There was a horrendous E. coli outbreak last year.

The culprit turned out to be E. coli, a powerful pathogen that had contaminated romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona, and distributed nationwide. At least 210 people in 36 states were sickened. Five died and 27 suffered kidney failure. The same strain of E. coli that sickened them was detected in a Yuma canal used to irrigate some crops.

For more than a decade, it’s been clear that there’s a gaping hole in American food safety: Growers aren’t required to test their irrigation water for pathogens such as E. coli. As a result, contaminated water can end up on fruits and vegetables.

After several high-profile disease outbreaks linked to food, Congress in 2011 ordered a fix, and produce growers this year would have begun testing their water under rules crafted by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration.

Would have. Note the conditional. Would have, but didn’t.

But six months before people were sickened by the contaminated romaine, President Donald Trump’s FDA – responding to pressure from the farm industry and Trump’s order to eliminate regulations – shelved the water-testing rules for at least four years.

Eliminate regulations!! All of them!!! Including the ones that would keep people from eating E. coli on their lettuce and dying!!!! Preserve our god-given right to eat shit-contaminated lettuce.

Despite this deadly outbreak, the FDA has shown no sign of reconsidering its plan to postpone the rules. The agency also is considering major changes, such as allowing some produce growers to test less frequently or find alternatives to water testing to ensure the safety of their crops.

The FDA’s lack of urgency dumbfounds food safety scientists.

Oh well – maybe the wildfires or the floods will kill us first.

I missed this last August. I was alerted to it just now by Walter Shaub.

People are talking about Bill Shine's ethics waiver. His waiver only covers part of the impartiality regulation (5CFR2635.502). Does NOT cover the extraordinary payment regulation (5CFR2635.503), the criminal conflict of interest statute (18USC208) or the ethics pledge (EO13770). https://t.co/i0zQbJH9bw

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) November 24, 2018

Waiver? thought I. What waiver? So I looked it up.

Oh. That waiver.

It is “in the public interest” for the White House’s top communicator to be excused from federal ethics laws so he can meet with Fox News, according to President Donald Trump’s top lawyer.

Bill Shine, Trump’s newly minted communications director, and Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economist, who worked at CNBC before his White House post, have both been excused from provisions of the law which seeks to prevent administration officials from advancing the financial interests of relatives or former employers.

So, administration officials, go ahead and advance the financial interests of former employers.

“The Administration has an interest in your interacting with Covered Organizations such as Fox News,” wrote White House counsel Don McGahn in a July 13 memo granting an ethics waivers to Shine, a former Fox executive. “[T]he need for your services outweighs the concern that a reasonable person may question the integrity of the White House Office’s programs and operations.”

Kudlow, a former CNBC host, received a similar waiver allowing him to communicate with former colleagues.

In other words, we want you to do these unethical corrupt things for us, so we’re giving you a waiver from the rule that says you can’t do these unethical corrupt things for us. Slick.

Hillary Clinton says the way to stop xenophobia is to be more xenophobic.

Europe must get a handle on immigration to combat a growing threat from rightwing populists, Hillary Clinton has said, calling on the continent’s leaders to send out a stronger signal showing they are “not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support”.

Definitely. Combat that threat from rightwing populists by being a rightwing populist. Totally makes sense.

Clinton urged forces opposed to rightwing populism in Europe and the US not to neglect the concerns about race and identity issues that she says were behind her losing key votes in 2016. She accused Trump of exploiting the issue in the election contest – and in office.

And she doesn’t want to exploit it, she just wants to…what? Appropriate it? Take it over and do it right: genteelly, apologetically, with gravitas?

“The use of immigrants as a political device and as a symbol of government gone wrong, of attacks on one’s heritage, one’s identity, one’s national unity has been very much exploited by the current administration here,” she said.

“There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements.”

Say “go back” with a pleasant smile.

Hillary: should the US roll back decades of civil rights rulings to appease white supremacists? Or just deport African-Americans to their continent of origin?

— Barbara Ehrenreich (@B_Ehrenreich) November 23, 2018

Katha Pollitt asks some pointed questions about the beliefs of others.

