Say Anything Blog

WASHINGTON—The food industry pressured the Bush administration a few years ago to limit the paperwork that companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak’s source. Companies complained that the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and could disrupt the availability of consumers’ favorite foods

The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million in the current salmonella outbreak.

Under pressure in 2003 and 2004, the White House agreed to dilute record-keeping proposals by FDA safety experts.

According to government records, business groups met at least 10 times with the White House between March 2003 and March 2004, as the FDA rules were under debate.

‘’The FDA’s strong proposed bioterrorism rules were significantly watered down before they became final,’’ said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Participants in the meetings included companies and trade groups up and down the food chain.

Eight term Republican Rep. Mark Olson, who was shunned by his caucus after a domestic assault conviction, said today he will not file for re-election for his Big Lake seat in the state House of Representatives.

Olson allegedly “pushed” his wife Heidi down three times, bruising her. Why would he do such a thing? Because he was terrified of her.

Olson’s attorneys pleaded self-defense, and claimed Mark was a battered husband. The incidents of abuse they allege will shock and horrify and amuse you.

Their fights included Heidi Olson hitting him several times, stabbing his favorite dresser and cutting his picture off their wedding album cover with what he thought was a knife, Olson said.

The legislator said they both were exhausted on Nov. 12 after his just-ended reelection campaign and had been at odds for several days.

Heidi Olson testified Wednesday that her husband pushed her down three times and threatened “to finish the job” before he left. Heidi Olson, 50, who is larger than her husband, admitted hitting him once during their marriage and said he assaulted her several times, including bruising her by throwing two Bibles at her.

We’ll leave the “Bible-thumping” jokes to more shameless hacks. We’re too dumbfounded by the idea. Two bibles? At once? What translation? Would it have been more or less serious if they’d been Korans? Or Dan Brown books?

H/T Wonkette

Matthews: “Did you see FOX television as a tool when you were in the White House? As a useful avenue to get your message out?”

McClellan: “I make a distinction between the journalists and the commentators. Certainly there were commentators and other, pundits at FOX News, that were useful to the White House.” […] That was something we at the White House, yes, were doing, getting them talkng points and making sure they knew where we were coming from.

Matthews: “So you were using these commentators as your spokespeople.”

McClellan: “Well, certainly.”

Cecelia Grimes, a lobbyist close to former Rep. Curt Weldon, pleaded guilty today in federal court in Washington, D.C., the latest evidence that an ongoing corruption probe is closing in on Weldon.

After Grimes received two grand-jury subpoenas in late 2006, FBI agents caught Grimes trying to throw out documents related to the Weldon probe, including tickets for trips with Weldon and fundraising materials for Weldon events.

Grimes also tossed out her blackberry while at an Arby’s restaurant in Nov. 2006, but FBI agents retrieved that as well.

The former lobbyist could receive as much as 20 years in federal prison for her criminal actions.

Grimes is the second person to plead guilty in the Weldon probe, although the former lawmaker himself has not been charged.

Peter Hong, a longtime Republican operative in Minnesota, was arrested Wednesday afternoon on a charge of soliciting prostitution in St. Paul.

Police spokesman Peter Panos said that the arrest came during the first day of a two-day sting operation during which “johns” and prostitutes responded to ads placed on the Internet and in print. Thirty-five people were arrested Wednesday and Thursday, Panos said today.

...Most recently, Hong was a point person for presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

...He is the third political figure to be arrested in a St. Paul prostitution sting in the past year.

Last summer, police arrested Tim Droogsma, a press secretary to former U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, who initially attributed his arrest to a “severe misunderstanding” before pleading guilty in January to an engaging-in-prostitution charge.

In February, New Brighton City Council member David Phillips was one of nine men nabbed in a prostitution sting. His next court appearance is in August.

Obama? He’s my pal,” the president told Le Figaro. “Unlike my diplomatic advisors, I never believed in Hillary Clinton’s chances. I always said that Obama would be nominated.”

Sarkozy added that an Obama victory “would validate” his strategy of reconcilation with the United States. His embrace of the United States has made him American conservatives’ favorite Continental politician, but he doesn’t seem to be reciprocating.

Today France’s new leader Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech before Congress that was, dare I say, almost...Reaganesque.  He called America “the greatest nation,” among other platitudes.

Hat tip FoxNews.com

Speaking to dinners at Schmidt’s Sausage Haus und Restaurant, John McCain is thought to have said something like: “I’d like to give a speech in Germany.”

He also sampled the Haus’ sausage and made a special point of ordering some chocolate cream puffs, a traditional German dessert, to go.

Young Turks host Cenk Uygur noticed that his confusion about the timeline of the “surge” in Iraq wasn’t McCain’s only gaffe in his interview with CBS news this week. McCain seemed to forget the war in Afghanistan preceded the invasion of Iraq; either that or he didn’t think it was a major conflict.

