Plenty room for Change® at USDA

If you've been here long you've perhaps noticed that I'm no fan of USDA's behavior in the recent past. And none of us foodie types has been too thrilled with the choice of Tom Vilsack as Obama's secretary of agriculture.

But more recently there are signs that Vilsack might not be all bad (see another Tom, and yet another one). Among other things, he's signaled that he intends to make USDA less...blatantly racist.

That's right: not only do your tax dollars pay for big-agriculture thugs to do their food-safety-/local-community-/environment-destroying dirty work in federal uniforms, but they're also paying to explicitly discriminate against black farmers.

But perhaps not for long.