The FDA Is Holding Thousands Of Pounds Of Mimolette Cheese Captive

From Video Description:

With immigration reform in the news, here’s another tale of the federal government telling foreigners that they’re not welcome in the United States: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is holding thousands of pounds of mimolette cheese captive in a New Jersey compound because the regulators say the orange-hued, gouda-like fromage has too many mites on its rind.

Never mind that the mites – tiny, microscopic insects – are supposed to be there as part of a cheese-making process that goes back hundreds of years. The mites help to aerate the rind of mimolette, thus helping to produce the cheese’s distinctive attributes. Many other cheeses – including hugely popular varieties such as Stilton and high-end “bandage-wrapped” cheddars – also have rind mites that serve similar purposes. The FDA worries that some people might have allergic reactions to the insects.

Virtually all of the mites are blown off the cheese with compressed air or wiped off by hand, but some always manage to stick around. Although it has no official or definitive guideline of how many mites per square inch is acceptable or safe, the FDA has decided that a recent uptick in the number on mimolette is grounds for holding the cheese hostage.

The result, explains Jill Erber, the owner of Cheestique in Alexandria, Virginia, is that once American cheese shops sell out whatever supplies they have left, the United States will be a mimolette-free zone. As she told Reason TV, there is simply no way to know how or when the prohibition might be lifted.

Erber, like other cheesemongers, isn’t taking the arbitrary FDA action lying down. As a way of drawing attention to the situation, Cheesetique offered patrons of its Alexandria and Shirlington, Virginia free chunks of mimolette if they posted Facebook pictures of themselves frowning. Another Facebook page, Save the Mimolette, has over 2,000 likes and is rallying forces to say “No to the Mimolette ban in the US! Let us eat stinky cheese!”

For Erber, who worries the FDA will extend the ban to other mite-rind cheeses, the issue is about more than just cheese. “Food is one of the products for which it’s easy to say less regulation is better,” she explains. “The research is out there, let people look into what they want to eat. If they’re concerned about the safety of a particular food, they shouldn’t consume it.”

And, she adds, “It’s less about the actual cheese and more about ‘I want my choice.'”

Professor Thomas Hazlett – Net Neutrality

A Liberal Democrat Governor Of Hawaii Talks Unfunded Liabilities And Democratic Spending Habits ~ ReasonTV

From Video Description:

“When the special interests become too powerful,” warns Ben Cayetano, “the voter only has the collective conscience of the people who are in public office.”

Cayetano was a popular two-term Democratic governor of the state of Hawaii who held office from 1994 to 2002. In 2012, Cayetano became alarmed by what he saw as out-of-control spending and special interests run amok. He came out of retirement and made a failed bid to become the mayor of Honolulu, Hawaii’s largest city.

Cayetano opposed the city’s $5.26 billion rail project, which he says costs too much and will not address Honolulu’s traffic problems. The massive system and inevitable cost overruns, he fears, simply piles more debt on a government already straining under unfunded liabilities for public-sector pensions and benefits. “They are going to end up raising taxes,” Cayetano told Reason TV. “Or the city will go bankrupt.”

In a wide-ranging conversation, the 73-year-old Filipino American discusses the Aloha State’s fiscal mess, the trouble with Hawaii’s one-party government, and why he believes social issues are distracting voters from more pressing economic problems.

Nanny of the Month (ReasonTV)

Video Description:

This month’s lineup of of busybodies includes the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where administrators may ban booze in dorms–even for students of legal drinking age (guess those college kids would just stay dry!). Then there’s Chi-Town, where officials are using GPS devices to track food trucks to make sure they don’t wander within 200 feet of any fixed businesses that sell food, including convenience stores. Violators could face fines of $2,000. Compare that to the $100 fine you’d face for parking in front of a fire hydrant and you get an idea for just how seriously city officials take the threat of competition. (Good thing the Institute for Justice is on the case.)

