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Credit: Aramis

From the great Aramis at Barkers and Rubes, from a suggestion from Jesse LaGreca.

Open thread below. ...

Former vice president Dick Cheney, 71, who has struggled with cardiac problems for years, is recovering from heart-transplant surgery at a Virginia hospital, according to a statement from his office. Cheney had been on a waiting list for a transplant for nearly two years after being hospitalized in 2010 for conditions related to coronary artery disease. At that time he had a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implanted to help his heart pump.

"Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift," it said.

Cheney has a history of heart trouble, suffering at least five heart attacks since 1978. His first occurred when he was 37.

More at CNN.

This classic from a criminally overlooked band should set your Saturday right.

Moby Grape
	Artist: Moby Grape Price: $16.61 (As of 03/28/12 05:26 am details)

Paul Roberts, author of The End of Food, speaks to use of antibiotics in agriculture. April 2009

Hopefully, this isn't another case of Charlie Brown and the football, where the administration announces some needed changes, only to back off later when there's an uproar from industry. Because antibiotic-resistant infections are a serious health crisis:

The Obama administration must warn drug makers that the government may soon ban agricultural uses of some popular antibiotics that many scientists say encourage the proliferation of dangerous infections and imperil public health, a federal magistrate judge ruled on Thursday.

The order, issued by Judge Theodore H. Katz of the Southern District of New York, effectively restarts a process that the Food and Drug Administration began 35 years ago, but never completed, intended to prevent penicillin and tetracycline, widely used antibiotics, from losing their effectiveness in humans because of their bulk use in animal feed to promote growth in chickens, pigs and cattle.

The order comes two months after the Obama administration announced restrictions on agricultural uses of cephalosporins, a critical class of antibiotics that includes drugs like Cefzil and Keflex, which are commonly used to treat pneumonia, strep throat and skin and urinary tract infections.

Siobhan DeLancey, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, would not say whether the government planned to appeal. “We are studying the opinion and considering appropriate next steps,” she said.

In a separate move, the F.D.A. is expected to issue draft rules within days that ask drug makers to voluntarily end the use of antibiotics in animals without the oversight of a veterinarian.

[...] Environmentalists and health advocates cheered Judge Katz’s ruling, as they have largely cheered the F.D.A.’s incremental efforts to begin restricting some of the less discriminating antibiotic agricultural uses because they welcome any improvement in the decades-old issue.

“The rise of superbugs that we see now was predicted by F.D.A. in the ’70s,” said Jen Sorenson, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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Anyone who knows anything about professional sports knows that, first and foremost, it's a bottom-line business. Players who put up numbers get paid and players who don't perform, don't. It's really that simple.

So it was amusing to watch the wingnut weeping over Tim Tebow being traded to New York. Whether it was Pat Robertson issuing a fatwa on Peyton Manning or Matt Lewis pretending he knows more about the quarterback position than John Elway — or Sean Hannity saying Elway traded Tebow because he was "shaking things up" — it's been fun to watch wingers display their new-found support for affirmative action.

The 50-state blog round-up has existed over the years in various forms. The idea is to take a look at state and local blogs in order to see what important things are going on in state politics and campaigns, to get a preview of what's coming to the national stage and to recognize the work of great state and local bloggers.

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, April 2011

The extremely unappetizing phrase "pink slime" has come to the forefront of late. In case you haven't heard--or don't have the stomach (pun intended) to watch the video above--pink slime is the process by which some beef manufacturers have come up with to strip every last bit of beef and render it "fit" for human consumption by cleaning it with an ammonia solution and mincing it.

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Credit: The Inquisitr

McDonalds pink slime

That is, until recently. After the above episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and a 2009 article in the New York Times, the public outcry over the usage of pink slime grew, leading the USDA to allow school districts more choices in their ground beef purchases. Soon, retailers also followed suit:

Wal-Mart has become the latest food retailer to announce that it's making changes after listening to customer concerns about LFTB.

"While the USDA and experts agree that it is safe and nutritious, Wal-Mart and Sam's Club will begin offering fresh ground beef that does not contain LFTB," writes Deisha Galberth Barnett, a Wal-Mart spokesperson, in a statement.

