Letters by Boz

USDA: The U is for Useless

In the wake of the scandal of sick, tortured cows being slaughtered for human consumption right under the eyes of the Keystone Kops at the USDA, one lawmaker has concluded we probably need to rethink the federal government's relationship with the food industry. From an MSNBC.com article:

A lawmaker called Tuesday for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be stripped of its responsibility for food safety in the wake of the nation’s largest-ever meat recall.

The agency’s twin mandates of promoting the nation’s agriculture and monitoring it for safety have become blurred, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro said.

“Food safety ought to be of a high enough priority in this nation that we have a single agency that deals with it and not an agency that is responsible for promoting a product, selling a product and then as an afterthought dealing with how our food supply is safe,” said DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee responsible for the USDA’s funding.

    The USDA is hamstrung by its ties to the very industry it is supposed to be monitoring. It is well-known that there are never really any surprise visits to processing plants and slaughterhouses, and as Michael Pollan described, inspectors biggest concern is often whether or not they have access to private bathroom during their inspections. Toughen up standards in the food industry, and create an agency with real power to enforce the rules, and let the corporations worry about "promoting a product."

Philharmonic in Pyongyang

The New York Philharmonic just played a historic concert in the totalitarian state of North Korea. Under the baton of Lorin Maazel, the NYP played a variety of tunes of a distinctly American flavor, including Dvorak's "New World" symphony, Gershwin's "An American in Paris," and, amazingly, "The Star-Spangled Banner." The crazed dictator Kim Jong Il was not in attendance. Perhaps was busy sentencing someone to a slave labor camp, hosting a party with kidnapped foreign starlets, or was drunk on rare cognac.
    I was initially very much against this trip, fearing it would merely add to the corrupt North Korean regime's legitimacy. However, and article in National Review by Jay Nordlinger made me at least reconsider my opposition, though not actually abandon it. Nordlinger's piece basically summarizes the opinions of some very respectable experts concerning the concert...

Malkin vs. Helprin

Opinion Journal highlighted a Wall Street Journal piece by Mark Helprin heaping scorn on McCain's enemies in the conservative talk-radio movement:

Half a dozen talk-radio hosts whose major talent is that, like hairdressers, they can talk all day long to one client after another as they snip, have decided that the presumptive Republican nominee does not hew sufficiently close to their gospel. . . .

Ostracism following tests of "right thinking" is a specialty of the left. Not that it doesn't exist on the right, blooming with great malice especially on the radio. But in light of their prospects, conservatives have no room for it. For by their neglectful forfeit they have lost the battles of culture and education, and to remain other than an occult force they must express their beliefs through politics, from which, after November, they may be for a time excluded. . . .

So, rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by sabotaging their own party ostensibly for its impurity but equally for the sake of their self-indulgent pique, each of these compulsive talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run, discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man. And that would apply equally as well to the gorgeous Laura Ingraham and the relentlessly crocodilian Ann Coulter.

    Helprin is a smart man, and his point is dead-on. However, Opinion Journal notes that the poor man's Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, is oh so outraged by Helprin's article:

The most anti-conservative rhetoric against conservative talk radio these days is coming from supposedly free-market conservatives. It’s disgusting.... But now, we have establishment Republicans parroting liberal ad hominem rhetoric: Talk-radio hosts are talentless blabbermouths. Their listeners are mind-numbed robots. Or, as supposed free-market conservative and McCain supporter Phil Gramm put it in his broadside against talk radio in the Washington Post last week: “They say they have principles, but some of it is their ego and power, too. They’re well-known, and they’re used to having power.”.... In any case, if you’re a true free-market conservative, it’s not supposed to be a crime to make a profit. There’s no shame in making a living by sharing information and opinions—or in meeting unmet demands in the marketplace of ideas....

    What is Malkin really trying to say by linking attacks on talk radio with a betrayal of free-market principles? Is she implying that anything which is successful in the marketplace is therefore worthwhile, since "the people" have spoken and voted with their wallets? Does popular equal good, and beyond criticism?
    Madonna is popular, but when she decided to launch a series of children's books Malkin wrote

Madonna has yet to receive a Mother of the Year award, but corporate pimps looking to cash in on what’s left of her fame have come up with something even more outrageous.

    Wait, I thought making a profit was always a good thing, beyond reproach.
    How about MTV? Malkin acknowledged the network is "No. 1 among Americans aged 12-to-24-years-old" before attacking "the channel's main fare is a corrosive, constant, and instantly accessible mix of sex, drugs, violence, and vulgarity laced with hypocritical political correctness." But wait.. young people have spoken. They love MTV.  Are they "mind-numbed robots"? If MTV is profitable, isn't that what should matter free-market types?
    Would Malkin defend Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which made nearly $50 million in worldwide box office and was thus both popular and profitable. Would she defend radio host Howard Stern, who has more fans than most conservative talk radio hosts?
    Personally, I have no problem criticizing MTV, talk radio, pro football, or anything else loved by der volk. Why not? For one, I am not a free-market absolutist. More importantly, I am not a populist. The masses often have terrible taste, and plenty of junk makes money. Is this an elitist, snobby way to think? Maybe... but it is true.

