End of the week musing…

The weather out is delightful, even the humidity has fallen below 90%. Morning temperature is 64°. The skys are clear and the day has yet to break. We should be heading into a beautiful weekend. It could be time for a photo road trip…

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Well…It looks like the Industrial Agriculture/Food Industries strike again.

Food & wine | Salmonella alert halts pot-pie production | Seattle Times Newspaper

OMAHA, Neb. — ConAgra Foods voluntarily stopped production Tuesday at the Missouri plant that makes its Banquet pot pies after health officials said the pies may be linked to 139 cases of salmonella in 30 states, including Washington.The Omaha-based company told consumers Tuesday not to eat its chicken or turkey pot pies until investigations are complete.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a health alert Tuesday to warn about the possible link between the pot pies and the salmonella cases.

The USDA is advising consumers to discard the pies, said Amanda Eamich, of the agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. ConAgra is not recalling the pies but is offering mail-in refunds and store returns.

Add this to the ground beef recall and you begin to think you should eat nothing you haven’t prepared yourself.

Thanks to the Ethicurean for the link…

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Am I missing something about the Republican Party that is obvious to their members? Time and again they champion the opposite type of action from the one spelled out in their self professed creeds.

Sliming Graeme Frost – New York Times

Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call middle-class.And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately, this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his sister.

I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.

It all seems to be about winning at any cost. It almost seems to me that the entire party is still infected with the Tom Delay syndrome. The Hammer was proud of his actions like this…And now the Party itself seems to have lost perspective when it come to just common decency…

There was a time in my life that I didn’t pay attention to the Party affiliation  of the person running for political office. But as the years have gone by that has changed. I really don’t think I have changed in the way I view politics, but politics has surely changed in the way the game is played. And sadly for the Republicans, I was raised on the old maxim “It’s not whether you win or lose that matters, but how you play the game…”.

Today in the age of swift boats and personality smears, that sentimentality has passed the Republicans by. The lake of that feeling of fair play is what has turned the Party from a front runner to the failing minority status it now deserves. Yes they can still win elections in some localities…Hell, here where I live, most races only have Republicans on the ballot. And chances are if there is someone else on the ballot it’ll be a Green Party member or a Libertarian. Only a few races even manage to field a Democrat.

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Gore, U.N. panel win 2007 Nobel Peace Prize | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

OSLO, Norway — Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize today for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.”I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said. “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year and he had been widely expected to win the prize.

Just think, another winner of an American Presidential Election wins a Nobel Peace Prize. It just goes to show you, the people can pick’em even if the Supreme Court can’t.