Hating the Govt, Loving the Disease

Conservatives:

Topps Meat Co. on Friday said it was closing its business, six days after it was forced to issue the second-largest beef recall in U.S. history and 67 years after it first opened its doors.

On Sept. 25 Topps began recalling frozen hamburger patties that may have been contaminated with the E. coli bacteria strain O157:H7. The recall eventually ballooned to 21.7 million pounds of ground beef.

Government is the means by which we come together to accomplish that which we cannot achieve by ourselves. It is an acknowledgment that we are all in this together. Only those who cannot see these important ties and lack this empathy would choose to sever them. These people are conservatives and they are psychotic.

E. Coli Conservatives

Government is the problem:

Congressional investigators are expected to tell a House subcommittee today that the Food and Drug Administration's ability to ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply is "minimal" and agency plans to overhaul its inspection regime could make a bad situation worse.

FDA officials, under fire for the recent string of high-profile food scares involving both domestic and imported foods, have been asked to appear before a House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee hearing to discuss the agency's food inspections.

Committee staff reviewed the system extensively and found that a shrinking inspection staff examines less than 1% of all imported food. A typical inspector in the
FDA's San Francisco office examines nearly 1,000 food entries a day -- roughly one every 30 seconds, the committee report found. The agency, it says, allows importers to take possession of their high-risk goods and arrange for testing by a private laboratory. Before melamine-contaminated pet food killed and sickened thousands of pets, the FDA had never inspected those ingredients from China.

Government is not the problem, rather, people who believe government is the problem and act towards emasculating it, otherwise known as conservatives, are the problem. Or, in Grover Norquist's words, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Because that worked so well with Katrina.

Private industry cannot be counted on to work for the benefit of the public. Heck, they cannot even be counted on to work for their own paying customers (see Sprint). All they are good for is their own profit.

In Other Worlds

Wow.

China on Tuesday sentenced the former head of its food and drugs agency to death for corruption in a surprise judgment as the government sought to contain a wave of scandals over health safety.

Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, was convicted on charges of taking bribes and dereliction of duty, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People's Court.

The sentence, which was unusually harsh, could still be reduced on appeal. But it reflects the weight China's top leaders are giving to the issues of corruption and food safety as they grapple with the fallout overseas after a series of safety breaches involving toxins in food and other products.

My feelings are mixed on this. I am firmly against capital punishment but I am glad the Chinese government is taking responsibility for this egregious problem and steps - I hope - to make sure it does not happen again. Can you imagine any other outcome in the current administration besides whoever was responsible getting promoted to Food Czar?

You know American hubris has ruined American prestige when we need to take cues from developing nations.

Best outcome he gets a very long jail sentence.

E. Coli Conservatives

Are at it again:

A Michigan meat packer is recalling 129,000 pounds of beef because it may be contaminated with the E. coli bacteria.
The firm, Davis Creek Meats and Seafood, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, shipped the beef products between March 1 and April 30, according to USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.
The potentially-contaminated meat was shipped to foodservice distribution centers
and Marketplace stores in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Federal safety inspectors were not involved in the discovery. Rather, the problem was uncovered by state health officials carrying out the Michigan Department of Community Health’s ongoing E coli illness investigation.

Republican strategy: Say that government does not work, get elected, wreck government, thereby proving one's point. Rinse and repeat.