Saturday, 22 September 2007

Rants

Man, you've got to watch them EVERY MINUTE!


I swear, I want to revise "legalpad's" quote to include the whole damn federal government!

ONE:

Nearly 10,000 people from countries designated as sponsors of terrorism have entered the United States under an immigration diversity program with relatively few restrictions, a report released on Friday said.

The report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office said the State Department's inspector general warned in 2003 that the Diversity Visa Program posed a significant risk to national security and recommended it be closed to people from countries on the U.S. list of state terrorism sponsors.

But four years later, the program remains open to people from those nations and little is known about what becomes of them once they enter the United States, the GAO said.
...
The GAO said the State Department expressed disappointment with the report's findings and rejected recommendations that the department compile more comprehensive data on fraud activity and formulate a new strategy for combating it.-- Reuters, September 21, 2007 [highlighting mine - o.g.]
Ah yes, the State Department: "Looking out for everybody's interests except America's."

TWO: It's amnesty! And it's alive! Again!:
The problem with this bill is not just that it's apparently been drafted as a stealth mechanism to allow lots of illegal immigrants to claim they qualify and thereby achieve legal status, although it has... [But that] it would inherently create an incentive for further illegal border crossing (namely by telling potential illegals to bring their kids across the border when they are young)... Now that the government is finally (seemingly, at least temporarily) trying to remove the "jobs magnet" for continuing illegal immigration, this is not the time to activate an alternative "kids magnet." -- Mickey Kaus [bolding and link in the original - o.g.]
Sigh! Time to write our Senile Senators AGAIN! The bill number is S.774.

THREE: Various corporate weasels[1] want to screw up our chocolate!
The current legal standard to call something "Chocolate" is that it be made of:
  1. Chocolate Liquor*
  2. Cocoa Butter**
  3. Real Sugar
  4. Real Milk solids (for Milk Chocolate)
*Chocolate Liquor (or unsweetened baking chocolate) is the meat or nib of the cocoa bean which has been ground into a smooth paste. It contains more than 50% cocoa butter.

**Cocoa Butter is the vegetable fat found in cocoa beans which is released when Chocolate Liquor is pressed.
...
Today, whenever you see the ingredient "chocolate" on a package, it MUST be made of these, and only these ingredients.

The proposed, lower standards would allow for cheaper, non-cocoa-bean vegetable fats to be substituted for cocoa butter, and still allow manufacturers to call the resulting brown stuff "Chocolate".
...
Basically, they want to make the chocolate equivalent of Velveeta...but not be required to call it "processed [chocolate] food". [highlighting mine - o.g.]
The Food and Drug Administration is the agency involved in this mess. Address, fax number, and sample letter here. (It's Docket 2007P-0085.)

Hattips:
------
Footnote:
[1] The weasels: American Frozen Food Institute, American Meat Institute, Chocolate Manufacturers Association, Food Products Association, International Dairy Foods Association, Juice Products Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Fisheries Institute, National Meat Canners Association, North American Millers’ Association, and Snack Food Association, along with the Grocery Manufacturers Association. I'm not going to chase links to all of these, but if anyone has some spare time, it might be interesting to find out why the various "meat" associations have signed on to something involving chocolate? Hmmm?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 23:45:17 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 567 words, total size 7 kb.

1 Nice recap on Point One.

Thanks, and we DO have to watch them every damn minute.

Posted by: USCitizen at 09/23/07 00:45:49 (4HWub)

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