Debbye Turner, the resident vet at CBS, warns that there are indications that the final number of deaths will be in the hundreds when the results are in for the tainted pet food. Matthew Philips of Newsweek asks Is Pet Food Properly Regulated?

I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Philips, but he needs to look at recent history, which makes the answer obvious – pet food has a lower priority than human food, and the record on regulation of human food is shameful.

Wikipedia maintains a List of United States foodborne illness outbreaks. If you come forward from year 2000 you will find:

• Salmonella in peanut butter, bean sprouts, and orange juice,
• E. coli O157:H7 in lettuce, spinach, and hamburger,
• Hepatitis A in green onions,
• Listeria in chicken, and
• Botulism in fish.

In case people have forgotten the mantra of Republans is that regulation is bad for business and should be avoided because of the costs. They forget about the costs involved when people and pets die from the lack of regulation. They forget about the cost associated with government bailouts after unregulated businesses go bust.

Right now we are looking at “Resolution Trust II” to clean up the mess in the home mortgage sector. More billions of tax dollars to rescue people from what unregulated business does under Republans.

And some people still believe these clowns are going to protect us from terrorists? All al Qaeda has to do is incorporate in Delaware and they’ll receive tax breaks and subsidies.

Via Crooks & Liars a report on some righteous embarrassment for John McCain’s Myspace page.

Techcrunch makes a mistake in calling what happened a hack.

What Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson did was change a graphic on his own site: he didn’t access the McCain site at any time. It was the fault of the McCain’s people that they used Mike Davidson’s template and then stole his bandwidth by not bothering to create their own graphics. Mike Davidson doesn’t mind people using the template that he created, but he wants to be identified as the creator and to have people host the graphics on their own server.

The only reason I will use a graphic from someone else’s site without hosting it myself, is if they make it a condition of use, like my weather info in the sidebar. Whenever possible I identify the source of things and provide links, because it’s polite and a legal requirement. If you look at the source code for my page you will find the name of the guy who wrote the code for the Shrubbery and Osama trackers, and a link. I made modifications, but the original logic was his idea, his creation. People like to get credit for their work.

McCain’s site wasn’t hacked, it was shown to be a bandwidth thief.

Via Avedon Carol a video: La marche de l’empereur.

Not a bad metaphor for giving the Shrubbery his daily intelligence briefing.