The Washington Post reports today that documents show that the Food and Drug Administration had known for many years about the problems that led to E. coli contamination in produce late last year, which resulted in hundreds of cases of illness, three deaths, and a massive recall of spinach. They did pretty much nothing about it.

“We know that there are still problems out in those fields,” [Robert E. Brackett, director of the FDA’s food-safety arm] said in an interview last week. “We knew there had been a problem, but we never and probably still could not pinpoint where the problem was.

The reason, of course, is that the FDA has a much tighter budget than they used to, even though we’re importing and processing more food than ever.

In another recent case that I don’t remember hearing about before,

an agency report shows that FDA inspectors checked into complaints about salmonella contamination in a ConAgra Foods factory in Georgia in 2005. But when company managers refused to provide documents the inspectors requested, the inspectors left and did not follow up.

In 2006, a salmonella outbreak that was later traced to that factory made over 400 people sick.

Funny thing is: according to Brackett, it’s a step forward for the FDA to be doing business this way.

Explosive growth in the number of processors and the amount of imported foods means that manufacturers “have to build safety into their products rather than us chasing after them,” Brackett said. “We have to get out of the 1950s paradigm.”

Ah yes, that silly old 1950s paradigm where we foolishly expected law enforcement agencies to “chase after” lawbreakers right away and not wait for them to do more serious damage. How superior it is to do as we do now, collecting our government salaries for the hard work of sitting back with our arms folded and simply expecting businesses not to gamble with people’s lives in order to maximize their own profits. If we just expect hard enough, others will certainly follow, and when they don’t and people fall ill or die as a result, well, at least we’ll know that it’s in no way because we didn’t do our job. We never lowered our expectations, not for a moment, no sirree.

From Media Matters:

On the March 30 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage stated that he “agree[d] 100 percent” with a caller who said: “I’m very concerned that the Jews are now accepting gays as rabbis. And as a Catholic, I can tell you it almost destroyed our church when we accepted gays as priests.” The caller added, “[T]hey were raping teenage boys, and if you allow them to come into your churches, I’m sorry, your synagogues, I have no reason to believe they’re not going to do the same thing.” Savage responded: “The idea of a gay rabbi is an oxymoron. Think about it: ‘Rabbi’ means teacher. You cannot have a homosexual teacher teaching boys how to be a Jew,” adding, “I’m not going to mince words for fear of offending homosexuals. They’re everywhere, anyway, trying to tell me what to say and what not to say and what to think. I know what’s right and what’s wrong. And that’s all there is to it.”

It’s true enough, as Mr. Savage has so significantly ascertained, that every Catholic priest who has had sex with boys is also a male who has had sex with males. But as shocking and unexpected as that conclusion may be, there is another factor here that everyone — the media, the Catholic church, the left-wing blogosphere — has been sweeping under the carpet.

Every last one of the Catholic priests found to have molested boys has at some point in his education attended a seminary. Not some, not most, but every last one.

Think about it. I have never attended a seminary, and I have never molested any boys. The probability is extraordinarily high that the same is true of you.

I can only assume that Mr. Savage is unaware of this startling statistic or he would be applying the same dazzlingly brilliant logic to it and also calling for the Catholic Church to stop accepting as priests anyone who has ever attended one of these dens of iniquity.

Nice essay by Andrew Sullivan from his column, The Daily Dish, for The Atlantic, and I admire how the essay is angry and well reasoned and insightful and dignified all at the same time:

Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it’s worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn’t homophobic. It was, in her words, a “school-yard taunt,” directed at a straight man, meaning a “wuss” and a “sissy”. Why would gays care? She is “pro-gay,” after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into “reparative therapy” to “cure” them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.

Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. They’re not. And when you unpack Coulter’s joke, you see she does both. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a “faggot.” She’s absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that — a better one, to be sure — but a joke. But she didn’t just do that. She added to the joke a slur: “John Edwards is a faggot.” That’s why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised. To put it simply, either conservatism is happy to be associated with that atmosphere, or it isn’t. I think the response so far suggests that the conservative elites don’t want to go there, but the base has already been there for a very long time. (That’s why this affair is so revealing, because it is showing which elites want to pander to bigots, and which do not.)

There’s more, and it’s worth a read, especially if you’ve been inclined to buy Coulter’s defense that calling John Edwards a faggot wasn’t an insult to gays as well.

From a story in the St. Petersburg Times:

LARGO — City commissioners ended one of the most tumultuous weeks in Largo history Tuesday night by moving to fire City Manager Steve Stanton following his disclosure that he will have a sex-change operation. …

After listening to about 60 speakers, mostly from Largo, a majority of commissioners said they had lost confidence in Stanton’s ability to lead. …

Commissioners voted 5-2, with Mayor Pat Gerard and Commissioner Rodney Woods in dissent, to place Stanton on paid leave while his departure is made final.

And:

During the meeting, Stanton described the dismay of watching his professional reputation disintegrate in just seven days.

Until last week, he had served 14 years as the city manager, generally to good reviews. Last fall, commissioners raised his salary nearly 9 percent to $140,234 a year.

But on Feb. 21, the Times reported that Stanton was undergoing hormone therapy in preparation for gender-reassignment surgery — a plan known only to a small circle of people, including his wife, medical team and a few top officials at City Hall.

