Mardi Harrison, lawyer
Posted on 06/05/2014 8:43:11 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Watching the Tea Party consistently object to everything and anything the Obama administration has proposed over these 5 years has certainly been frustrating to those of us who believe that government can play a positive and valuable part in the lives of the citizenry.
In another column I listed just some of the initiatives that could have had our economy singing, our people employed, and our citizens enjoying the equal treatment guaranteed to them under our constitution and our laws. Instead, we have the most ineffective congress in history, universal, unrelenting obstruction, and our people and economy continue to struggle. And the Tea Party insults our intelligence by bemoaning that the Obama administration doesn’t accomplish anything. Crazy-making!
But for me, the Tea Party has absolutely jumped the shark with their latest attacks on Michelle Obama’s healthy eating initiative. If there is one universal imperative that everyone should be thrilled to get behind, it’s raising healthier kids. But as I understand the Tea Party argument – “government has no right to tell me what to feed my kids – if I want to feed them poison in the form of fast foods and junk, well, they’re my kids, and that’s my right.” Sarah Palin personified the position a couple of years ago, when she expressed her opposition to the First Lady’s initiative by delivering cupcakes to a local elementary school. About our children, she was metaphorically – and actually -- saying, “let them eat cake!”
This reaction strikes me as infantile. It’s as though the entire Tea Party is throwing itself on the floor and having a tantrum. “No! I WON’T eat my vegetables! I don’t wanna – and you can’t make me!” What kind of a parent chooses not to feed healthy food to his/her child? What kind of a parent is fine with allowing his/her children to become increasingly obese? What kind of parent would deny healthy food to someone else’s kid? Just what is really going on here?
My hope is this -- that a hatred of our President that is so blind and overwhelming that it manifests in a desire to intentionally harm our children will finally rip the blinders from the public’s eyes, and start them thinking about whether other issues that conservatives have opposed were actually objectionable, or were just another in a long line of otherwise worthy positions that were maligned because of who proposed them.
Or is this something more? The real opposition seems to be to new healthy requirements in school lunch programs. Who are the major beneficiaries of those programs? Poor children. For some of those children, their school lunch is the best meal of their day. But conservative hostility to poor people seems to have no bounds, so are they really saying that not only do poor children not have a right to decent, well-funded schools, but they don’t even have a right to healthy food?
Think I’m imagining things? The House of Representatives is currently considering a bill to mandate that white potatoes be included on the list of foods that women can purchase with their WIC dollars. (These are the same folks who rammed through an “expanded definition of vegetables in school food to include the tomato sauce on pizza). There’s nothing wrong with potatoes – I like potatoes, but studies demonstrate that most women and children already consume plenty of potatoes – what they need is incentive to purchase more fruits and vegetables. This is why the nonpartisan, scientific Institute of Medicine, which advises on WIC standards, has cautioned that white potatoes should not be included in the WIC program.
The current standards are making a difference. In 2010, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which set higher nutritional standards for school lunches, and now, 90% of schools report that they are meeting these standards, and guess what? The rate of childhood obesity is declining for the first time ever. I can see why the Tea Party wouldn’t love that – (not!)
Is it just that lazy parents who enjoy junk food themselves don’t want to have to change their own habits? Could they really be so selfish that they’re willing to trash their kids’ health rather than adopt new healthy habits themselves? I think the real answer is much more insidious. Like so many other political issues, you just have to follow the money. There are huge food companies that make a lot of money feeding junk to our kids. It’s a very lucrative income stream that they don’t want to give up. There’s gold in them thar burgers! So, they frame the issue as an infringement on personal freedom, mention that the Obama’s are in favor of healthy food, and a million Tea Party members reflexively hyperventilate and attack the First Lady.
Shouldn’t this be the issue that demonstrates to rational people in this country just how irrational the Tea Party is when they put their ideology of anti-Obamism and obstruction before everything – including their own healthier kids? Won’t this finally be the bridge too far? If not this issue – is there ANY Tea Party position that the citizens of America will decide is too absurd for them to accept?
The author thinks that people’s opposition to Obama is driven by hatred? Where has he or she been the past five and and a half years. Obama’s policies are a disaster. That is why people oppose him. Sadly, it’s clear that this article is a product of the irrational hatred some have for the Tea Party. The Tea Party wants to save this country. Obama wants to destroy it.
Satire?
The drunken ravings of propagandist Lord Haw Haw after the Nazis had lost?
Obama’s “honesty” has jumped the shark. And the same excuses have been trotted out after each scandal. All of them. They never do settle on ONE excuse...
We were eating broccoli earlier tonight. Two of my children asked if there was butter on it. And salt. Then they talked about how awful the broccoli at school is because it has no butter or salt or cheese. Lol. I told them why it is so tasteless. They continued to eat our broccoli and to talk about other nasty tasting vegetables at school. Like green beans that taste like cardboard. Our youngest son used to like a lot of foods, but he goes for junk food now at every opportunity. He thinks everything is going to taste “nasty” like school food. So we are working on giving him vegetables that taste good this summer. He would eat breakfast at school. (Breakfast is “free” for every student and served in the classrooms.) they have things like sausage biscuits or croissants. Sometimes they had pop tarts. They also had muffins and fruit. Most of the children ate their fruit and drank their milk. Lunch was another story. I saw so much food thrown away. No one likes cardboard pasta. Or cardboard tortillas. Lol
I don’t have a problem with schools serving food that isn’t loaded with preservatives and MSG. I do have a problem with mandates from DC.
Mardi Harrison, lawyer
Which one?
Mardi Harrison
Realtor/Attorney/ProblemSolver at Keller Williams/Mardi Harrison Esq.
Greater Philadelphia Area Law Practice
Her firm's URL is...SueTheBoss.com
I.e., she's not an ambulance-chaser, she's a grievance-chaser.
Read it (if you haven't eaten recently and can refrain from gagging) and you will see WHY she wrote this particular article.
LOL yeah right. Not this government!
“This reaction strikes me as infantile.”
Seems to me she’s the infantile one - she’s so helpless and stupid she needs the government to tell her what she must feed her kids.
STFU Mardi and get out of the way. You lose.
Which one?
Realtor/Attorney/ProblemSolver at Keller Williams/Mardi Harrison Esq.
Greater Philadelphia Area Law Practice
She sounds like a real moron. Golly gee, she “installed” apps on her IPhone all by her lonesome self. A huge triumph!
” He was not given the questions in advance “... is she really gullible enough to believe that?
She thinks it is “cool” that the President would do propaganda like that. lol.
"Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream."
I was going to ask if she was on the left or the right
She’s a babbling cliche. And she’s unreadable.
What a wonderfully poofy dog you have there, Mardi. Wonder what the carbon footprint of that brow-dry session was.
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