The meat packers got permission to use Carbon Monoxide to keep meat looking fresh (it makes hemoglobin very red). It should be noted that they approved it as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, which meant that there was no public review.
FWIW, this technology is banned by banned by the European Union, Japan and Canada.
Here are some pictures:
God bless the George W. Bush Agricultural department.
This comes as no surprise. Many of the features that are viewed as revolutionary in the US are considered fairly ordinary in Europe, where regulations, particularly those that apply to hardware openness, have created a more dynamic and innovative marketplace.
According to reports he draft stateall immunities … shall be canceled.
I would not be at all surprised if this is the first law that the Iraqi parliament passes. I would be surprised if there are 5 Iraqis in the world who would oppose this law.
Here is a picture of the good Reverend Eddie Long:
He’s complaining about having to turn over financial data to a Senate investigating committee.
Boo F&^%ing who. I used to run the largest (only really) event for a 501(c)3 non-profit, and we had to do a form 990, which is publicly available every year. Churches do not.
It’s was a lot more of pain for this non profit, which did not break $100K in gross revenues when I was there, than it is for his multi-million dollar mega-church.
The real solution is to eliminate the 990 exemption for churches, and let them play by the same rules as other not-for profits. We’ve seen more than enough corruption by the “God Squad” and they should operate under the same rules as other non-profits.
The FCC has (finally) appeared to nitice that Cable is a natural monopoly, and had decided to enforce the so called 70/70 rule*, and it is proposing some new regulations:
It’s about bloody time.
*“The agency may adopt rules necessary to promote “diversity of information sources” once the commission concludes that cable television is available to at least 70 percent of American households, and at least 70 percent of those households actually subscribe to a cable service.”
When one considers how blythly the Bush DoJ signed off on Georgia’s poll tax voter ID law, the news that the department of justice is enforcing the laws is a bit surprising.
My guess is that Waxman has scared the hell out of them.
You may recall that the banks got a law passed a few years making it harder for people to discharge credit card debts.
Well now, this is one of the factors behind the explosion in defaults and foreclosures.
Washington Mutual, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. spent $25 million in 2004 and 2005 lobbying for a legislative agenda that included changes in bankruptcy laws to protect credit card profits, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan Washington group that tracks political donations.
The banks are still paying for that decision. The surge in foreclosures has cut the value of securities backed by mortgages and led to more than $40 billion of writedowns for U.S. financial institutions. It also reached to the top echelons of the financial services industry.
They exceed the limits of my cynicism.
This time, it’s a Consumer Products Safety Commission that is refusing a larger budget and staff, and its head taking what are morally, if not necessarily legally, bribes from manufacturers and they are so disinterested in protecting the consumer, it’s as if they were dosing the kids with date rape drugs themselves.
They consistently exceed the limits of my cynicism.
Well, despite the best efforts of the craven Bush Dogs to kill it, Barney Frank’s mortgage reform bill was voted out of committee.
It tightens restrictions on issuing mortgages (a barn door cow thing, but still good), and gives people more options in bankruptcy.
This is why Democrats matter.
Iraq Plans to Confront Security Firms on Guns – New York Times
The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.
…..
If anyone here does not think that this will result in all out warfare between the Iraqi security forces and the mercs, I want what you are smoking.
He’s just the first. After all, as acting head of the CPSC, she’s refused additional money to keep products safe, and she’s taken free trips, and lord knows what else from toy manufacturers so that they can keep giving lead contaminated toys to kids.
I’m surprised I haven’t heard calls from the other Dem candidates yet.
No surprise, the U.S. is lagging in broadband penetration, performance and price, and it is falling further behind. The free market shills claim that it’s bad data, but every study confirms this.
This is not surprising. Telcos are not in the business of providing good service. They are in the business of making money, and it is far more profitable to use their natural monopoly, the ownership of the last mile of wire to the home, to keep competitors out than it is for them to invest in new equipment.
Given recent deregulatory decisions by the FCC, the level of competition, and hence the level of innovation are low, and prices are high. They will remain that way until the government steps in.
When the IG turns over these rocks, it will not be pretty.
