Talking about…Hallmark’s Animal abuse, Ethanol, Food-borne illness

"This must serve as a five-alarm call to action for Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our government simply must act quickly both to guarantee the most basic level of humane treatment for farm animals and to protect America's most vulnerable people -- our children, needy families and the elderly -- from the potentially dangerous food."
(Source: CNN.com, January)
Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society of the United States president, belatedly raising the alarm over alleged animal abuse.
>PS: Wayne, you waited patiently for two months to raise a general alarm? I expect the feds will react with greater speed. The USDA, in its news release, rightly said it was "unfortunate" the Humane Society "did not present this information to us when these alleged violations occurred in the fall of 2007."
>PPS: Let me issue an open invitation to everyone at Hallmark and Westland - the alleged perps and their partners-in-crime company - to attend the Animal Care and Handling Conference in Kansas City, February 14-15. Maybe you can claim the time as Community Service. Click here for more information. Please come well-disguised. Temple Grandin will be there and she won’t be happy.

"These were not rogue employees secretly doing these things. This is the pen manager and his assistant doing this right in the open." (Source: Washington Post, January 30, 2008)
Anonymous HSUS investigator talking in a telephone interview about the videotape of extreme animal abuse allegedly taken at Hallmark Meat Packing.
>PS: The videotape was taken in October and just released by the investigator and Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society. Doesn’t sitting on something this long make them accomplices in the abuse?
>PPS: Here is the rogue’s gallery of sinners in this deal –
(1) The folks at Hallmark who are hands-on guilty of abuse and the rest of management and employees at Hallmark and Westland who were complicit in the abuse.
(2) The San Bernardino county district attorney who received the tape in December and asked the Humane Society not to go public until they ‘had time to assess the information’ and then sat on it for much too long.
(3) The normally media-happy folks at HSUS who claimed they waited – two unforgivably long months - until they thought no action was forthcoming from the D.A.’s office before going public.

“We are shocked, saddened and sickened by what we have seen today. Operations have been immediately suspended until we can meet with all of our employees and be assured these sorts of activities never again happen at our facility.”
(Source: Burbank Leader, February 1, 2008)
Steve Mandell, president and chief executive of Westland Meat Co. and Hallmark Meat Packing, claiming he was astonishingly clueless.
>PS: What’s that old saying? Ignorance of the law is no excuse?

"By lifting the ethanol tariff, we'd end up subsidizing Brazilian ethanol. I can't figure out why Secretary Bodman would want the United States to risk becoming dependent on Brazilian ethanol when we're already dependent on Middle East oil.”
(Source: Meatingplace, January 31, 2008)
Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), responding to a statement made by Energy secretary Sam Bodman that the Bush administration "will start to deal with that question" of whether the tariff should be renewed or allowed to expire at the end of this year, according to Reuters.
>PS: Bodman said, "I believe that, the best I can tell, this industry is pretty close to being able to stand on its own"
>PPS: In addition to the import tariff, U.S. ethanol blenders get a separate 51-cent-per-gallon tax credit through 2010 under current law. Chucky, my boy, please get your hand out of my tax-paying pocket. Time to let this industry stand on its own.

“Now we have this whole new question mark about leafy produce and the whole ecological question out there as we grow our leafy greens in the same area where more and more intensively we are producing milk. Wisconsin used to be the biggest dairy state, and California was where we grew produce. Now California is both. And there's also wine production in California, so you have vineyards and cattle and lettuce patches competing for the same land and water. Agriculture is really sort of bumping into each other."
(Source: USA Today. February 1, 2008)
Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of the division of food-borne bacterial and mycotic diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, trying to explain the increase in food borne illnesses in 2007.
>PS: It’s a fact of life in raising “free range” animals: they poop on the ground, rain falls, E. coli washes over the landscape. &*it happens.

“For the last 3,000 years or so, we asked crop farmers to produce food for people and feed for our livestock. Now suddenly we're asked to produce food for people, feed for our livestock, and fuel for our automobiles. My take on things is this is a watershed once-in-three millennia change that will have implications for all sorts of things.”
(Source: The Prairie Star. February 2, 2008)
Ron Plain, University of Missouri Extension hog economist, talking about ethanol-driven $5 corn changing forever the way we see agriculture.
>PS: Will the cost of an acre of good Iowa farmland start to rival the price of real estate in Manhattan (the Big Apple, that is)?