“The fact is we had four years of failed policy. ... We were losing the war in Iraq. The consequences of failure. The defeat of the United States of America in the first major conflict since 9/11 would have had devastating impacts throughout the region and the world,” McCain told CBS anchor Katie Couric.

“Was Afghanistan not major enough for him?” Uygur asks.

Like his previous flub, CBS edited this misstatement from its broadcast. The full version of the interview, which only aired online, also saw McCain wrongly crediting the surge with sparking the “Anbar Awakening,” in which tribal leaders began to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq.

The Anbar Awakening gaffe was edited out and replaced with McCain’s scurrilous attack accusing Democratic nominee Barack Obama of caring more about winning the election than winning a war. Crooks & Liars notes that bit of editing violated CBS’s own Standards & Practices because they edited in an answer from an earlier question and changed the meaning of McCain’s statement.

Auditors at an oversight agency of the Pentagon were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on a major defense contractor’s work, hiding wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency, which is charged with overseeing contractors for the Defense Department, made an upfront agreement with “a major aerospace company” to limit the scope of work and basis for an audit, the report said.

When the contractor, who is not named in the report, objected to the draft findings of the DCAA audit, managers at the audit agency assigned a new supervisor to the case and threatened the senior auditor with personnel action if “he did not delete findings from the report and change the draft audit opinion to adequate,” according to the GAO report.

Supervisors at DCAA attempted to intimidate auditors, prevented them from speaking with GAO investigators and created a “generally abusive work environment,” the report said.

GAO said it launched the investigation on its own after receiving complaints on a hotline about 14 DCAA audits. It conducted more than 100 interviews of more than 50 people involved in the audits at two DCAA locations in California. The report details three of the audits the GAO looked into but does not name any of the contractors.

“Let me be clear: I have said in every private and public conversation, I’ve got the job that I want. And I’ll say again on air: I’m not going to be the vice presidential nominee or vice president. I’m going to help Senator McCain get elected, as governor of Louisiana,” Jindal said.

CBS found editing Old John lying.
Damn liberal media

CBS puts up actual interview on line.
Flipper goes off at the 3 minute mark

Thank you HuffPo

And the MSM’s love affair with Flipper John continues.

Republican Senate leaders — terrified by the prospect of losing five or more seats in November — have freed their members to vote however they need to vote to get reelected, even if that means bucking the president or the party’s leadership.

On at least four votes over the past month — Medicare, housing, the GI Bill and the Farm Bill — Republican leaders haven’t even bothered whipping members to toe the party line or back President Bush’s veto threats. Instead, a GOP leadership aide says leaders have told vulnerable senators that it’s all right to “get well” with voters by siding with Democrats on anything but energy and national security.

It’s unusual for rank-and-file members to get a green light to blow off their party leaders. But these are unusual times for Republicans. They are genuinely worried they could get their clocks cleaned in November. The prevailing attitude: It is better to lose some big votes now than big races in November.

This helps explain why so many Senate Republicans are taking flight from President Bush and their own leaders — and doing it loudly and proudly.

Shortly after the Medicare vote, the website for Sen. John Cornyn featured news that the Texas Republican — best known as a Bush loyalist — had voted to override the president’s veto.

In a brief conversation with POLITICO, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) openly discussed how Vice President Cheney had personally asked him about his Medicare vote. Chambliss said he told the vice president that he needed to back his local doctors and senior citizens.

“I said, ‘Dick, I’m beyond that,’” Chambliss said. Cheney’s “my good friend and my hunting buddy, but my mind was made up.” Asked whether Republican Senate leaders had whipped the Medicare vote, Chambliss said he hadn’t been pressured.

In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet.

Given that the Arizona Republican had never logged onto the Internet before, advisors acknowledged that his first visit to the World Wide Web was fraught with risk.

But with his Democratic rival Barack Obama making headlines with his tour of the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign felt that they needed to “come up with something equally bold for John to do,” according to one advisor.

McCain aides said that the senator’s journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook.

With a press retinue watching, Sen. McCain logged onto the Internet at 9:00 AM Sunday, paying his first-ever visit ever to Mapquest.com.

“I can’t get this [expletive] thing to work,” Sen. McCain said as he struggled with his computer’s mouse, causing his wife Cindy to prompt him to add that he was “just kidding.”

Having pronounced his visit to Mapquest a success, Sen. McCain continued his tour by visiting Weather.com and Yahoo! Answers, where he inquired as to the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

Sen. McCain said that he had embarked on his visit to the Internet to allay any fears that he is too out-of-touch to be president, adding that he plans to take additional steps to demonstrate that he is comfortable with today’s technology: “In the days and weeks ahead, you will be seeing me rock out with my new Walkman.”