IG to audit Iraqi security forces
By Megan Scully CongressDaily November 5, 2007
At the urging of Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction plans to review how many trained Iraqi personnel are actually serving in the nation’s security forces. The audit was sparked by an Oct. 31 letter to Stuart Bowen, the U.S. inspector in charge of investigating Iraq reconstruction, in which Dorgan expressed frustrations at the Bush administration’s inability to provide reliable statistics on the size of the nascent security forces.
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There are a number of states in which the pig felching greedheads in the phone companies have managed to make municipal broadband and WI-Fi illegal, and a number of other states where they are trying to.
We have good news, the Senate Commerce Committee has passed a bill out to the floor that overturns these laws with broad bipartisan support.
Bad news is that there is no similar effort right now in the house, so call your congresscritter, and tell them to support the Community Broadband Act.
Verizon has decided to allow shareholders to hold non-binding votes on executive compensation.
Verizon?? The phone company, is going for transparency and responsiveness?????
We are approaching the end of everything….when do cats start sleeping with dogs??? When does that marshmallow guy appear?
It said that the FCC ruling that no requirement for access to the list mile wiring stands.
Ma Bell has lived for years by using monopolistic techniques to ice out competition. It’s more profitable than supplying a better product, which is why the US is behind the rest of the industrialized world in broadband.
The FCC claims that this will give more competition. Why should it, when anti-competitive behavior is more profitable than competing.
I have mixed feelings about this happening.
It is a good thing, but when the agencies of our Iraqi puppet regime are responding more competently, pro-actively, and responsibly than our government, I wonder how long it is until Washington, DC begins to look like Baghdad.
Given the history of private tax collection, you can go to Paul Krugman’s blog post regarding the return of this activity, it is no of a surprise that the operation of most state lotteries greatly resembles the “Tax Farming” that bankrupted and caused the overthrow of the French monarchy.
It turns out that morally dubious is the most charitable description of how these companies operate, and when one takes the long view, they cost the states money when they operate a lottery.
While a state with an active lottery cannot switch immediately, it would benefit everyone by the lottery oligopoly, Gtech and Scientific Games, to take these functions internal to the state government, where there is far greater transparency.
I have not followed the lottery in Maryland, but it is clear that bribery, or something akin to bribery, has been going on in Texas for years.
This getting a bit of mainstream play, because it is on CNN:
But one observer, Tom Schlesinger, the founder and executive director of the Financial Markets Center, a think tank that has followed the Federal Reserve closely for the past decade, believes the blame for the crisis falls squarely on the Fed and accuses the central bank of “regulatory foot-dragging” that has harmed the public.
Schlesinger maintains the Fed’s prevailing regulatory philosophy has shifted from that of 20 or 25 years ago, which in essence was “here is the line between right and wrong, don’t cross it,” to a current underlying policy that “anything and everything that might be called financial innovation ought to be embraced.”
…
He points specifically to the opposition to government regulation that flourished at the U.S. central bank under former Fed chief Alan Greenspan and has continued unabated under his successor Ben Bernanke.
(Emphasis mine)
The article mentions Greenspan’s Randroid* inclinations as an aside though, when they are actually the source of the problem.
He found anything that created disasterous bubbles to be an artifact of man at his most noble.
*He was one of Ayn Rand’s inner circle and bought into her nutzo worldview.
It appears that someone at ICANN is feeding domain name lookups to people on the outside so that they can hold them for ransome.
If you have ever checked if a domain is available, and come back a few hours later to discover that someone has taken it, you know what I mean.
ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee is looking into suspicions that someone with access to search requests has been using this data to snap up potentially desirable domains, a process dubbed domain name front running.
Unlike traditional domain speculation, those who buy searched-for domains can be pretty sure of a potential interest when they attempt to sell their domains at a profit.
Damn straight. You already know that someone wants the domain, because they have searched for it.
Suspicions that the sharp practice is happening have not yet been proven, but are fuelled by user experiences suggesting something is amiss. Many people who check to see if a domain is available reportedly find it’s been bought by the time they return a short time later.
But the allegations are true, as anyone who has had this happen to them over, and over, and over again can attest.
If you want a domain, you need to snapit it up immediately after the search.