As we know, King enjoys touting his carnivorous habits while beating up on people who don’t eat meat. But meat producers have also been major financial backers of King, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, throughout his political career. A cursory glance at King’s fundraising records shows more than $45,000 in campaign contributions from the meat industry during his time in Congress. This cycle alone, two prominent PACs, the National Beef Cattleman’s Association and the National Council of Pork Producers, as well as Lynch Livestock, have already maxed out their contributions to King’s reelection campaign.

That money appears to have been well-spent. All this week, King has been defending pink slime — or “lean finely textured beef” as he calls it — to his constituents. Indeed, in every one of the half dozen town halls that ThinkProgress attended, King talked up pink slime unprompted. In Emmetsburg, for instance, he said pink slime was actually a “supplement” and an “enhancement.” In Algona, he pledged to hold congressional hearings not into pink slime, but into the “smear campaign” against pink slime.

Watch a short clip of King defending pink slime:

KING: I’m on the phone today and throughout the weekend and into last week trying to establish a congressional hearing before the Ag Committee for Beef Products, Incorporated, so that we can put into the congressional record the nutritional value and the safety and the tastiness of their product which is an enhancement to hamburger. I’m working with Governor Branstad on that. At this point, there will be a decision made today I think on whether we’re able to get a hearing.

The meat industry is engaged in an all-too-common practice: making campaign contributions to politicians, who in turn go to bat for the industry in the public sphere, whether that’s defending it to constituents or holding hearings into opponents.

Ryan’s budget would turn food stamps into a block grant program, sending it back to the states to do with as they see fit. The plan also cuts SNAP by 17 percent, or more than $133 billion. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, this proposal could cut millions of low-income people off from vital food assistance:

If the cuts were to come solely from eliminating eligibility for categories of currently eligible households or individuals, more than 8 million people would need to be cut from the program, if the cuts began taking effect in 2013. If the cuts did not begin until 2016, an average of almost 10 million people would have to be cut from the program in the years from 2016 through 2022 to achieve the required savings. [...]

Cuts in benefits: If the cuts were to come solely from across-the-board benefit cuts, SNAP benefits would have to be cut by about $22 to $27 per person per month in 2016 dollars….The impact of such a change would be pronounced. All families of four — including the poorest — would see their benefits cut by about $90 a month in fiscal year 2016, or more than $1,100 on an annual basis. All families of three would be subject to cuts of more than $70 per month, or almost $900 on an annual basis.

Republicans, including Ryan himself, have been attacking the food stamp program by falsely claiming that it is “rife with fraud.” But in addition to having an incredibly low rate of payment error (at 1 percent), SNAP is a vital poverty fighting tool. Last year, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty by half. Overall, more than 5 million people were lifted out of poverty by food stamps in 2010.

The USDA estimates that the program, known as HIMP, would save the USDA just under $100 million over the next three years while providing a $520 million shot in the arm to poultry companies. At the same time, the USDA claims, it will reduce 5,200 poultry-related illnesses each year. Advocacy groups like Food & Water Watch, however, share a different story. FWW examined more than 5,000 USDA documents and found that companies already operating under trial versions of HIMP are missing defects at absurd rates, Food Safety News reports:

FWW said they found that company employees often miss quality defects like “feathers, lungs, oil glands, trachea and bile still on the carcass.”

Their analysis found that the average error rate for these types of defect in chicken slaughter facilities was 64 percent and 87 percent in turkey slaughter facilities. And for one turkey slaughter facility, nearly 100 percent of samples found this category of defect. FWW also found that the vast majority of non-compliance records filed for the 14 plants under the pilot was for “fecal contamination found on the carcasses.” Out of 229 NRs filed from March to August 2011, 208 (90 percent) were for visible fecal contamination that was missed by company employees.

The USDA says it is trying to “modernize” its outdated and inefficient system, but previous attempts to expand the HIMP program faced similar criticism. In 2002, the Government Accountability Office reported that some plans participating in HIMP had higher results of contamination than before. Five of 11 plants had higher rates of salmonella contamination while only two improved, and tests found higher rates of defects in seven of the plants. At the time, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) called the program a “recipe for food safety disaster.”

