Al Gore is a Bigger Potatoe Than Quayle, Father of the Internet Internet my Ass

[threemae]

Inspired by the complaints about the BBQ pit itself, I would like to say that Al Gore is an idiot along with all of the other moronic, farmer-ass kissing politicians who actually supported a throw back to FDR Great Society bullshit like the updated Freedom to Farm bill. If cantaloupe is to cheap for farmers to make a living off of, I can sure as hell guaranty you that the way to solve the problem is not to subsidize farmers to produce more food than we know what to do with! Fuck those moronic liberal headed idiots who think that a farmer should be paid as much as Bill Gates, just because they work harder or that janitors are, "important too, if they did not do it, who would?"

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You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

--Lyndon B. Johnson

[pldennison]

I would be careful, threemae. I can think of at least two liberal Democrats on the SDMB (myself and BigIron) who emphatically do not support farm subsidy programs. Be careful what brush you use and who you paint it with.

[Therealbubba]

Make that three.

[Boris B]

The following link might shed some light on the alleged connection between liberalism and the Freedom to Farm program: http://www.ewg.org/pub/home/reports/FTFWeb/FTFCh1.html

Government usually pays farmers to reduce, not increase, their output of crops.

Great Society was a term coined in the Johnson administration, and I don't know of any agricultural programs that were part of the Great Society.

[tracer]

And I thought "The Great Society" were LBJ's buzzwords, not FDR's.

[neuro-trash grrrl]

May I remind the assembled that farmers, especially big farmers, usually vote Republican? Hmmmm...

[Boris B]

I suppose we urban liberals have pretty much killed this one, but I though this link migh be interesting:
http://news.excite.com/news/pr/99100...bradley-farmer

Right on, grrrl!
And it's the REPUBLICANS that always wail about the poor ol' tobacco farmer, bless his little heart. We wouldn't want to cut into the profit margin of the producers of that particular addictive drug that kills more people than all the illegal ones combined!

No, I'm not a Democrat, either. I distrust both parties. But I've noticed that the alleged liberals believe in conserving our natural resources, whereas so-called conservatives support the welfare-state practice of subsidizing companies to log our National Forests.

I'll take the liberal hypocrisy, thank you.

[threemae]

Yeah, but destroy every legal precident in the book like proving damages just to sue tobacco?

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You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

--Lyndon B. Johnson

I agree. That is going a bit far.

But, here in the tobacco-growing region, you hear people bitch that tobacco is even taxed and that warnings are on cigarette packs.

I am not anti-tobacco. I think all drugs should be legal. But let's tell the truth about them and tax the hell out of 'em.

[tracer]

The California Something-or-other of Health recently started airing TV advertisements that practically blamed second-hand smoke for everything from bronchitis to SIDS.

Since the established links between second-hand smoke and any serious ailments are weak at best and non-existent at worst, I'm thinking the tobacco companies should launch a little class-action suit of their own against this California organization. What this alleged "health" organization is doing is little different from running TV ads claiming that whole milk causes lung cancer.

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Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

[Boris B]

tracer
What is your criticism of: http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/etsfs.html
?

[threemae]

The EPA report was rather ambiguous, rather than showing the percent of people who got lung cancer who were and were not exposed to ETS, they simply showed the result or their guesses as to the number of lung cancer cases caused by ETS. The EPA also used terms such as statistically significant, what does that mean, a SD or a CI? I also doubt the validity of suits against tobacco firms if people exposed to ETS do not have a cancer rate increase of bellow 100% because then the majority of those cases would be naturally occurring.

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You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.

--Lyndon B. Johnson

[Boris B]

Well, I don't think second-smoke victims' lawsuits against the tobacco industry are valid either. Suits against smokers might be valid, and they would be incredibly satisfying (did I mention cigarette smoke gives me nosebleeds? Not free-flowing blood either ... blood that seems to start out coagulated, mixed with pus and mucus). But I don't know of any and most smokers wouldn't be worth suing, especially given the enormous cost of proving that a given case of throat cancer or whatever came from a given smoker.

In any case I give the EPA report quite a bit more credence than tracer and threemae.

[tracer]

I'm surprised the EPA had the gall to call that article a "fact sheet". A carefully-selected-fact sheet would be more like it.

F'rinstance, one line in the report reads as follows:

ETS exposure increases the risk of lower respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis and pneumonia. EPA estimates that between 150,000 and 300,000 of these cases annually in infants and young children up to 18 months of age are attributable to exposure to ETS. Of these, between 7,500 and 15,000 will result in hospitalization.

Ignore for the moment that they don't mention how they arrived at these figures. What caught my attention was that they give no non-ETS figures to compare them to! Okay, maybe 150-300 thousand upper respiratory infections in babies per year are attributable to second-hand smoke -- but how many babies normally get upper respiratory infections? Is 300,000 a lot? Is it even statistically significant? We can't tell given the information in this "fact sheet"!

The top paragraph of this report -- the only one that most people are going to read -- says:

The report concludes that exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) -- commonly known as secondhand smoke -- is responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths each year in nonsmoking adults and impairs the respiratory health of hundreds of thousands of children.

Again, there are no percentages or per-capita figures to compare this to. But worse, the last line screams of political rhetoric. "Won't somebody please think of the children!!" it bellows. "If you don't give us at the EPA the power and the money to establish anti-smoking policy, it would mean you really hate children! You don't hate your own children, do you?!"

BTW, Boris, I'm sorry if ETS gives you big honkin' nosebleeds. But if a few people bruise easily, everybody else shouldn't be required to pad all the corners.

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Quick-N-Dirty Aviation: Trading altitude for airspeed since 1992.

[Boris B]

tracer

But if a few people bruise easily, everybody else shouldn't be required to pad all the corners.

If I asked nicely, do you think they would quit beating on me using objects with unpadded corners?