Daily Music SelectionHerd About It? by Ana Grarian The American Meat Institute (AMI) is urging the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to move forward with the rule making process regarding its petition to allow electron beam irradiation (e-beam) to be applied to the surface of beef carcasses as a processing aid, and that the agency treat this process no differently than it treats any other processing aid, AMI Executive Vice President James Hodges noted, adding that AMI has provided the necessary research and rationale to support our request. The Humane Society of the United States and a coalition of environmental and public health organizations filed a legal petition with the Environmental Protection Agency seeking to regulate air pollution from factory farms. The 69-page petition provides detailed scientific and legal information about the significant emissions of methane and nitrous oxide two greenhouse gases as well as hydrogen sulfide and ammonia from factory farms, and how all of these pollutants have been shown to have negative effects on human health and welfare, including adverse effects on climate and the environment in the United States. I was struck by these two articles in the October 2009 Animal Ag E-letter by the Illinois Farm Bureau.…
Judging by this, Lone Star state Republicans may have much to fear in the future. I’ve made plenty of fun of Texas and that breed of Texan that keeps electing crooks and nitwits like Tom DeLay and Junior-clone Rick Perry against their own best interests, but it seems things have gotten bad enough down there that even Houston, the nexus of Bush Oil Country, has elected a lesbian Democrat, former City Controller Annise Parker, as Mayor rather than face a corrupt and/or dumb Republican. (Albeit that Houston has been trending Dem for some years and the last mayor was a Democrat.) Although Parker has some past ties to the energy industry, her most recent non-political gig was running a bookstore and she is regarded as fairly liberal, at least by Texas standards. It’s no secret the GOP has raped the state from one end to the other, giving massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations while cutting social safety-net programs to the bone, eviscerating the educational system, and putting workers at the mercy of employers it was the neocon corporatist blueprint for what King Junior tried to do in Washington, but didn’t quite succeed at entirely. Now that…
