Avian Flu and China: An Hour Later You STILL Can't Trust Them

And we're seriously considering letting these people buy a US oil company? Oh wait, that's right: they own so much of our debt, that we couldn't possibly turn them down on that. But then there's this:

The United Nations health agency says an influenza outbreak among migratory birds in Northwestern China is far worse than the government had reported.
World Health Organization experts who recently visited China's northwestern province of Qinghai told reporters that five times as many birds have died of the avian flu there as originally reported.
The agency estimates five-thousand wild birds died sometime during the spring on an island in Qinghai. In late May, the Chinese government put the number of dead at only one-thousand.
Dr. Julie Hall, the WHO's coordinator for communicable diseases in China, said this is the first time that migratory birds have been found to die from the avian flu in such numbers.
She urged Chinese authorities to conduct immediate tests for the H5N1 virus, before the birds migrate to neighboring countries.

Not to scare the shit out of anyone, but SOMEONE SHOULD PAY ATTENTION to this sort of thing, so when Treasury Secretary John Snow says it's a bad idea to push back against China, someone can call BULLSHIT.
All I can say is, I'm happy to see Lou Dobbs calling BULLSHIT on some of this. He seems to be doing to China what he's been doing to illegal immigration. Right or wrong, at least someone is talking about it on the national stage.

Why the Social Security Fight Isn't Over

The republicans want to dismantle, destroy, whatever word fits, Social Security. Don't believe anything you hear about how it's a dead issue. This article demonstrates that. I think they probably believe that if they lay in wait long enough, doing background noise discussions on the issue, people won't be so surprised when it actually comes to a vote. Stay with it, Democrats. Don't back down. At. All.
Via Josh Marshall.

Lawmakers Who Want to Test PESTICIDES On Your Children

The Boxer Amendment to the Interior Department spending bill essentially makes it illegal for the EPA to test pesticides on humans, including pregnant women. Let's say that again. Illegal for the EPA to test pesticides on humans, including pregnant women. The amendment passed today, 60-37. More on the future of the amendment in a moment. First, have a look at the Senators who want to test pesticides on your children:
Alexander (R-TN)Allard (R-CO)Allen (R-VA)Bond (R-MO)Brownback (R-KS)Bunning (R-KY)Burns (R-MT)Burr (R-NC)Chambliss (R-GA)Cochran (R-MS)Coleman (R-MN)Cornyn (R-TX)Craig (R-ID)Crapo (R-ID)DeMint (R-SC)Dole (R-NC)Domenici (R-NM)Enzi (R-WY)Frist (R-TN)Grassley (R-IA)Gregg (R-NH)Hagel (R-NE)Hatch (R-UT)Inhofe (R-OK)Kyl (R-AZ)Lott (R-MS)
Martinez (R-FL)McConnell (R-KY)Roberts (R-KS)Santorum (R-PA)Sessions (R-AL)Shelby (R-AL)Stevens (R-AK)Sununu (R-NH)Thomas (R-WY)Vitter (R-LA)Voinovich (R-OH)
What do they all have in common? That's right! Republican to a one. Democrats? Are you paying attention? Make an issue of this during the mid-terms. Every single one of these "lawmakers" should be vulnerable on this, because going beyond "they want to test pesticides on your kids" takes nuance. And republicans don't do nuance, unless you're Dick Cheney spending time looking up 'throes' in the dictionary. But I digress.
Back to the Amendment itself. It will probably be killed in conference committee. Democrats, however, can keep it alive by making issue ads in every state these jizzbags hail from.

How Now, Mad Cow

I don't know if this link will work for people without AOL, but this is the only article I can find on this subject. I am linking it here, and pasting it below, and asking for AOL's forgiveness. All I can say is, the people who trust the government on Iraq? They're the ones who should go on eating beef, and trusting their leaders. The rest of us, well, we know better.

