ARE THE REPUBLICANS TRYING TO POISON YOUR LITTLE FIDO? NO, BUT THEY DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS IF THE CHINESE DO

Steven Porter is a progressive Democrat running for Congress in northwest Pennsylvania against a garden variety Bush rubber stamp loon, Phil English. English, like almost all Republicans, has been busy pushing deregulation on everything. "Let the buyer beware" and "let the market regulate itself" are the GOP catch-phrases they're chanting like mantras as they attempt to take away the consumer and worker protections that had made America-- until the advent of Bush-- the strongest and most prosperous country in history. Dr. Porter explained to voters in PA-03 how English and his Republican brethren and their insane ideological slash and burn tactics have endangered our country-- and killed our pets:

While our Congressman, Mr. Phil, and his pals in international business have presided over, and in some cases profited by, the outsourcing of jobs to China, they have failed yet again to warn us about the unseen dangers of that endeavor, and one of them has recently reared its ugly head.
 
I refer to the additive in wheat gluten which has been put into an untold number of pet products.  The list of recalls grows daily. 
 
It is difficult enough for the U.S. Government to keep track of dangers in the American-produced food chain. You all remember the spinach problem last year. I cannot see how an American company can with any guarantee of safety keep track of dangers in the stuff they import from China.
 
For those like me and my wife whose work on behalf of animal welfare has been a lifelong concern, the contamination of food products coming from China is really intolerable. Not only has the short-sighted greed of outsourcing harmed our own economy and our own workers, but now the products of that outsourcing are returning to harm us after they have been manufactured.
 
I cannot tell others what to do, but for us, we will now make sure we know if the manufacturers of any brand of pet food we buy do business with China. If they do, we will discontinue buying their products until the practice is stopped. I also hope that pet owners whose pets have been killed or injured by this episode will be compensated by the pet food companies for their losses-- and I hope that the compensation is great enough to wipe out any gains made by the outsourcing.
 
Finally, I call for the defeat of Congressmen like Mr. English who has stood by for 14 years and tolerated this kind of thing, tolerated the spread of global warming, the war in Iraq, the lack of health care, the threats to Social Security. These are not men of character.
 
We do not need more politicians like them. What we need are caring statesmen.

David Goldstein up in Washington has been following this story as well and he's done some research into the tainted wheat gluten the regulations-hating Bush Regime has opened our ports to and it looks like the Regime and their regulations-free Chinese associates have allowed the stuff into the human food chain enough.

The FDA announced today that it has traced the contaminated wheat gluten to a single processor, Xuzhou Anying Biological Technology of Peixian, China, but has not released the name of the U.S. distributor who supplied the product to Del Monte, Menu Foods, Nestle Purina, and Hills Nutritional. In all, more than 70 brands and over 60 million cans and pouches of dog and cat food are now part of this massive recall, as well as at least one brand of dry cat food.

Public statements have indicated that the contaminated gluten was distributed by a single U.S. company, but since the FDA refuses to name the supplier, it is not yet known if this company also supplies human food manufacturers. It is also not yet known if Xuzhou Anying sells direct to food manufacturers in the U.S. or abroad.

While cats seem particularly susceptible to the effects of melamine poisoning, there is little research on the substance’s human toxicity. Unless and until the FDA determines otherwise, one cannot help but wonder if our sick and dying cats are merely the canary in the coal mine alerting us to a broader contamination of the human food supply.

It boggles the mind to imagine that one single Republican could be elected to any office anywhere (except Utah).


UPDATE: ON THE OTHER HAND... THERE ARE REPUBLICANS WHO WANT TO KILL FIDO... LITERALLY

Today's NY Post is reporting that Giuliani's wife used to work for a company that sells surgical products to doctors and that the products are demonstarted on dogs-- who were then killed. The Post doesn't say that Judi actually murdered the dogs herself... she was just part of the team. Is this the woman Giuliani promises to have sitting in on Cabinet meetings and giving her say... because she's a nurse? I better rethink my position on voting for him for president. OK, I rethunk and I came to a conclusion-- instead of "not in a million years," I can now report... "not in a billion years." I mean not only did he pick a Mafia-connected crook as his closest business associate, he also married a puppy-killer. Ewwww.

Judith Giuliani once demonstrated surgical products for a controversial medical-supply company that used dogs-- which were later killed-- in operations whose only purpose was to sell equipment to doctors, The Post has learned.

"It was a horribly cruel, outrageous program," Friends of Animals President Priscilla Feral said about the demonstrations of medical staplers on dogs conducted by U.S. Surgical Corp. employees during
Giuliani's tenure there in the late 1970s. Feral said U.S. Surgical's demonstrations on hundreds of dogs each year through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were done to boost sales, not for medical re search or testing.

The dogs were "either put to death following the sales demonstrations because they can't re cover from them, or they die during them," Feral said.

"I'm not going to characterize her, but I hope she regrets it for what it was-- a money-grubbing effort," said Feral, whose Darien, Conn.-based activist group waged a heated public-relations battle
with the Norwalk-based company for more than a decade. "I guess the question would be, how does she justify this now? What is her conscience at this stage?" Feral asked about Giuliani's association with U.S. Surgical.

"There's no ethical justification for this."

...Judi Giuliani joined the company as a saleswoman in North Carolina in 1975 after spending a year working as a nurse. At age 19, she married fellow U.S. Surgical salesman Jeffrey Ross, who she only recently disclosed was the first of her three husbands. Giuliani spent four years at U.S. Surgical.

The company, now part of Tyco Healthcare, has long acknowledged its salespeople routinely demonstrated staples on anesthetized dogs as part of sales pitches to doctors.

Then-CEO Leon Hirsch defended the practice in the 1980s, saying there was no other way to properly show how the staplers worked. "A dead dog doesn't bleed," Hirsch said in a 1988 issue of Time magazine. "You need to have real blood-flow conditions, or you get a false sense of security."