Hillary Clinton's' long-time adviser, including for PR, and her chief campaign strategest, is Mark Penn, who works for Burson-Marsteller - Monsanto's PR firm, which represents some of the worst corporations in existence - including Blackwater. http://www.sourcewatch.org/...   And DC Lobbyist and McCain campaign "senior advisor" Charlie Black also works for Monsanto:  http://rawstory.com/...

I do not know about Obama's connections to Monsanto.

But...

Those who support one candidate, or another, are now trying to induce guilt in the Progressive Community if we don't climb aboard their bandwagon.

If you don't vote for Hillary Clinton you harbor secret thoughts of the "weakness" of women to hold the role of President.  

If you don't vote for Barak Obama you are really a closet racist.

Score 1 for consumers!

After a fierce letter-writing campaign and vocal opposition, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, stepped in and blocked the enforcement of the new rule to ban rBGH-Free labels which would have started January 1 2008. At this point, the matter is simply listed as being "delayed" for further review, but I am hopeful that due to the massive public outcry, this rule will be thrown into the trash where it belongs.

I'm not the first one diarying this, but last week there were several calls for a VMD on the topic. So here it is.

According to the New York Times, Pennsylvania just banned all "rBGH-free" labels on dairy products, effective January 1, 2008. The move was taken by the state's Secretary of Agriculture, Dennis Wolff.

I promise I will abstain from any puns using the phrase "guarding the henhouse" in this diary. You'll find an action alert at the end.

I tried to decide why the flurry of wire stories, picked up on websites, TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers around the world, with headlines about the FDA investigating whether or not the contamination of pet food was intentional, was bugging me so much.

It's not that I can't see why that angle seems important. It opens the door to criminal legal proceedings, and makes the story sexier, turns it into an investigative piece, a sort of "whodunit" of food safety.

But that angle also steers perception of the story in a specific way. If this is just a limited issue of corporate wrong-doing in China, some unscrupulous companies tossing in a little melamine to up the protein content of their product and make a little extra money? That dogs and cats were canaries in the coal mine, and that's sad and even tragic, but still, limited?

What the FDA knows, and you don't: The FDA knows the two remaining companies who received shipments of contaminated rice protein concentrate and won't name them. I know, because when I asked them on Thursday at their press conference, they refused to name them.

What the FDA doesn't know, and should: First it was wheat gluten from China, sold in the United States for human or animal use, and used, as far as we know but without certainty, only in the production of pet food. Then it was corn gluten from a different Chinese source, sold in South Africa, and used in pet food, where it has caused illness and death in large numbers of pets.

Then it was rice protein concentrate, from yet another Chinese source, sold in the United States, and used in pet food. Some of this found its way into livestock feed, as well. Three sources, all in China. Three different products. All contaminated with melamine.

I'm a contributing editor with Universal Press Syndicate's Pet Connection, a nationally syndicated pet feature that's in over 75 newspapers nationwide. We have been covering the pet food recall on our blog for more than a month now - and we got a shout out at the Senate hearing on the recall from Dick Durbin for the job we've been doing.

I cover the late night shift on this story, and so I've gotten a fair amount of the midnight press releases in which bad corporate news is usually dumped. And tonight I got another one, and I can't quite believe what it said.

I was just reading an art history book (The Power of Art, Simon Schama, excellent by the way), and the authors mentions the phrase Muslim Terrorists and it got me thinking about labeling.  If we call them Muslim terrorists then it can be inferred that they are terrorizing others for some reason having to do with their "Muslim-ness".  This may be a useful inference for dear Leader to make because he is fighting a Crusade TM.  However it is not true.  The fact that these terrorists are Muslim really has nothing to do with what they are fighting for.  Is Timothy McVeigh a Christian terrorist, or a White Male terrorist, or a Lower Class White American terrorist?  So why should we call Mohammed Atta a Muslim terrorist?

This discussion is not to belittle what terrorists do, just to help us name terrorists correctly.  All terrorists terrorize for some reason.  No one wakes up and says, HEY today I want to terrorize.  No there is a reason for it.  And no one in the world wakes up and says HEY I am Muslim and because of that I am going to terrorize someone.  No, terrorists are always fighting for something, regardless of whether it is ethical or valid.  They have some focus that causes them to kill innocents.

Sorry, I won't be around to discuss this topic, but it is one I understand, not even as a Nascar Mom or Dad, or a Soccer Mom or Dad, but as someone who lives in a rural community being gobbled up by suburban communities, and the labels frequently applied toward both, and perhaps the labels applied toward the urban areas.

I am a "rural" Mom; but a lifelong Democrat, and an even "liberal" democrat at that, although I defy all the labels because I can identify with almost all of these except "fundamentalist" and "neo-con", or frankly for that matter "neo-liberal"...

So here goes, for starters...the Nascar Dads, featured via Tom's Dispatch...

It's time to pass the "Truth in Legislative Labeling Act."  

In his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell explained:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Illustrating this concept, in his classic book 1984, Orwell portrayed a totalitarian state in which the Government's oxymoronic language created false truths: "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength."

The past five years of Republican rule has provided many examples of the use of Orwellian language.  But, perhaps the worst of these examples has been the blatant mislabeling of legislative Acts.  

Part of the success of right wingers and conservatives in getting 51% of the vote despite collectively being only 20% of all Americans is rooted in their ability to shrink the political spectrum in the minds of voters. (With help from the press they own). They have effectively misdefined moderate and the center as a position to the right of Nelson Rockefeller and to the left of the KKK.  Of course those two positions are conservative and very conservative.  But if moderate simply means finding a person on either side of an individual then Karl Marx is a left winger, Paul Wellstone is a centrist, and Ted Kennedy is a right wing conservative.

I have watched over the spring, the constant drone of labeling democrats as "cut 'n' run" for wanting to leave Iraq. Even if you are in favor of leaving Iraq,  as I am, cut 'n' run sounds bad, and somehow un-American. If you are thinking of voting democratic, and have to defend those words, it is difficult, and might make you less inclined to do so.

I have been trying to think of a phrase to label republican policy with, that has the same type of negative connotation for them.