PRETENTIOUS FOODIE ENGAGES IN ANGUISHED REFLECTION.

For breakfast, I usually have a cappuccino—espresso made in an Alessi pot and mixed with organic milk, which has been gently heated and hand-fluffed by my husband. I eat two slices of imported cheese—Dutch Parrano, the label says, “the hippest cheese in New York” (no joke)—on homemade bread with butter. I am what you might call a food snob. My nutritionist neighbor drinks a protein shake while her 5-year-old son eats quinoa porridge sweetened with applesauce and laced with kale flakes. She is what you might call a health nut. On a recent morning, my neighbor’s friend Alexandra Ferguson sipped politically correct Nicaraguan coffee in her comfy kitchen while her two young boys chose from among an assortment of organic cereals. As we sat, the six chickens Ferguson and her husband, Dave, keep for eggs in a backyard coop peered indoors from the stoop. The Fergusons are known as locavores.

Alexandra says she spends hours each day thinking about, shopping for, and preparing food. She is a disciple of Michael Pollan, whose 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma made the locavore movement a national phenomenon, and believes that eating organically and locally contributes not only to the health of her family but to the existential happiness of farm animals and farmers—and, indeed, to the survival of the planet. “Michael Pollan is my new hero, next to Jimmy Carter,” she told me. . . .

And so the conversation turns to the difficulty of sharing their interpretation of the Pollan doctrine with the uninitiated. When they visit Dave’s family in Tennessee, tensions erupt over food choices. One time, Alexandra remembers, she irked her mother-in-law by purchasing a bag of organic apples, even though her mother-in-law had already bought the nonorganic kind at the grocery store. The old apples were perfectly good, her mother-in-law said. Why waste money—and apples?

The Fergusons recall Dave’s mother saying something along these lines: “When we come to your place, we don’t complain about your food. Why do you complain about ours? It’s not like our food is poison.”

Nope. In fact, organic veggies aren’t any more nutritious than the regular kind. I favor good food, and I don’t mind people who want to support local artisan producers. But I’d much rather dine on spam than on the self-congratulation of pretentious strivers.

JOHN HINDERAKER THINKS THAT BARBARA BUSH SHOULDN’T HAVE SPOKEN AGAINST PALIN:

This is the kind of intramural spat that the liberal media love to play up. It serves their purposes to portray the Republican Party as divided between “establishment” or “country club” Republicans and Tea Party upstarts led by Governor Palin. . . . Sarah Palin can be a great asset for the Republican Party and the conservative movement, but only if the Democrats’ plan to use her to create a needless schism in the movement fails. Palin has generally been scrupulous about not criticizing specific Republicans, but occasionally falls into stereotyped attacks on unnamed “establishment” Republicans. Worse, in my view, are the anti-Palin Republicans, some of whom talk about her as though she were a vampire to be warded off with a clove of garlic. Palin is not my first choice as a Presidential nominee, but so what? The conservative movement is not, and cannot be, a one-person show. Conservatives of all stripes need to resist the liberal media’s effort to stir up intramural brawls in our ranks.

Yes, Barbara Bush did this on purpose — to lay the groundwork for Jeb running? — and it was either unwise or selfish, depending on what you think she was after.

THE GENIUS OF OLIVER WILLIS: Recognized at last.

LAND OF THE FREE? “Nice to see the old girl is packing heat, though.”

A BUNCH OF pre-Black Friday deals at Amazon.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Reflections on an ailing society. “Warren Buffet is once more calling for higher tax rates, in advising the congress to revoke the Bush-era tax rates, and apparently to return to those of the Clinton administration—reminiscent of the elder Gates touring the country stumping for a reinstatement of a substantial inheritance tax. Aside from the fact that the deficit is not due to falling revenues, but almost entirely a result of astronomical federal spending increases since 2000, this bromide is quite pathological, this peddling of elixirs that the sellers do not drink. . . . Why do so many of these zillionaires chase the dollar almost to the exclusion of all else, and then only when wildly successful in a manner that the other 99% were not, suddenly in the twilight years want to make it tougher on others? Is that the price of penance?”

If Warren Buffett would like to make a donation to the Treasury — they take ’em, you know — I volunteer to fly out to pick up the check and hand-deliver it to Washington.

UPDATE: C.J. Burch writes, “Tell Warren to snap it up with the check. There is a budget to balance and the year is almost over.”

