Chupacabra Report

News that gets my goat!

-Heads rolling in Washington over veteran’s healthcare; the Secretary of the Army and the General in charge of Walter Reed Hospital canned over deplorable conditions and breakdown of care delivery for wounded soldiers. This should come as no surprise from this administration that has yet to face even the fiscal cost of the neocon Iraq adventure. They have failed all along to provide resources to care for the thousands of wounded, some of whom will require disability care for the rest of their lives. But they’ve trotted out a couple of scapegoats, and soon, no doubt will be blaming the congress, or the press.
Support our troops, indeed! These bastards should resign in shame.

-Last week the Texas House passed their version of “Jessica’s Law,” complete with death penalty provisions. Now, I’m not surprised that some Bill O’Reilly viewers can’t get their mind around the problems this raises, but how can these state legislators disregard the testimony of professionals in this sad field that applying capital punishment to these cases will result in some perpetrators going scot-free because some witnesses and victims will not testify if it means Uncle Ernie will go to the deathhouse. And some victims may be murdered by their abusers to eliminate the only witness. Another travesty from Austin!

Kudos to new West U. Rep. Ellen Cohen, former head of the Houston Area Womens Center, for speaking out against this measure, but until we vote all these pandering Pharisees out of office, eloquence such as hers or that which we enjoy from Rep. Sefronia Thompson, will amount to no more than dissenting opinions.

-And the Wa Po reports that the FDA is about to approve the use of the antibiotic cefquinome in cattle feed, despite warnings from it’s own scientists, and the AMA, that this will “probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotic, as has happened with other drugs.”

Again, when the facts contradict the party line, or the bottom line; the facts lose out.
When Agribusiness and The Cattlemen can’t but poison us without letting drug-resistant microbes loose on the population, something is way wrong. Our congress ought to know that, but then again we know that the last meaningful safe food legislation to come out of congress happened during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, after he saw more U.S. troops die from Armour Bully Beef than from Spanish bullets.