For almost three years now, reporters have been begging tired farmers and miners eating their pancakes at Josie’s Diner in Smallville, Nebraska, to say they’ve seen the light. They never do. White evangelical women sneaking away from the Republican Party make for a good story—but they didn’t stop Ted Cruz from getting 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in Texas.

After Trump took the White House, and even after political scientists and pollsters figured out that many Trump supporters were not out-of-work Rust Belters but just your basic well-off Republicans, there was an orgy of self-criticism among Democrats and progressives. Somehow, those voters were our fault; we had neglected them, disrespected them, not felt their pain.

Democrats and progressives tend to be masochistic that way. Republicans and conservatives don’t, so much (except when it comes to the fetus), because of The Invisible Hand. The Hand does everything for the best, so compassion is not just a waste of energy, it’s also a slope down to socialism and economic armageddon.

Another version of this idea is to call on progressive white women to convert other white women who support Trump. Nobody calls on white men to convert white men, because everyone assumes that’s impossible, but for some reason, white women who hate abortion and taxes and Obamacare, who want to “build the wall” and “lock her up,” are supposed to be pliable—and it’s the duty of liberal white women to expiate their own racism by bringing them around.

Some suggestions about what the some reason might be? Women are all Mommy, supposed to take care of everything. Women are seen as the sex whose duty it is to succor everyone and be Most Enlightened. Women are also seen as the sex that can be told what to do. This of course also does much to explain why there is so much ranting and raving about “TERFs” when there is no equivalent ranting and raving about the male equivalent (which is so neglected it doesn’t even have an acronym). Women are compassionate Mommy, and women are also to blame for everything that goes wrong.

The assumption is that we have the right ideas; we just haven’t been conveying them persuasively enough to win the other side over. But let me ask a question: When was the last time someone persuaded you to change your worldview? I have written this column for over 20 years, and I doubt I’ve brought more than a handful of people to my way of thinking.

It depends on what kind of point of view we mean, though. Big general category, like left v right, the last time was more or less never, but there are smaller, more particular subcategories, on which I can change my view (worldview probably doesn’t apply) at a moment’s notice. Left v right is what Katha’s talking about here, but at the same time, changes in smaller particulars can add up to shifts even there. Several famous lifelong Republicans have stopped identifying as such thanks to Trump – James Comey and Richard Painter, for two, and there are others. There are also people like David Frum and Bill Kristol who remain Republicans and conservatives (I think) but exercise much of their punditry on explaining what’s wrong about Trump.

So why is it so hard to believe that white women who voted for Trump are mostly as fixed in their views as you are? They voted for him for dozens of reasons: to fit in with their family and community, to preserve or gain status, to piss off the libtards, to ally with their menfolk, to keep MS-13 from killing their children, to bring back jobs stolen by Mexico and China, to keep taxes low and black children out of their schools, or because it’s what Jesus wants. You may think their beliefs are bigoted and ill-informed and illogical—which they are. You may marvel that women who think the polite and scandal-free Barack Obama is the Antichrist can believe that foul-mouthed, abusive Donald Trump is God’s instrument, like King David. What you are not going to do is make them see it differently by reminding them that at least 15 women have accused Trump of a range of sexual offenses.

It may be impossible to change their minds, but it could be possible to get explanations, I think, and I wouldn’t mind getting some explanations, because even after all this time I still don’t get it.

Elevating the discourse:

Conservative commentator Anna Paulina had her wires crossed on Fox News, and somehow, her Thursday segment only got worse from there.

She was brought on to discuss investigating Hillary Clinton.

Let me interrupt for just a second to ask: why? Why talk on a purported news show about “investigating” Hillary Clinton?

But Paulina opened on the southern border and a bizarre history of century-old legislation that federalizes reservist troops. Another guest tried to quell the confusion before careening back to Clinton’s emails — a favored Fox News topic.

Though his show prompted the discussion about Clinton, host Rick Leventhal said it was incredible that Clinton still captured attention.

“She won’t go away,” Paulina said. “She’s like herpes.”

The rest of the story is about how shocked everyone pretended to be, but that’s where we are now. We call women “herpes” for no particular reason while the president calls Congressional Representatives shit.