STEPHEN GREEN: THE DESCENT OF THE LEFT. “It’s almost enough to make you long for the Journ-O!-List, where you might at least find Spencer Ackerman longing to throw you through a plate-glass window. But spitting? Lame.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “Libertarians, ‘enemies of the state?’ He says that like it’s a bad thing.”

Plus this: “Mark Ames has in his possession the names of 57 Libertarians who are in the State Department at present.”

JOHN CONYERS: Mr. Smut Goes To Washington. Hey, give the man a break. His wife’s in jail.

HEH: “They told Glenn that if he voted for McCain we would continue the Bush policy of refusing to enter bilateral negotiations with North Korea – and they were right!”

TOM DELAY convicted on money laundering and conspiracy charges.

THANKSGIVING DOCUMENT DUMP: U.S. Surrenders E-Mails On Gulf Oil Leak Estimates.

WHAT BARACK OBAMA COULD LEARN FROM JFK. But, unless I miss my guess, won’t. Kennedy, whatever his flaws, lacked Obama’s insecurities, which is why he was able to admit mistakes graciously and engage in amusing self-deprecation, two things Obama can’t pull off.

EDITORIALIST EXPLAINS HIMSELF: “[Please note that Winston Bouvier Cuddlepup is not a real person.]”

INSTAVISION: I talk with Popular Mechanics’ Jim Meigs about Airport Security.

BOBBY JINDAL: Make Congress Part-Time.

WOMAN WEARS BIKINI FOR TSA PAT-DOWN. “Every time I go through security I always say, ‘I don’t even know why I got dressed this morning.’ I end up taking off belts, jewelry and everthing else off anyway.”

TIME TO GET THE PUBLIC INVOLVED IN AIRPORT SECURITY CHOICES: I’ve got a column up over at Popular Mechanics. (Bumped).

PRAISE OF AMERICANS, FROM 1932: “All the world criticizes them and they don’t give a damn….Moralists cry over them, criminologists dissect them, writers shoot epigrams at them, prophets foretell the end of them, and they never move. Seventeen brilliant books analyze them every month; they don’t read them .… But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn; don’t need to; never did need to. That is their salvation.”

SARAH PALIN RESPONDS TO BARBARA BUSH: “I think the majority of Americans don’t want to put up with the blue bloods. And I say it with all due respect because I love the Bushes. The blue bloods who want to pick and choose their winners instead of allowing competition to pick and choose the winners.”

STATES GOING RED:

Of all the stories of the great Republican wave election of 2010, one of the stories that didn’t get wide play is just how dominant the GOP was in state elections. Republicans claimed a record 680 state legislative seats around the country, 52 more than the old record, set by Democrats in 1974 and 208 more than they picked up in the 1994 Gingrich Revolution. The right now controls both chambers of 26 state legislatures.

And the hits just keep coming. In the past couple of weeks, at least 11 Democratic state legislators have switched sides — one in South Dakota, one in Maine, , one in Louisiana, two in Georgia, and four in Alabama. In Louisiana, the switch gives Republicans control of one house of the government for the first time since Reconstruction; in Alabama, the Republicans control both houses for the first time since 1874.

This matters for a lot of reasons going beyond the obvious one of reapportionment.

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes:

You bet it matters! Apart from the obvious reapportionment to come, the states are the Achilles’ heel of all national parties. You don’t get to DC except through some state electorate – and some state-level party apparatus. I won’t be surprised if the revolution in communication and the disaggregation and decentralization of information and the media makes political organization at the state-level more relevant than ever. Couple that with the presumptive superiority of the bi-coastal media and governing classes being rendered risible by the last decade and contemptible by the last two years, and there’s every reason for people to look for state and local answers to problems and to demand that states themselves have a greater autonomy and a greater voice in setting national policy.

Apropos of your link to praise of “Americans as Americans See It” ca. 1932, the last decade has been an education for all those that Codevilla places in the “Country Class”; and, if those members of the Country Class ever did care for the opinions and presumptive wisdom of the “Ruling Class”, I’m betting they sure-as-hell don’t now: Credibility can be a fragile thing.

Indeed.

SPACE: Lockheed Martin proposes manned mission to far side of the moon.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in camping and hiking.

BANKRUPTING AMERICA: Story Of Business: When Costs Compete With Passion.

CHINA, RUSSIA QUIT THE DOLLAR: “China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.” This is presented as bad news for the dollar — and it may be — but it also looks like a return to the old Soviet days of intra-communist trade. Good luck with that.

A LOOK AT Graphene and Drug Delivery.