Tainted Foods Reflect Tainted Bush/Republican Leadership

Part and parcel of the government-hating wolves gaurding our national henhouse is their penchant for contempt of government regulation in the public interest. The foodborne health crises, from spinach to peanut butter and most recently pet foods, is just one of many ways in which we, the public, suffer from a lack of adequate governmental oversight.

Tonight on PBS, a food industry leader, Tom Nassif of the Western Growers Association, said that they readily accept the need for and presence of federal regulators but that they are largely absent. He said that there simply were not enough inspectors, a dearth which he blamed on insufficient funding at the FDA.

Caroline Smith deWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the FDA inspects non-meat food production facilities once every 5-10 years, while the USDA inspects meat processors daily.

We put so much of our trust in food processors and they undoubtedly try hard and are for the most part responsible. It's not that when they err, they do so intentionally, there could just be an oversight, or the occassional sloppiness bred by the knowledge that there is sparse oversight.

This intentional de-funding of essential regulatory oversight of the food industry endangers our public health. It is yet another taint on the record of Bush and his fellow Republicans.

A Post After a Prayer for Direction

God has put in my heart this directive: RIGHT THE WRONG! Thus, again I call for the impeachment of Bush, Cheney and Rice. Again I call for new leadership that apologizes to the world, gets the world--starting especially with the middle eastern nations--involved in a proper approach to building a better solution, that includes all the parties, all sides in the process.

Any less on my part and God will hold me accountable for my silence. You who once or still support this administration, please, re-think it. Step outside your supposed "truth" and at least for just a moment pretend that there may be some merit that we were/are wrong, that perhaps it's not just "God bless America," but "God bless THE WORLD."

Over 600,000 INNOCENT Iraqis have been killed by our wrongful invasion. Little babies--out of the womb babies--as well as children and adults---murdered, torn asunder limb from limb, hundreds thousands more injured. 20% of the Iraqi population have fled, nearly half of those OUT of the country--ALL because of our illegal and immoral war SOLD ON BUSH'S LIES!

You may or may not believe in God or a higher power, but polls show those who most support this most UNGodly war are "Christian." So I implore those that so profess to pray, pray for the highest truth, to see and know God's highest truth, to have God show you the solutions as well as the truth.Maybe you'll feel the same afterwards, maybe not. This post is a result of my own prayers.

WE NEED TO END OUR fearful assault on others, we need to re-build bridges in the world and not be intimidated by the skeptic hawks at home who know only one solution, one path, the path of supercharged force of arms.

One is simply NOT a true follower of Jesus, the namesake of Christianity, if one places their faith more in the force of arms than the teachings of Jesus, prime among them charity, mercy, justice and love.

Make no mistake, our path the last 6 years have not been following the footsteps of Bush's so called favorite philosopher (Jesus).

Compassion crafts a safer society

It is easy to be hard. But this heartless path of callous indifference leads inevitably to sorrow and misery, both to the recipient of a snub or slur, and ultimately to its giver. In fact, it is the cold disdain with which we treat our brethren that is the common thread running through the Don Imus hate-speech firing and the Virginia Tech massacre. (There is evidence that, like the killer at Columbine, Cho Seung-hui felt the sting of rejection.)

Yes, we are a good and charitable people. But we are also a society that fosters discord and division, donning our pride and prejudice as the sacred birthrights of a people free to live however we see fit, regardless of the consequences. By our rabid consumption of spiteful radio snipers and demeaning reality shows, we enable our descent to an ever more brutish existence. And it is this numbing of our sensibilities that eventually effects how we treat -- and mistreat -- others.

We have allowed our precious rights of free speech to be exercised without demanding a corresponding use of responsibility. We must therefore insist that discourse over our public airwaves be civil, that political shows are fair and fact-based, and that opposing viewpoints are afforded equal time as our government once ensured. (The Reagan administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, thus giving rise to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk).

Above all, we must make the often-hard effort to be nice, to teach our youth that kindness is the highest virtue and to order our world in a way that is consistent with this truth, instead of allowing the disparities that undercut it.

It is a fitting coincidence that Kurt Vonnegut, who saw simple human kindness as the ultimate meaning of life, died on the day Don Imus was fired. His radiant compassion that enlightens our pathway to peace shines in contrast to the mean streets of pitiless insensitivity that drove Imus down a dead end, and possibly to the slaughter at Blacksburg.

"Islamofascism" -- a Hitlerian Lie

An uncanny coincidence this week bore seeds of truth that will, if planted within the rich soil of an open mind, reap a harvest of clarity that may save us from the Armageddon of inter-cultural world war.

First, a good friend in the garment industry sent me the Rudolf Vrba book "I Escaped From Auschwitz." To say that the life most of us face is pure heaven as compared with just five minutes in the Nazi death camps is a vast understatement. I could only read so much about his experience in one sitting without shaking my head in utter horror and disbelief that this could ever occur; this even though I have read, seen movies and studied this sad reality many times before.

