Just How Screwed We All Are in 2 Headlines

Fewer Chicken Inspectors and More Chickens?

—By Tom Philpott

| Thu Sep. 12, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

 

I'm not sure how much good he was doing anyway.

USDA Seeks to Expand Pilot Program Which Leaves Meat Contaminated With Fecal Matter

 Tuesday, 17 September 2013 09:55

By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report

 Like all of our regulatory agencies, theUSDA has been so completely captured by the industries it is supposed to oversee that one wonders what the point of its existence even is anymore.

 

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has plans to expand a privatized meat inspection model that has been in place for 14 years at five hog plants in the United States and which has been found to fail time and time again at preventing contamination of meat - with fecal matter.

And what is this completely failed pilot program?

 The program. . . has been in place since the late 1990s and its expansion would replace almost half the USDA Food Safety Service inspectors in industrial meat plants with inspectors employed by those very same companies.

 

 So they get to inspect themselves. Who could possibly see anything going wrong with that program?

 

Okay, I mean besides "everybody."

 



The USDA is so beholden to the big agri-business companies, it's even starting to talk like them:

"The USDA all along has been saying that these pilots will prove that removing government inspectors and turning over [their] the responsibilities to the company employees will enhance food safety

The USDA has insisted that the novel inspection regime would improve the safety of the chicken and turkey cranked out by industrial-scale slaughterhouses,

Those are exactly the kinds of claims churned out by right-wing pro-industry "thinktanks" like the Competitive Enterprise Institute or Americans for Prosperity, or the Assface Institute. De-regulation will make food safer.  Clear-cutting is good for forests. Fracking is good for the environment. Up is down, black is white, Sarah Palin is qualified to hold public office. Why do we even have a USDA if they're just going to go around parroting this libertarian fantasy bullshit? I mean, they gotta know this is bullshit, right?

. . .[A] recent article in The Washington Post, reports that three out of the five pilot HIMP [the self-inspection model] plants were among the 10 worst health and safety violators in the country, according to a spring report by the USDA inspector general.

[T]he Agriculture Department has given a green light to Australia, Canada and New Zealand to use this experimental, privatized model of food inspection in meat plants whose products are for export to the United States, even though the foreign plants operating under processes considered equivalent to the HIMP program have experienced an epidemic of contamination-related problems within the past two years, including a Canadian plant which had to recall more than 8.8 million pounds of beef product fouled with E. coli.

So obviously this is a bad idea. And just as obviously, it's going to happen anyway.

I really need to look into veganism.

Ready for Hillary?

I keep seeing these das pop up all over the interwebs, asking me if I'm ready for Hillary in 2016.

Am I ready for Hillary? No. No, I'm not and I'll tell you why.

I'm not ready for another DLC "centrist."

I'm not ready for someone who voted for the invasion of Iraq because she "trusted" George W. Bush. I'm just some guy, I have no inside info and I'm not especially bright and I knew that Bush and his crew were lying about everything.

I'm not ready for another friend of Larry Summers.

I'm  not ready for a president whose resume' includes being the designated hawk of the previous administration. (http://www.thenation.com/blog/172635/good-riddance-warmonger-hillary-clinton#)


I'm not ready for someone whose answer to the health-care crisis was "managed competition." I'm not ready for yet another president for whom single-payer is not on the table.

I'm not ready for someone who was a part of the administration that gave us NAFTA, GATT and the WTO. Granted, it was her husband, ol' what's his name Clinton that was in charge, but has she ever expressed any disagreement with the "free trade" conventional wisdom?

I am definitely ready for a female prez. I would love to see a President Elizabeth Warren, for instance. Why not a president Barbara Lee? Or Barbara Boxer? Or Barbara Erenreich? Or really anyone named Barbara, I guess? Anyway, I just want to make sure that no one misunderstands me and thinks that my objections to Hillary for president have anything to do with her gender. I would welcome a female president. Just not her.



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A little insight into the mindset of Florida police

In Email, Zimmerman’s Local Police Chief Agrees He’s Another ‘Sandy Hook’ Waiting To Happen

By Judd Legum on September 12, 2013 at 5:11 pm

Police Chief Steve Bracknell, who is responsible for the Florida town where George Zimmerman resides, agreed in a series of emails that Zimmerman is a “ticking time bomb” and another “Sandy Hook” waiting to happen.
Bracknell expressed his views in response to two emails from Santiago Rodriguez, who reached Bracknell through a contact form on the police department’s website. Bracknell confirmed the emails’ authenticity




See, here's the thing. George Zimmerman is not a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. He has already exploded. He has already murdered a young man. But that apparently doesn't count in Florida. Now he has threatened his white estranged wife and her white parents, now suddenly he's become dangerous? Now he's a threat to "the community?"