And if the various analyses of HIMP plants is true and it fails to decrease the instance of foodborne illness, the program likely won’t save taxpayers money, as FSIS claims. One out of six Americans suffer from foodborne illnesses each year, with 128,00 resulting in hospitalization and 3,000 resulting in death. According to Georgetown University’s Product Safety Project, those illnesses come at a cost of $152 billion a year.

And as with the spikes of 2008 and 2011, commodity investors and speculators are largely to blame, according to one study highlighted by Time:

The New England Complex Systems Institute released a study last week linking speculation in global commodity markets to rising food prices. The study indicates that spikes in food prices in 2008 and ’11 came largely as a result of investor speculation and increased ethanol conversion, in which corn is used for fuel rather than food. The authors expect another “food bubble” to occur by 2013, which “may lead to major social disruptions” on par with the riots and unrest in North Africa and the Middle East in 2008 and ’11.

Speculation on other commodities has also drawn recent attention. After blaming speculators for oil and gas price spikes in 2008 and 2010, experts are again pointing to “speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year” for the current rise in fuel prices. As with the fuel spike, rising food costs could have a dampening effect on the recovery of the American economy while also triggering social disruptions around the world — rising food prices were a factor in the unrest that led to the Arab Spring, according to some analysts.

The study also blamed increased conversion of corn from a food product into ethanol used for fuel. Corn prices spiked to a record high in 2011, and the U.S. now uses more corn for ethanol than it does for food production, a practice that has been propped up by federal ethanol subsidies that have been targeted for elimination by bipartisan groups of lawmakers.

Food stamps have been key to alleviating poverty during the Great Recession. In 2010, the program kept more than 5 million Americans from falling below the poverty line. Plus, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted today, food stamps reduced the number of children living in extreme poverty — defined as less than $2 per day, before government aid — by half in 2011:

Counting SNAP benefits as income reduces the number of households in extreme poverty in 2011 from 1.46 million to nearly 800,000, the study found. And it reduces the number of children in extreme poverty in 2011 by half — from 2.8 million to 1.4 million…Other studies have also documented SNAP’s powerful poverty-fighting impact. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts SNAP as income, SNAP kept more than 5 million people out of poverty in 2010.

Food stamps are more critical now than ever, since extreme poverty in the U.S. has doubled in the last 15 years. Overall, the poverty rate in 2010 would have been twice as high as it was were if not for the social safety net.

Thursday’s hearing will focus on the testimony of officials about why USDA is struggling to police these unscrupulous stores who engage in fraud. Unfortunately, skyrocketing fraud and a dysfunctional enforcement system is handicapping the program’s ability to help those in need – families and children.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) has made similarly disparaging comments about the food stamp program being “rife with fraud.” But the fact of the matter is that fraud in the food stamp program is incredibly low, at a rate of 1 percent. And overall error rates in the food stamp program have absolutely plunged in recent years, hitting an all-time low in 2010, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Despite the recent rapid caseload growth, USDA reports that states achieved a record-low SNAP error rate in fiscal year 2010. Only 3 percent of all SNAP benefits represented overpayments, meaning they either went to ineligible households or went to eligible households but in excessive amounts, and more than 98 percent of SNAP benefits were issued to eligible households.

In addition, the combined error rate — that is, the sum of overpayments and underpayments reached an all-time low in 2010 of just 3.81 percent.

That low error rate encompasses both overpayments and underpayments, those instances when an eligible participant in the system received less money than he/she was due. As CBPP noted, “the overwhelming majority [of food stamp errors] result from honest mistakes by recipients, eligibil­ity wor­kers, data entry clerks, or com­puter program­mers,” not fraud.

Oversight Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) said in his opening statement, “while the need for the SNAP program is at an historic high, fraud within the program is at an all-time low…Given this strong track record, I am concerned that the true purpose of this hearing may be to discredit the entire program in order to justify draconian cuts.” According to the Census Bureau, food stamps kept more than 5 million people out of poverty in 2010.

