He was still in the closet and embarrassed by it

He was still in the closet and embarrassed by it. When I got home, I saw all this blood in the bathroom sink. I found out they had taken Moses to the hospital and he had been slashed all over his face. I told her not to leave the house and she didn't, but this boy and some friends came to the house and did this. The doctor said they had just missed a vital vein and that he was a very lucky young man. All I could think was why?

This wasn't a stray comment, but a glimpse of a larger strategy that has served Bush extremely well since he first launched his campaign for president---the myth that his administration doesn't use polling. As Bush endlessly insisted on the campaign trail, he governs "based upon principle and not polls and focus groups."

It's not hard to understand the appeal of this tactic. Ever since the Clinton administration's well-noted excesses---calling on pollsters to help determine vacation spots and family pets---polling has become a kind of shorthand for everything people dislike about Washington politics. "Pollsters have developed a reputation as Machiavellian plotters whose job it is to think up ways to exploit the public," says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Announcing that one ignores polls, then, is an easy way of conveying an impression of leadership, judgment, and substance. No one has recognized and used this to such calculated effect as Bush. When he announced he would "bring a new tone to Washington," he just as easily could have said he'd banish pollsters from the White House without any loss of effect. One of the most dependable poll results is that people don't like polling.

Forest landowners who own cattle are learning how to combine livestock, forages and timber into one production system, called silvopasture.

Beth Richardson, Clemson extension agent for forestry and wildlife, conducted a seminar this fall at the Edisto Research & Education Center in Blackville, S.C. Participants learned about the system practiced in South Alabama, where a breed called pineywood cattle have grazed in the forest for centuries.

I will forever be grateful to Greenpeace. Founded on the Quaker principle of bearing witness—the idea that seeing wrong-doing with our own eyes creates a moral responsibility to inform others and take action— Greenpeace provided me with a laptop computer and rudimentary training and then set me loose upon the world to bear witness to waste trafficking and tell everyone what I saw. However, like most institutions, Greenpeace divided its work into specific issue areas that left us working in silos, disconnected from one another: toxics, oceans, forests, nukes, marine ecosystems, genetically modified organisms, climate, etc.

The organization cultivated a strong culture of specific expertise. For example, the toxics people knew a scary amount about toxics—even the interns could rattle off the molecular structures of chlorinated organic compounds and explain their environmental health impacts—and they single-mindedly pursued their issue to the exclusion of everything else. Back then, we didn't spend much time understanding the connections between the problems we were each working so hard to solve.

“The cattle are feral stock descended from animals introduced by Spanish explorers, and they learned to fend for themselves in the longleaf pine forests and swamps of the Southeast,” she says. They tolerate heat, resist parasites and diseases, help control competition in the forest and provide an alternative income source.