Can you struggle through the rest of this year and 2008 before the collective citizenry labeled U.S.A. can realize the possibility of limitless potential and opportunity? Will enough have been lost to bring focus to how much is to be gained?

George Bush, facilitator for the upcoming 18-month gauntlet of struggle and loss, is looking to guarantee you will answer those questions in the affirmative.

And since this is a column about food and politics, confirming the ensuing pain with a glance to Iraq would be an injustice to what's going on here around the kitchen table.

CAFOs rage on

Guaranteeing at least 30 more months of pollution from animal factories, the Environmental Protection Agency has for the second time delayed implementing court-ordered changes aimed at improving water quality from these facilities.

Already stalled once for a year, the new standards are now set to begin in February 2009, rather than this summer, according to an announcement in May.

When and if the new laws go into effect, it will have been more than 10 years since the EPA first proposed water protection guidelines to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for animal factories. It's a running legacy for Bush, who left Texas in 2000 with that state producing a nation's-best 31 billion pounds of chicken manure a year.

Jeff Stigdon of Coxton Road near Bedford called The Bloomington Alternative earlier this month and confirmed Big Ag's happy ride on Bush's back.

"The kids came home from school and told me about it," was how Stigdon recalled learning of the new turkey factory coming to his watershed. "Now we're trying to figure out who we need to talk to."

No information was available on where the Stigdon family purchased their ball-o-butter-lookin' bird last Thanksgiving ...

Labs turned off

The same day the EPA green-lighted continued animal factory pollution for two more years, the Food and Drug Administration said it would close seven of its 13 field laboratories that help investigate public health threats like food-borne illnesses.

Apparently the pet food fiasco, bad salsa, nasty spinach, increased e. coli fears and an increase in salmonella outbreaks weren't keeping the labs busy enough, as the FDA reported it was using only about 300,000 square feet of the half-million available at the 13 labs.

(Interagency Memo: FDA may have space for manure piling up at EPA.)

It was reported that House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, was understandably miffed about the announcement. He'd been told by Bush's FDA chief in late December that "there are no changes to (FDA's) current laboratory structure."

Dingell's fiery protest peaked with a "completely unacceptable" press release. But no reply came back from the NRA-loving congressman's office on the Alternative Table's suggestion he lead a salsa shoot-'til-u-drop contest at a Washington, D.C., Taco Bell to help underscore his outrage.

Coming soon to your backyard

Finally! Haven't you always wanted a genetically engineered eucalyptus tree hailing from Australia to become available to frost-loving climates like Indiana?

Always fair to our FDA and EPA cohorts at USDA, it would be inexcusable not to forewarn about the USDA's review of a request by biotech bad boy ArborGen to engineer a frost-tolerant eucalyptus tree at a site in Alabama.

ArborGen is shopping for the fastest-growing, best biomass-producing monster, and the USDA, in the past, has been the place to take good horror stories.

Eucalyptus fits that bill - big and fast-growing - but frost kills it. That's why it's native to places like Australia and Indonesia and not San Diego, where it was introduced into the U.S. There are now an estimated 220,000 eucalyptus trees on just the University of California-San Diego campus.

Fish food and Karl Rove

Big Ag suffocated about 300,000 wild salmon and trout to death in Oregon's Klamath River in 2002, in part thanks to Karl Rove's longstanding campaign against the Endangered Species Act.

And former federal employee and whistleblower Mike Kelly is a hell of a human for talking about it -- non-stop for four years now.

Kelly's fish-friendly positions on a controversial farm irrigation plan were dismissed and water levels dropped in the Klamath after it was implemented, leading in part to that 2002 fish kill.

It turns out that as Kelly was writing the plan to save the endangered coho salmon, Rove was holding meetings with Kelly's bosses in Washington on what it would take to get Bush-lover and Oregon Senator Gordon Smith re-elected. Tops on the agenda was delivering the farm vote.

So how did it all end? Recalling the themes of struggle and loss, Kelly lost his job, Smith was re-elected, and the Office of Special Counsel is reviewing Kelly's whistleblower claims while a court has already decided Kelly's bosses used "no evidence" in making the irrigation decision.

Poison icing on the cake is Bush-appointee Scott Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel, who is under investigation by the Office of Personnel Management, by the Government Accountability Office and by a U.S. Senate subcommittee over the mass dismissal of hundreds of whistleblower cases and allegations of cronyism, tagerting gays for removal and for refusing to investigate discrimination cases based on sexual orientation.

Before taking his current post, attorney Bloch was with the Justice Department's Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives.