Britain hit with "pasty-gate" class warfare

For those of you unfamiliar with a pasty, it's a popular food that is a meal folded into pastry. (Many people love them though I was unable to stomach more than a few bites on my one and only attempt.) They're widely available in the UK with one particular pasty chain that seems to be at every train station across the country.

To some degree, it's sort of a home grown McDonald's in that it's cheap and quick food for people on the run. Just as the 1% in America probably doesn't often do fast food like McDonald's the British 1% (including and especially the blue blood elite government leaders) probably don't do too many visits to pasty shops.

With that in mind, fast forward to the ongoing economic problems in the UK. The Conservative government recently announced tax cuts for the rich (to spur on growth despite there being no proof of such a theory) while raising taxes on take-away food items such as pasties. The pro-austerity government once again is fine with clobbering the middle class who works for a living while catering to the richest Brits, who have prospered during the recession. Fortunately these policies are being noticed by the public, who are now turning against the current government in favor of Labour.

With a sagging economy and slow growth expected due to the unnecessary (and counter-productive) austerity, the Tories may be in for a rough ride. Their class warfare against the middle class is being exposed. NY Times:

The tax controversy, which the British press has called, inevitably, “Pasty-gate,” has come to symbolize the increasingly vitriolic debate in Britain over who should shoulder the burden of the government’s drive to cut debt and spending.

The tax has ignited a political firestorm, prompting even generally pro-government tabloid newspapers to attack it and leading the equally posh British prime minister, David Cameron, to claim — not all that convincingly — that he, truly, is an aficionado of the pasty (which rhymes with nasty).

The issue has also revived memories of the poll tax and other unpopular measures imposed by previous Conservative Party-led governments that left many Britons feeling that their leaders were out of touch.

How is it possible that Cambridge educated government leaders who carry the title of baronet could be viewed as elitist and out of touch? Go figure. Read the rest of this post...

Eat chocolate, be thin?

It's a sacrifice, but sure, why not?

The findings come from a study of nearly 1,000 US people that looked at diet, calorie intake and body mass index (BMI) - a measure of obesity.

It found those who ate chocolate a few times a week were, on average, slimmer than those who ate it occasionally.

Even though chocolate is loaded with calories, it contains ingredients that may favour weight loss rather than fat synthesis, scientists believe.

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Catholic bishop forces school to rescind commencement invite to Ted Kennedy's widow

It must an election year. The Catholic church is again turning Democratic politicians away. It's like clockwork. Every four years there a presidential election, and suddenly the Catholic church starts kicking out Democrats. They get a tax break for this? Boston.com:

A small Catholic college that invited Victoria Reggie Kennedy to speak at its spring commencement has rescinded the offer under pressure from the Worcester bishop, who described her apparent political views as out of line with Catholic teachings.

Anna Maria College in Paxton, west of Worcester, released a statement today placing the decision at the feet of Bishop Robert J. McManus and saying it still believes Kennedy is an appropriate choice.

However, the statement continued, “after hours of discerning and struggling with elements of all sides of this issue, the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees decided with deep regret to withdraw its invitation.”

I'm sure they can replace her with a pedophile priest who's more than palatable to the church leadership. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Drunk arrested guy sings Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody for cops

God bless Canadians. Best part is when he really gets into it and whips off his glasses.

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Olbermann fired from Current TV

Sounds messy.

Okay, it is messy.  He's suing them. Read the rest of this post...

Why health insurance isn't broccoli (the short version)

Paul Krugman spends his precious Times inches on the Supreme Court ACA-broccoli debate. Along the way he has a nice tight explanation about why the two aren't comparable.

He writes (my emphasis):

Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has.

That's pretty straight-forward. As to how to fix the problem, Krugman clearly sees the options:

There are at least two ways to address this reality — which is, by the way, very much an issue involving interstate commerce, and hence a valid federal concern. One is to tax everyone — healthy and sick alike — and use the money raised to provide health coverage. That’s what Medicare and Medicaid do. The other is to require that everyone buy insurance, while aiding those for whom this is a financial hardship.

Krugman doesn't have a SCOTUS ACA prognosis, but he does say that:

it’s hard not to feel a sense of foreboding — and to worry that the nation’s already badly damaged faith in the Supreme Court’s ability to stand above politics is about to take another severe hit.