Now, a new study reveals that soda companies have been targeting black and Latino children in high numbers, diminishing parents’ attempts to encourage their kids to eat right:

A new report from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity has found that beverage companies are aggressively targeting black and Latino kids with ads to promote sports, fruit and energy drinks. The products that are promoted to kids of color happen to be among the least healthy of the 644 products studied by researchers at the university.

Black children and teens saw 80 percent to 90 percent more ads compared with white youth, including more than twice as many for Sprite, 5-hour Energy, and Vitamin Water.

From 2008 to 2010, Latino children saw 49 percent more ads for sugary drinks and energy drinks on Spanish-language TV. Latino preschoolers saw more Spanish-language ads for Coca-Cola Classic, Kool-Aid, 7 Up, and Sunny D than older Latino children and teens did.

Colorlines notes that the two largest soda companies, Pepsi and Coca-Cola, have repeatedly promised to market less to children, who are more susceptible to advertising: “Coca-Cola, for example, has previously stated publicly that they wouldn’t market ads in TV, radio and print programming aimed at kids under the age of 12.”

But the report found that soda companies have just shifted to using more sophisticated and insidious forms of advertising that promise kids rewards for purchasing sugary drinks. Kids are exposed to these messages “often without their parents’ awareness.”

Companies’ targeting of minority children is a social justice issue as well as an economic one. Just like mortgage companies that focused their predatory lending on minority communities, soda companies are preying on a particularly vulnerable group (poor children) who are already suffering the ill effects of their product and have the most to lose from consuming more. For instance, these children are less likely to have health insurance to cover the numerous medical problems associated with obesity.

This is not a problem that’s going to happen someday, and this is not a problem that’s just going to impact some industries. If you drink beer now, the issue of climate change is impacting you right now.

“For our brewery, growth depends on abundant clean water and quality barley and hops—and climate change puts those ingredients at risk. Our supply chain—including barley, hops and water—is especially vulnerable to weather in the short-term and to climate change in the long-term,” Orgolini told Forbes.

Heavy rains in Australia and drought in England have hurt malting barley crops this year.

Climate change has caused the quality and yield of Saaz hops — the key ingredient in Czech pilsner lager — to decline. Global warming pollution will cause further declines, scientists found in 2009. Yields of malting barley will also decline in coming years as droughts increase because of carbon pollution.

17.2 million: The number of households that were food insecure in 2010, the highest number on record. They make up 14.5 percent of households, or approximately one in seven.

48.8 million: People who lived in food insecure households last year.

3.9 million: The number of households with children that were food insecure last year. In 1 percent of households with children, “one or more of the children experienced the most severe food-insecure condition measured by USDA, very low food security, in which meals were irregular and food intake was below levels considered adequate by caregivers.”

6.4 million: Households that experienced very low food security last year, meaning “normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.”

55: The percentage of food-insecure households that participated in one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs (SNAP, WIC, School lunch program).

19.4: The percentage of food insecure households in Mississippi, which had the highest rate in the nation last year.

3.6 percent: The amount by which food prices increased last year.

30 percent: The amount by which food insecurity grew during the Great Recession.

44: The percentage increase in households using food pantries between 2007 and 2009.

20 million: The number of children who benefit from free and reduced lunch per day.

10.5 million: The number of eligible children who don’t receive their free and reduced lunch benefits.

$167.5 billion: The amount that the U.S. lost in 2010 due to hunger (lost educational attainment + avoidable illness + charitable giving to fight hunger). This doesn’t take into account the $94 billion cost of SNAP and other food programs.

8: The number of states (FL, TX, CA, IL, NY, OH, PA, GA) where the annual cost of hunger exceeds $6 billion.

Last year, “nearly half of the households seeking emergency food assistance reported having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food. Nearly 40 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food.” This Thanksgiving, as you sit down to enjoy a meal with family and friends, please spare a thought for those who, due to the country’s continuing economic woes, may not have enough to eat.

This holiday season, please consider donating to a local food bank. You can find one nearby or donate online through the Feeding America website. You can also give to Operation Homefront, a group that provides assistance to military families.

In a heartbreaking report, CBS chronicles the plight of “America’s new poor” — many of whom used to be the very people who donated to food banks. But with millions out of work, foreclosure rates still high, and the country’s economic outlook as bleak as ever, yesterday’s givers have become today’s takers.

