Well, everybody else was doing it...

So why are we being picked on?

Sounds like twelve year olds caught out late:

Li Changjiang, head of the General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said officials were focusing on stricter market access requirements for companies, conducting random checks and beefing up product testing.

But he stressed that China was not the only one with problems, citing comments by World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan this week that the agency receives about 200 reports of food safety problems every month from its 193 member states.

"This shows that food safety is not an issue of a particular country or region," Li said at a news conference.

But further down the article:

This week, Philippine authorities said a Chinese candy was found to be tainted with formaldehyde — an allegation the maker denied on Wednesday, blaming counterfeit versions.

An official at the Shanghai branch of Swiss SGS, the testing company, said Friday that "the milk candy samples did not contain formaldehyde."

But the official, who gave only his surname, Zhang, said it was unclear if the products tested were the same as those found in the Philippines.

Uh huh. And I presume the dog ate your homework, too.



By the way, just a heads up when you take your vitamin C:

New York and Beijing - A sharp rise in the international price of vitamin C is focusing fresh attention on the risks of the world's growing dependence on China for essential food supplies and additives.

China, which exports more than 80 percent of the world's ascorbic acid – also known as vitamin C and a key food preservative – appears to have cut production over the past several months, pushing prices up by more than 200 percent to a four-year high.

Update: The costs in lawsuits and finding other producers of food products is still being calculated.

The Washington Post:

In Nevada, the chief executive of an import company examines the lawsuit that just hit him, wondering how much it will cost to ensure that his next purchases of pet food ingredients are free of industrial poisons.

In Kansas, wheat growers wonder how China usurped the once-bustling market in gluten, a protein-rich byproduct of those amber waves of grain that once symbolized America's bounty.

And at a park in Washington, the owner of a soft-coated terrier says that after learning the food he had been giving his beloved Checkers for the past six years was on the recall list, he will never again buy pet food brands with foreign ingredients.

"They've lost a lot of credibility," said Fred Mitzner, who after the recall started buying California Natural dog food. "It was very upsetting."

While the Food and Drug Administration pursues what is sure to be a long investigation into how pet food became contaminated with an ingredient for making plastics, and while Congress begins the months-long process of haggling over food-safety amendments, pet food companies, their suppliers and their customers do not have the luxury of waiting.

They have to cope with the crisis immediately, and for most, that is already proving expensive.

This is YOUR war, Mr. Bush.

(Found via whig at Cannablog).

Why being able to fill judicial posts

Gives the president so much power:

Yesterday, federal district Judge John D. Bates “dismissed a lawsuit filed by former CIA officer Valerie Plame and her husband [Joe Wilson] against Vice President Cheney and other top officials over the Bush administration’s” retaliatory leak of Plame’s identity. Bates’s decision yesterday is in line with a long record of injecting his personal political agenda into the administration of law.

This man has shielded the Bush administration in several lawsuits and was appointed to FISA where he promptly allowed the White House to continue its domestic spying program.

It's going to take years sifting out these clunkers in our judical system.

Like the undead zombies

Here's proof that if you don't stake them through the heart, they keep on coming back to life:

A few months ago, Seymour Hersh reported that a White House official and Iran Contra alum, Elliot Abrams, had recently led a "lessons learned" discussion about Iran Contra:

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

Today the Washington Post reports that the White House may have taken that lesson to heart. It has determined, the Post reports, that in legal disputes between the Congress and the White House over executive privilege, game over, because the White House has decided no US attorney can uphold a contempt of Congress decree:

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

Help Home Depot

"If Home Depot is serious about protecting the environment, they must stop advertising on Fox -- a network that consistently spreads misinformation about and denies the existence of global warming."

Sign the petition.

Just in time

Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope Blogging.

Governed by those

Who hate government and want to prove that it doesn't work.

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo prints a letter that discusses Bush's destruction of what used to be a functional system:

Your post . . . about the slowdown in cases in San Francisco got me thinking about the larger bureaucratic issue associated with more than half a dozen years under Bush.

