So while it’s a little strange that people might eat less pork because the words “swine flu” have been in the news lately, it’s kind of pathetic to see Food Network host and Smithfield pork spokesperson Paula Deen putting out a news release like this:

“You know y’all, the Secretary of Agriculture has said it’s safe to eat pork,” said Deen, restaurateur, best-selling author and the host of “Paula’s Home Cooking” and “Paula’s Party” on the Food Network. “You can eat all the pork you want. You are not going to catch the flu from eating pork.”

After witnessing what she calls myths and misinformation surrounding the safety of pork, Deen was moved to speak out on the subject. She decided to make her views public when she considered the hardship many were experiencing due to a misunderstanding regarding pork safety.

“There’s a lot of people that’s been affected by this,” Deen said. “It also affects our pork farmers, our truck drivers, our grocery stores. It affects the whole economy.”

Oh, for crying out loud. The pork industry has been the biggest WATB’s about the swine flu thing, and in the best traditions of American corporate culture have set the PR hacks to busily spinning away, going so far as to insist traditional media outlets not use the term “swine flu.” Which is flat out ridiculous.

Say, what about the workers, citizens and consumers affected in other ways by Smithfield? From a 2006 Rolling Stone article:

A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That’s a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.

A lot of consumer disgust isn’t being caused by flu fears, it’s being caused by disgust at how food is produced and handled. To be fair, Smithfield is just one corporation, albeit a giant corporation with operations in the United States, Mexico and Europe.

Whether you eat meat or not, everyone is impacted in some way by the flaws in our food production and safety system. The Peanut Corporation of American salmonella cases showed that. You’d think giant corporations concerned about profits would realize that until proper safeguards are put in place, and safe, humane production techniques become the norm, any part of the food sector is vulnerable to being rejected by consumers. Ask the tomato growers in Florida or the beef producers hammered by mad cow and e-coli scares.

Making dinner shouldn’t be an exercise in bio-hazard management. At some point consumers will rebel to the point that changes in the entire system happen, it’s just a matter of time.

Putting out celebrity news releases instead of dealing with underlying consumer concerns is laughable.

From yesterday’s Danny Westneat column about how opponents of gay civil rights are rather discouraged.

“Voters are immune or desensitized to the word ‘gay marriage’ right now. Besides, they think we hate them,” wrote Josephine Wentzel, a Vancouver-area Christian conservative.

I wonder how anyone ever gets that idea?

Social conservatives should have hope, though, because I am developing a web site and program to cure social conservatism, which is, in the end, a lifestyle choice.

All this progress towards equal rights, and my marriage is STILL NOT THREATENED. Weird, huh? I was pretty scared there for a while that my wife would leave me because gay folks could visit each other in the hospital.

I did give my wife a silver ring, but she prefers diamonds. I’m done listening to these people, they can’t even give decent jewelry advice.

Nation confronts crisis of severely chapped hands after a week of sanitizer use, lotion titans rejoice.

Fox Noise still just makes stuff up.

SUMMARY: Fox & Friends hosts repeatedly touted the allegation that Steven Rattner “threatened to ruin” Perella Weinberg’s reputation, as Dave Briggs put it, if it continued to oppose the Obama administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan. Only hours later did anyone on the program mention that the administration and the investment firm have both denied the allegation.

And then the lie spins its way out into the conservative wank-o-sphere so conservative wankers can get their panties all in a bunch about something that didn’t even happen in the first place.

Way to rebuild your brand, guys.

Only fools believe Fox Noise about anything, and I don’t think the American people are in the mood for fools right now. I mean really, the guy with the annoying voice who sells television products late at night is more believable.

Sigh.

Larry Stickney, president of the Washington Values Alliance, has a noon appointment to file a referendum that, if passed, would repeal Washington’s most recent domestic partnership bill, says Washington Secretary of State spokesman David Ammons.

But who, exactly, is running the show?

It’s unclear which group will actually run the referendum. Faith and Freedom had been fundraising for the referendum, but the group, led by the carpetbagging and tax-evading Gary Randall, may not run the campaign after all. “The latest buzz we’re getting is that it will be run by the Washington Values Alliance,” says Brian Vysltra, a spokesman for the Secretary of State.

For more on the skeevy nature of Faith and Freedom, check out this diary at Washblog by poster Lurleen.

