day care. No, it was because of an "absolute moral collapse."

Just when the dudgeon rose high over the outrage levee, along came the beleaguered mayor of her struggling city to tell a packed news conference that there was no evidence of a "blood oath" and that the high school principal had gotten a bit "foggy in his memory." Next, some of the pregnant girls spoke up and the pact fell apart at the seams. Maybe some got pregnant intentionally, maybe some bonded before or after the pregnancy test, but there was no mass plunge into motherhood. Phew.

MAD was based on a triad of air, land and sea forces that would punish a Soviet first strike, ending all semblance of life on the one-sixth of the planet that comprised the old Soviet Union. Toward that end, we needed not only thousands of land-based weapons, but thousands of other weapons on ships and on airplanes.

It was LeMay's insistence that nuclear-armed bombers be in the air 24-7 that gave rise to the mid-air refueling tankers that were in the news this past week. Controversy arose when the Government Accountability Office questioned an Air Force decision to award the contract for a new generation of those "gas stations in the sky" to one defense contractor instead of its rival.

The news was presented in a Wall Street Journal front-page story focusing on the profit potential rather than the military significance of the tanker. So, too, the account that led the New York Times business section, which detailed the good news in Boeing's revived chances to secure the refueling tanker contract. This deal would initially cost $35 billion but, as the Times pointed out, "could eventually grow to $100 billion to build a fleet of 179 refueling planes ... one of the most lucrative (Pentagon contracts) ever."

Neither newspaper indicated why we needed $100 billion in tankers, other than in a revealing photo in the Times showing it refueling a B-2 bomber, which brings us back to LeMay and his MAD doctrine. The B-2 was designed to be the modern bomber in the triad confronting the Soviets. Its very expensive stealth cover would be able to penetrate a sophisticated Soviet radar system -- which was never built. That also assumes that the B-2's stealthy cover would stop deteriorating in the rain, as it was wont to do, but the test for this technology never occurred

He rejected the Bush tax cuts in 2001 because they provided an unearned bonanza for America's wealthiest citizens while giving a pittance to the middle class and nothing to the working poor. To him, as a long-standing enemy of waste and profligacy, these proposals were not only unfair but also unwise.

"I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief," he said, joining courageously with Lincoln Chafee, then a senator from Rhode Island, as one of two Republicans who dared to cast such a crucial vote against president and party.

Now Mr. Chafee is no longer in the Senate, losing reelection in 2006 after enduring a brutal primary challenge from the Republican right. And Mr. McCain, now driven by ambition rather than principle, has changed. He supports the tax cuts that his conscience once moved him to oppose--and indeed, he promises to deliver even more lucrative benefits to those who need relief least, at the expense of those who need it most.

Tax policy is rarely discussed as a character issue. It is possible to believe that rewarding the rich should be the main purpose of the tax code, and it is also possible to believe that taxation should advance rather than diminish equality--and it is possible for honorable people to argue either way. But in Mr. McCain's case, his complete flip-flop and his implausible explanation raise disturbing questions about his integrity. (That is particularly true of a candidate like Mr. McCain, who questioned the character of a primary opponent, Mitt Romney, for revamping his positions on abortion and other social issues.)

By the time Mr. McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, he had established a strong position against their regressive effects. That stance marked him as a true maverick in his own party and a straight talker who spoke for the national interest against his own personal interests. Running against George W. Bush in the 2000 G.O.P. primary, he mocked the Texas governor's "misplaced" bonanza for the affluent.

"Sixty percent of the benefits from his tax cuts go to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans--and that's not the kind of tax relief that Americans need," he said. Despite his wife's inherited wealth, he criticized proposals to repeal the estate tax for the same reason, noting that such legislation "would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country."