Although the Agriculture Department confirmed Friday that a cow that died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease. The result was never publicly disclosed.
The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow.
Indeed, the lengthy delay occurred despite the intense national interest in the disease and the fact that many countries have banned shipments of beef from the United States because of what they consider to be lax testing policies.
Until Friday, it was not public knowledge that an "experimental" test had been performed last November by an Agriculture Department laboratory on the brain of a cow suspected of having mad cow disease, and that the test had come up positive.
For seven months, all that was known was that a test on the same cow done at the same laboratory at roughly the same time had come up negative. The negative result was obtained using a test that the Agriculture Department refers to as its "gold standard."
The explanation that the department gave late Friday, when the positive test result came to light, was that there was no bad intention or cover-up, and that the test in question was only experimental.
"The laboratory folks just never mentioned it to anyone higher up," said Ed Loyd, an Agriculture Department spokesman. "They didn't know if it was valid or not, so they didn't report it."
On hearing that Friday night, Dr. Michael K. Hansen, a senior research associate at Consumers Union and frequent department critic, reacted skeptically.
"That seems hard to fathom," he said. "If it's true, we have a serious communication problem at the Department of Agriculture. How can we be confident of anything they're saying?"
Mr. Loyd, reacting to a reporter's question about the Agriculture Department's handling of the issue, said, "In hindsight, reporting it would have been the thing to do."
Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns briefly mentioned the positive test result at a news conference on Friday. The primary focus of the conference was to announce that British scientists had confirmed the United States' second case of the disease.
The sequence of events started in November, when an Agriculture Department laboratory in Ames, Iowa, performed two tests on the animal in question. After the "gold standard" test came up negative, the agency announced that the animal had not had mad cow disease. But at the same time, the same lab also conducted the experimental test, with different results.
The sequence of events started in November, when an Agriculture Department laboratory in Ames, Iowa, performed two tests on the animal in question. After the "gold standard" test came up negative, the agency announced that the animal had not had mad cow disease. But at the same time, the same lab also conducted the experimental test, with different results.
Then two weeks ago, for reasons that are unclear, Phyllis K. Fong, the Agriculture Department's inspector general, arranged for further tests on specimens of the same cow. A test known as the Western blot, which is widely used in England and Japan but not in the United States, came up positive.
Because this result conflicted with the "gold standard" result from November, a specimen from the same animal was sent to a laboratory in Weybridge, England, that is considered pre-eminent in its field. Several tests were conducted there, and all of them came up positive; it was the results of those tests that Mr. Johanns announced at the news conference on Friday afternoon.
The nation's mad cow testing system is now infuriating both ranchers and consumers. Consumer lobbyists say the flawed results show once again that 15 years of testing has been dangerously inadequate. And now the beef lobby, which has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Agriculture Department, is complaining that the testing system is dangerously unpredictable.
Jim McAdams, president of the 25,000-member National Cattlemen's Beef Association, has complained that unexpected testing creates "great anxiety within our industry," and leads to "significant losses."
Thirty-six countries have shut their doors to American beef, virtually wiping out a $3 billion export market, which Australia happily moved into.
On Saturday, Taiwan reimposed a ban on American beef that it had lifted just two months ago, Reuters reported.
The new case of mad cow appeared to be in a native-born animal, though Mr. Johanns was vague about that. Testing also suggested that the animal caught the disease from a new food source, since the strain was different from that of the Washington State cow that tested positive in 2003.
Mr. Johanns said that catching one positive in 388,000 recent tests proved the system worked.
But critics said it did no such thing, because the system was designed strictly for surveillance. One positive caught after a seven-month delay was, at best, a stroke of luck, the critics said.
Other countries use food-safety standards: Japan tests every cow, Europe tests about one in four.
The United States instead uses statistical models that it says will let a few tests detect the infection even in one cow in a million. It now tests one in 90; when the first mad cow case was found in 2003, it was testing one in 1,700.
With its statistical logic under regular attack, the United States has increased the number of tests to 388,000 in the past year, from 40 in 1990. But until recently, Mr. Johanns was discussing cutting back to 40,000 tests.
That system is "bizarre, illogical and woefully inadequate," said John Stauber, co-author of the book, "Mad Cow U.S.A.," which was first published in 1997.
"The bottom line," he said, "is that the U.S. government is afraid of putting in real food-safety testing because it would certainly find additional cases."
Mr. Loyd of the Agriculture Department replied that surveillance testing assumed a few animals would be positive, and that his department had nearly doubled its own goal of testing 220,000 cases in a year.
"There is no scientific basis," he said, for doing what Japan and many critics want: testing all animals or all those more than 20 months old.
But even a scientist who helped design the department's testing now harbors doubts about it.
In an interview before the second case was found, Dr. Linda A. Detwiler, who retired in 2002 as the chief of the mad cow testing program and now teaches veterinary medicine at the University of Maryland, said the department should be using the Western blot test it was resisting.
"You need to put as many tools in your tool kit as possible," she said.
Mr. Loyd said Secretary Johanns now agreed. The beef industry now cites its consumer-protecting "firewalls."
But it took many years to erect them: a ban on feeding ruminants to cattle, a ban on using near-dead dairy cows as beef and a ban on using the brains and spinal cords of older cattle in feed.
Other practices that many veterinarians dislike continue, such as feeding poultry litter with spilled cattle meal in it back to cattle, giving calves "milk replacer" made from cattle blood and letting cows eat dried restaurant "plate waste."
Dr. Detwiler was adamant that those practices should end, and that the brains and spines of all cattle should be destroyed, not made into feed even for pigs or chickens.
"That's how you keep infectivity out of the food chain," she said. "If a farmer makes a mistake and gives pig feed to cattle by mistake, the feed is safe."
The beef lobby has opposed many changes, and statements from the industry and the lobby often echo each other. When Mr. Johanns held a sort of pep rally for beef in Minnesota recently, no consumer groups were on a panel that declared American beef "very, very safe," but lobbyists were.
The industry casts a long shadow over the department. Ann M. Veneman, a former agriculture secretary, had as her spokeswoman Alisa Harrison, who, in 1996, accused a doctors' group of being an animal rights group opposed to eating meat. The doctors' group had endorsed the ban on feeding cattle or sheep to cattle.
Mr. Johanns, a former Nebraska governor who grew up on a dairy farm, inherited two officials of the cattlemen's group, Charles Lambert and Dale Moore, as deputies. His under secretary for farm and foreign agriculture services, J. B. Penn, worked at a consulting firm serving the industry.
Last week, according to the Kyodo news service in Japan, a group of Japanese lawmakers who visited Mr. Penn in Washington accused him of "threatening" them with trade retaliation and saying that the United States' patience was growing short and that they should simply accept American beef.
Mr. Loyd denied that, saying the meeting was "cordial."
Such connections to industry impede the department's duty to police it, said Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. (On Tuesday, the department announced $140 million in grants to advertise American food overseas, including $12 million to the U.S. Meat Export Federation.)
She wants a new, separate food safety agency, like the one Britain created in 1999.
But the department's harshest critic has emerged from within - it is Ms. Fong, the inspector general, who ordered the new round of tests.
Last spring, she issued a scathing analysis of the testing program, saying, for example, that it could not do scientific sampling because it was voluntary, tested too few healthy-looking cattle, and could not assure that sick but walking cattle and cattle that died on farms were tested.

