FTC: Hormone-free milk ads not misleading

According to the Associated Press the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rejected chemical company Monsanto's request to take action against dairies who advertise their milk being free of synthetic hormones.

St Louis based Monsanto claims the ads mislead consumers into believing hormone-free milk and dairy products are safer than those containing recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST, a hormone made by the company used to boost milk production in cows by 10 percent.

The Federal Trade Commission said last week that the ads it reviewed -- by more than a half dozen companies that advertise milk products -- did not make any misleading claims about the safety of rBST.

The FTC decision came during the same week Starbucks announced it would no longer use milk containing Monsanto's hormone -- marketed under the name Posilac. Various grocers, including Safeway and Kroger Co., have already switched to milk without any synthetic hormones.

rBST is banned in Europe and Canada primarily over concerns that it leaves cattle prone to illness. But both the FDA -- which approved the substance in 1993 -- and Monsanto claim the hormone is safe.

Consumerist.com points out:

In 1997, a FoxNews investigative team cracked a story about Monsanto's conspiracy to push bovine growth hormone while ignoring the potential risks to consumers. They were then ceaselessly badgered by Monsanto lawyers and Fox corporate into changing their story, fired, and sued by their employer.

One of the ads, by national milk producer Borden, say, "we work exclusively with farmers that supply 100 percent of our milk from cows that haven't been treated with artificial hormones. So, who do you trust when it comes to your family's milk?"

Monsanto claims that this type of advertising has led to an artificial demand and higher prices for milk from cows without growth hormone.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation

Nominated for Best Political Blog

A "talent scout" for the Blogger's Choice Awards recently contacted me wanting to know if he could nominate Political Reps.com for the site's best political blog. Why not? So go to the site, register, type "politicalreps" in the search box and vote, if you are so inclined.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation

CIA Missed Chances to Take On al-Qaida

A CIA internal report released Tuesday found the agency's top leaders faltered in using their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed prime opportunities to stop hijackers before the September 11th terrorists attacks.

Then director George J. Tenet and his top lieutenants allowed bureaucratic red tape and budget shortages to stifle the agency's effort to hunt down and capture al-Qaida operatives, said the CIA inspector general in the report.

The 19-page executive summary was completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now. Although "the agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner," Inspector General John Helgerson found neither a "single point of failure nor a silver bullet" that would have stopped the attacks on 9/11.

Steven Aftergood from Security News blogs about the nature of report's release:

From a secrecy policy point of view, the most interesting thing about the disclosure is that it was the result of a congressional initiative undertaken against the wishes of the executive branch.

"While meeting the dictates of the law," said CIA Director Mike Hayden in an official statement, "I want to make it clear that this declassification was neither my choice nor my preference."

In theory, the CIA's "choice" or "preference" should be irrelevant to the declassification process. The President has directed categorically that "Information shall be declassified as soon as it no longer meets the standards for classification under this order." (Executive Order 13292, section 3.1). It is clear from the release of the Inspector General report, which was partially redacted, that it could be declassified. And therefore it should have been.

At least two bloggers want to shift the blame away from Tenet and the CIA, letting it fall on Bush instead. The Semidi blog:

Oh, so George W. Bush — y’know, the guy who’s been pretending to be President the last seven years — had nothing to do with the attacks occurring? Bush ignoring the Presidential Daily Brief of August 6th, 2001 — the one that said Bin Ladin was determined to strike in the U.S. — played no part? It’s all the fault of former DCI George Tenet — the guy who recently wrote a scathing (albeit occasionally self-serving) tell-all about the Bushites?

How convenient.

And WISCO at Griper Blade:

. . . Tenet shouldn't take the blame here. Yes, he was incompetent. Yes, he was "too busy schmoozing" to be effective. Yes, he was one of the asses leading the lions. But nothing he could've done would've gotten the Bush administration to take al Qaeda seriously.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps to be Labeled a Terrorist Group

According to a Washington Post article today the Bush Administration is ready to declare Iran's Revolutionary Guard -- an elite military force -- a foreign terrorist organization.

The reason behind the move is the Guard's increased involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and its support for military extremists in the Middle East. The U.S. is also concerned with Iran's nuclear program.

The Revolutionary Guard would be the first national military branch deemed a terrorist organization, a very unusual move because it is part of a government, not the usual non-state terrorist organization.

The primary goal of this designation is to stem the tide of the Revolutionary Guard's business network including foreign companies conducting business with the military unit.

But some see this a prelude to war with Iran. Will Bunch of Attytood:

The White House hawks in Dick Cheney's office and elsewhere who want to stage an attack on Iran are clearly winning the internal power stuggle. And an often overlooked sub-plot on the long road toward war with Tehran is this: How could Bush stage an attack on Iran without the authorization of a skeptical, Democratic Congress?

Today, the White House has solved that pesky problem in one fell swoop. By explicitly linking the Iranian elite guard into the post 9/11 "global war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's lawyers would certainly now argue that any military strike on Iran is now covered by the October 2002 authorization to use military force in Iraq, as part of their overly sweeping response to the 2001 attacks.

