JAYNE MANSFIELD AND THE MANSFIELD BAR

Are you really going to eat that vanilla ice cream? Beaver Anal Glands = Natural flavoring? 2SEP13

I've never been a big ice cream eater so I have probably have consumed less beaver ass gland than most, but I am still grossed out!

Or, Regulation = Freer Markets
For years, various food companies have been using "castoreum" to flavor ice cream and other foods because of its rich, sensuous, vanilla-like flavor. The problem? Castoreum is a fancy word for a compound extracted from the crushed anal glands of beavers. Not only is this stuff disgusting and inhumane, it's kept totally secret. Under FDA rules, companies don't need to include castoreum on the ingredients list -- they can just call it "natural flavoring."
Technically speaking, beaver ass glands are natural, and beaver ass gland flavor could technically be described as a natural flavor. What's more natural than beavers? Let's see...

So, who built this? How could regulation make a market freer?
Here are the competing worldviews:
A company uses a legal but obscure and disgusting natural flavor to increase profits vs. customers deserve to know when they're eating bizarre products.
With less regulation, you wouldn't even have a label on that ice cream, let alone know its nutritional value or main ingredients. With more regulation, you would know that you were eating beaver ass gland ice cream.
If you are a company, I can see why less regulation looks attractive: the fewer unflattering facts about your product you are forced to expose so that consumers can make educated purchasing decisions, the more weird and potentially toxic shit you can put in our ice cream in the name of profit. And of course, regulations exposing your shortcuts and money saving ingredients make actual competition take place in the market. If we know that Yum-yum ice cream is cheaper because it is full of rat feces and beaver ass glands, it will suffer in the marketplace, whereas if ALL we know is that Yum-yum ice cream is cheaper, it would prosper in the marketplace despite its ingredients.
Yum-yum ice cream company, though, is in business for one purpose only - to make money. If it is incorporated, than it answers to the shareholders and MUST make money for them. It is not nor should it be Yum-yum's job to make beaver ass gland-free ice cream, unless the market demands it and it delivers a return on investment for Yum-yum's shareholders. That is the role of the market!
In order for the market to function, though, consumers need to be rational. This is the current (epoch's) economic gospel. Economic theory as we are all taught it says that:
1. People act with full information
2. People have known preferences
3. People choose the best option available
Think about beaver ass gland ice cream for a moment, though. If it isn't disclosed on the label, how can you act with full information? If you don't know that "natural flavoring" or "castoreum" mean "crushed beaver ass gland," can your preferences even truly be known to yourself? If you have no way to know which brand of ice cream contains beaver ass glands, how can you choose the best option available? This means that the free market is broken, because, as long as you can't be a rational consumer, the market can't behave rationally.
Companies operating in a competitive market will, for profit-driven reasons, design their advertising, products, contracts and pricing structures in order to induce as well as in response to consumer irrationality, resulting in both market efficiency losses and financial and other harms to consumers. Sometimes competition or other market forces compel companies to educate consumers and reduce irrationality, like the Susan G. Komen fiasco, but these mistake-correction forces are limited in frequency and scope within the market. The existence of skewed demand, generated by the irrational consumers, creates a market failure – a behavioral market failure. Basic consumer labeling regulations, deliberately designed for creating rational consumers, is the fix.
That would be regulation creating a freer, fairer, and more competitive market. We, i.e. society, build that!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/02/1127071/-Natural-flavoring

Castoreum

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For the fungus genus, see Castoreum (fungus).

Castoreum

Castoreum /kæsˈtɔriəm/ is the exudate from the castor sacs of the mature North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) and the European Beaver (Castor fiber). Within the zoological realm, castoreum is the yellowish secretion of the castor sac which is, in combination with the beaver's urine, used during scent marking of territory.^[1][2] Both male and female beavers possess a pair of castor sacs and a pair of anal glands located in two cavities under the skin between the pelvis and the base of the tail.^[3] The castor sacs are not true glands (endocrine or exocrine) on a cellular level, hence references to these structures as preputial glands or castor glands are misnomers.^[4] Castor sacs are a type of scent gland.
Today, it is used as a tincture in some perfumes^[5] and as a food additive.

