UPDATE: Marler Blog reported Wednesday afternoon that agribusiness behemoth Cargill is behind the tainted turkey. The company will soon announce a voluntary recall of nearly 36 million pounds of ground-turkey products, the blog reports, all of which emerged from a single processing facility in  Springdale, Arkansas. This latest fiasco does not mark the first time Cargill has sent out massive amounts of product potentially tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. In 2009, a beef processor owned by the company had to recall 826,000 pounds of hamburger meat laced with a resistant strain called salmonella Newport. For good measure, the same plant had to recall another 22,000 pounds for the same reason a few months later. A USA Today investigation revealed that the troubled plant was a major supplier to the national school lunch program. Cargill, among the globe's largest privately held companies, processes about 25 percent of the beef consumed in the United States, along with 14 percent of the turkey and 9 percent of the pork.

Once again, a drug-resistant "superbug" has infiltrated the national food supply. This time, the culprit appears to be tainted ground turkey, although federal investigators have not been able to definitively identify the source and thus have not issued a recall. The Centers for Disease Control reports that 77 people in 26 states have fallen ill; one person has died. Here's how the CDC describes the situation:

The outbreak strain of Salmonella Heidelberg is resistant to many commonly prescribed antibiotics; this antibiotic resistance can increase the risk of hospitalization or possible treatment failure in infected individuals. [Emphasis added.]

"Treatment failure," of course, is a polite way of saying "death."

Such outbreaks are almost certainly related to the meat industry's practice of giving confined livestock daily antibiotic doses, both to keep them functioning under cramped, unsanitary conditions and to make them grow faster. Will this outbreak finally force federal regulators to crack down on this practice? Doubtful.

As I reported last week, the USDA recently acknowledged the factory farm/antibiotic-resistance link in a "technical review" of the latest peer-reviewed science on the topic. But instead of throwing its weight behind a crackdown of factory-farm antibiotic abuse, the agency unceremoniously stepped on the report, removing it from its website without explanation after meat-industry groups complained about it.

Then there's the FDA. As the agency that regulates pharmaceuticals, the FDA could act to protect the public from drug-resistant pathogens by limiting their use at factory farms. The agency strongly and publicly acknowledged the link back in 2009. Yet it maintains its official stance that antibiotics should be "used judiciously" on factory farms, and it leaves it to the industry to define what that means.

[Read more]

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How unpopular is Florida tea party Republican Gov. Rick Scott? He can't even make donut-lovers happy.

As part of an image-rehabilitation program for the beleaguered novice politician, Scott's handlers revived a practice by one of his (Democratic) predecessors, Bob Graham: getting out and doing the jobs of regular Floridians for a day.

Scott's first day didn't go so well. There he was, just trying to make some donuts at Nicola's in Tampa, when he was inundated by (surprisingly respectful) protesters from Pink Slip Rick, a group that's angered by the guv's pro-privatization, anti-public schools agenda (which Stephanie Mencimer wrote about for MJ). Check out the video below.

Wait for the fireworks at 46 seconds, when the senior mother of a schoolteacher gives Scott a pink slip and a timeout:

Mother: "You should be ashamed that I have to go out and buy things for my daughter's classroom because of a shortage of funds."

Scott: (pause) "Thanks for coming."

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Ryan Avent reviews some ancient history today. As we all know, the 2009 stimulus package was smaller than it should have been given what we knew at the time. But it was way smaller than it should have been if we'd only known what was really going on. The House passed an $800 billion stimulus bill on January 26th:

Two days after that, Americans received grim news about the economy: in the fourth quarter of 2008, GDP contracted at a 3.8% annual pace—the worst quarterly performance since the deep recession of 1982....Unfortunately, the situation was far more dire than anyone in the administration or in Congress supposed.

Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.

So what would Obama have proposed if he'd known that GDP had just contracted by 8.9% instead of 3.8%? Beats me. But even as cautious as he is and as mainstream as his advisors were, surely a recession that was more than twice as bad as they thought would have produced a stimulus that was something on the order of twice as big. I've never thought that the difference between, say, an $800 billion stimulus and a $1 trillion stimulus was a very big deal, but the difference between an $800 billion stimulus and a $1.6 trillion stimulus sure would have been.

BEA has a long track record of not doing a good job on GDP figures when the economy is turning sharply. It's too late to cry over spilt milk now, but if there's a way to get better at this it might help us out next time.

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Joined by House Republican leaders outside the Cannon Caucus Room, Speaker Boehner discusses the Republicans' jobs plan.

As soon as the ink was dry on the new debt-ceiling deal, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was on Twitter pushing the GOP's "blueprint" for creating jobs and fixing the economy. There's a special new jobs website set up to promote the Republican plan. I was pretty sure that I knew what it was even before I looked at it, but Boehner's tweets were pretty insistent, so I decided to check out the plan. As it turned out, the fancy new website simply promoted the same old "jobs" plan my colleague Andy Kroll wrote about back in May. But since that was a lifetime ago in Washington, here's a refresher on what the GOP wants to do now that the debt fight is over:

Number one on the list of "pro-growth" policies House Republicans intend to push is reducing "regulatory burdens" on small businesses. The GOP plan highlights a number of regulations that hurt "job creators," including the EPA's efforts to regulate greenhouse gasses; the FCC's net neutrality proposal, which is hated by the nation's biggest telecom monopolies; and "burdensome pesticide regulation."

Next on the list is.... lower taxes. House Republicans are promising to lower the tax rate for individuals and businesses to 25 percent, down from the current 35 percent. How that squares with the other GOP proposal to tackle the national debt isn't laid out in the plan. Presumably the big tax reduction will spur so much growth that the revenue will magically appear in the federal treasury, just the way it did, uh, with the Bush tax cuts. (It didn't.)

The GOP's other ideas include patent reform (which Congress actually passed since the last version of the plan was released) and "expediting" the drug approval process at the FDA. And no GOP jobs plan would be complete without a proposal to drill, baby, drill, to increase domestic energy production.

Critics can laugh all they want about Obama going on a bus tour to focus on job creation, but even if all he does is wrangle up some money to fix a few falling-down bridges, it's likely to put more average people to work than anything the GOP has in mind.

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