Ron Sanders, pastor of a local church, is quoted as saying, and I am not making this up:

If Jesus was here tonight, I can guarantee you he’d want him terminated. Make no mistake about it.

Pretty ballsy to claim such intimate acquaintance with a man he didn’t even notice standing right there in the room.

Strong essay in the Washington Post over the weekend by William Odom, retired lieutenant general and former NSA chief, laying out why the arguments in favor of prolonging the war are based on illusions.

First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly “constitutional” — meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

The absurdity of our stated goal in Iraq has been clear from the start: We are at war because we want to create a democracy in a country where, if we held a democratic vote today to determine the form of government, the majority of people would choose not to have a democracy. And our presence has not only not changed that, it has turned popular opinion even further away from our cause.

And:

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense.

Likewise, we are trying to create a pro-American democracy in a country where the great majority of people are anti-American. This was true before the invasion, and it’s even more true now, and neither dropping more bombs nor terrorizing more civilians nor locking up another hundred innocent people for every one true insurgent is going to reverse that.

Gen. Odom recites several popular arguments for staying in Iraq, and shoots down the absurdity, the inherent contradiction, of each of them.

1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. …
2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran’s influence from growing in Iraq. …
3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. …

But that terrible aftermath is now already upon us; that new haven for al-Qaeda has already emerged; and as the great majority of Iraqis are in favor of closer ties with Iran, how we’re supposed to create a true democracy and at the same time not see Iran’s influence increasing is a question somebody really ought to come up with an answer to.

And:

4) We must continue to fight in order to “support the troops.”

“Has anybody asked the troops?” writes Gen. Odom, and then shows the fallacy in that one as well: Our military is here to serve the commander-in-chief, not vice versa, and the responsibility — both practically and morally — for the decision whether to continue fighting in Iraq lies with Bush, not with our troops.

(For what it’s worth, I have a cyberpal on the WELL who is an officer serving in Iraq, and while he’s only one troop, he’s the only troop I know personally. Over the years I’ve seen him grow increasingly angry over this war and over the impossible goals and willfully ignorant strategies of the civilian commanders, and I’m comfortably sure that if we decided to bring the troops back home as quickly as possible he wouldn’t regard it as a lack of support. If we want to support our troops, we should give them goals that are not inherently impossible, and the equipment to make those goals physically achievable, or else stop asking them to sacrifice their lives for a hopeless folly.)

More advice from Gen. Odom:

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region. …

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a “tactical draw” and make “regional stability” our measure of “victory.” That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond?

Really excellent essay, well worth rereading and chewing over.

Heard on the 2/7/07 edition of MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning, as reported on the WELL:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The subways didn’t smell like pee anymore. Even the phone booths in New York have always smelled like pee — when there’s not even a booth, it’s just a phone and it smells like pee. And [Giuliani] cleaned it up, and he made you feel like you had a right to walk the street safely. I think he did a great job. I’m sorry. And I think the country wants a boss like that. You know, a little bit of fascism there. Just a little bit. Just a pinch of it.

As if. As if it were “a pinch of fascism” that got the subways and phone booths mopped, rather than a willingness to commit some resources to it and actually pay someone to do the job and have someone in charge actually take the time and trouble to check up and make sure it got done. As if it were impossible to get the subways and phone booths mopped in any other way but making people afraid to displease the powerful. As if the remarkable cleanup of the Times Square area, which is almost certainly what Mr. Matthews is talking about, were due primarily to Giuliani and not the Walt Disney Company. As if the Bush administration has not already been handling affairs both domestic and foreign with more than a pinch of fascism, and the result has been that two of the world’s great cities have in fact been left in a considerably less sanitary condition than they were when Bush & Co. took over.

There is this great myth we have that fascism at least makes things run more efficiently. Such is the power of that myth that we still want to believe in it even though there is no shortage of fascist countries that the proponents of “a pinch of fascism” somehow do not seem to care to move to; even though we all saw for ourselves how the Soviet Union’s horrendous inefficiency ultimately led to its collapse; even though those who lived through Mussolini have told us over and over again that, no, no, no, he did not in fact make the trains run on time.

The court martial of Lt. Ehren Watada ended yesterday in a mistrial. A new trial has been scheduled for March 19.

Here’s an article about it at The Raw Story.

The judge [military judge Lieutenant Colonel John Head] said the instructions requested by the defense, which were not immediately clear, could conflict with a pre-trial agreement between prosecution and defense concerning Watada’s motives for not deploying to Iraq.

Prosecutors on Tuesday told the court Watada had brought disgrace upon himself after and the services by deciding to abandon his soldiers and accusing the army of committing war crimes in Iraq.

Although the US Army insists that a soldier has to respect the chain of command and cannot choose which war to fight in, Watada has said that under the US Constitution he has the right to refuse an illegal order.

Watada joined the army in 2003 and was posted in South Korea until 2005, when he was transferred to Fort Lewis to prepare for deployment to Iraq.

Instead he requested to be transferred to another unit and proposed that he be deployed to Afghanistan. That was turned down.

Head ruled on Monday that the issue of the legality of the war in Iraq will not be raised during the court martial, saying the proceeding has no authority to rule on the question.