Lame-duck Senate passes food-safety bill with bipartisan love

good A food-safety regulation bill, made necessary in the wake of multiple salmonella crises, passed the Senate with bipartisan support.
bad The bill may not benefit organic or small-scale farmers, who could be treated to similar levels of scrutiny to the agricultural giants.
worse The bill was held up for months by GOP Senator Tom Coburn, who apparently thinks you should eat contaminated peanut butter. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

As a culture, our cheese-eating is way higher than it should be. Yeah, it’s tasty, and we know how tough of a habit it is to break (looks down at stomach), but we’ve gotten hooked on it as a culture at large. But the thing you should be really scared about? That, with the help of the government, the dairy industry is pushing us to eat even more of it. Dairy Management, Inc., a government-created industry marketing group, has been pushing for more cheese in foods, even as our culture has slowly been switching to low-fat or even plant-based forms of milk. Some more details:

bad That 33 pounds number is triple what the average American ate back in the 1970s, when the culture was cheesier in general.
worse Cheese is a key source of saturated fat, that kind of really safe fat that’s linked to heart disease and high calories.
worser Dairy Management has been promoting eating more cheese as a form of weight-loss, even though that’s not true.

The government feeds big dairy… Dairy Management is a very powerful group, and has been closely tied to both the Bush and Obama administrations. They have a budget of around $140 million, mostly from fees the government forces on the dairy industry, along with some money directly from the Agriculture Department. This is despite the public get-healthy face that folks like Michelle Obama have pushed in recent years. Not so much.
… And we just eat it up In recent years, Dairy Management’s efforts have led to new products such as Domino’s pizza relaunch (which had way more cheese), Taco Bell’s quesadillas (which have eight times more cheese than any other item on their menu), and cheesy burgers from Wendy’s and Burger King. In 2007 alone, their efforts led to an increase in cheese sales of 30 million pounds. You feel guilty now, don’t you?

» Are you a cheese-snacking fanatic? All of this underlines the big problem: The Agriculture Department is both the regulator and the government group that pushes the economic engine of the farming and dairy industries. This is very problematic for a lot of reasons. By the way, one group that Dairy Management is specifically focusing on: Families who eat lots of cheese and don’t really worry about the health qualms. That’s who these crap food products are marketed towards. Perhaps you should consider ordering your next sandwich without cheese.

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

cause California’s legislature passed a bill giving farm workers the same right to an 40-hour workweek as everyone else. It would’ve been the first of its kind in the nation.
reaction Ah-nold vetoed it, saying that the rules don’t really work for farming – something, surprisingly, both organic farmers and big agriculture corporations agree on. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink

That’s good Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack is doing an investigation into the video that cost Shirley Sherrod her job. Not the three-minute one that was spliced to make her look bad. The full one.
That’s fair Shirley Sherrod, in the wake of all this, doesn’t know if she’d return to her job. Given all the drama, and the clearly low confidence in her work performance shown by Washington, we understand.
That’s unfair Andrew Breitbart and his Big Government people still get to roam the streets and do hit pieces. What a bunch of pricks. Making crap up to ruin peoples’ lives. How do you sleep at night? Seriously? source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

right Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government ran a video of this unknown USDA worker who claimed that she denied a white person help. The right gets angry.
left Fearing a political backlash in the wake of the whole NAACP/Tea Party thing, the USDA quickly fires her. Sherrod says the White House pulled the trigger.
right It comes out that the video was heavily edited by Breitbart’s folks, giving the right ammunition to attack the White House for firing her. They just can’t win. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

You know, Dale Peterson may not have a future in politics, but he definitely has a future in advertising. In fact, he could use the Ernest advertising model so popular in the ’80s – use the same exaggerated NIMBY farmer type to sell milk. Or pitch for other politicians, like he does here. He’s really, genuinely, good at this. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

Key quote (as he pulls out a rifle): “We’re Republicans, we should be better than that.” Dale Peterson, who’s running for a fairly random state position in Alabama, has been getting a lot of attention for this this ad, which seems to fit absolutely every cliche of the current GOP. It’s not ironic. Well, at least we don’t think it is. Someone actually made a “Chuck Norris Facts”-style parody site for Peterson, and Peterson linked to it on his campaign site. Nice. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 4 Comments • Permalink

30 Nov 2010 11:08