Jeet Heer notes that the NY Times ran an op-ed today written by two guys at two Saudi-funded think tanks, without mentioning the Saudi-funded part.

On Thursday, The New York Times published an oped headlined, “Trump is crude. But he’s right about Saudi Arabia.” Written by Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and  Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the op-ed  offered a full throttle defense not just of Saudi Arabia but also, specifically, of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the CIA believes ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – they sound so respectable and thinky, don’t they?

As The New York Times reported in May, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been using American think tanks as part of an extensive lobbying effort to shore up their support in America. Two key figures in this effort are George Nader, an advisor to the ruler of the UAE and Elliott Broidy, a major Republican donor and former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Both the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies claim they reject any foreign funding. But as the Times reporting makes clear, Nader was able to use Broidy as a front-man for helping to fund the two think tanks in projects supporting Saudi and UAE policies:

Mr. Nader did, however, provide a $2.7 million payment to Mr. Broidy for “consulting, marketing and other advisory services rendered,” apparently to help pay for the cost of conferences at two Washington think tanks, the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, that featured heavy criticism of Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood.

…

Th[e] publication of this op-ed mars the reputation of everyone involved. The Hudson Institute and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies seem more than ever to be mouthpieces for Arab autocrats. But The New York Times itself is also tainted by publishing this op ed. After all, their own reporting provides ample evidence for why these two think tanks should not be taken seriously. Yet the newspaper did nothing to inform readers of the op ed about the very salient connections between these think tanks and the Arab monarchies.

Conflict of interest at all?

The rich and the poor are equally free to sleep outside in the snow.

At least 320,000 people are homeless in Britain, according to research by the housing charity Shelter.

This amounts to a year-on-year increase of 13,000, a 4% rise, despite government pledges to tackle the crisis. The estimate suggests that nationally one in 200 people are homeless.

This isn’t Haiti or Bangladesh, it’s the UK. (It’s worse in the US. There are more homeless people here and we do less for them.)

Shelter says its figures, which include rough sleepers and people in temporary accommodation, are likely to be an underestimate of the problem as they do not capture people who experience “hidden” homelessness, such as sofa-surfers, and others living insecurely in sheds or cars, for example.

The bulk of those affected, 295,000, are in forms of temporary accommodation after being accepted as homeless by their local authority.

It is Shelter’s third annual analysis of homelessness. In 2016, it estimated there were 255,000 homeless people in England alone, a figure it subsequently adjusted to 294,000 for Britain. This rose to 307,000 in 2017.

Polly Neate, Shelter’s chief executive, said: “Due to the perfect storm of spiralling rents, welfare cuts and a total lack of social housing, record numbers of people are sleeping out on the streets or stuck in the cramped confines of a hostel room. We desperately need action now to change tomorrow for the hundreds of thousands whose lives will be blighted by homelessness this winter.”

Well, look on the bright side. Allowing a desperately poor underclass to form and swell is an easy way to keep the working class frightened and powerless. Nasty for them but nice for the ruling class.

Melanie Onn, the shadow housing minister, said: “It is appalling that enough people to fill a city the size of Newcastle will wake up this Christmas without a home. This is the outcome of eight years of austerity that even the United Nations say was designed to hurt the poor.”

If you hurt them enough, they’ll be afraid to organize.

A friend of mine posted a couple of photos together under the heading “Two presidents, two Thanksgivings.”

Trump phoned the troops to boost morale and express thanks.

Or he meant to, or he was supposed to, but it didn’t come out quite right.

President Donald Trump struck a nakedly political tone during a Thanksgiving call with US service members stationed around the world as he steered the conversation toward controversial political topics.

Speaking with a US general in Afghanistan, Trump likened the fight against terrorists to his efforts to prevent a group of migrants from illegally entering the United States, and he assailed federal judges who have ruled against his administration. The President also pressed the commanding officer of a Coast Guard ship in Bahrain on trade before touting his trade policies and arguing that “every nation in the world is taking advantage of us.”

Who wouldn’t want to take a call like that? So festive, so grateful, so empathetic.

