This Sunday, the deadline will expire on the current farm bill. Many programs will revert back to the 1949 permanent legislation. However, provisions in the continuing resolution will keep food stamps, crop insurance, farmer subsidy programs and other funding streams moving through the system. That continuing resolution sets the USDA budget and will allow full funding for most current programs.

That’s not true across the board, however. In particular, dairy farmers could feel a pinch.

The Clintonian response to this would be that a rising tide lifts all boats. Grow the economy and you reduce poverty. That’s how it worked in the 1990s. And that’s true to an extent. But the moral crime of rampant hunger, along with rampant inequality (which skyrocketed in the 1990s, by the way), shouldn’t be predicated on what kind of economy we have. There’s no time where it’s “appropriate” for mass hunger.

Today is Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) awareness day!

After being offered a new job with USDA, Shirley Sherrod told the media she indeed wants to hear from the President, to acquaint him with some realities from her life that he may not understand. So she needs to be convinced that he — the President of the United States — believes in, and will fight for, the principles he claims to hold.

Anyone following the Administration’s shameful treatment of Shirley Sherrod also knows that the entire episode began with a premeditated act by Andrew Breitbart, an unethical right wing thug who knowingly smeared both Ms. Sherrod and the NAACP with an obviously and misleadingly edited video.

We have bigger challenges than at any time since the 1930s, and we’re spending time interpreting two-decade parables from an NAACP banquet. The biggest times of media bread and circus over the past couple decades have been now, and during the Clinton Administration. Whatever do those two eras share in common?

All hail the stupid.

Watching the story of Ms. Sherrod’s unfair firing unfold, there are several people who deserve to be fired in the Obama Administration today, possibly even in the White House. But so far, the only person to lose her job is Ms. Sherrod, the lone honest public servant in this sorry episode.