Food use

In the United States, castoreum is considered to be a GRAS food additive by the Food and Drug Administration.^[10] It is often referenced simply as a "natural flavoring" in products' lists of ingredients. While it is mainly used in both foods and beverages as part of a substitute vanilla flavour,^[11] it is less commonly used as a part of a raspberry or strawberry flavoring.^[12] The annual industry consumption is very low, around 300 pounds,^[13] whereas vanillin is over 2.6 million pounds annually.^[14]
Castoreum has been traditionally used in Scandinavia for flavoring snaps commonly referred to as "Bäverhojt".^{[15]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoreum} 

Romney Has Public and Private Morality Upside Down 15MAI12

mitt romney does have morality upside down, here is the problem with his lack of business morality and his obsession with private morality explained by Robert Reich on HuffPost.....
Mitt Romney's reaction to J.P. Morgan Chase's mounting losses from reckless trades is "the market will take care of it." His spokesman says "no taxpayer money was at risk" so we don't need more financial regulation. Romney has even promised to repeal Dodd-Frank if he's elected president.
Yet at the same time, Romney has come out strongly against same-sex marriage. He's also against abortion. He has no problem with government intruding on the most intimate of decisions a person makes.
He's got private and public morality upside down. He doesn't want to regulate where regulation is necessary -- at the highest reaches of the economy, where public immorality has cost us dearly, and will cost even more unless boardroom behavior is constrained. Yet he wants to regulate where regulation is least appropriate -- at the level of the individual, in bedrooms and other intimate spaces, where private morality should govern.
This is a dangerous confusion. It should be a matter of personal choice whom to marry and when to have children. But it is undoubtedly a matter of public choice whether big banks should be allowed to take the kind of risky bets that plunged the economy into the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and whether people with great wealth and should be able to buy our democracy with huge campaign contributions.
Please see the attached video and pass it on.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/romney-same-sex-marriage-_b_1519480.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications

GOP Defends Bishops Over Grant For Sex Trafficking Victims 1DEZ11

republican and tea-bagger politicians continue their propaganda war against the Obama administration with this sham hearing where they claim concern for the health and welfare of sex trafficking victims while at the same time legislating cuts to vital social safety net programs that offer support for the very lives they claim to value, cuts the teachings of Jesus Christ do not support (see Matthew 25, the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount). Their platform of smaller, less intrusive government, a government with less regulation, doesn't seem to apply to women, suggesting these men doubt women have the intelligence and morals to make the right decisions concerning their own lives while arguing for less regulation for the male dominated banking-financial industry cabal, because these men have the intelligence and morals to make the right decisions for our economy.....Maybe it's just me, but their arguments concerning both issues scream hypocrisy.....
House lawmakers sparred bitterly on Thursday over the Obama administration's decision to deny a group of Catholic bishops a lucrative grant because they refused to refer sex trafficking victims to a full range of reproductive services. Republicans accused the administration of being overtly anti-Catholic and promoting abortion, while Democrats said the GOP had scheduled the hearing with the sole purpose of "smearing" President Obama.
The Department of Health and Human Services recently decided not to renew a $19 million, five-year contract with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to help sex trafficking victims because the group does not refer survivors to abortion or contraception services. The three groups who received the grant instead of the bishops -- Tapestri of Atlanta, Heartland Human Care Services of Chicago and the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants of Washington -- all agreed to provide victims "the full range of reproductive services" recommended by the health department.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on Thursday to interrogate the health department over its decision on this one grant. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said the fact that the bishops were qualified in every other way to help sex trafficking victims proved that the administration was basing its decision entirely on a pro-abortion, anti-Catholic bias.
"The Obama administration's bias against Catholics is an affront to religious freedom and a threat to all people," he said at the hearing. "The Catholic organization was discriminated against solely because it fundamentally respects the innate value and dignity of an unborn child and refuses to be complicit in his or her violent death."
George Sheldon, Acting Assistant Secretary for Children and Families under HHS, told the committee that many sex trafficking victims who become pregnant following multiple traumatic rapes deserve to be at least offered the option of ending that pregnancy and procuring contraception for the future. He said that HHS clearly told all groups competing for the grant that "strong preference" would be given to those organizations that would refer victims to doctors who can provide STI treatment, family planning services and "the full range of legally permissible gynecological and obstetric care."
According to HHS, a team of reviewers looked at all the applications and determined the strengths and weaknesses of each. The USCCB initially received a higher score than the others because it had carried out its previous contract successfully and had significant experience helping sex trafficking victims. Yet it lost the contract because it failed to provide details in its application as to what reproductive health alternatives it would provide for pregnant sex trafficking victims.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, asked Sheldon how the bishops could receive a higher rating than other groups and still be denied the contract. Sheldon tried to answer the question, but Issa interrupted him angrily.
"You did not tell them that they could be just a shitpot better and still not get the award," he shouted. "That has a chilling effect."
Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) pointed out that the Obama administration had awarded Catholic groups a number of other lucrative federal contracts this year and had granted them more money over the past three years than the Bush Administration did in the three previous years. He said that this should be proof enough that Obama is not biased against Catholics, and that Republicans were only making a big deal out of this particular grant to make the president look bad.
“The title of today’s hearing frames Health and Human Services as being in conflict with the Catholic church," he said. "The underlying argument is whether a victim is going to have their health care services limited or not."
"I hope the gentleman did not mean to say that the Chair is being disingenuous or outright lying about the purpose of this meeting," Issa snapped back.
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who is Catholic, tried to lay the issue of Obama's alleged religious discrimination to rest, but slipped in a dig to Issa in the process.
"I am alarmed when people use hyperbolic rhetoric, which might suggest to some, certainly not me, that actually the purpose of the hearing … is to try to smear the Obama administration with a label that, if true, would be very disturbing," he said. "As a Catholic, I would like to believe that it's not true. In fact, there's plenty of common-faith evidence that it's not."