The announcement comes amid a flurry of similar announcements from other retailers this week.

So anything that leaves bits and pieces of waste and by-products including connective tissue, nerve tissue, cartilage, bone, and in a quarter of the samples, Sarcocystis parasites (yum!) out of the food our children eat is a good thing, right?

Not according to Fox News.

They lambasted ABC for daring to scare the public with those pesky little facts of science.

TV news loves a health scare. Think deadly Tylenol. Killer tomatoes. Mad Cow Disease. Alar in apples. And lots more. Sometimes, as with Tylenol, they are legit and important. Other times, like Alar, they are entirely bogus.

Yet every time, the template is the same. Someone gets sick and the ravenous media tear at the company or industry for not being safe.

This time, however, ABC News has turned that idea on its head in its usual quest for tabloid headlines. It’s going after a company, Beef Products, Inc., for making a product that's not only already safe, it's one we’ve all been eating for years.

But that hasn't stopped ABC and reporter Jim Avila. The network's news division has decided to declare open war on … beef. So far, they’re winning. In a series of 10 stories in just about two weeks, ABC has so demonized the company and its products that Safeway, SUPERVALU and Food Lion just stopped buying it. Ditto Kroger and Stop & Shop.

The meat, often called "lean finely textured beef, is made up of beef that is just harder to get at, so the meat isn’t lost. It’s treated to get rid of the fat and included with the rest of the ground beef. The USDA declares it healthy, but it is less expensive. As an added bonus, it is treated tiny amounts of ammonium hydroxide to make it safer to eat.

But network broadcasts and activist videos act as if this treatment is somehow bad.

For those of you keeping score at home, Fox News just defended the use of a filler ingredient, one with some pretty questionable ingredients, that enables beef producers to give you a lower quality product for the same amount of money. They think that ABC informing their viewers of this practice is a bad thing.

Why does Fox News hate informing viewers?

A Wells Fargo executive explains to the SEC that his company didn't do anything wrong!

I had to laugh when I read this, because bill collectors from Wells Fargo keep hounding me over a few bucks I owe from when I closed my account and moved it to a credit union. (I plan to give them the money, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.)

"Don't you have any sense of honor about your just debts?" the last bill collector said.

"Are you serious?" I said after I stopped laughing. "Do you know who you're working for?"

The next time he calls, I'm going to tell him I'll write him a check just as soon as Wells Fargo complies with their SEC subpoenas!

(Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators accused Wells Fargo & Co on Friday of repeatedly ignoring its subpoenas for documents in connection with a probe into the bank's $60 billion sale of mortgage-backed securities.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's filing in a San Francisco federal court seeks to compel the fourth largest U.S. bank to hand over documents. The SEC said it has issued several subpoenas since September.

A Wells Fargo spokeswoman called the SEC's action "inappropriate" and pledged the bank would "vigorously defend itself in court" against the SEC action.

"Wells Fargo has extensively cooperated in the commission's investigation and believed it had an understanding with the SEC staff with regard to the outstanding document requests; the filing of this action violates that understanding," said Wells Fargo spokeswoman Mary Eshet.

The SEC said on Friday it is looking into whether Wells Fargo made "material misrepresentations or omitted material facts" in offerings it made to investors from September 2006 through early 2008, a period that included the beginnings of the financial crisis.

The SEC charges that a due diligence review of a sampling of the securitized loans was done, and some of those loans would be dropped because they failed to meet the bank's underwriting standards.

But the regulator said it "does not appear that Wells Fargo took any steps to address similar deficiencies in the remainder of the loans in the pool, which were securitized and sold to investors."