Take Forsyth County, near Atlanta. Despite having the highest average household income in Georgia, hundreds of these “newly-needy” file into local food banks:

“People lost their jobs and went from great incomes to no incomes,” said Sandy Beaver [who] leads The Place, Forsyth County’s biggest non-profit center for social services. She calls those who visit The Place “the new poor.” The Place’s main mission: Feed the hungry. [...]

“Many of our people who have come for assistance used to be our donors. And they’ll say, ‘I never thought I’d have to do this, never in my wildest dreams.’” [...]

People like these married retirees in their 70s, too embarrassed to appear on camera…They retired comfortably in their early 50s. But now, after bad investments, a ruined portfolio, and costly medical issues, they qualify for food stamps – and could lose the house.

“Taking the food was really tough,” the woman said. “The hard part was, we used to give it, and now I’m taking it back, you know?” she said, crying.

At one Forsyth high school, 8 percent of kids now get free lunch, double the number three years ago. And unfortunately, the situation Forsyth is not unusual. One in six Americans — 49 million people — isn’t sure where their next meal will come from. A record 15 percent of Americans are now receiving food stamps — a jump of about two-thirds since 2007.

Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, who are returning from combat to face higher unemployment rates than nearly any other group, are also struggling to get by. Raymond Price, an Afghanistan vet, says “All I want is a job. I don’t really want anybody’s handouts.” But with a family to feed, he came by a food bank last week for a box of non-perishables.

This holiday season, please consider donating to a local food bank. You can find one nearby or donate online through the Feeding America website. You can also give to Operation Homefront, a group that provides assistance to military families.

The year 2011 has been one of the most extreme ever for weather disasters. Below, ThinkProgress Green discusses a few examples of how our increasingly dangerous weather, poisoned by hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse pollution, is jacking up the costs of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.

TURKEY

Retail turkey prices are up 23 percent, an average $1.35 a pound instead of $1.10 last year. Wholesale prices on the East Coast for turkeys are up 26 percent this year to a record $1.18. The super-hot summer killed turkeys and slowed weight gain. The two main commodities that go into a turkey are feed corn and soybeans, and prices for both have gone up sharply. The U.S. is “reaping its smallest corn harvest in three years” after a drought and the hottest summer since 1955 in the Midwest damaged what was a record crop as recently as July, driving annual prices to record highs. Average temperatures in the Midwest were as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in July, and a stretch from Illinois to Indiana had its driest ever conditions for that month.

PECAN PIE

The average retail price for a pound of pecans rose from $7 in 2008 to $9 last year, and it’s expected to be about $11 this year. Drought in the Southeast has dramatically reduced the pecan crop. Production in Texas, which has had a record drought, dropped the most, from 70 million pounds last year to an estimated 40 million pounds this year. In Louisiana, production plunged from 20 million pounds last year to an estimated 9 million pounds this year. The entire U.S. crop is expected to be less than 252 million pounds this year, roughly 14 percent smaller than last year. “I’ve been farming for 60 or more years, and this is the driest I’ve ever seen,” said Ben Littlepage, a grower in the central Louisiana town of Colfax.

PUMPKIN PIE

The cost of canned pumpkin is up more than 13 percent this year from last. Hurricane Irene wiped out pumpkin crops in flooded fields throughout the Northeast. Flooded fields meant not only waterlogged pumpkins that rotted on the vine but also fungus, mold and mildew.

WHIPPED CREAM, BUTTER, MILK

Dairy prices are extremely volatile, but have risen considerably, primarily because of the extreme hay shortage in the nation. Hay prices have nearly doubled because of drought in Texas, Florida, and the rest of the Southeast.

COFFEE

The sustainability director of Starbucks, Jim Hanna, said that the company’s coffee bean suppliers, “who are mainly in Central America, were already experiencing changing rainfall patterns and more severe pest infestations” because of global warming pollution. “Even in very well established coffee plantations and farms, we are hearing more and more stories of impacts,” with worse droughts, storms, and floods. Extreme weather has damaged crops from Colombia to Indonesia this year.