Rich People Create Jobs! And five other myths that must die for our economy to live. from MOTHER JONES

HERE is an analysis of the oft repeated myth "rich people create jobs" from Mother Jones. If this is true, as the repiglicans and tea-baggers claim, with the massive tax cuts the rich and corporations have continued to receive throughout this recession one has to ask how many jobs have been created in the U.S. as a result of these tax brakes?
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character is forced to relive a single day over and over and over—waking up to the same song every morning, meeting the same people, having the same conversations—until, after thousands of repetitions, he finally realizes what a shmo he's been his entire life. With that epiphany, the calendar starts to flip forward again. His life reboots, and he once again gets to hear new songs, meet new people, and have entirely new conversations.

Like the charts in this story? Get more info on them or check out these 12 charts exposing the dirty secrets of the jobless recovery. Plus: Why are Republicans determined to snuff the recovery?

When it comes to the economy, we're stuck in our own version of Groundhog Day—and this one doesn't seem to be coming to an end. America is in a deep and persistent slump, and unemployment is mired at more than 9 percent. Yet when you turn on the TV, all you hear are the same manufactured sound bites delivered in the same apocalyptic tones from the same pack of talking heads—over and over and over. Groundhog Day has turned into the eighth circle of hell.
Unfortunately, these zombie talking points aren't just wrong; they're dangerous. If we're ever going to revive the economy, we've got to tackle them head on. Here are six of the worst.

Myth #1: The stimulus failed.

For the first four years of his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt tackled the Great Depression with inflation, easy monetary policy, and government spending. But in 1937, FDR's advisers persuaded him to reverse gears. After all, interest rates had been close to zero for years, commodity prices were climbing, and fear of inflation was on the rise.

Bust or Boost?

What happened next is now called the "Mistake of 1937" (PDF). Federal spending was cut and monetary policy was tightened up, with disastrous results: GDP immediately began to plummet, and industrial production fell by a third. Within a year everyone had had enough. In 1938 the austerity program was abandoned, and the economy started to grow again.
The truth is that stimulus worked in 1933 and it worked in 2009. So why is our economy still in such bad shape? For one, partly due to political considerations and partly because it was rushed through Congress, the 2009 stimulus wasn't as well designed as it could have been. It was also sold badly. If the bill passed, administration economists predicted, unemployment would peak at 8 percent and then start declining (PDF). But the recession was far worse than the White House originally thought. Unemployment peaked in the double digits, and that's made the stimulus a fat target for Republican critics ever since.
But as awkward as it is to argue that things would have been worse without the stimulus—"Not as bad as it could have been!" isn't a winning slogan—well, the truth is that things would have been a lot worse without the stimulus. Everyone from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (PDF) to private-sector forecasting firms have concluded that it increased economic growth, reduced unemployment, and put millions of people back to work. It just wasn't big enough, or long-lasting enough. Unfortunately, this has given conservatives an opening to demand tighter money and lower spending—exactly the same mistake we made in 1937.