This is a relatively trivial incident, but a while back I attempted to get my passport renewed and discovered the wait times had doubled (partly because of the new rule requiring travelers to Canada to have passports) -- trivial, yes, but it also highlights some of the more mundane effects of an administration run by people who have a fundamental antipathy toward government service and government programs.

This gets writ large in the case of incidents like Hurricane Katrina, the prosecution of the Iraq war and so on...but it also gets writ small in thousands of details of everyday bureaucratic life -- especially as the Bush influence trickles down through the bureaucracy from political appointees to career employees.

If the governing Bush/Cheney philosophy is that the public sector doesn't work, that it is inherently not just inefficient and corrupt, but antagonistic to citizens and individuals, this philosophy has a way of slithering its way into the workings of the system itself -- not just in the case of high profile corruption scandals, but also, again on a more mundane level, in the day-to-day operation of government bureaucracies.

And here's the weird thing, even though that sounds so unexciting, there's something almost stifling about imagining a bureaucracy that really is antagonistic to individuals -- one that not only slows down, but finds some vindication in throwing up road blocks, thwarting citizen requests, and, in the end, not serving the public. I have family members who lived in former communist countries -- and that's really how the bureaucracy was there, and life under those circumstances was made much more difficult, bureaucratic responsibilities increasingly cumbersome, much of the time the system just didn't work, and had to be gamed (or bribed).

Although I have large scale concerns about Bush's handling of the war, the economy, and so on, I also have some more micro scale concerns about what his philosophy of governance means for everyday life and our everyday interactions with the bureaucracy. Indeed, this scale, though more mundane, is also the one that in some ways affects the majority of the population more directly, even if much less dramatically. I've lived in places where the bureaucracy functions quite well, and where citizens take a certain pride in the fact that the government serves them.

The idea of living in a country where the administration's goal is to demonstrate just how bad government is/can be scares me at this very prosaic level -- I want my schools and courts and inspection agencies and passport agencies and so on to be run by people who really believe in government service and in the fact that the government can work effectively to serve the populace. Bush seems to be doing everything he can to dismantle such a world -- and he risks fueling a vicious circle in so doing.

Fridaiz kat blogn

W/ sumbudi elz' kat:

Up is down, right is wrong

So obviously after China's melamine debacle, this makes total sense:

Lawmakers also criticized the Food and Drug Administration's plan to close half of its laboratories. They called that idea misguided and questioned whether it would save money and enhance the agency's ability to target unsafe food, as FDA commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach said it would.

"FDA's ill-conceived decision to close seven of its 13 laboratories likely would expose American consumers to even more danger from unsafe foods, particularly imports," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., at a hearing of a House Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee.

What the fuck are they thinking? Food is contaminated so don't test it?

There goes FEMA's plan

Of gassing the poor to death:


(photo taken from article.)

The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday.

A trail of e-mails obtained by investigators shows that the agency's lawyers rejected a proposal for systematic testing of the levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde gas in the trailers, out of concern that the agency would be legally liable for any hazards or health problems. As many as 120,000 families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita lived in the suspect trailers, and hundreds have complained of ill effects.

[snip]

FEMA tested new trailers last September and October after rejecting more stringent standards suggested by the Environmental Protection Agency, Waxman said. In May, the agency reported finding formaldehyde in those trailers at 1.2 parts per million, but it said levels dropped to 0.3 parts per million after four days of ventilation.

FEMA said that met a standard used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for its manufactured homes. But Paulison said yesterday that FEMA now recognizes that ventilating trailers is impractical during the Gulf Coast's summer heat and humidity. Lawmakers noted that FEMA issued the advice at the beginning of last summer.

Mary C. DeVany, an occupational health and safety engineer advising the Sierra Club, testified that the exposure limit of 0.3 parts per million is 400 times the normal limit for year-round exposure set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. DeVany called the move a "misapplication and skewing of scientific results . . . to minimize adverse health effects."

Who made money on this deal? Follow the money and you'll find one of Bush's fat cronies. Make him pay it back. All of it.

Update: Eli of Multi Medium has more on why FEMA decided not to test for formaldehyde in the trailers.