THE FDA AND THE GOP-- A MARRIAGE MADE IN HELL, AT LEAST FOR THE REST OF US

I'm not wishing death on Grover Norquist, the Bush Regime's chief ideologist, any sooner than God decided he's given him enough rope. But I suspect that Norquist and I would both agree that of all the things he's said over his years as a far right propagandist, the statement most suited to appear on his tombstone would be:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Norquist's quote, gospel around Republican Party circles, is what should disqualify that party from ever gaining control of any branch of government again, let alone all three. Even a Bush supporting Neocon like Thomas Friedman took Norquist to task for it, writing in his NY Times column after the dismal-- if not studied-- failure of the Bush Regime to respond competently, adequately, or even humanely, to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, that "An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist... doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town."

And that brings us to an article in the Wall Street Journal, no doubt Grover's very favorite daily newspaper and one that consistently espouses his gruesome and selfish philosophy of government on it's addled editorial pages.

Congressional investigators are expected to tell a House subcommittee today that the Food and Drug Administration's ability to ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply is "minimal" and agency plans to overhaul its inspection regime could make a bad situation worse.

FDA officials, under fire for the recent string of high-profile food scares involving both domestic and imported foods, have been asked to appear before a House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee hearing to discuss the agency's food inspections.

Committee staff reviewed the system extensively and found that a shrinking inspection staff examines less than 1% of all imported food. A typical inspector in the FDA's San Francisco office examines nearly 1,000 food entries a day-- roughly one every 30 seconds, the committee report found. The agency, it says, allows importers to take possession of their high-risk goods and arrange for testing by a private laboratory. Before melamine-contaminated pet food killed and sickened thousands of pets, the FDA had never inspected those ingredients from China.

The FDA is trying to reorganize its field operations, but the report says some of its measure may backfire. Only a small percentage of its senior scientists are willing to be transferred if the agency closes seven of 13 laboratories. And in boxes of documents delivered to congressional investigators to explain the reasoning behind the closures, the agency didn't appear to have conducted any cost
analysis.

The committee investigators also raise questions about the adequacy of the FDA's mostly voluntary approach to domestic and imported food. Because of lack of authority, FDA inspectors had been refused by some companies to access their records and test results. With the exceptions of several food categories, "FDA has no rules governing testing protocols, record retention...manufacturing, quality assurance and control, or the right to examine any records that a food-processing firm chooses to keep voluntarily," the report said.

...The report, part of today's hearing, comes as Democrats are critical about how the White House has handled food safety. Funding for the FDA's food program has been stagnant, and the agency's effort to fix problems has been limited by funding shortfalls, bureaucratic delays and lack of political will.

How is it possible that a narrow extremist philosophy of government, based on blatant selfishness and on the overt and aggressive disregard for one's neighbors, has gotten into a position where the American people can be victims of poisoned food and a failure of government to respond to natural disasters? It can't all be about George Bush, can it? Nope it can't. It's about the Republican Party-- and Insider Democrats-- obsessed with greed and devoid of conscience or the will to stand up and fight for what was once valued.

Recently Bush's Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, told Parade Magazine that American workers would suffer less from the export of jobs if they had better personal hygiene. There's more to this than just the disdain for working people by the selfish rich running Bush's Regime. Elaine Chao, a civil servant married-- in a manner of speaking-- to another civil servant, Kentucky's closeted gay Republican Senator, Mitch McConnell, has gotten enormously wealthy by encouraging big corporations, like WalMart and its suppliers to export jobs overseas, where I doubt the slave laborers use more soap than American union workers. The McConnells have done very well for themselves posing as "free traders," rather than as the vicious predators they have been, using their offices to enrich themselves while jeopardizing the livelihoods of the people whose taxes pay their salaries.

There is something very dysfunctional about the American government. It's called the Republican Party, branches of which are called the DLC and the Blue Dog Democrats.


UPDATE: WHY DID THE BUSH REGIME SABOTAGE THE FDA?

Last week FDA employees testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and told lawmakers that top political appointees attempted to intimidate them and prevent them from cooperating with Congress in investigations about the agency's ability to keep the nation's food supply safe. Par for the course, the Bush Course.