Random Politics & Religion #00

Give me a sword and a shield Mr. Obama I shall fight racism !

Trading in their combat boots and fatigues for high heels and ball gowns, female rebel fighters who normally fight Ukrainian soldiers took Saturday off to take part in a beauty pageant.

The event was organized by self-proclaimed authorities in the rebel-held city of Donetsk on the eve of International Women's Day, which is widely celebrated throughout the former Soviet Union.

Women from three main rebel battalions showed off their dinner dresses before they changed back to fatigues to receive prizes and roses.

Most of the women were local residents who followed their husbands or boyfriends to the front while one was a Russian, from the Russian western city of Bryansk. Some of the women used to work in pre-schools, while others were in private business.

"I'm not used to this," said Nataliya, a contestant in a corseted dress who gave her nom de guerre as "Radist." ''There are heels to wear and then the dress is so revealing. We are soldiers after all."

Last week we brought you the wonderful story of young Mr. CJ Pearson, a brilliant young Georgia boy who gave an eloquent defense of Mayor Rudy Giuliani on YouTube. It was in the wake of Mayor Giuliani’s comments about whether or not President Obama loved our nation, and young Mr. Pearson added his voice to the conversation. The video, which he shared on his Facebook page, went viral in a matter of hours as Americans all over the country enjoyed his perspective on Mayor Giuliani’s thoughts.

The heart of Pearson’s argument – “Today I just want to applaud Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his comments about President Barack Obama. President Obama, you don’t love America. If you really did love America, you would call ISIS what it really is: An assault on Christianity, an assault on America and a downright hate for the American values our country holds. Here in America, we don’t back down to terrorists. We fight them on their own battleground and we annihilate them to the very end.”

Sadly, the fascists who run Facebook apparently don’t appreciate when people offer dissenting views of President Obama’s emotional connection to our nation. Facebook has decided to shut down CJ’s account with no explanation as to the reason for doing so. The timing is suspicious considering the popularity of CJ’s recent post, and while he doesn’t know if Facebook banned him for his anti-Obama post, he does think the whole situation stinks.

“If they are going to stifle free speech and hinder the First Amendment, then I think there should be necessary repercussions about that. I think the point is this: When a person decides to speak up, their voice shouldn’t be hindered because of someone disagreeing.”

Bad form, Facebook. Very bad, indeed.

McDonald's Corp's decision last week to phase out human antibiotics from its U.S. chicken supply will add to costs of production in a tight-margin business that are likely to be borne mostly by poultry companies.

McDonald's, whose top chicken suppliers include giant Tyson Foods Inc, has given its producers two years to eradicate all antibiotics used on humans from barns and hatcheries. It's going to be expensive and may take longer than planned: switching to antibiotic-free chickens could increase on-farm costs by up to 3 percent. Perdue Farms, a supplier with about a third the volume of Tyson, told Reuters it's taken more than a decade and millions of dollars to make such a change.

McDonald's will use its purchasing muscle as the world's largest restaurant chain to avoid passing extra costs on to customers, increasingly lower income as more affluent diners prefer competitors like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc, said analysts including Morningstar's R.J. Hottovy.

Marion Gross, McDonald's senior vice president of North America supply chain management, declined to say how much the company’s costs for chicken could rise. Rather, she told Reuters, the project is "an investment" to meet customer demand.

While veterinary use of antibiotics is legal, controversy has grown over routine feeding of antibiotics that are important to humans to otherwise healthy chicken, cattle and pigs in a bid to stave off disease and help the animals grow more quickly.

The risk is that overuse could spur the creation of so-called superbugs that develop cross-resistance to antibiotics used to treat humans. Reuters found last year that major U.S. poultry firms were administering antibiotics to their flocks on the farm far more pervasively than regulators realized.

The poultry industry maintains there is little evidence that bacteria which do become resistant also infect people. However, more restaurants and retailers are heeding the concerns of consumers, straining meat supplies.

Sandwich chain Chick-fil-A in 2014 gave its producers five years to meet its commitment to go antibiotic-free for chicken. Perdue is a major supplier to Chick-fil-A.

Costco Wholesale Corp., the nation's third-largest retailer that annually sells 80 million rotisserie chickens, told Reuters Thursday it has a "large" appetite for chicken free of these medically-important antibiotics.

The company is aware of the supply difficulties and won't commit to a timeline, said Craig Wilson, vice president of food safety for Costco.

WHO PAYS THE PRICE?

Some of the extra costs of cutting out antibiotics could be borne by franchisees, which could cut labor hours, waste and utility costs to offset higher meat prices.

