Bad Deeds for 3-16-2009

Bush-Era Food and Drug Administration Only Inspected 5% of Nation’s Food-Processing Facilities – Thirty-five years ago, the F.D.A. did annual inspections of about half of the nation’s food-processing facilities. Last year, the agency inspected just 7,000 of the nearly 150,000 domestic food facilities, and its oversight of foreign plants, which provide a growing share of the nation’s food supply, was even spottier. Each year, about 76 million people in the United States are sickened by contaminated food, hundreds of thousands are hospitalized and about 5,000 die, public health experts estimate.

President Obama announced the creation of a Food Safety Working Group, which will include the secretaries of health and agriculture, to advise him on which laws and regulations need to be changed, to foster coordination across federal agencies, and to ensure that laws are enforced. “In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president, but as a parent,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

 

So Eager to Call CNN ‘Communist News Network,’ Fox Misses Name of Latin American Leader – On Fox & Friends Monday, host Steve Doocy took time to note that a former CNN employee, Mauricio Funes, has been elected President of El Salvador. “He is from a party down in El Salvador that is essentially the communist party,” Doocy explained. “I wonder if he is just on a leave of absence from CNN, which, given his political inklings CNN could stand for the Communist News Network,” he said.

But Fox was so eager to tie CNN to communism that they couldn’t get the name of Venezeula’s leader right when making an unsourced allegation. A second Fox pundit pointed out that Funes’ party, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, is liberal and said it was essentially communist. He then declared that FMLN “allegedly” has ties to Caesar Chavez. Except that Caesar Chavez doesn’t lead a party in Latin America. He was a Mexican-American farm worker and labor activist who died in 1993.

 

It’s Official: Red Cross Report Says Bush Administration Tortured Prisoners – US interrogators attached detainees to collars like dogs and used their leashes to slam them against walls, forced them to stand for days wearing only diapers, and tied detainees necks with towels and threw them against plywood walls, according to accounts in a secret 2007 report issued by the Red Cross to be printed in a New York magazine and leaked on Monday. But the report goes further: Prisoners were routinely beaten, stripped, doused with freezing water and loud music, and kept awake for days with their arms shackled above them, wearing only diapers.

 

Medicare Advantage Sellers Trick Elderly Into Giving Up Benefits – Medicare Advantage plans are privately run and can be more expansive – with vision and dental coverage – but have a smaller network of providers that participate. In practice, the extra vision and dental coverage is often of negligible benefit and doesn’t outweigh what’s lost by leaving traditional Medicare – but it looks good at first.

A sales rep told Curtis Smith that her plan would be cheaper and would provide vision coverage, something Smith, whose eyes are deteriorating, had wanted. “She told me to sign it. It was a piece of paper just like one of these right here,” says Smith, who can’t read well. “A big piece of paper. And she had read me something about the benefits being better and cheaper and I signed it.” The next time Smith went to his pharmacy, he was told he was no longer covered. When he went to Howard University Hospital for a colon cancer procedure, he was told the same thing.

Peter Orszag, who’s leading Obama’s healthcare reform effort, said. “Evidence suggests that each dollar provided under Medicare Advantage costs the government a dollar thirty in costs. I believe in competition. I don’t believe in paying a dollar thirty to get a dollar.”

 

Politico, AP Forward GOP Small Business Falsehood – The Politico and the AP forwarded the false Republican talking point that President Obama’s proposals to let the Bush tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers expire and reduce the tax rate at which wealthy taxpayers could take itemized deductions would increase taxes on a large percentage of small businesses. In fact, according to the Tax Policy Center, just 2 percent of tax returns that reported small business income in 2007 are in the top two income tax brackets, which include all filers with taxable incomes that would be affected.

 

Boehner Says Republicans No Longer Plan To Legislate – John Boehner (R-Ohio) defended his Party’s refusal to offer an alternative to any of the Obama Administration’s plans, including the President’s budget, by saying his party’s lawmakers don’t have to offer any plans and, in fact, “ought to get the idea out of their minds that they are legislators.” It was the second time in a month Boehner has been quoted telling his caucus to stop offering policy alternatives and just say “no” to everything the President proposes.

 

Mitch McConnell: Party of No Won’t Offer an Alternative Budget Proposal – Mitch McConnell on This Week was asked if the GOP had a comprehensive alternative budget proposal to what the Democrats have offered. McConnell’s replies that the GOP is going to be offering amendments rather than a comprehensive proposal.

McConnell: We are going to offer a number of amendments to the Democratic proposal.

Stephanopoulos: But no comprehensive budget?

McConnell: Well it will reframe what the Democrats recommend for America for the next five and ten years and I assure you that the amendments that we offer will not lay out a blueprint for doubling the national debt in five years and tripling it in ten years. That is not what we think.

Stephanopoulos: But shouldn’t you have to have a comprehensive approach that lays out the trade offs? If you just have rifle shot amendments then you don’t have to make all the trade off that you have to make in an overall budget.

McConnell: Well we’re just sort of getting down in the weeds here on procedure.

 

Dana Perino Says Bush Deserves Credit For the Recent Stock Market Uptick – Republicans and Fox News have been charging that the downturn in the stock market is due to President Obama. But former White House spokesperson Dana Perino said on Sunday that the Bush administration, while presiding over the start of the current recession, nevertheless deserved some credit for the modest uptick that Wall Street experienced this past week. The effort to credit the market boost to Bush administration fiscal policy comes at a time of renewed debate over what role the former president played in the recession. On Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney said he didn’t think it was fair to blame Bush for creating the current economic woes. Do they really expect us to take them seriously?

Regards,

Jim