Page after page of sadistic beatings (usually to death), deprivations of food, water and clothes, shootings, gassings and burnings where 90% were killed (ultimately up to three MILLION humans in Auschwitz alone) within days or weeks of their arrival. Yet even through this surreal state of bestial inhumanity Dr. Vrba noted this truth: the Nazi abusers truly believed their prisoners—the Jews, the Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians and others who did not fit the Aryan mold—were a threat to civilization.

Of course, this was pure nonsense. But to Hitler and his many minions this horribly flawed yet heartfelt belief was an eternal truth; and it is this fact that helps explain how they could see and treat their innocent victims as non-humans, and invest so much in their war machine.

Coincidentally, on the very day I received this book there was yet another Cal Thomas article stressing the real justification for the war in Iraq: that it is but one front on an impending world-wide war against Islam. Thomas and President Bush are the lead trumpeters of the flawed notion that Muslims want to take over the world and annihilate Christians, Jews and essentially any non-Muslim.

They have created a term for this fiction, Islamo-fascism, which they use to rouse public fear. Yet, whether by design or not, they have horribly mis-construed the criminal acts of a tiny sliver of the Muslim world in order to justify our ever-enlarging military might, thus guaranteeing war without end, to the end.

They point to suicide bombings and insurgencies as proof of a vast Islamic plan for conquest where such deeds are in fact a reactionary resistance to: a) the ongoing injustice of Palestinian eviction from their homeland and b) their anger over western meddling in their native lands.[2]

Further underlying their demonization of Islam lays an equally flawed understanding of Christian theology. Mainline Christianity sees Jesus as God and believes that those who do not accept this are out of the fold, that is, beyond the salvation and/or blessings of God. Thus, devout Christians evangelize in order to ‘save’ non-believers. Consciously or not, they view those of different faiths—or of no faith (atheists)— as being something less than believers in the eyes of God.

The problem is that the same people who espouse this belief also believe in the inerrant word of God as it is written in the Bible. Yet somehow they missed Genesis 17:20, wherein God distinctly blessed Ishmael (Abrahams son by his servant, Hagar) and ordained that ‘a great nation’ with innumerable descendants (Gen 17:10) would come through him. Ishmael thus became the father of the future Arab Islamic nation as God expressly divined.[3]

God also repeated his promise to Abraham in Genesis 21:13 saying, “I will make a nation of the descendants of Hagar’s son because he also is your son.”[4]

Thus we have this situation: God made two separate and distinct promises with Abraham: one being a covenant of innumerable descendants representing many nations (Gen 17:5,19,21) through his child with Sarah (Isaac), as well as a similar assurance that a great nation will come through Ishmael, his child with Hagar. Most importantly God ordained that although this second line through Ishmael would be totally separate and distinct from the first line, it would be equally blessed, that is, within the ‘fold’ of God. As we know Jesus (and the Jewish nation) descended from the first line, through Isaac, David and Mary. Mohammed is a descendant of Ishmael. From the beginning God decreed that they would be and remain a separate peoples, but equally within His good graces.

Therefore, from either perspective—logic or theology—the truth is far different from those who see war with Islam as a final solution. It is nearly as big a lie as the one proposed, and tragically executed, by Hitler a generation ago.



[1] My friend’s wife was actually a prisoner in a concentration camp as a young girl, narrowly escaping death herself as the Nazis collapsed before she could be sent to the ovens. I met her at an industry convention where she showed me the tattooed identification numbers on her left wrist.


[2] This is no secret. The Iraqi Study Group said as much. Osama bin Laden has given the same as reasons for al Qaedas very existence.

[3] God gave the same assurances to Ishmaels mother, Hagar (Gen 16:10, 21:18). Abraham was old and childless so his wife, Sarah permitted him to have a child with their young servant girl Hagar. Hagar became pregnant and disrespected Sarah who kicked her out. On the wilderness road the angel of the Lord directed her to return and apologize to Sarah and then added, (GEN 16:10) ‘I will give you more descendants than you can count…You are now pregnant and will give birth to a son. You are to name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard about your misery. This son of yours will be a wild one—free and untamed as a wild donkey! He will be against everyone, and everyone will be against him. Yes, he will live at odds with the rest of his brothers. Thereafter Hagar referred to the Lord, who had spoken to her, as “the God who sees me, for she said, “I have seen the One who sees me!


[4] Abrahams wife, Sarah, evicted Hagar and Ishmael from the household after Isaac was born. They were lost and out of water, and as Hagar despaired, (Gen 21:17) ‘God heard the boys cries, and the angel of God called to Hagar from the sky, ‘Hagar, what is wrong? Do not be afraid! God has heard the boys cries from the place where you laid him. Go to him and comfort him, for I will make a great nation from his descendants.’ Then God opened Hagars eyes, and she saw a well. She immediately filled her water container and gave the boy a drink. And God was with the boy as he grew up in the wilderness of Paran.’