Yes, Professor. We all have that foreboding. We've been forebode before.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius) Read the rest of this post...

Romney donated $10k to organization that wanted to incite race war

I think Mr. Mitt has some explaining to do. Read the rest of this post...

Unemployment fell in 29 states in February

We need more and things are hardly settled, but really, this is positive news as we head into the weekend. CNNMoney:

Unemployment fell in 29 states in February and rose in only eight, the government reported Friday, in another sign of broad improvement in the U.S. labor market.

The improvement means there are only three states with unemployment above the 10% mark -- Nevada with a 12.3% unemployment rate, Rhode Island, which has 11% unemployment, and California, where unemployment stood at 10.9%.

North Carolina and Mississippi dropped out of the states with double-digit unemployment.

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Study: College educated conservatives don't believe in science

No wonder the GOP hates education and wants to cut spending on education. To them, unless it's in the Bible, it doesn't count. While this is a unique and daring approach to building a country that can compete it may struggle when other countries focus on education. It's the dumbing down of America, brought to you by our good friends, the conservatives.

Conservatives, particularly those with college educations, have become dramatically more skeptical of science over the past four decades, according to a study published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review. Fewer than 35 percent of conservatives say they have a "great deal" of trust in the scientific community now, compared to nearly half in 1974.

"The scientific community ... has been concerned about this growing distrust in the public with science. And what I found in the study is basically that's really not the problem. The growing distrust of science is entirely focused in two groups—conservatives and people who frequently attend church," says the study's author, University of North Carolina postdoctoral fellow Gordon Gauchat.

In fact, in 1974, people who identified as conservatives were among the most confident in science as an institution, with liberals trailing slightly behind, and moderates bringing up the rear. Liberals have remained fairly steady in their opinion of the scientific community over the interim, while conservative trust in science has plummeted.

The conservatives can take special pride knowing that they aren't alone with being both educated and fearful of education. Pol Pot and his gang were all part of the educated elite in Cambodia. How'd that all work out? Read the rest of this post...

USDA Undersecretary for Pink Slime Hagen refusing to talk to media while defending beef additive

Undersecretary
for Pink Slime

If the USDA is going to send the undersecretary for food safety, Elisabeth Hagen, to a GOP photo opp in favor of adding "pink slime" to what we all thought was simply "ground beef," they can at least direct the undersecretary to take questions from the media.  Otherwise it makes one question how safe pink slime really is if she's been ducking the media for three weeks now.

What is Pink Slime?  It's processed beef - and boy do I mean processed - that's added to 70% of the ground beef in America.  Gaius wrote about it the other week - here he cites ABC News:

According to [USDA scientist] Custer, the product is not really beef, but “a salvage product” ... made by gathering waste trimmings [beef "waste" is everything you think it is], simmering them at low heat so the fat separates easily from the muscle, and spinning the trimmings using a centrifuge to complete the separation. Next, the mixture is sent through pipes where it is sprayed with ammonia gas to kill bacteria ... [then packaged] into bricks [and] frozen and shipped to grocery stores and meat packers, where it is added to most ground beef.

Mmmm... frozen ammonia beef bricks.  So it's a food AND a floor cleaner!

More from TLC Cooking/Planet Green:

"Ten years ago, the rejected fat, sinew, bloody effluvia, and occasional bits of meat cut from carcasses in the slaughterhouse were a low-value waste product called 'trimmings' that were sold primarily as pet food. No more. Now, Beef Products Inc. of South Dakota transforms trimmings into something they call 'boneless lean beef.' In huge factories, the company liquefies the trimmings and uses a spinning centrifuge to separate the sinews and fats from the meat, leaving a mash that has been described as 'pink slime,' which is then frozen into small squares and sold as a low-cost additive to hamburger."

And even more:

See, the problem when you turn garbage bits of animal carcasses into "pink slime" to sell as a food product is that there's an issue with pathogens, such as E. coli. And when samples of the pink slime were tested, the tests came back showing that the slime was rampant with harmful bacteria. Now, one might think that the best idea would be to decide not to sell pink slime to feed to humans, but there's no money in that, is there? So BPI cleverly started disinfecting the slime with ammonia. And convinced the FDA to allow them to list it as a "processing ingredient" so that we wouldn't know we were eating ammonia.