OTHER FACTORS

Commodity volatility is being grossly amplified by that rampant and unregulated speculation in commodity markets and their derivatives, as Wall Street financiers have sought profit-making schemse after the housing bubble collapsed. Better Markets does a good job laying out how index funds are running amok, distorting commodity markets.

The demand pressure on corn to produce ethanol is not a major factor in the extreme price spike, since that demand is known ahead of time, allowing farmers to plant enough. The biofuels mandates do help set the floor for corn prices, and speculators exploit the situation of the commodity having a price floor but no ceiling.

Sadly, the American Farm Bureau Federation — which claims to represents the interests of American farmers — is run by global warming deniers.

This meal is chock full of vegetables, according to the House GOP.

Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes:

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat.

According to a bill summary released by Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, these provisions are meant to “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations.” What they will actually do is ensure that a steady flow of dollars continues toward certain favored food manufacturers, at the expense of children’s health.

“We are outraged that Congress is seriously considering language that would effectively categorize pizza as a vegetable in the school lunch program,” said Amy Dawson Taggart, the director of Mission: Readiness, a group advocating for healthier school lunches. “It doesn’t take an advanced degree in nutrition to call this a national disgrace.”

This is hardly the first time that the GOP has attacked attempts to boost the nutritional content of school lunches. Back in May, House Republicans derided the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which was signed into law late last year, as a “massive and costly” federal intrusion. They did this despite the fact that escalating obesity rates cost the nation $147 billion per year in direct medical costs.

As education policy analyst Theodora Chang has written, “student nutrition programs ensure that students are ready to learn and are not stymied by hunger. Schools are ideal locations for social services like healthy meals because they have unparalleled access to low-income students and their families.” Instead, the GOP has decided to roll back what little progress has been made in terms of school lunch nutrition.

[I]n moments of desperation, a lie can seem like the only option. Anita McLemore, a Mississippi mother of two, faced one of those unfortunate moments when filling out her application for food stamps — and now she’ll pay the price, by spending three years of her life behind bars in federal prison.

Thanks to a federal ban on food stamps for people with felony drug convictions, people like McLemore are out of luck when it comes to getting assistance with putting food on their tables. Though states can opt out of the ban, those that don’t (like Mississippi) deny food stamps even to individuals who have already served their sentences or overcome previous addictions. It’s true that McLemore’s past isn’t perfect — she has four felony drug convictions and one misdemeanor, which place her firmly in the category of people the federal government has declared unfit to receive public benefits. Hence, faced with the prospect of being unable to feed her family, McLemore lied on her application.

In a compassionate nation, the penalty for drug use is not starvation. In a just nation, the penalty for drug use is not that your two children must be hungry as well. There is no excuse for a federal drug policy that punishes anyone by taking away their ability to put food on the table — and that punishes them so severely for the crime of needing to eat.

And, unlike thousands of Wall Street bankers who helped plunge America’s economy into a catastrophic recession, McLemore actually paid back the $4,367 she received.

Industrial agriculture is a major part of the global ponzi scheme. By continuing to fool ourselves into thinking we can infinitely produce more fossil-fuel laden food with limited resources, we’re setting ourselves up for a major catastrophe.

And that fooling happens on every level. Take the disturbing ways in which we create flavors for foods.

The “all natural” label applied to food means absolutely nothing by federal standards. And yet, food companies prey on growing consumer demand for wholesome healthy food by slapping the label on anything they can. The Food and Drug Administration, which is charged with protecting and promoting our health through regulation and oversight of the food industry, has not developed a definition for the “all natural” label. However, “the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances,” according to the FDA’s website.

People have a false perception that our food industry is well regulated, when it simply is not. To shed some light on what is in our food and what concoctions can even be labeled as “all natural,” Bruce Bradley, a former food marketer at companies like General Mills, Pillsbury, and Nabisco, keeps a blog about the food industry. In 2008, he left the corporate world and decided to devote the rest of his life to promoting healthy food and criticizing the Big Food industry.