Eshet said that the SEC had inaccurately described its conduct with regard to residential mortgage backed securities and that no enforcement action was warranted.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! speaks with Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan, and Meghan Maurus, McMillan's attorney and mass defense coordinator at the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

McMillan suffered a seizure when New York City police officers pulled her from the crowd and arrested her as hundreds attempted to re-occupy Zuccotti Park on Saturday, to mark sixth months since the launch of the movement. In her first television interview since her arrest, McMillan says she has decided to speak out because of an outpouring of public support. "I have received so many emails, Twitter messages and phone calls. People are just horrified about what happened to me." McMillan has a black eye and her body is covered in bruises, at least one in the shape of a handprint. She says she was not allowed to contact an attorney while she was taken to the hospital and transferred to a jail cell along with some of the 72 other detained protesters. Facing charges of police assault and obstructing governmental administration, she was released Monday after a judge denied a request that her bail be set at $20,000. McMillan is northeast regional organizer for Young Democratic Socialists of America, and a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.

More video of McMillan's arrest and treatment while she was suffering a seizure during Saturday's police brutality:

Here at about 7:20 into the video, and remember these may not be suitable for work due to language and graphic nature.

Video Here.

Here.

Here.

Last year, I received several automated phone calls from my school district that necessitated some very intense discussions in my home. Several girls my daughter's age reported that they had been approached while walking home from school by a man who tried various methods to get them into his car. This happened several times over the course of about six weeks; one of these events actually took place just outside my neighborhood. Wisely, the girls reported these incidents to their parents, the police and the schools and fairly quickly, a detailed description of the man and his car was put together and passed on to other parents. And the man was arrested after one quick student remembered the last few digits of his license plate and they matched it up with the description of the car and suspect. The school district deserve praise for their prompt work to avert a tragedy.

They also had the local law enforcement come into the individual schools to discuss "stranger danger" and what kids should do if they felt threatened. The school district reinforced those guidelines by sending them home as well so that parents could go through them with their child. So I sat my kids down and we discussed what they should do if they ever felt threatened. We came up with family codes, names of trusted people if something happened that would prevent me or their father coming to them, walking route strategies, "safe locations" (like the local library) they could go to, etc.

But there was one thing first and foremost that both the police and we as parents told our kids to do: if they felt that they were being threatened by a stranger, run in the other direction and scream out to get the attention of other adults. The reasoning is that the screaming could a) scare off the suspect; b) bring witnesses out to the scene; c) avert a tragedy.

So when I heard the screams for help of Trayvon Martin on the 911 calls of George Zimmerman's neighbors, it hit me like a gut punch that not one of those people answered those screams for help. Sure, they called 911, but there was a boy out there, being threatened by a man ten years older and 100 pounds heavier--a stranger. And he did what we tell our children to do. And no one came.

We've looked at overzealous tendencies of George Zimmerman; the ridiculousness of the "Stand Your Ground" law; the shameful history of racial inequality in Sanford, Florida, and the failures of the investigation by the Sanford Police. But this was a community. A community of people who knew George Zimmerman's obsessive tendency to call 911, so much so that they called a special meeting of the HOA to discuss it. Did they know that Zimmerman made his neighborhood watch patrols armed? That could open the entire HOA up to civil liability. But more than liability, where was their civil responsibility to be a good neighbor, to come to the aid of a kid begging for help?

Nearly fifty years ago, there was an infamous case of what was later termed "the bystander effect" by researchers John Darley and Bibb Latané: the Kitty Genovese murder. Now the truth of Genovese's assault and murder have been obscured by far more dramatic misinformation by media sources. So it wasn't a case of blatant witness apathy that like the Sergio Aguiar case, but it does still point to a larger, meta question: what is our responsibility to others when we hear their cries for help?

I had a fairly heated discussion of this with other liberals within the context of Trayvon Martin's murder. One in particular insisted that the fact that I was concerned with the neighbors' hesitation was way, way out of line. He said that no cop would encourage someone to go out and risk being shot. There's some truth to that. But as a parent, there's no way that I could ignore a kid's calls for help. And I'm counting on the fact that others share that ethic if ever my own child is in that situation. I don't think they necessarily needed to jump into the fray, but I really believe that Zimmerman would not have been as quick to pull the trigger if he knew there were witnesses.

It's a fine line, I admit. But speaking as a parent, responding to those cries of help could be the difference between life and death of my child. It may have been the difference for Trayvon Martin too.

But now, we'll never know.