Myth #2: The deficit is our biggest problem right now.

If your credit card company offered you $30,000 interest-free to buy a car, would you take the deal? Sure you would. It's a three-way win: You replace your clunker, the auto industry keeps its assembly lines humming, and the credit card company is happy to have made a safe loan, even at no interest. Apparently, they think you're a pretty good credit risk.

The Bush Effect

This is pretty much the situation the US government is in now. If our national debt were really at dire and unsustainable levels, as conservative economists and Republican leaders have taken to arguing, nervous investors would be driving up interest rates on federal borrowing. But just the opposite has happened: As I'm writing this, 10-year real treasury yields are at 0.00 percent. The seven-year rate is actually negative. Apparently, the financial markets think we're a pretty good credit risk.
It's true that the United States needs to address its long-term deficit problem—a problem almost entirely due to Medicare and other health care expenditures. (Domestic, defense, and Social Security spending have actually decreased as a percentage of GDP over the past 40 years, and there's no reason to think that's about to change.) But that's in the long term. Right now, our problem is a sluggish economy and too many people out of work. The real answer to future deficits is to spend money now to get the economy growing again.
America's infrastructure is crumbling, there are people who could be put to work fixing it, and banks are practically begging us to take their money. A trillion dollars in infrastructure spending would be good for our economy today, good for economic growth tomorrow, and thanks to those low interest rates (and the increased revenue that would come from growth), it wouldn't even increase our debt much. As they say, only an idiot turns down free money.

Only an Idiot Turns Down Free Money

Myth #3: Lower taxes are the best way to grow the economy.

There's no greater orthodoxy in the Republican Party than unconditional fealty to tax cuts. In a recent GOP debate, when the candidates were asked whether they'd walk away from a deficit deal that included just $1 in tax increases for every $10 in spending cuts, every single hand shot up.
Taxes have been the third rail of American politics ever since the California tax revolt of 1978. Even Democrats are nervous about touching them: President Obama has famously called for letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire, but he's always careful to make it clear that he wouldn't change rates for anyone earning less than $250,000 per year. In other words, he'd repeal less than a quarter of the Bush tax cuts.
This fear is easy to understand. No one likes paying higher taxes. But do lower taxes actually spur economic growth? Bruce Bartlett, an economist in the Reagan administration, has compared tax rates in various rich countries in 1979 to each country's growth rate since then. His conclusion? There's virtually no correlation.
Recent US history backs this up too. Bill Clinton raised tax rates in 1993, and Republicans insisted it would cripple the economy. Instead, the economy boomed. In 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush lowered taxes and Republicans insisted the economy would flourish. Instead, we got the weakest expansion of the past century. Republicans are simply wrong about taxes: Within reason, high tax rates don't hinder growth, and low tax rates don't stimulate it.
But don't high taxes reduce the incentive for people to work? Actually, no: For ordinary wage earners, participation in the job force and total hours worked barely respond to taxes at all. (According to tax specialists Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija, this is "a rare example of a question on which there is a broad consensus among economists.") The same is true for rich people. As a trio of prominent economists concluded last year after reviewing the literature, "there is no compelling evidence to date of real economic responses to tax rates" (PDF). Even capital gains rates have virtually no impact: During the past few decades, they've bounced up and down from 40 percent to their post-Depression low of 15 percent. The effect on business investment is nil.

If a Tax Rate Falls...

Will the Economy Notice?

Next Page: Myth #4: Regulatory uncertainty is clogging the economy…

#4: Regulatory uncertainty is clogging the economy.