But most analysts expect McDonald's to push the costs back onto its suppliers, who may not have the market power to resist. The top four U.S. chicken processors control about 53 percent of the domestic market, according to the National Chicken Council.

McDonald's "carries a lot of clout with suppliers," and some of them are dependent on the chain for survival, Hottovy said.

Tyson and Keystone Foods, part of Brazil-based Marfrig Global Foods SA, both told Reuters they have significantly reduced medically-important antibiotic use in their flocks and are positioned to meet McDonald's and other customers' needs. However, neither company would answer specific questions about how such drugs are used on-farm and in hatcheries.

SLOW CHANGES

Perdue, the fourth-largest domestic chicken producer, began removing antibiotics used for growth promotion in 2002 amid consumer questions about what was being put into the animal feed, said Bruce Stewart-Brown, senior vice-president of food safety, quality and live operations.

Now more than 95 percent of the chickens it produces are raised without antibiotics approved for human use, and more than half are raised with no antibiotics of any kind, according to the company.

The transition led to unexpectedly high bird mortality rates, a need for more chicken houses and spending at least $4 million more a year on vaccines than rivals who haven't made the switch, among other things. Birds raised without antibiotics also generally take three to nine days longer to reach their market weight, Stewart-Brown told Reuters -- or as much as 20 percent longer than conventionally raised birds.

McDonald's two-year deadline is "a really fast timeframe to do it right and be predictable to your customers and your supply," Stewart-Brown said.

Birds raised on farms without antibiotics take longer to reach optimal slaughter weight, resulting in higher feed costs and death rates, forcing companies to ramp up with more eggs at the hatcheries, said Tom Elam of FarmEcon, an agricultural consulting company.

"The ones that aren't quite as good with keeping up with their biosecurity, it's going to cause some issues," Elam said. "This change is not free."

The only issue that could make it a "scandal" is if she chooses not to release specific communications to the white house. I doubt she used a private email to communicate with Obama, so I can't see why he'd have any reason to know that she'd used a private email for any official business. the repeated feigned outrage by people with a financial stake in seeing the GOP back in power.

It's apparently a pretty widely used practice, however questionable. The only issue that could make it a "scandal" is if she chooses not to release specific communications to the white house. I doubt she used a private email to communicate with Obama, so I can't see why he'd have any reason to know that she'd used a private email for any official business.

There still is nothing quantifiable about the extent or purpose of her private email use. You're just anticipating it being her line of communications directly to the Benghazi embassy where she got emails about security risks and told them to piss off.

No, she only used her private email, and it's not a widely used practice. She herself fired members of the state department staff because they were doing the same thing. The only political reason to set everything up in your own email server is so that you have total control over what someone else gets to see. C'mon bro, it's the Clintons! We've all played this game before.

BTW politico reports that obama's full of ***as the white house knew about this in august!

We've all played this game before.

Before we get into the whole reading comprehension thing... where do either of these reports say anything about Obama being informed or her ONLY using her personal email? Or, are you just taking the ambiguity of "used" to mean that it was exclusive or substantial?

Oh I see, so he's really not lying when he says 'I knew nothing about her only using her private email to conduct government business' because he only knew she was using her private email to conduct government business?

Blah, blah, blah, e-mails, private, redacted, BENGAZI, God, patriotism, 'murrica, blah, sex with animals, blah, blah, birth certificate, talking points of faux outrage, blah.


The real question is, assuming these waters get navigated, what do we all the husband of the first female president?

Well, aside from "president" in the case of Hillary, as they get to keep the title even after they've left office.

First Gentleman? First Lord? First Sir? First Rooster-in-the-Hen-House?

I like first lord.

and it's not a widely used practice.

Funny, Colin Powell used a non-governmental e-mail, too. Of course, he's brown, so I'm sure you'll have no trouble leaping all over him, too.

Funny, Colin Powell used a non-governmental e-mail, too. Of course, he's brown, so I'm sure you'll have no trouble leaping all over him, too.

No, because the fact that a private email even existed was only revealed by a special committee investigating Benghazi for the 12,000th time and it mentions nowhere in your article that Obama was ever informed that she conduction any official business over a personal email and I can't find anywhere where anyone outside of the neo-con freakout camp says she exclusively used a private email or even that it was a significant amount of her email communications.

You're just using ambiguity to affirm your previously formed opinions, whether they offer any support or not. "She dropped a chip on the ground, I told you she was a communist!"

Funny, Colin Powell used a non-governmental e-mail, too. Of course, he's brown, so I'm sure you'll have no trouble leaping all over him, too.

Funny, Colin Powell used a non-governmental e-mail, too. Of course, he's brown, so I'm sure you'll have no trouble leaping all over him, too.