I know I'm hungry.

More from Chris:

Who would have guessed that a governor who receives $150,000 in money from Pink Slime producers would come out in support of Pink Slime being sold? Other promoters of Pink Slime include a website that receives money from the Pink Slime industry as well as cattle state governor Rick Perry.

Since the GOP governors, plus the USDA undersecretary for food safety, were all there for the no-questions event, how about they all go on record and formally announce that all “beef” meals at home and at formal state events will use only Pink Slime? Show us all how nutritious and delicious it is and lead by example. Dude, it’s Pink Slime, as Rick Perry says:

Governors from three meat-producing states today defended Beef Products Inc., the company that makes lean finely textured beef, which now-former USDA scientists nicknamed "pink slime," after a walk through the company's plant accompanied by ABC News.

"Let's call this product what it is and let 'pink slime' become a term of the past," Texas Gov. Rick Perry said after the tour, after which officials showed off t-shirts with the slogan, "Dude, it's beef!"

Stung by consumer reaction to the process used by BPI, grocery stores pulled beef containing the filler off the shelves and BPI closed three of its four plants for lack of demand. The governors said that the treatment the product received in the media was unfair because it is not only safe, but also nutritious and allows grocers to sell leaner ground beef at a lower cost.

Since these GOP governors and the USDA “safety” director are in theory so supportive of the free market, what’s to fear about clearly labeling products that include Pink Slime and letting consumers decide. Surely there’s nothing to fear since it’s such a wonderful product. Right? And why stop at school lunches -- the entire administration should be serve 100% pink slime in its cafeterias and lead by example.

Someone please remind me why Dr. Elisabeth Hagen still has a job with this administration? Obama needs to do a lot better than this for a job as important as food safety. But maybe he likes Pink Slime and thinks it's OK to feed to his family? Read the rest of this post...

"Natural gas" means "Fracking"

Let's call this a Quick Hits.

I want to add to your list of replacement phrases — substitution words that make right-wing statements make sense. For example, when a right-wing politician says something he wants is going to increase "jobs" he really means "profits" — try it yourself; works every time.

Your new replacement phrase — "natural gas" means "fracking". Thus:

• "We need more natural gas" = "We need more fracking"
• "I favor natural gas production" = "I favor fracking"
• "I'm a natural gas company"= "I'm a fracking company"

See how simple? Every word a true one.

I'm seeing a glut of "natural gas" commercials, an absolute flood. "Natural gas is clean" they say. Yes, true of the gas as it burns, relative to other carbon-based products. But what about its production? (Remember your replacement phrase, which hides the truth.)

In the U.S. today, much new natural gas comes from western states where homesteading farmers were prevented by the government (per the Stockraising Homestead Act of 1916) from owning the mineral rights to their own property. This is the meaning of the term "split estate." Western homesteaders after 1916 owned only the surface.

In the east, you own your mineral rights (unless you or your ancestors had sold them). In the west, you don't — the government did and does.

This is what those BLM auctions, by the way, the ones that Tim DeChristopher disrupted and publicized, are all about — natural gas (fracking) leases.

To produce new natural gas from anywhere in the country almost always requires fracking. The perniciousness of western fracking is that the government can give away (sorry, lease) the fracking rights to fracking companies (see, substitution at work) without the landowner's consent.

Do you want to see how widespread fracking is in the U.S.? Click here for the map (it opens in a new tab).

And for a definition of all these terms — fracking, fracking fluid, and so on — go here, a great, bookmarkable resource.

So two points:

■ "Natural gas" means "fracking" and "Increasing natural gas production" means "Increasing fracking."

This is the carefully hidden fact behind all those music-sweetened, "jobs"-dangling, mixed-race–friendly commercials that some highly professional PR firm has created to confuse you. (Stay in school, soulless right-wing kids; you too can be paid for such work.)

■ Watch this trailer for the excellent film Split Estate. A great entry point into this little pocket of evil in the world.



For more on the film, go here.