Why trust these people with the life of your child in a foreign land, if you can't even trust them to tell the truth about the food you feed that child at home?

Presented Without Comment

From Knight-Ridder:

NEW YORK - Young Republicans gathered here for their party's national convention are united in applauding the war in Iraq, supporting the U.S. troops there and calling the U.S. mission a noble cause. But there's no such unanimity when they're asked a more personal question: Would you be willing to put on the uniform and go to fight in Iraq? In more than a dozen interviews, Republicans in their teens and 20s offered a range of answers. Some have friends in the military in Iraq and are considering enlisting; others said they can better support the war by working politically in the United States; and still others said they think the military doesn't need them because the U.S. presence in Iraq is sufficient. "Frankly, I want to be a politician. I'd like to survive to see that," said Vivian Lee, 17, a war supporter visiting the convention from Los Angeles, Lee said she supports the war but would volunteer only if the United States faced a dire troop shortage or "if there's another Sept. 11." "As long as there's a steady stream of volunteers, I don't see why I necessarily should volunteer," said Lee, who has a cousin deployed in the Middle East. In an election season overwhelmed by memories of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military's newest war ranks supreme among the worries confronting much of Generation Y'ers. Iraq is their war. "If there was a need presented, I would go," said Chris Cusmano, a 21-year-old member of the College Republicans organization from Rocky Point, N.Y. But he said he hasn't really considered volunteering.

CSPAN Hero

This man, Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, a democrat, should be honored as today's CSPAN Hero. He just stood up to Sensenbrenner, who is trying to stifle speech (imagine the shock) of Rep. Taylor, who is trying to make the House accountable to the people (see post below). Rep. Taylor is talking about fiscal issues, Sensenbrenner, as we have seen this week, wants nothing to do with truth. So Taylor just said to Sensenbrenner, to a rousing cheer from the left, "you all passed a contract with America that said you'd balance the budget, and haven't yet. I'm just trying to get you to live up to your promise to America." Really. Hero status.

