Yummers

2:58 am EST April 18th, 2007 | News | 6 Comments

Your food is less safe, thanks to conservatives.

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6 Responses to “Yummers”

  1. Dr. Anatole Gavage-Huskanoy says:
    April 18, 2007 at 9:47 am

    Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm is an incredible book for anyone interested in the history of the conservative movement. Glad to see he’s entered the blogosphere.

  2. fd10801 says:
    April 18, 2007 at 10:02 am

    I’d like to think of it as “Dining becoming more adventurous”.

    AGH: You know how much I hate to disagree with you.

    But the actual history of the Conservative Revolution requires exactly two readings:

    Rise of the Right, by William A. Rusher

    The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, by George Nash

  3. Dr. Anatole Gavage-Huskanoy says:
    April 18, 2007 at 2:41 pm

    Have you read Before the Storm? It’s quite entertaining and not particularly partisan.

  4. pedromd07 says:
    April 18, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    ollie is becoming particularly shrill these days….

    Only the government can protect us is that it ollie?

    The point I took away from that link was that in fact, the industry itself is much better able to police itself. In fact, they are finacially motivated to do so, as outbreaks such as this cost huge amounts of money. So it seems to me that conservativsm has improved the process…

  5. VRWC drone says:
    April 18, 2007 at 4:44 pm

    Looks like Rick Perlstein has O-Dub’s “Conservatives are to blame for everything” schtick down pat. Or did O-Dub get it from Perlstein?

    Despite his noble goal of showing how “Conservatism has been killing Americans”, he fails to provide actual evidence to back up this ludicrous claim.

    After a couple of paragraphs about Goldwater and Reagan, he focuses on the four years between 2002 and 2006 when Republicans controlled Congress and evil conservatism had free reign.

    Surveying the results, what once looked to me like principle now looks to me now like mania. Conservatism has been killing Americans. The recent food safety crisis is only one case study.

    Let’s start connecting the dots.

    “Conservatism has been killing Americans”. Sounds awful. So where are the supporting facts?

    The Associated Press studied the records and found that between 2003 and 2006 the Food and Drug Administration conducted 47 percent fewer safety inspections. FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees. Safety tests for food produced in the United States have gone down by three quarters—have almost ground to a halt—in the previous year alone.

    Of course he fails to explain that the same AP story notes that “After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FDA, at the urging of Congress, increased the number of food inspectors and inspections amid fears that the nation’s food system was vulnerable to terrorists. Inspectors and inspections spiked in 2003, but now both have fallen enough to erase the gains.”

    Did you follow that? The numbers went up from their supposedly post-Clinton levels in 2001 to a high in 2003, then back to the 2001 levels. So the shocking revelation that inspectors and inspections decreased between 2003 and 2006 actually means they just dropped from a peak in 2003 back to their prior 2001 levels.

    So in reality, the evil conservatives didn’t slash the numbers of FDA inspections and inspectors to record low levels in a mad quest to boost profits and kill more Americans on the alter of ‘conservatism’. They just reduced the numbers back to the 2001 levels.

    Perlstein’s story is a pretty damning portrait of an ineffective and negligent FDA and I will be the first to insist that we need to fix it pretty damn quick. But Perlstein blames the crisis on “George Bush’s Food and Drug Administration” without showing specifically how it differs from when it was “Bill Clinton’s Food and Drug Administration”.

    This is pretty weak, O-Dub. But I guess you’ve gotta keep beating the “conservatives = bad” drums if you want to someday move up to the majors.

  6. fd10801 says:
    April 18, 2007 at 5:23 pm

    “not particularly partisan” = another leftie thinks he knows something about conservatives

    When will liberals learn that conservatives are not liberals awaiting conversion?