Because our food has become so highly processed and because by FDA law, food companies can list spices and flavorings as natural or artificial flavors, unbelievably strange and disgusting things are being added to our food:

• Beaver anal glands, known as castoreum (I guess anal glands was a hard sell), are typically used in vanilla and raspberry flavoring and can legally be labeled natural flavoring
• L-cysteine or cystine is used a dough conditioner. It’s sometimes made from human hair, but more and more from duck feathers and can be found in breads and baked goods.
• A red food coloring additive that goes by many names (Carmine, Crimson Lake, Cochineal, or Natural Red #4) is made from insects like the cochineal beetle.

This is just one more example of how distorted our food system is. To see a longer list of the strange food additives that can be grouped under “natural flavors,” go to Bruce Bradley’s blog.

— Cole Mellino is an intern with the energy team at the Center for American Progress

SESSIONS: No program in our government has surged out of control more dramatically than food stamps. And nothing is being done about it. [...] Multimillion dollar lottery winners are getting food stamps because the money is considered to be an asset not an income. One of the fast and furious gun buyers –

HOST: But hold on, for ever lottery winner that has food stamps, there’s probably a lot more people who really need them who have them, right?

SESSIONS: Well look, do you think there are four times as many people who need food stamps today as in 2001. That answers itself. [...] We cannot do this. We do not have the money. Congress doesn’t understand that we can’t afford to double the program every three years.

Watch it:

It’s shockingly ignorant at best and dishonest at worst for Sessions — the ranking GOP member of the Senate Budget Committee — to completely ignore the role the economy has played on food stamp usage. The cost of the program has jumped because more Americans are out of work and wages are down, thus more people need assistance. Food prices have also gone up, adding additional costs. But the cost of the program will come down on its own as the economy recovers and more people can afford to feed themselves.

In fact, the food stamp program has been critical for reducing poverty and pumping money into local economies during the down economy, so cutting it now would not only take food out of peoples’ mouths, but could slow down the recovery. No one is trying to “double the program every three years” as Sessions claims. (Currently, nearly one in five Alabamians is on Food Stamps.)

And while the senator suggests the program has grown due to fraud, in fact, errors in the food stamp program — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) –are currently at an all-time low, accounting for less than three percent of the program’s cost. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

To ensure that benefits are provided only to eligible households and in the proper amounts, SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program and, in recent years, has achieved its lowest error rates on record. In fiscal year 2009, even as caseloads were rising, states set new record lows for error rates. The net loss due to errors equaled only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009. There is no evidence that program errors are driving up SNAP spending.

It’s worth noting that while Sessions claims the country can’t afford to feed the hungry, he has fought to preserve the Bush tax cuts for wealthy, subsides for big oil companies, and demanded new tax cuts for corporations, all of which also contribute to the deficit.

In response to sharp questioning from the moderators and his fellow contenders about the effects of his plan, which would raise taxes on common food items to pay for a massive corporate tax cut, Cain seemed to have settled on a simple solution: the poor should just eat used food and buy used goods.

Asked to “explain why under your plan all Americans should be paying more for milk, for a loaf of bread, and beer?” Cain noted that under his plan “there is no tax on used goods.” Cain repeated this “used goods” suggestion in two interviews after the debate, insisting that his plan is not regressive. Instead, he explained, the new tax structure would give families the “flexibility to decide on how much they want to spend it on new goods [and] how much they want to spend it on used goods.”

Watch it:

In a Bloomberg interview, Cain claimed that under 999, “prices don’t go up” because “consumers have the option to stretch their dollar because of buying used goods instead of new.” Cain failed to explain how this solution would apply to food, which families might have difficulty buying “used” unless they rummage through garbage. Clearly he considers relying almost entirely on secondhand items for everyday life a perfectly reasonable idea for poor families.

As a former CEO of a pizza company, Cain should know that a hike in taxes on food products will be a heavy blow for the millions of families who are already having a hard time making ends meet. Thirty-one states charge no sales tax on food, and others tax food at a lower rate than other goods or provide rebates for lower-income families to offset the tax. Only two states, Mississippi and Alabama, charge full sales tax on food.

As ThinkProgress has explained, 999 would slash taxes on the wealthy, drive up deficits to their highest levels since World War II, and force low-income Americans to pay nine times their current tax rate.

