Good Sunday Morning to everyone.  We are expecting sun again and temperatures above 50 today (and for the next couple of days.)  So today we start cleaning up the patio and getting our containers ready to become gardens in a couple of months.  I got the seed started for the tomatoes, peppers, asparagus beans, sugar peas, fairy eggplant, and sweet peas yesterday.  It is amazing how projects just seem to grow.  Last fall we found one of the large storage tubs on sale for $10 and bought it thinking it would do very nicely for the tomatoes which need something much larger than the largest pots we have.  That is all we really thought about at that time.  Then I retrieved another large bin (slightly smaller than the one we bought.)  Suddenly we had room for peppers also and the beginnings of a container garden as opposed to simply a large tub with tomatoes.  During spring cleaning we found an old litter box, a discarded fish tank, a tub from when we bought a particular brand of cat litter--all waiting to be turned into gardens.  I haven't even begun to think about the pots of which we have a dozen--give or take.

Well, the mainstream media has finally brought up the issue of food safety--in a completely innocuous manner with little real information and none about the various pending legislation.  The ABC evening news had, MAYBE, a minute on it with a sound bite from the President citing the urgency of the issue.  This morning, on my way to my e-mail, I saw this at MSNBC.  So the Administration has banned the slaughter, for human consumption, of 'downer' cows.  My question is simply--why couldn't the present meat inspection laws have done the trick?  The real problem with our interstate trade in foods is that the FDA has been underfunded and understaffed.  The previous administration was pathologically averse to any kind of limits on any industry and failed to enforce what laws they couldn't remove.

Archcrone at The Crone Speaks has an acerbic but right on assessment of some of the news this week--including the 'pork' in the continuing budget passed this week and signed by the President who promised to examine budgets 'line by line' and veto any pork he saw.  She also makes a very cogent comment on the matter of the failure of government entities, at all levels, to faithfully regulate business and industry.  Governments, at all levels, have eliminated needed regulations and failed to enforce those regulations that remained.  We should remember that the Peanut Corporation plants, which were the source of the salmonella outbreak, should have been inspected by the health departments of two states (Georgia and Texas) either escaped inspection or were not subjected to rigorous follow-ups.  Further, both states' agencies relied on the company to honestly report the results of self-administered bacteriological tests.  What was Reagan's famous quip about dealing with the Soviets?  'Trust, but verify.'  Perhaps it should be applied closer to home.