Shame Them Out of Office

Today Your US House of Representatives is spending what appears to be the entire day trying to pass legislation that will amend the US Constitution to ban flag burning. The Senate will probably pass it this time, because republicans have control over both houses.
Regardless of your personal feelings on whether burning the flag should be legal, doesn't the fact that oil is still close to the $60 a barrel price, or the fact that food lines are making a huge comeback in ways that haven't been seen since the depression, or any number of other important issues happening to real people in this country bother you enough to go on your own tirade against the assholes that are spending your money on this???
I really wish more people would watch CSPAN. Maybe CSPAN could be convinced to cover missing white women and children, so their viewership would rise enough to stick in images of republicans behaving like jizzbags on the taxpayer's dime. They (and the democrats who vote for this) should be shamed from office. Oh wait. That would imply they have shame. My mistake.

The Media and the Presidency

Ha! This is a good day! Through a diary on Daily Kos, we learn that the General Accountability Office has announced that it will investigate possible contracts between public relations and media companies, and seven (7) different White House-level cabinet departments! I predict Armstrong Williams is only the beginning. In fact, that much has already been shown. We should create a new betting category: How much of the finished report will be redacted due to Terrorism Concerns? Heh.

Avian Flu

A week or so ago, Atrios had a discussion about coverage of the Downing Street memos. Essentially, the pundits and columnists claimed it was covered exhaustively, but essentially just because Russert discusses it on one show a bazillion days later doesn't make for exhaustive coverage. I think something similar is happening with coverage of the Avian Flu. There has been media coverage about how serious a disease this could become, but you have to look hard to find it. PBS' News Hour had something on it about 3 weeks ago. Tonight, Lou Dobbs did a segment on it. It seems the Chinese have been giving their birds Amantadine to counter any possibility of getting Avian Flu. Oh, and they won't admit it. This has disastrous consequences.
Anthony Fauci, of the National Institutes of Health, says that testing up to a year ago of Amantadine against the virus shows that the virus is immune from the drug. The Chinese (remember how forthcoming they were about the mere existence of SARS?) officially have not admitted to this (they say they did not officially as a government encourage this), but apparently everyone from veterinarians to KFC operators (my exaggeration) admit this happened.
Why should you care? Avian Flu has warnings from all those people who are not in MSM as being the next possible pandemic. The influenza pandemic of 1918/19 killed what? 20 million people? Sheer population numbers, combined with the fact that there is no vaccine yet, throw in migratory birds, the mobility of the population, yadda yadda, and this is shaping up to be a deadly pandemic. I have to figure that if the National Security Council is talking about it, then maybe we ought to. And China should pony up some truth once in awhile, when it concerns the health of the population.

The General Has An Idea...

Jesus' General has a fabulous idea. Operation Yellow Elephant is designed to get those young republicans who are so aggressively defending the Iraq war to go and fight it. The casualty count keeps rising. So off you go, young studs, and take the studliest (Jonah Goldberg) with you.

The White House and the CPB

If this is what we have to look forward to from PBS, maybe we should just go ahead and give the conservatives what they want. Kill the funding, or be beholden to the RNC for public television. How did we allow this to get to this point?

Mr. Tomlinson said in an interview three months ago that he did not think he had instructed a subordinate to send material on the ombudsman project to Mary C. Andrews at her White House office in her final days as director of global communications, a political appointment.

But the e-mail messages show that a month before the interview, he directed Kathleen Cox, then president of the corporation, to send material to Ms. Andrews at her White House e-mail address. They show that Ms. Andrews worked on a variety of ombudsman issues before joining the corporation, while still on the White House payroll. And they show that the White House instructed the corporation on Ms. Andrews's job title in her new post.

Joe, Joe and more Joe

Joe Biden is running for president. Yippee. Because he couldn't keep his mouth shut a few weeks longer, everything out of his mouth from this point forward will be shown by the SCLM (so-called liberal media) to be only for political gain. This includes his mission to see the documents from the State Department that show what John Bolton was doing requesting intelligence information on American citizens. Biden was in the right up until this point. Now the media will remind everyone that he has political reasons for asking. Shoulda shut up a little longer, Joe.

Why does this matter? Because, until the Democrats get serious about managing media, messages, campaigns, etc., there will be a double standard. Perception is reality. All that the SCLM has to do is create the perception of "playing politics" by asking the question. This candidacy won't be treated seriously, because he seriously has no chance of getting the nomination. It's the perception that matters.