“This was, sadly, predictable and avoidable,” said retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, a CNN military and diplomatic analyst. “The President’s conduct on that call, the manner in which he politicized it, demonstrated an utter and complete disregard for what military service means.”

And for what his relationship to it is supposed to be, and for any point of view that isn’t his. Other than that, great stuff.

Without evidence, he painted Air Force Gen. David Lyons as a proponent of his hardline immigration policies after Lyons said US troops are fighting in Afghanistan to prevent terrorists from reaching “our shores again.”

“Large numbers of people are forming at our border and I don’t even have to ask you, I know what you want to do, you want to make sure that you know who we’re letting in. And we’re not letting in anybody essentially because we want to be very, very careful,” Trump said, speaking to Lyons over the phone. “You’re right, you’re doing it over there. We’re doing it over here.”

See what he did? He took Lyons’s statement about fighting in Afghanistan to prevent terrorists from reaching the US again and pretended it was exactly parallel to repelling asylum seekers from Central America. Here’s the thing: Islamist terrorists are not Central American asylum seekers and vice versa. (Is it possible that terrorists could pretend to be asylum seekers? Yes. Is that a reason for one ignorant president to violate the law on asylum seekers? No.)

The topic brought Trump to another familiar airing of grievances, as he complained over the phone to the general that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has “become a big thorn in our side.”

“It’s a terrible thing when judges take over your protective services, when they tell you how to protect your border. It’s a disgrace,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace.”

I’m sure that boosted the troops’ morale no end.

After he hung up Trump went on ranting at the reporters present about the court and the border and closing the whole entire border and yadda yadda. And then the “who can possibly know?” issue again.

Trump also once again undermined the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the murder of Khashoggi, insisting the agency did not conclude bin Salman was responsible.

“They have not concluded. Nobody’s concluded. I don’t know if anybody’s going to be able to conclude that the crown prince did it,” Trump said. “They said he might have done it. That’s a big difference.”

And yet…Trump knew for certain that the Central Park 5 were guilty before the trial and also after DNA evidence emerged and their convictions were thrown out. Somehow he can know unknowable things when he wants to, and other people cannot when he wants them not to. Convenient.

At one point, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for on this Thanksgiving.

“For having a great family and for having made a tremendous difference in this country,” Trump said. “I’ve made a tremendous difference in the country. This country is so much stronger now than it was when I took office that you wouldn’t believe it.”

So, long story short, he’s grateful for himself. Cool.

17 year old Sudanese girl sold to the highest bidder:

Five hundred cows, two luxury cars, $10,000, two bikes, a boat and a few cell phones made up the final price in a heated bidding war for a child bride in South Sudan that went viral after the auction was pointed out on Facebook. It is the largest dowry ever paid in the civil war-torn country, the government said.

The highest bidder was a man three times the 17-year-old’s age. At least four other men in Eastern Lakes state competed, said Philips Anyang Ngong, a human rights lawyer who tried to stop the bidding last month. Among the bidders was the state’s deputy governor.

“She has been reduced to a mere commodity,” Ngong told The Associated Press, calling it “the biggest test of child abuse, trafficking and auctioning of a human being.” Everyone involved should be held accountable, he said.

But he’s a human rights lawyer – he has a conflict of interest. His interest in protecting human rights is in conflict with the girl’s family’s desire for money and goodies, and the winner’s desire to fuck her. The lawyer is what Trump stupidly calls “conflicted,” so he should have no say in the matter. They should get someone who has no interest in human rights to take over from Ngong.

Earlier this month, Nyalong became the man’s ninth wife. Photos posted on Facebook show her sitting beside the groom, wearing a lavish dress and staring despondently at the floor. The AP is using only her first name to protect her identity.

On Facebook, please note. Facebook suspends people for wrongthink on trans dogma, it “investigates” George Soros for criticizing Facebook, but selling female human beings is copacetic.

The bidding war has caused local and international outrage. It took several days for Facebook to remove the post that first pointed out the auction, and after it was taken down other posts “glorifying” the situation remained, George Otim, country director for Plan International South Sudan, told the AP.

Facebook ignored a request for comment.