The major recipient of PAC expense payouts was Northern Concepts LLC. Northern Concepts LLC is owned by the Faith & Freedom PAC Vice Chair and former F&F lobbyist, Jon Russell. He and his wife reportedly “run the business from their home”. The PAC paid Mr. Vice Chair $3,790 in “event planning” fees. The previous year, he had received a Warning Letter from the Public Disclosure Commission dated March 8, 2007 for failure to file his monthly lobbyist expense report (L-2) for January, 2007. Commission files relating to Jon’s tenure with FFN contain several memos between himself and the Commission regarding his mistakes in depositing funds in the wrong accounts and failure to submit reports on time. For the latter he was assessed a fine on June 3, 2008.

It’s the endless multi-level marketing nature of conservatism that’s the problem. A few rich and ultra-conservative nutballs pay the wannabes to do their dirty work for them, and the wannabes call themselves bidnessmen. Let’s call it “the Tim Eyman model.”

We should just take up a collection and pay these people to sell diet formulas and steam cleaners on late night television, give them a Chamber card, maybe they’d go away finally.

The regional manager of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Craig Nolte, told an audience in Vancouver this week that there’s still trouble in them there ARM’s. From The Columbian:

The high rate of foreclosure has made Clark County No. 1 out of all 39 counties in Washington state in the first quarter of 2009. The problem could get worse before it gets better, given the lax lending standards and high number of adjustable rate mortgages issued during the 2005 home-selling boom, Nolte said.

“It’s not all subprime loans that are the problem. It’s mainly subprimes with ARMs,” he said.

Adjustable rate mortgages made up more than 23 percent of the area’s home lending while Clark County’s housing market was hot. Now those homeowners are overstretched as their mortgage rates adjust, which can raise the average payment by up to $300 a month.

And as Atrios is pointing out this morning, the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Tanta, who is sadly no longer with us, in an old post reminds me to use the correct terminology to describe the problem. Option ARM rates are going to be recasting soon and in increasing numbers. That’s the magic moment when people can no longer make minimum payments, when they can longer make interest-only or neg-amortization payments.

When that magic moment comes, all of those people are going to look at how high their now unaffordable mortgage payments are. Then they’ll look at how much their house is actually worth relative to how much though owe. Then, maybe, they’ll try one of the various initiatives to modify their mortgage terms. And then, quite likely, they’ll jut walk away.

And these re-casts are coming in 2010 and 2011 in big numbers.

The point being, as Atrios succinctly says, is that’s why the failure to put in place cramdowns is so troublesome.

The banksters stopped it, and if nothing is done we’re all going to get to enjoy another round of mortgage-related calamity, presumably with similarly damaging results to the larger economy. So meanwhile idiots can talk about socialism and guns and gays and whatever, but the regular citizenry needs both the financial system and the larger economy to function well.

It’s absolutely fascinating, too, how some bidness guys ‘n gals think this is all just a bump in the road, and that everything will go back to what they thought was normal soon. Thus the silly talk lately here in Clark County from Republican county commissioners about how important it is to re-inflate the bubble to provide jobs, as if the larger systemic problem know colloquially as “big shitpile” doesn’t exist. Who the heck is going to be buying lots of new houses now, when the market is being depressed so badly and there seems to be no end in sight?

Beyond that, neo-liberal economic policy has been an utter and complete disaster. Continuing to pursue it, as the Obama administration and Congress are doing when it comes to the financial sector, is likely to produce the same result. Most regular people who screw up their jobs horribly get fired, but the banksters get our money and get to continue making a mess of things. Awesome.

It’s worth keeping in mind Republicans want the Obama administration to fail, so of course they are going to fight hard for the status quo ante. We still need a change we can believe in on this front, and if it doesn’t happen by the end of the year, things may get very interesting again.

I think it’s fair to say that this casts even more doubt on the legitimacy of Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

The campaign of Sen. Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., agreed to pay a $50,000 civil penalty after the Federal Election Commission concluded that the campaign repeatedly flouted the law in disbursing cash payments to volunteers during Lieberman’s bruising Democratic primary against businessman Ned Lamont in 2006.

The FEC opened an investigation in late 2006 after Lamont’s campaign lodged a complaint alleging that Lieberman was using a “slush fund” to fuel his campaign in the waning days of the primary. Lamont’s campaign cited more than $387,000 in unexplained expenditures listed only as “petty cash.”

So the next time you hear a Republican complaining about ACORN or something, realize that the actual shenanigans come from ethically corrupt corporate mouthpieces like Joe Lieberman, who at the time was rewarded with fawning traditional media coverage about how “moderate” he is.