But this time the nanny of the month comes to us from deep in the heart of Texas, where administrators at San Antonio’s Northside school district are tracking kids with radio frequency identification chips. Dozens of electronic readers have been installed in the school’s ceiling panels to keep tabs on the kiddos while they’re at school. The official number-one reason for going RFID is to “increase student safety and security,” but–since district funding goes up when attendance goes up–it’s clearly all about the Benjamins.

With school-based tracking going back to at least 2004, the Lone Star State has been something of an RFID trailblazer. In fact, Northside is considering expanding the program to cover all of the district’s 97,000 students.

`Obama Misrepresenting My Work` ~ Princeton Professor Harvey Rosen (Plus: Eulogizing Killers)

…the United States is actually more dependent on rich people to pay taxes than even many of the more socialized economies of Europe. According to the Tax Foundation, the United States gets 45 percent of its total taxes from the top 10 percent of tax filers, whereas the international average in industrialized nations is 32 percent. America’s rich carry a larger share of the tax burden than do the rich in Belgium (25 percent), Germany (31 percent), France (28 percent), and even Sweden (27 percent). ~ Washington Times

To set the stage for lowering taxes and Mitt Romney’s tax plan — the rich… the American rich specifically, pay the most taxes when compared to the rest of the world

This lack of understanding by the left leads to how they fight and lie and misrepresent what Mitt Romney says and will even twist other peoples work to win the day:

Here is the Weekly Standard’s “blurb” of the Obama Campaign lie:

Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. “Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes,” said the Obama campaign press release. “In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney’s tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000.”

But that’s not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney’s tax plan:

I can’t tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work.  It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal.  The main conclusion of my study is that  under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same.  That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral.

Dennis Prager touched on the “wonderful eulogy” the New York Times gave the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and how the left loves killers, dictators, and Communists. Here is the Wall Street Journals take on all this:

In 1987, Jean-Marie Le Pen called the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps “just a detail in the history of World War II.” Explaining himself a few years later, the head of France’s National Front said: “If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail.”

Such remarks cemented Mr. Le Pen’s reputation as Europe’s leading fascist. So what was one to make of the reception accorded the publication, in 1994, of “The Age of Extremes,” by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm?

The book—subtitled “a history of the world, 1914-1991″—was hailed as “bracing and magisterial” by the New York Times. “Facts roll off Hobsbawm’s pages like thunderbolts,” gushed the New Republic. But search the index, and the words “Holocaust” and “Auschwitz” never appear. Nazi concentration camps get about 10 or 15 lines. As for the Soviet gulags, Hobsbawm devoted exactly two paragraphs to them.

Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin’s tyranny “must be measured in eight rather than seven digits,” adding that the numbers are “shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.”

Yet Hobsbawm did justify them. “Like military enterprises which have genuine popular moral legitimacy, the breakneck industrialization of [Stalin’s] first Five-Year Plans (1929-41) generated support by the very ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ it imposed on the people,” he wrote. “Difficult though it may be to believe, the Stalinist system . . . almost certainly enjoyed substantial support.”

The rest of the book is shot through with similar rationalizations. That included the observation that “for most Soviet citizens the Brezhnev era spelled not ‘stagnation’ but the best times they and their parents, or even grandparents, had ever known.” As for Soviet dissidents, they were “anti-plebeian” elitists who “found themselves up against Soviet humanity as well as Soviet bureaucracy.”

None of this should have been surprising coming from a man who, over the years, gave his political assent to everything from the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Asked by the BBC whether the achievement of a communist utopia would have justified “the loss of fifteen, twenty million people,” he answered “Yes.”

Yet what are we to make of the warmth with which Hobsbawm is now being eulogized? Only this: That the world is far from recognizing that the crimes of communism were no less monstrous than those of Nazism. In treating the gulag as a detail of his history, Hobsbawm proved himself to be the moral equivalent of Mr. Le Pen. And in treating Hobsbawm as a paragon among historians, his admirers prove they’ve learned nothing from history itself.