And Ken of the Seventh Sense:

Calling the military branch of another government a "terrorist" organization also allows Bush to skirt other nasty legal obstacles. For example, Congress won't have to declare war on them because now they would fall under the AUMF that was passed in the wake of 9/11.

And assuming we do go to war with Iran, we won't have to treat the soldiers of the opposing army under the Geneva Conventions.

So basically, by slapping the label "terrorist" on any person, or group, the Bush Administration can do anything it wants (i.e., attack them) and avoid complying with the U.S. Constitution and international treaties and human rights and stuff like that.

The administration has yet to decide exactly when to announce the measure, but officials said they would like to before the UN General Assembly convenes next month, where the U.S. intends to ramp up international pressure against Iran.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation

Vote-swapping Web Sites Ruled Legal

After seven years, a federal appeals court, siting the First Amendment, has finally made vote exchange websites legal.

Now-defunct sites votexchange2000.com and voteswap2000.com were set up to let a Nader supporter in a state where George W. Bush might win "swap" her vote with a Gore supporter in a state like Texas where Bush was practically guaranteed a win.

There is no real way to enforce the vote exchange. It is based on internet "good will."

The two websites shut down after legal action was threatened by California Secretary of State Bill Jones. The site operators then took the state to federal district court with little luck.

But on Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said "the websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected."

At least one blogger, T.S. from The Sophistry, does not believe this current ruling is a step in the right direction:

First, it’s one thing for the Ninth Circuit to say that communication was constitutionally protected, but it went on to hold specifically that the vote swaps the communications enabled were also protected.

Second, the Court applied the strict scrutiny standard, which courts generally do in Bill of Rights cases, but… I’m not sure that the Court had to apply that standard. The right to vote is not a First Amendment issue — as the existence of the Fifteenth, the Nineteenth, the Twenty-Fourth, and the Twenty-Sixth Amendments makes clear. If voting were a First Amendment issue, why would we have needed four separate Constitutional Amendments? Do those Amendments now just lose force because of this ruling? Of course not — that would be silliness on its face.

Either way, rather than recognizing that the act of voting, and the right to vote, is not “speech” as covered under the First Amendment, the Court actually held that in this case, the act itself was some sort of expressive conduct that communicated support for third party candidates.

And the Court distinguished this sort of “expressive” vote swapping with simply buying votes, which is no-goodniks under settled case law. So as long as no money changes hands, and there is no enrichment, vote swapping is constitutionally protected political speech.

Okay, fine.

So these websites, and the people doing vote-swapping, are presumably going to run afoul of McCain-Feingold, right? They are advocacy for a political candidate (or a set of them) and are political speech, according to the Ninth Circuit.

This is a sad day, when even our courts think the whole election system is just a game to be played, as opposed to an honest way to vote your conscience and let the outcome dictate the results.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation

Florida Voting Machines Still Flawed

According to a government ordered study obtained by the AP Tuesday, optical voting machines in Florida are still flawed despite efforts to fix them.

Theoretically, someone with only brief access to the machines could swap out the memory card with a preprogrammed one allowing one candidate's votes to count towards another. In other words, it would switch up the vote making the loser actually win the precinct. A successful "attack" in this manner assumes there are infrequent paper audits.

Diebold Election Systems, the company of the machines in question, stated they would address the problem before next year's primary election.

Currently, swapping memory cards is not a matter of walking up to the machine and popping it out. Only a few people have keys to access them. Even then, screws must be removed and a seal broken before the card can be replaced.

Some bloggers see this situation as the continuing demise of our current voting system and call out for change. Badtux the Snarky Penguin:

So how do we get out of this situation? Well, first we need national standards. Real national standards, that require voting machines to meet the same accounting standards when accounting for votes that their business counterparts are required to meet when accounting for dollars. I don't care if the dimwit Registrar of Voters in Palm Beach County makes the decision to buy a particular machine, as long as the machine is guaranteed to work properly via some national body that has full authority to audit the thing. Secondly, we need to educate local voter registrars that just because it's a computer doesn't make it great. You'd think that anybody who had regularly experienced the Blue Screen of Death under Windows would have been cured of the notion that technology is necessarily a good thing, but a lot of these people still think technology is magic, not a bunch of cranky machines that humans programmed and often mis-programmed that do stupid things like, say, crash and lose votes, which is why you need that paper trail. And finally we need more folks like in Florida and California who are willing to stand up to powerful forces and say "We aren't gonna buy stuff that doesn't meet our standards, and if your stuff doesn't meet our standards, you either fix it or you're out of here."

Greg of Rhymes with Right doesn't seem to have much of a solution but asks all the right questions:

So, what is the solution? Do we rely on these new technologies, despite the flaws? Do we return to the punch cards, which had a relatively low error rate and are relatively easy to use? Or do we go back to hand-counted paper ballots, eschewing the technological fixes but introducing the element of human error?

No system is perfect, no system is fraud-proof, and no system will satisfy everyone. The question therefore becomes "which one will be seen as conferring the greatest legitimacy on the results?"

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation