Miracles never cease.

The standard Thanksgiving Week act of "kindness" by the president of the United States is to "compassionately" spare the lives of a couple turkeys - the kind with feathers. But our current president, George W. Bush, has gone a step farther. He's eliminated hunger!

According to report by Agence France Presse:

"The US government has tweaked its terminology in referring to the nearly 11 million Americans who face a constant struggle with hunger to refer to them as people with 'very low food security.'

"According to a report released this month by the US Department of Agriculture, roughly 35 million Americans had difficulty feeding themselves in 2005 and of those some 10.8 million went hungry.

"But unlike last year's report on hunger in America, which labeled families who don't get enough to eat as having "food insecurity with hunger," this year's report referred to them as having "very low food security."

I'm not making this up.

In fact, it was Vermont's senior senator - Patrick J. Leahy who brought this to our attenton with a Wednesday morning press release. St. Patrick is a senior member and former chairman of the Senate Committee On Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry and has long led in Congress on policies to address hunger in America and overseas. Said Leahy:

"Hunger is an ongoing problem, people know what it means, and it should be a higher priority than it is.  I am going to continue to call hunger by its name, and I expect that many others who have long worked on this problem will too.

“Calling it something else is not going to bring us closer to solving it.  We need to be watchful to prevent wordplay from becoming a way to minimize the blight that hunger has on millions of Americans’ lives."

“More important than what we call hunger is what we do about it, and we need to watch closely right now as the Bush Administration sets its priorities for the new budget.  Hunger-relief efforts have been in a holding pattern for several years.  A nation as blessed as ours should not tolerate having millions of its families facing hunger day in and day out, year after year.  The Thanksgiving season is an appropriate time to redouble our commitment to ending hunger sooner, rather than later.”

Wonders never cease, eh?