Posted on 07/20/2009 10:14:14 AM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast
Two items from Drudge-- the first, an unprecedented Administration rebuttal to a Drudge post (the ham item I gleefully posted yesterday, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2296111/posts) which merely increases their IQ (Idiocy Quotient) by several notches.
In response to the astonishingly inept recovery.gov website which implied two-pounds-of-ham were purchased for more-than-a-million-bucks, the Administration has even more lamely dug itself into an even deeper hole by extolling the actual price of the ham... approximately double what Food Lion is selling it for... the good stuff, in Food Lion's case, a nice Smithfield smoked ham.
Now that's pork!
No wonder Obama's latest czar, Cass Sunstein, wants to censor the Internet. I'm quite certain Drudge's posts have hurt someone's feelings-- Sunstein's litmus test for shutting down a website or blog.
=== 1 ===
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?contentidonly=true&contentid=2009/07/0322.xml
Release No. 0322.09
Contact:
Office of Communication 202-720-4623
Response to Drudge Item on Recovery Act Funding
Statement from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack
"Through the Recovery Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made $100 million available to the states for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which acquires food that is distributed to local organizations that assist the needy – including food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens.
The Recovery Act funds referenced in press reports allowed states to purchase ham, cheese and dairy products for these food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries that provide assistance to people who otherwise do not have access to food. This program will help reduce hunger of those hardest hit by the current economic recession.
The references to "2 pound frozen ham sliced" are to the sizes of the packaging. Press reports suggesting that the Recovery Act spent $1.191 million to buy "2 pounds of ham" are wrong. In fact, the contract in question purchased 760,000 pounds of ham for $1.191m, at a cost of approximately $1.50 per pound. In terms of the dairy purchase referenced, USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA) purchased 837,936 pounds of mozzarella cheese and 4,039,200 pounds of processed cheese.
While the principal purpose of these expenditures is to provide food to those hardest hit by these tough times, the purchases also provide a modest economic benefit of benefiting Americans working at food retailers, manufacturers and transportation companies as well as the farmers and ranchers who produce our food supply."
=== 2 ===
Smithfield Shank Portion Smoked Ham
$.79 Lb.
Love it!
Glad to see Drudge is getting more in the game.
bookmark
Would it help if we circulate a petition requesting “The Divine One” retire to a monastery and as our Catholic friends say “enter the life of a contemplative?” He may have a finer side to which we could appeal.
“The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP)
acquires food that is distributed to local organizations
that assist the needy – including food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens...
ham $1.50 - per pound...
mozzarella cheese...
processed cheese...
canned pork - $1.99 per pound...”
-
Our tight budget won’t allow us to eat that well at our place,
my wife and I are feeding 6 hungry adults and 2 toddlers,
but I am glad to know my tax money allows others to do so.
</s>
Clougherty Packing llc: a short lesson in how politics works
Devil’s advocate....
That’s an apples to oranges comparison.
That shank portion is going to have a lot of bone in it. Whereas the canned ham won’t have any.
The canned ham may be easier to store. I don’t know if refrigeration is a problem.
But price comparisons need to be for the same thing. Canned ham to canned ham.
You can question the wisdom of buying canned ham vs fresh refrigerated ham if you want plus the cost and availability of refrigeration.
Also Food Lion may be using that ham as a loss leader to get people into the store. They may be unwilling to fill a government order for 760,000 lbs of ham.
I’m also wondering if it was 760,000 lbs or 760,000 cans. That might account for the price descrepancy too.
Awesome! You should write a book. I would probably buy it.
Absolutely no slight to Rush at all...But him hitting it hard does what???
If he means to insite outrage at the way money the government really doesn’t have on things like this will translate into votes for “conservatives” in November 2010...
We got a long way to go, and the outrage will die, and the momentum will be lost, and people who will vote will have meny more distractions to ease the outrage between now and then...
I do not see it (outrage) being sustainable...And reinforcing the outrage in the weeks leading up to the election will only garner apathy and fatigue...
Timing is everything...Even though 99.95% of the participants on this website already know what they are going to do at the time...
The equation is simple...
All you have to do is remember how much was spent, what it was spent on, how much we ALL will be taxed to cover it, and how long it will take to pay it off, and how much into debt and international political servitude this country was put under by this congress and its president...
All in the first 6 months...
I do not know what more it will take to reach critical mass in this country, but we had better have some people warming up in the bullpen to take the reigns to stave off some potential and unfortunate reactions...
I’m sorry, but we have got to stop getting hysterical over stuff that just makes us look lame.
The logical thing is that there is an order for a certain amount of ham, sold in 2lb sliced quantities.
I know this man is outrageous, I know this man is bankrupting our country, but conservatives are going to start looking like loons if we don’t at least start looking into things before screaming “He paid a gazillion bajillion dollars for 2 pounds of ham!!!”.
I’m sorry, maybe I’m just crabby today, but I am seeing a lot of hysterics on FR today. Even that woman at the Mike Castle thing irritated me because she had a good opportunity and a good platform and what does she say? “Obama is not an American citizen”. WTF? That will go NOWHERE. Hell, for that matter, marrying Michelle would fix that problem. If you are going to scream about an issue, KNOW THE ISSUE. It’s NATURAL BORN that’s the problem.
Bah, I’m cranky.
I’m actually glad to see the administration rebutt this with more information. They need to fix recovery.gov to show enough information such as quantity and price, so that these questions go away.
There is no point in having a website if the descriptions are cryptic and the quantities are not published.
I remember back in the late 70’s early 80’s, my grandparents used to get govt cheese from the senior center. When my nanna died, we uncovered a freezer that stopped working but it was filled with five lb blocks of cheese all dried up and molded over. Not the fancy mozzarella either but just some generic yellow stuff that made velveeta taste good in comparison. (no we didn’t eat the molded stuff)
This reminds me of that. They say it’s for families in need but it’s probably just a purchase in name only and the food will never see a needy family but will get distributed to school programs in democrat states or given to people in lieu of smokes and mad dog at the voter registration drives.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken
Good points. One more point...you also have to add in the bureaucracy factor. This is, after all, a Government procurement which involves more regs and paperwork than a typical grocery store transaction.
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