The Good Wife is all about image, innocence, and blaming the victim as half of Lockhart/Gardner, including Will and Alicia, are stuck in a hotel for a court-ordered mediation—with the defense lawyers are led by Will’s ex, Celeste. The show gets into issues of regulation and patent law as Lockhart/Gardner negotiate on behalf of a woman disabled by pain caused by the malfunction of an unapproved medical device of her doctor’s own invention. He didn’t tell her the device had not been FDA approved, and the patient thought he was using her as a test subject without her consent. Celeste first tries to blame the victim by claiming that the problem would have been recognized before permanent damage was done if the patient hadn’t been overmedicating, but when that fails, Celeste turns to a defense that centers on the device’s regulatory status. She claims that the device is a minor modification of an existing device, and therefore doesn’t need to be approved by the FDA, but Kalinda finds a patent application made in which the doctor says his device is original work, not a modification. In this case, regulation and governmental oversight of medical technology is presented as an unqualified good.

Lockhart/Gardner win this case on the facts – the mediator says as much – but the techniques they use to get there offer some insight into what the firm, and especially Will, will and won’t do to win. He will neither sleep with Celeste nor bet the outcome of the case on a card game with her – he insists he’s grown up – but he will use that game to figure out what the defense is willing to pay. And when he realizes that Celeste plans to play Alicia by making her jealous of Celeste’s past with Will, Will and Alicia gleefully use this supposed jealousy to play upon the mediator’s sympathies. After two seasons of Alicia’s public stoicism in the face of Peter’s infidelities, it was delightful to watch her play-act storming out of a room in a jealous huff. The mediator knows he’s been played, but he seems to admire Lockhart/Gardner for it, rather than hold it against them, and says he’d hire them himself if he needed representation. Once again, virtually everyone in the world of this show expects everyone else to be operating in a moral gray area, and it’s refreshing that the show doesn’t waste time on people getting unrealistically outraged about these things.

While Will and Alicia are stuck in mediation, Eli takes on the case of the Wisconsin State Dairy Guild, whose cheese is implicated in a listeriosis outbreak in a Chicago elementary school. Eli makes the Guild hire Lockhart/Gardner as temporary counsel so that they can speak under attorney/client privilege, but he gets more than he bargained for when Diane insists on actually getting involved in the case. Eli, exasperated, tells her that she was just supposed to be “window dressing,” which he should realize is not something you ever say to a woman like Diane Lockhart, who has given up so much in order to get into her current position of power and to pave the way for other women to follow. Her legal advice contradicts Eli’s PR advice, and since one of the defining characteristics of this world is that Eli always sees what others can’t, the language Diane tells the cheese company’s CEO to use comes across just as badly in the press as Eli says it will. And the CEO does his own version of blaming the victim by repeatedly asking what else the ill children might have eaten.

Eli and Kalinda finally met and realized they were kindred spirits last week, but this week, the fundamental difference between them becomes obvious: Kalinda deals in facts, while Eli uses facts as tools to affect the higher truth of image and perception. When Kalinda’s investigation shows that the cheese company’s culpability is far from clear, Eli is frustrated, and explains that it’s not that he wants their client to be guilty – it’s that he wants it to be over so he can pick up the pieces, fix things, and move on. And when Kalinda goes to Cary for information on the mediation case, he finally calls her on the way she uses people’s feelings for her to further her investigations. Cary sees through Kalinda’s manipulation of others’ feelings, but he has obviously bought into her illusion of having no feelings herself. That one is going to really blow up in her face one of these days.

A plot strand involving a reporter serves as this week’s reminder that the disparate cases on this show take place within the same world. The reporter has a possible leak that will affect the mediation case, but she doesn’t really care about that and uses it as leverage to make Will to leak to her about Eli and the cheese case. In return, she tells Will that the investigation leak is actually not from the FDA, but rather the State’s Attorney’s office – they’re siding with the doctor rather than prosecuting him for fraud. There’s never any overt suggestion that Peter himself is behind this, or is doing it for personal reasons rather than political, but the possibility lingers, as it must any time Lockhart/Gardner and the State’s Attorney’s office go up against each other.