Think about it. Joe Lieberman basically has no moral right to serve in the U.S. Senate and it should be Ned Lamont’s seat. But under our system of enforcement, cheaters prosper. Hell, under our system of everything cheaters prosper.

I’d call that downright…uncivil. And everyone in the country gets to pay for this miscarriage of the will of the voters, because you know—you know–Lieberman will continue to do great harm. It’s really not hard to imagine him trying to derail an Obama Supreme Court nominee, because Lieberman is that venal.

Why is being a political prostitute always synonymous with some abstract and non-existent notion of virtuous centrism in this country? It’s a bizarre fairy tale.

Lieberman is the worst of the worst, and the Senate should censure him and strip him of his committee assignments. Yeah, he’ll go over to the Republicans, but he basically already is a Republican, and there is no filibuster-proof group of 60 in reality anyway. The people are sick and tired of their will being subverted by arrogant, corrupt blowhards. The most exclusive club in the world needs to start cleaning up its own house, and a good place to start is with Lieberman.

No, I’m not holding my breath.

(Props to Firedoglake.)

Not unexpected. Bank of America wants its money.

The Columbian’s difficulties began almost as soon as it moved into a new six-story $40 million office building at 415 W. Sixth St. in downtown Vancouver in January 2008. A sour economy and costs related to the building – where newspaper, advertising, circulation and newsroom operations occupied four floors – triggered three rounds of company-wide layoffs last year that cut more than 100 positions from operations. In December, the newspaper was forced to relocate to its former address at 701 W. Eighth St., where it had operated since the 1950s.

The newspaper is promising to continue operations, though.

Publisher Scott Campbell told The Oregonian that his firms, which include not just the newspaper but a real estate development company, might give the fairly empty new building to Bank of America.

Hard to fathom, Bank of America owning a distressed property.

Joe Turner at Political Buzz posted an email from state Rep. Deb Wallace, D-Vancouver, stating her concerns that Washington will be cutting 40,000 people from the state health care rolls just as the H1N1 flu hits. Wallace seems to be asking fellow Legislators to think about doing something (like further cutting state worker hours) about it in the upcoming special session. You can read it here.

Yeah, I don’t know. Obviously waiting to see how this outbreak actually goes is problematic, because by then it’s too late. I don’t suppose anyone would support a high-earners swine flu tax?

Portland, always the little brother to Seattle.

Oregon’s first probable case of swine flu has been detected in a Multnomah county woman and another three specimens under review by the state public health lab could be counted as swine flu cases by the end of the day, officials said this morning.

The woman identified as a probable case was not hospitalized and is now recovering, public health officials said.

My only observation is that public health officials are now (correctly) looking intensely for the H1N1 influenza virus, meaning in theory there could have been some cases earlier that we didn’t know about.

It’s very anecdotal, but our family knows an otherwise healthy teenager who became mysteriously ill with flu-like symptoms and was hospitalized after traveling to the desert southwest over spring break, which ended April 5 or so. Happily, the teen recovered after spending a few days being re-hydrated, but it makes you wonder if this thing was already out there and we didn’t know it quite yet. As I said, it proves nothing, but as reporting increases we might want to keep in mind increases in cases will be partly because people are now looking for H1N1. Or so it seems.

Otherwise, feel free to panic if that’s your thing. Bad flu sucks, of course. Our family had it one Christmas about ten years ago, and it’s the only Christmas of which we have no photos, because we fell ill Christmas morning. We lived on a honey-baked ham until New Years Eve, it was sad. The real nasty flu makes you feel like you are constantly having a severe asthma attack. But we all lived.

While it’s interesting that state Sen. Don Benton, R-Vancouver, missed 157 of 847 votes, including some crucial to Clark County, what’s truly heady and delicious, in a smelly-cheese sort of way, is the comment thread below the Columbian article.

Don Benton’s missed votes are all part of a nefarious liberal media plot to make him look bad!

Sigh.

Summary: On April 29, 2009, in a speech on the House floor, Rep. Virginia Foxx claimed that Matthew Shepard’s death was merely the result of a robbery gone bad. While his killers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson did rob him, they also admitted that they were well aware of his sexual orientation and pretended they were gay to lure him away from the bar he was in at the time. The most striking feature of the case, of course, is that during the course of a normal, simple robbery, the victim is not generally beaten, tied to a post, and left for dead.

This may not be the way to re-build brand Republican. Yeah, it’s great to cater to the ever-shrinking GOP base, but everyone else finds such comments repulsive.