As the chance to run for president again drew closer, however, Mr. McCain shifted toward conservative orthodoxy. In 2005 he voted for cuts in capital-gains taxes that he had previously opposed, and in 2006 voted for essentially the same estate-tax repeal he had once denounced. And today, his economic platform extends to the Bush tax cuts and renders them still more regressive--and more expensive.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the McCain proposals would render almost one-quarter of their benefits to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of taxpayers. Those are households with annual incomes over $2.8 million. Families in the lower 60 percent of the income scale would receive 8 percent of the McCain plan's benefits. This scheme will result in the loss of at least four trillion dollars in revenue over the coming decade, as our physical infrastructure crumbles.

Even more troubling than those numbers, however, is the contorted rhetoric that the Republican nominee-to-be has used to justify his policy reversal. Over the past several months, you see, he has discovered that he never really opposed the Bush tax cuts as unfair. He only opposed them because there weren't enough spending cuts to balance the revenue reductions.

This prompted a cynical question from a young lawyer in my family: "Does that mean you can renew your virginity again and again? Or is it three strikes and you're out?"

Well, now we are having a secondary argument over secondary virginity.
This time the subject isn't spiritual revival but surgical re-virgin. The furor comes from Europe where there's a trend among women -- mostly immigrants and mostly Muslims -- to have their hymens restored for the marriage market.

This began with a recent case that has France in an uproar even by French standards. A Muslim groom who discovered on his wedding night that his wife was not what she claimed to be -- a virgin -- sued for and won an annulment. He claimed a breach of contract on the grounds that virginity was an "essential quality" of the woman he chose to marry.

This ruling outraged a country that bans headscarves in schools and has immigrants sign a pledge that describes France as a secular country where men and women are equal. It was described by a Cabinet minister as a "fatwa against emancipated women" and identified by others as something that would pressure more women into hymenoplasty.

Now, why precisely one woman found guilty of fraud would drive other women into deeper fraud I'm not sure. But gynecologists in Paris report women coming to them for certificates of virginity, and medical tourist packages take women to places such as Tunisia where the surgery is cheaper.

There is even a new Italian movie about an immigrant returning to Casablanca to "have her odometer brought back to zero."

All this is happening despite the fact -- Biology 101 -- that the presence or absence of a hymen may be unrelated to sexual experience.
Indeed, one surgeon gives patients a vial of blood to pour on the sheets just in case.

This has led to a controversy not just over sex and equality but the ethics of surgery that's designed to retrofit a woman to a rigid culture.
On one side, the French gynecological organization condemned the practice as a "submission to the intolerance of the past." On the other side, a doctor who performs the surgery said, "My patients don't have a choice if they want to find serenity -- and husbands." And some of the patients describe it flat-out as a matter of life and death, acknowledging that they are in real danger from their families if their 'dishonor' is discovered.

Now, before we dismiss this whole restoration project as Europe vs.
Fundamentalism, remember that American doctors are also offering to repair hymens in Web site ads promising privacy and like-a-virgin results -- thank you, Madonna.

Bioethicist Alta Charo squirms over the idea of hymen repair but then says we ought to "put it in the larger context of how far women will go to make themselves marriageable and sexually attractive." Just what will secular, modern women do to fit their own cultural stereotypes -- breast implant, anyone? What will they do to stay employable -- face-lift, anyone?

It is certainly a great asset to have a formidable female vice presidential candidate, whose victory would further a legitimate aspiration of many of the nearly 18 million people who voted for her in the primaries. Nor is there a more progressive woman who would likely be added to the ticket. Clinton is about as good as the Democratic Party leadership will accept in its insistence on a right-of-center balance to Obama's purported liberalism.

Right of center she is. Just take the three major legislative accomplishments of the Clinton White House, whose record Sen. Clinton has trumpeted. First was President Clinton's so-called welfare reform, which wiped out the federal obligation to deal with poverty. When Democrats claim to be the party of concern for the underdog, they most often refer to the federal welfare programs originated under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It was Clinton's mandate to gut those programs and devolve concern for the poor, including the 70 percent previously on welfare who were children, to the tender mercies of the states.