And remember, the more we "succeed" at carbon production, the more we fail, since everything we "produce" goes into the air. A time-bomb of our own making, and why you should care.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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How the GOP honors our troops: "Female wounded veteran... ehhh"

You remember GOP Congressman Joe Walsh, he's the deadbeat dad who reportedly owes his three kids $100,000 in child support he's refused to pay.  Iraq war vet Tammy Duckworth is running against him this fall.

Ah, those GOP family values.  (Speaking of family values, right after a judge admonished Walsh for the $100,000 in back child support, a religious right hate group gave Walsh a "family values" award.)

From VoteVets:

In an appalling new low, [GOP] Congressman Joe Walsh today slammed his opponent Tammy Duckworth's military service. Walsh told Politico, "What else has she done? Female, wounded veteran ... ehhh." Duckworth served as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot in Iraq in 2004, and lost her legs and part of the use of her right arm. She was awarded the Purple Heart for her combat injuries and is still active as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Illinois National Guard.

VoteVets.org PAC, the largest group of progressive veterans responded in a statement, demanding an apology to Duckworth, and putting Walsh's own record up against Duckworth's service to the country and veterans.

"Just when you think Congressman Joe Walsh couldn't sink any lower, he insults the service and sacrifice of our Veterans, particularly one like Tammy who lost her limbs in the line of duty. Congressman Walsh owes Tammy Duckworth and all Veterans an apology for his outrageous disrespect for their service," said Jon Soltz, Iraq War Veteran and Chairman of VoteVets.org PAC. "But it's not just that. If you think working for America's veterans at the VA both in Washington and Illinois is nothing, if you think working to improve the economic lives of veterans is nothing, then Joe Walsh's record is below nothing. He represents the do-nothing, obstructionist, extreme Tea Party wing of the GOP, not the values that Tammy stood up for."

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OECD: UK back in recession, will be slow to recover

Another story line that may not make it into the GOP discussions. They're always keen to talk about the savings of austerity, but fail to discuss the real world negative impact that consistently occurs. Now the British public has fewer services and they're hampered by a sagging economy because the government strangled any chance to stimulate the economy. Brilliant.

Only Italy will struggle over a longer period to return to growth, highlighting the difficult situation confronting the British government as it battles to boost confidence and get the economy back on track.

In recent weeks surveys have shown the business and consumer sentiment falling back after an initial boost earlier this year.

The Office for National Statistics added to the gloomy prognosis for the economy on Wednesday when it reported a bigger fall in output in the final three months of 2011 than first estimated. It said a previous 0.2% drop in output had underestimated the size of the fall, which further analysis found to be 0.3%.

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PA doctors banned from telling patients about impact of fracking chemicals

Pennsylvania goes from bad to worse with fracking. Besides the earthquake risk, besides the flammable tap water, besides the tax free business of fracking and besides the dangerous impact of chemicals being pumped into the ground with costs left for taxpayers to cover, Pennsylvania is now blocking medical doctors from having honest discussions with patients about the impact of fracking chemicals on their patients. Is there any question as to what industry owns the political class of Pennsylvania? The Atlantic:

Under a new law, doctors in Pennsylvania can access information about chemicals used in natural gas extraction -- but they won't be able to share it with their patients. A provision buried in a law passed last month is drawing scrutiny from the public health and environmental community, who argue that it will "gag" doctors who want to raise concerns related to oil and gas extraction with the people they treat and the general public.

Pennsylvania is at the forefront in the debate over "fracking," the process by which a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, sand, and water are blasted into rock to tap into the gas. Recent discoveries of great reserves in the Marcellus Shale region of the state prompted a rush to development, as have advancements in fracking technologies. But with those changes have come a number of concerns from citizens about potential environmental and health impacts from natural gas drilling.

There is good reason to be curious about exactly what's in those fluids. A 2010 congressional investigation revealed that Halliburton and other fracking companies had used 32 million gallons of diesel products, which include toxic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, in the fluids they inject into the ground. Low levels of exposure to those chemicals can trigger acute effects like headaches, dizziness, and drowsiness, while higher levels of exposure can cause cancer.

And to think the Republicans are worked into a frenzy about health care coverage rather than doctors having an honest discussion with their patients. Interesting. Read the rest of this post...