Back at home, Alicia’s brother Owen is babysitting while she’s stuck in mediation, and he does his own version of blaming the victim – though not in a wholly disapproving way – when he assumes that Alicia finally left Peter because she was sleeping with Will. Alicia, interestingly, doesn’t correct him, and it’s Zach who eventually mentions that the actual reason for the split was another affair that Peter had. Image and innocence are again juxtaposed as Owen calls Alicia “the most prudish wanton woman I know.” Meanwhile, Jackie, never the biggest fan of Owen, shows up at the house looking suspicious just as he happens to have his boyfriend over – what’s she up to, and how much does she know about the state of Peter and Alicia’s marriage? At the end of the episode, Alicia assures Owen that she doesn’t love Will. Do we believe her, or is she falling into Will and Kalinda’s trap of repressing her feelings by insisting that they don’t exist at all?

Kate Linnea Welsh is a New Hampshire-based writer and taxonomist. (No, that doesn’t involve dead animals.) She’s a senior editor at TheTelevixen.com, on staff at Vampire-Diaries.net, and writes about other TV shows, books, and more at her blog (http://katelinnea.blogspot.com). She’d love to talk to you on Twitter: @katelinnea

Inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration are searching fields in Colorado’s Rocky Ford region for clues as to how cantaloupes grown there this summer caused at least 100 illnesses and 18 deaths. But if a new law had been in place, they might have been there before the outbreak. [...]

Under the current FDA food-inspection system, facilities are inspected fitfully—if at all. In fiscal 2010, the FDA inspected about 15% of U.S. food production facilities, about 0.1% of foreign import facilities and essentially no farms. Farms such as Jensen Farms, which grew the cantaloupes linked to the deadly outbreak of listeria, don’t get inspected unless contamination is suspected.

Now, the FDA is writing a set of rules that will require farms and food facilities to identify hazards over the next two years, with the goal of preventing disease outbreaks in the first place. The rules will be based on scientific research and the outcomes of investigations, the FDA says. For example, now that the agency has learned that listeria can appear in fruit, it is expected to craft a rule requiring farms to minimize the risk of that occurring.

The law was the biggest upgrade of the nation’s food safety regime in decades, but Republicans fought its passage, calling it a “government takeover” of food. And even after Obama signed it, House Republicans threatened to defund the law through the appropriations process. They say the law is just another burdensome government regulation and that the food industry does a good enough job policing itself. The tainted melon outbreak, alongside other outbreaks of contaminated food, shows that’s clearly not true.

And now Iowa joins the list, where a pregnant woman had a miscarriage after contracting listerosis. The Iowa Department of Public Health said the woman, who has since recovered, “had been infected with a strain of listeria monocytogenes that matched the strain detected” in the tainted cantaloupes. According to the CDC, pregnant women are “are about 20 times” more susceptible to listeria and, as evidenced by this woman, “the complications can be quite serious”:

According to the CDC, pregnant women are about 20 times more likely than other healthy adults to get the bacterial infection, and roughly 17 percent of listeriosis cases occur during pregnancy.

“Pregnant women are much more susceptible to having symptoms and becoming severely ill from listeria,” Quinlisk said. “Once they have the infection, the complications can be quite serious.”

The deadly nature of food outbreaks should underscore the necessity for food safety regulations. Indeed, a federal food inspector in California recently prevented a new listeria outbreak in lettuce thanks to an FDA research program. However, House Republicans are blindly waging war on the very same food safety regulations that help prevent such tragedies. This summer, House Republicans slashed $87 million from the Food and Drug Administration and $35 million from the USDA’s food safety and inspection service, arguing that the food industry “self-polices.” GOP presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) railed against regulations on food supply as “overkill” that prevents job creation.

Even now, Republicans continue to block the necessary funds to implement President Obama’s landmark law that provides first significant upgrade to the nation’s food safety system since 1938. This kind of negligence will only result in greater tragedy. As the Department of Health and Human Services notes, one out of six Americans suffers from foodborne illness every year and 3,000 people die from such illnesses each year.

If Republicans want to continue calling itself the “party of life,” their first step should be to stop what they’re doing, and actually work to ensure that Americans — born and unborn — won’t die from what they eat.