Add to the list of horribles from the Clinton years the Financial Services Modernization Act, passed at the president's insistence, and his refusal to even threaten a veto of it if a strong privacy provision that he half-heartedly requested were not included. It wasn't, and as a result, your private financial, health and other records held by previously segregated stockbrokers, insurance companies and banks were merged, along with those respective corporate entities.

This law represents the dismantling of the major market regulations instituted by Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression, but don't look for Democrats or Republicans to be bragging about their vote for that one, in this time of the subprime mortgage meltdown.

Finally, there is the Telecommunications Act, which permitted media merger mania -- and all one needs to say about that assault on the diversity of ownership needed for a free press is that Rupert Murdock is a big buddy of the Clintons. And that's hardly just because they both shared an enthusiasm for the now widely discredited invasion of Iraq. Nope. Hillary Clinton, as she brags in her meetings with her financial backers, has faithfully carried water for the corporate elite while making appropriate noises about the little people.

After so many election cycles dominated by race-baiting, panty-raiding and swift-boating, voters might feel reassured by serious discussion of real issues. On no issue is such frank partisan discussion more urgent than the economy, as the numbers plunge downward along with national and world confidence.

Despite Mr. McCain's widely quoted confession that he doesn't know much about economics, the conceit of his party has long been that only conservatives understand how the world works--and that only cutting taxes on the wealthy and removing regulations from business can encourage growth, especially in recessionary periods.

Many American voters used to accept those simplistic nostrums as received truth, but perhaps it is time to reexamine them in the light of past history and present failures. When it is Mr. Obama's turn to speak in the coming debates, he may wish to point out that the record of past economic performance by Republican politicians compares quite poorly with that of their Democratic rivals.

Take Phil Gramm, the former Texas Senator whose proud authorship of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981 was immediately followed by severe recession--and then by the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. Among Mr. Gramm's final speeches in the Senate was an impassioned rant warning that the Clinton economic program would lead to disaster and higher deficits. He could not have been more wrong, of course, an embarrassing historical footnote that is only significant because he now serves as chief economic counselor to the McCain campaign.

The better question is should he or shouldn't he? This is also easier to answer: No, though not for the reasons you might think.

Sure, in the long run, we consumers, particularly the most wasteful ones who happen to reside in the good old U.S.A. and who have become accustomed to consuming many times our population's worth of the world's resources, do need to shape up. But that has little to do with the fivefold rise in the price of oil since George W. Bush became our president.

Yep, he did it. Bush's deliberate roiling of world politics is the key variable in the run-up of oil prices. No president has been more brilliant in destabilizing the politics of oil-producing countries from Venezuela to Russia, as well as those of the key oil lakes of Iraq and Iran.

This last will go down in our nation's history as one of the dumbest escapades of all time, rivaling even the madness of the Vietnam War. Vietnam was always absurd on its face as an imperial adventure because, as American consumers who check their labels must know, the Vietnamese dominate the market only in the provision of farmed shrimp.

This has not been an easy week for ardent Hillary supporters who are being told to move on and move over to the Obama camp. The woman who looked improbably energetic and strong as she bowed out last Saturday reinforced both the respect and disappointment of her core supporters.

Mourning is not too strong a word to describe what I've been hearing in the last few days. No sooner had the speech ended than a Hillary fundraiser received an e-mail from the Democratic National Committee asking her to raise money for Obama. She said, tersely, they didn't even wait for the body to cool. The next day, with Hillary waving goodbye on The New York Times' Page 1, there was an article on Michelle Obama's clothes in the Styles section. Back to the first lady beat, sighed a reader.

"Women have had the idea of her being president in their heads for a decade or more. So the level of disappointment, anger, discouragement is that much stronger," said Marie Wilson of the White House Project. As Dianne Feinstein said, "the nerve endings have to be healed."

Well, fair enough. But in the early stage of the mourning process, those supporters who have been dismissively pegged as Angry White Women should take another adage from politics: Don't Get Mad, Get Even.