He's already committed one murder, but I'm afraid that sooner or later he's going to became an actual problem. He's eventually going to end up killing someone. . . um, you know, someone who counts.

I swear, the more I learn about Ted Cruz the more he creeps me out.

First there was the story about Ted's father filling him with delusions of grandeur, telling him that he was God's chosen one or whatever.

Now I see this:

Ted Cruz: 'We Need 100 More Like Jesse Helms' In The Senate

Posted: 09/11/2013 7:20 pm EDT 

And that's not even the crazy part. The crazy part is not that Ted Cruz thinks we need 100 retrograde racist homophobes in the Senate, that's pretty much to be expected from any teabagger. This is the crazy part:

"I’ll tell you something … the very first political contribution I ever made in my life was to Jesse Helms. When I was a kid, I sent $10 to Jesse Helms, ’cause they were beating up on him, they were coming after him hard and I thought it wasn’t right, and at the time my allowance was 50 cents a week,”

What kind of a 10-year-old  kid is even aware of Jesse Helms? Much less is a fan? And so much of a fan that he saves up 20 weeks worth of his allowance to send him a contribution? And how does a Hispanic kid choose to donate to one of the most virulent racists the Senate has ever seen?

Also, at 10 years old, little Teddy had already absorbed the Republican right-wing victim mentality. "Oh, they were beating up on him! Oh, they were coming after him! Oh, poor defenseless little Senator Asswwipe, we all must chip in to defend him against whoever 'they' are!""

Seriously, the more I learn about Ted Cruz, the more he creeps me out!

The Right's Newest theme

With the mid-term elections looming just around the corner, the right has seemingly latched on to a new rallying cry:

Let Kids Go Hungry!

Seriously, it's all the rage these days!

Fox News Commentator Praises Child Hunger as a "Teaching Moment" for Parents

By Amanda Marcotte

 | 

Posted Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013, at 11:51 AM

. . .. In response to a New Jersey school district choosing to withhold lunch from kids whose parents forgot to refill their lunch accounts, Thomas Kersting, who is alarmingly a school counselor, said, "You know, if one day a kid doesn’t have lunch, right, maybe that’s a teaching moment when that kid doesn’t have lunch. That may sound harsh saying that, but we’ve got to get people to start being responsible for themselves."

Yes, and nothing will teach those schoolkids responsibility like hunger! Maybe next time these damn children will get jobs and make money to buy food instead of "playing" and "doing homework." Little free-loading jerks!


And, you know, if it was just one nut on Fox, it might not be worth mentioning, but you know if one of these assholes has a talking point, they're all going to have it sooner than later.

 

Especially this asshole!

 

 

 

Limbaugh Compares Students Who Receive Free School Meals To Family Pets

Video ››› September 6, 2013 4:00 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

 

 

Of course, as always when it comes to utter despicability, Rush was way ahead of the curve on this one:

June 17, 2010 02:00 PM

Rush Limbaugh thinks hungry children should "dumpster dive" for their dinner

God, this is just -- we can't escape these people. We just can't escape them. They live in the utter deniability of basic human nature. They actually have it in their heads somehow that parents are so rotten that they will let their kids go hungry and starve, unless the schools take care of it.

I think, you know what we're going to do here, we're going to start a feature on this program: "Where to find food." For young demographics, where to find food. Now that school is out, where to find food. . .
. . .There's another place if none of these options work to find food; there's always the neighborhood dumpster. Now, you might find competition with homeless people there, but there are videos that have been produced to show you how to healthfully dine and how to dumpster dive and survive until school kicks back up in August.


And it's not just media types, either. Southern Beale brings us this story of  Kevin Kookogey, chair of the Williamson County Republican Party, coming out against the school breakfast program:

“This is not a complicated issue,” he said. “It is not the role of government to feed people. Government exists to protect and defend our God-given rights. Government fails when it usurps these bounds.

Hey, it's not government's problem if kids are going hungry! Guv'mint's only job is ta protect mah right ta bear arms, muthafukker!

Mindy McAlindon, first vice chair with the Williamson County Republican Party, agrees with Kookogey.

“It’s not the government’s job to feed students. It’s our job to provide for ourselves,” the Franklin home-school mom said. “The government is deciding where our money goes. And we should be deciding where our money goes.”

Yeah, if'n I don't want any of mah moneys goin' to feed no hungry young'uns, that's mah business!


Of course, these people don't understand how "government" works. We elect a government to represent us. If we want that government to give some food to hungry children then that is the government's job. If we would rather elect people who will let kids go hungry, then we can go ahead and vote them in in 2014. But the "government's job" is to do whatever the people damn well want it to do, within certain bounds. There is no set list of duties, no job description for "government." We elect them and they're supposed to do what we want them to do.

Anyway, how's that whole re-branding thing working out for you, Republicans? You're going to be the party of hungry kids now? Good luck with that!
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