Movement conservatism, which was never conservative anyhow but rather a radical, theocratic malignancy allied with corporate interests, has now become the almost exclusive province of crazy and ignorant people.

I know there are still some fine, upstanding, “keep your hands off my stack jack” types out there at the grass roots level, but you’d think it would be clear to old-school Republicans by now that if they don’t manage to do something about the lunatics in their party, the American people are going to continue to reject the GOP.

The marginal tax rate we can all have a nice debate about, unless the debate is blown up ahead of time by crazy people. You can’t debate crazy, you can only hope to keep the crazy people from getting the keys to the car. Seriously, how much further off the rails can the GOP go? I guess we’re finding out, as this sort of thing seems to be happening with increasing frequency.

Here in Clark County, Aneurin notes that creating relentlessly pro-development policies hasn’t worked out all that well over time. From Politics is a Blood Sport:

Every election cycle, commissioners run on a “good jobs” platform promising to reduce the number of commuters heading over to Oregon and then proceed to go out and approve more growth management changes favorable to the residential construction industry. When the hang over comes, as it is now with a vengeance, the county then has nothing to fall back on other than increased retail sales taxes.

It’s really kind of sad to watch how the Republican majority on the Clark County Board of Commissioners doesn’t seem to understand how fundamentally things have changed. Not only would re-inflating the bubble be a bad thing, it’s also unlikely to happen any time soon. The easy credit rip-off days are gone, and the banks aren’t going to fuel the speculation again.

So the question is: does it matter that much to the regular workers if they’re pouring foundations for an endless, sprawling bedroom community versus bridge footings, new schools and light rail projects? Residential construction, after all, requires a huge public investment for roads, sewers and other public services, so since it’s taxpayer money maybe taxpayers deserve a better value for their dollar.

We can still have a vibrant construction sector that creates a better community, it’s just that the people who made fortunes building subdivisions will have to adapt to changed circumstances. You know, like in capitalism!

Clearly the BIAW-types think everyone else in the county owes them a time machine, and the way to make the time machine work is to give them tax breaks. Luckily the citizenry of Clark County kind of let the BOCC have it and the BIAW isn’t getting every last thing it wants. Now that’s progress!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdjRFJQuoiI[/youtube]

It would be one thing if there were just a few nutjobs on the conservative-Republican side, but Democrats can just keep pointing out the crazy all the way through 2010 and beyond. Good for us anyhow.

Long term, this is bad for the country, because crazy people rarely have useful ideas about how to solve complicated problems. Short term, the Rumpublican Party is getting rumpier by the hour.

As lame as Democrats can be sometimes, mostly they’re lame in a serious, “I sell-out because I’m an unprincipled whore” kind of way, rather than in a “I’m your crazy Aunt Michelle and the Tri-Lateral Commission poisoned the bean dip” kind of way.

The two party system is so awesome.

U.S. Senate Democrats get the coveted 60th seat from…a defection. So Norm Coleman’s odious delaying tactics against Al Franken don’t amount to squat could continue forever and ever and ever.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The Rumpublican Party continues its shrinkage.

UPDATE [Goldy]:
As a native Pennsylvanian, who proudly voted against Specter way back in 1986, all I can say is “wow.”  Wow. I’m as speechless as the Club for Growth.

UPDATE, UPDATE [Goldy]:
As N in Seattle points out in the comment thread, you have to understand Philadelphia politics to understand Specter’s politics.  Specter was a registered Democrat when he first ran for District Attorney as a Republican, and he built his reputation fighting the corrupt Democratic machine of Mayors Jim Tate and Frank Rizzo.  Specter was a bit of a reformer, more in line with the socially liberal, economically conservative “Rockefeller Republicans” who dominated suburban politics at the time.  Thus as the GOP moved further and further to the right, it was always disappointing to see him toe the party line again and again, out of political expediency.

No doubt this final party switch was driven by political expediency too.  But while he may be the newest member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, he is certainly far from the most conservative.

UPDATE THREE [Jon]: Updated the original post to reflect that some are pointing out Specter’s switch may actually increase the pressure on Republicans to not allow Al Franken to be seated. Whatever. It’s still funny as hell.

UPDATE 4 [Darryl]: Shrinkage, indeed. But Sen. Specter is destroying my narrative of being an independent-turned-Republican. As I explained in my statement of support for Mike Huckabee, in 1998 I voted for Republican Sen. Specter over his “pro-life” Democratic opponent Bill Lloyd.