Page-gate has sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room: We're all absolutely breathless to see where this all goes...
It's not really registering that the widespread spinach food poisoning was caused in part by the GOP!
That's right... it's Spinach Gate... according to no less than the Sacramento Bee, who front-paged this story on Sunday.
More on the flip...
I got wind of this via a brilliant blog called
Transparent Grid:
Petty GOP Politics Harms Food Safety
This was sent to me by a reader from Sunday's Sacramento Bee. It starkly demonstrates the pettiness of the party with too much power and that if Republican Congressman John Doolittle's satements are taken at face value, the war in Iraq is costing us lives back home...
He's right. This spinach killed one person, caused renal failure in dozens of others -- and sickened a couple of hundred people.
All because of Republican John Doolittle.
Here's a bit of the Sacramento Bee article:
DECISION TO QUASH FOOD LAB BLASTED
By Chris Bowman - Bee Staff Writer
Rep. John Doolittle played a key role in killing federal funding to create a team of food safety experts at UC Davis that the university said would have sped the response to the recent nationwide E. coli outbreak.
The outbreak, traced to California-grown spinach, has sickened at least 187 people, killing one and causing kidney failure in 29 others across the country.
Doolittle opposed as unnecessary the $1 million in startup funds for a Western Center for Food Safety and Defense included in a $100 billion Agriculture Department spending bill that the Senate approved last September....
As a member of the House Appropriations Committee and a close ally of then House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Doolittle's position on the center's funding was pivotal.
Doolittle, an eight-term lawmaker in a tight Nov. 7 contest with Democratic challenger and former Air Force officer Charlie Brown, has no regrets about his decision against funding the center....
If Doolittle had supported the funding, the food safety center would have been operational by last January and poised to help FDA investigators more swiftly trace the spinach contamination -- potentially limiting the spread of illness and reducing losses to the million-dollar-a-day Salinas Valley spinach harvest, said Jerry Gillespie , who heads a food safety research effort at UC Davis.
"We would have been further along in knowing where to look and having the right people on board to investigate those vulnerable points," Gillespie said.
The center would have been the first of its kind in the West...
There you have it. The Sacramento Bee pulls no punches: There's blood on Doolittle's hands for this.
Let's all help Charlie Brownkeep this in the public eye -- so that we can clean House!