Are American businesses paralyzed by fear of a tidal wave of new regulations? When McClatchy reporter Kevin Hall went out and asked small-business owners about this, he got a clear answer. "Absolutely, positively not," said one. "Government regulations are not choking our business," said another. In its most recent quarterly survey (PDF) of small-business trends, the National Federation of Independent Business reports that sales—i.e., lack of demand—is the No. 1 concern, beating out taxes, regulations, inflation, and everything else.

The Bottom Line Is the Bottom Line

In any case, regardless of what the Wall Street Journal editorial page says, the Obama administration has hardly been a whirlwind of regulatory activity. Its health care reform will have very little effect on either small businesses (which are exempt) or large businesses (which mostly offer health plans already) and only a modest effect on medium-size businesses (PDF). Its financial reform bill affects only the financial sector. Its proposed new air-quality regulations will mostly affect old coal-fired electrical plants that would have shut down anyway (PDF).
Dumb and outdated regulations are no friends to the economy—and the Obama administration has undertaken a regulatory review that's projected to save an estimated $10 billion during the next five years. But as welcome as that is, our economy's biggest problem right now isn't regulatory uncertainty. It's economic uncertainty.

Myth #5: Obama is debasing the dollar.

In one of the most infamous moments of his young candidacy, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry decided to tee off on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last summer. "If this guy prints more money between now and the election," he told an enthusiastic audience in Cedar Rapids, "I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."
Bernanke's sin? Pumping money into the banking system after the collapse of 2008. Although this is widely credited with helping prevent a second Great Depression, tea partiers and gold bugs are convinced that Bernanke's actions have debased the dollar. There are two problems with that claim. First, it's not true. Second, we'd be better off if it were.
First things first: Has the dollar lost value under Bernanke and Obama? No. The usual measure for the strength of the dollar is called "trade-weighted value." In July 2008, just before the financial crisis erupted in earnest, the greenback's value stood at 95.4. As I'm writing this in mid-September, it has gone up, then down, and is currently sitting at 96.1. Taking a longer view, the dollar lost value under Reagan and Bush I, gained value under Clinton, lost value under Bush II, and has mostly stayed steady under Obama. There's just no basis to the claim that Obama and Bernanke have debased the currency.
And that's unfortunate. As economist Dean Baker is fond of pointing out, if we want to get our national savings rate up and our long-term budget deficit down, there's only one way to do it: by fixing our massive trade deficit. We have to import less and export more, and one way to make that happen is with a weaker dollar. A weaker dollar makes foreign goods more expensive, so we'll buy less of them, and makes American goods cheaper, so others will buy more of them.
The truth is that we'd be better off if we ditched the loaded "strong/weak" terminology and just talked about an "export dollar" (weak) and an "import dollar" (strong). Sometimes one is good, and sometimes the other is. The Chinese, for example, have done well for decades with an export yuan. Likewise, an export dollar would be our friend right now.

Bad News for Tourists...

Is a Holiday for Manufacturers

Myth #6: If you unshackle the rich, they'll rev up the economy.

Think of this as the supermyth—the one underlying so many other fallacies. For decades, America's economic policies have been based on the notion that catering to corporations and the wealthy is the way to stimulate the economy. Republicans routinely insist that we need to bail them out, lower their taxes, allow them to repatriate hundreds of billions in overseas profits, and free them from annoying government meddling. If we don't, the "job creators" will stay in a funk, and the economy will stay in a rut.
But here's a pesky fact neither corporate America nor the GOP establishment is trumpeting: After-tax corporate profits are currently at an all-time high. The problem businesses face isn't lack of cash but rather a lack of confidence that consumer demand will pick up in the future. So they're not expanding or hiring at the rate they should be.
Rich people don't create jobs when we hand them big windfalls. They create jobs when the economy is growing and they have customers for their businesses. And the key to solving that problem, at least during a deep economic slump like the one we're in now, is to focus like a laser on more stimulus, easier money, higher inflation, and a weaker currency. Unless we want to relive 1937 over and over and over again. As Bill Murray said, "Anything different is good."

Wall Street's Gain...

Main Street's Pain

Click here for more information on the charts that appear in this story.