The Inconvenient Truth About Illegal Immigration

The February 18th issue of The Weekly Standard has a great piece by Harvard Law School professor William J. Stuntz entitled "The Inconvenient Truths of 2008." He basically looks as certain facts willfully ignored by party loyalists on each side of the aisle. I was particularly interested in what he had to say about the GOP's base on their problems with reality:

Each party's base has two inconvenient truths it doesn't want to hear. For Republicans, those truths concern immigration and the culture war. Most of today's illegal immigrant population is here to stay (along with their descendants) and will pay no significant price for getting here outside the legal channels. No presidential candidate can change those facts. On the issue that matters most to conservative Christians--abortion--the political phase of the culture war is over. The right lost --a pro-life initiative failed in South Dakota in 2006: If it can't win there, it can't win anywhere. Well, maybe Utah.

    The part about immigration is particularly important. A key complaint against John McCain is that he is too soft on illegal immigration. This point is often made by the wacky Minutemen types who want to round up all the illegals, out them in detention centers, and forcibly expel them from the U.S. Stuntz sees the problem with the Tom Tancredo Know-Nothing approach:

Hail Trader Joe's

Trader Joe's markets are among the very best in the nation. And now they are even better. From the Yahoo! News:

US grocery chain Trader Joe's said Monday it would stop selling food imported from China due to customers' concerns about the products' safety.

"Our customers have voiced concerns about products from this region and we have listened," Trader Joe's spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki said in a statement.

    In the wake of pet poisonings in the U.S. and the outbreak of dangerous dumplings in Japan, it would appear obvious that there are serious concerns about the quality of food coming out of China. Consider the following examples cited in the Washington Post:

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.... Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.... Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.... Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

    The strange hybrid commie-capitalist system employed by the Chinese seems only concerned with maximizing profits, and there is little oversight or quality control. The U.S. inspection program is a farce, with nowhere near enough inspectors to handle the staggering amounts of cheap foodstuffs flooding our shores from China. Less than 1 percent of regulated imports are ever inspected, so quite a bit of questionable product makes it onto the supermarket shelves.
    Free trade is a great and beneficial thing. So is not being poisoned. It America is going to continue to import large quantities of food from China, than rigid standards must be enforced to insure the public's safety. If more chains took a stand like Trader Joe's has, both the Chinese and U.S. governments may get the hint and begin taking these issues seriously.

Forclosure's Silent Victims

The whole housing/subprime loans/foreclosure mess is taking its toll on some truly innocent victims: animals. As reported in the Associated Press, people facing foreclosure of the homes they couldn't really afford in the first place are cavalierly abandoning their animal companions, sometimes leaving them in fields, sometimes just locking them up in their former residences and leaving them there to rot. As reported on About.com

Pets who are the casualty of foreclosures are often left indoors, without food, water or the comforts of a temperature-controlled environment. Experts say a dog will become dehydrated within 24 hours without water and could die in extreme heat within a few days.

    What kind of person does this? Are they so damn lazy and irresponsible that they can't even make an effort to find an animal shelter? Of course, what kind of person buys a property they cannot afford? That's right... an irresponsible person, a person who should not have pets, since they probably have a hard enough time taking care of themselves.

Obama's Going Strong

It now looks as if Barack Obama might actually have a shot at being the Democratic nominee for president. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, if we must have a Democrat in the Oval Office, I'd much prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton. Not because of his policies, which I tend to disagree with (though his openness to animal issues is intriguing), but because of his basic integrity and decency. On the other hand, I am a supporter of John McCain, and many polls suggest it would be easier for McCain to defeat Hillary than Obama. It's a tough call.        

The Wednesday After

Super Tuesday has come and gone, and the results are encouraging. Hillary Clinton is in a dead heat with Barack Obama, and will no doubt be slugging it out with him for some time. A Clinton sweep would have been discouraging. Even better news is John McCain's strong showing. (Though the continued success of hick magnet Mike Huckabee is disturbing.) Despite all the ridiculous whining emanating from talk-show luminaries such as Hugh Hewitt, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and El Rushbo himself, it looks as if McCain will be the GOP nominee for president. The aforementioned radio personalities don't think he is "conservative" enough. What do they think he is? A liberal? Or, heaven forbid, a moderate? Just because McCain doesn't agree with every single Right wing policy point, he is labeled as some sort of sell-out. I always thought conservatism was more of a way of looking at the world, a temperament of sorts, as opposed to a strict ideology with stringent litmus tests. Don't conservatives always say the Leftists are the ideologues? Consider what David Brooks wrote in the New York Times back in October:

Music for Tyrants

Later this month, the New York Philharmonic will perform a concert in the Orwellian nightmare nation of North Korea, perhaps the most totalitarian society in history. As the always interesting Terry Teachout noted in the Wall Street Journal last year, only elite members of the Communist regime will have a chance to actually see the performance, and observed that

Even if such a concert were to be telecast, the handful of North Koreans lucky enough to see it, isolated as they are from the rest of the world, might well conclude that by sending a great orchestra there, the U.S. was showing its support for the tyrants who rule them. That's why I've come to the conclusion that should the Philharmonic choose to play in Pyongyang, it will be doing little more than participating in a puppet show whose purpose is to lend legitimacy to a despicable regime.

    Teachout is right, of course. This event will simply play into Kim Jong Ils' grubby little dictator hands. The Philharmonic's conductor, Loren Maazel doesn't seem too worried about that, since, after all, who are we Americans to criticize North Korea? From the Associated Press:

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they? Is our standing as a country--the United States--is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.

    Maazel is a decent, if quirky, conductor. But he is being a moral idiot by making such statements. Even if one were to accept wholeheartedly his implication that the U.S. is guilty of a multitude of sins, the level of severity surely makes a difference. And there is simple no way the misdeeds of the North Korean regime and the misdeeds of America can be seen as equal. It is akin to saying a car thief has no moral standing to judge a child molester harshly, since they are both, after all, criminals.