The recalled wheat gluten used in pet food that has been killing pets is "food grade" meaning it could be used for human consumption.

Del Monte Foods has confirmed that the melamine-tainted wheat gluten used in several of its recalled pet food products was supplied as a "food grade" additive, raising the likelihood that contaminated wheat gluten might have entered the human food supply.

"Yes, it is food grade," Del Monte spokesperson Melissa Murphy-Brown wrote in reply to an e-mail query. Del Monte issued a voluntary recall Saturday for several products under the Gravy Train, Jerky Treats, Pounce, Ol’ Roy, Dollar General and Happy Trails brands.

Since cats are particularly sensitive, they started dying right away.  Humans may be getting poisoned (slow kidney failure), but we may not know yet.

You might think we would notice people getting sick, but it is important to note that here in Washington state kids start dying all the time from e. coli, and when our decent (not great) health system investigates it often turns out the contaminated food comes from some other state that does not have the health surveillance system to notice the pattern of sick kids.  

A study described in today's NYT shows that the structure of a candidate's face alone predicts their chance of election 71% of the time:

What's in That Face? A Candidate's Future

I'm more and more convinced that we are really much closer to our friends the feces throwing monkeys than we care to admit.

Historically I am the first to marshal facts and rational thought when confronting an issue. But it is clear from our irrational war mongering ways that much of our political decision making is based on thinly veiled primitive instincts.

Instead of despairing over my loss of innocence regarding the reality basis of the world, I am hoping we can use this knowledge with our eyes wide open about the way the world actually works.

With only one day of counting left, Republican candidate Rossi has only a 19 vote lead over Democrat Gregoire in the race for Governor.

Link to the updated count

Link to news story

Although I always vote on principle, in this case it may actually come down to my vote.  If the margin is less than 150 votes, by law they must do a hand count of the 2.8 million votes.  That will take a while.....

Peter Jennings is quoted in this Slate article...

Red-State PC: Why you can't call them "the Christian right."

...saying that our man-date delivering red state friends consider "Christian right" and "Conservative Christian" to be slurs (i.e., like "liberal").

Jennings phoned today and said, "It is not editorial policy" at World News Tonight to avoid the phrase "Christian right." He said that in covering religion for ABC News, he'd found that evangelicals "are offended" by the term "Christian right" because "it has become something of a slur."

We should work on keeping the slurs alive, and enhancing them.