While South Sudan’s government condemns the practice of child marriage it says it can’t regulate communities’ cultural norms, especially in remote areas.

“You can’t call it bidding as if it was an auction. It’s not bidding. If you see it with European eyes you’ll call it an auction,” government spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny told the AP. “You have to see it with an African eye, as it’s a tradition that goes back thousands of years. There’s no word for it in English.”

That’s an interesting point, because it can cut either way. It’s not surprising to learn that the people who practice it don’t call it by a pejorative (in context) name, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the name doesn’t fit. Naming is always contested.

Some local lawmakers and activists disagree. In a statement released this week, the National Alliance for Women Lawyers in South Sudan called upon officials to comply with the government’s plan to end child marriage by 2030. Ending the practice includes putting a stop to the auctioning of girls.

South Sudan’s anti-human trafficking chief called the case reminiscent of others he has seen across the country, in which girls are forced or tricked into marriage after being told they are going to live with relatives and go to school instead.

As those girls in Michigan were tricked into genital mutilation after being told they were going for a fun trip to the city. Funny how it’s always the girls, isn’t it…

Anna Denejkina at Foreign Policy on Russia’s decriminalization of violence against women:

The numbers of dead are staggering: 14,000 Russian women die annually from domestic violence-related injuries.

That’s about 38 women killed every day, almost two women every single hour, and one every 40 minutes. Making matters worse, Russia’s political system condones such violence.

In 2017, according to Human Rights Watch, up to 36,000 Russian women and 26,000 children faced daily violence and abuse. And most of the time—perhaps as much as 91 percent, according to 2013 data from the ANNA Center for the Prevention of Violence—the aggressor is a woman’s husband. Domestic violence is so common, in fact, that it affects one in four Russian families, according to ANNA. Two-thirds of all homicides in Russia are linked to domestic and family issues, and incidents of domestic assault on women and children increased by 20 percent between 2010 and 2015.

So what did the government do as violence against women and children increased? Made it legal.

In early 2017, the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Federal Assembly, decriminalized some forms of domestic violence, meaning that first-time offenses against a partner or child bear a fine rather than a criminal charge and trial.

The controversial bill was backed by the Russian Orthodox Church, which has historically advocated for less government interference in household matters. The church’s commission on family affairs even stated in 2015 that it considers the term “domestic violence” to be a tool used by radical feminists. It similarly maintains that the West is behind efforts to make domestic violence a crime in Russia.

In other words, laydeez, in case you’re too stupid to grasp the point, the Church is fine with your husbands, fathers, brothers, sons assaulting you. The Church considers it a household matter, and nobody else’s business. If the nearest male decides you are being insubordinate, he is entitled to punish you physically. Sucks to be you, doesn’t it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who officially signed the measure (known as the “slapping law”) into law on Feb. 7, 2017, has a poor record on women’s rights. Since his first presidential term in 2000, Putin has partnered with the Russian Orthodox Church to promote traditional conservative values, oppose LGBTQIA rights, and condemn feminism.

Now that the slapping law is on the books, women have few protections from domestic violence. Police are unlikely to interfere in attacks unless they cause “substantial bodily harm,” as per the new law. And already, according to Human Rights Watch, police are starting to refuse to investigate women’s reports of domestic violence. This marks a return to the treatment of women in the 1990s, when the police and authorities simply refused to get involved in family matters, and spells more violence to come.

But don’t jump to the conclusion that Russia doesn’t care about law n order. Not a bit of it.

Even as women and children lose protection from domestic violence, those who speak out against it have increasingly been handed criminal charges themselves. Feminist blogger Lyubov Kalugina, for example, was recently charged with inciting hatred toward men and now faces up to five years in prison.

The investigation and resulting charges were triggered when an anonymous man complained that her posts, including a meme that showed a woman holding a frying pan with the words “Beat up a brute, save Russia!” beneath, insulted him as a male. In other words, a woman who posted a mildly humorous meme may serve five years in prison. A man who beats up his partner may only be asked to pay a small fine—if the assault is even reported, as only 10 percent are.

Violence against women is necessary discipline; jokes about violence against men are treason.