Yuval, re those farm subsidies: Your disparager’s presumption that you must be arguing in bad faith is one of the most tedious features of the age. Speaking as a fully paid-up lackey of the Bush war machine, I said the following about what was then the Republican farm bill five years ago:

As far as I can tell no actual farmers – that’s to say, guys in denim overalls, plaid shirts and John Deere caps with straws in the stumps of their teeth – will benefit from the so-called farm Bill. Almost three-quarters of the subsidies will go to 20,000 multimillionaire play-farmers and blue-chip corporations with some canny land investments. Among the lucky ‘farmers’ piling up the dollar bills under the mattress are CNN founder Ted Turner, ABC News anchor Sam Donaldson, the oil company Chevron, and dirtpoor hardscrabble sharecropper David Rockefeller… [The legislation] is designed to help Republican fortunes in the ‘farm belt’. Judging from this Bill, the farm belt runs from Park Avenue, down Wall Street, out to the Hamptons and then by yacht to Martha’s Vineyard – or, as I like to think of it, Martha’s Barnyard.

Those of us who oppose this corruption do so regardless of who’s shoveling it out.