Posted on 09/05/2009 3:47:23 PM PDT by Still Thinking
The number of animals and plants protected by the federal Endangered Species Act is about to increase dramatically. For Cass Sunstein, radical animal-rights activist and nominee for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator job, that means he will be better positioned than ever to make livestock farming a thing of the past.
How are the two things connected? Our director of research appeared on the Fox News Channel yesterday to explain to Glenn Beck’s audience how much influence Sunstein may soon have over what we eat:
Cattlemen in this country own and manage most of the lands that are covered by the Endangered Species Act, that are subject to control. So you ask: Why is Cass Sunstein’s hatred and animus toward meat eating such a big deal? It’s because he’ll be in a position to be able to use the Endangered Species Act to put cattlemen out of business. And then the price of your steak goes up. And then the price of your cheeseburger goes up.
It’s not only cattlemen who could be at the business end of Sunstein’s ridiculous anti-meat philosophy. Environmental activists groups sued over the Endangered Species Act in 2006 to divert water to a habitat for a three-inch bait fish in California – taking the water away from drought-stricken farmers and costing the California economy more than 60,000 farming jobs. Imagine what would happen if activists didn’t have to sue to get what they wanted, but could just pick up the phone instead.
The future “regulatory czar” has made no secret of his coercive tactics to get Americans to eat less meat. His grand plan is to make meat more expensive to produce, which will in turn make it harder for American families to afford. Similarly unpopular tactics have been attempted in the drive to get people to drink less soda. While Sunstein couches his plans as a “nudge,” we’d say it’s more like a shove.
Hug your cheeseburgers tonight, because they too are about to become an endangered species.
Another one of Obama’s “czars”...
“If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?” — Homer Simpson
I’d imagine that Lloyd will be the next on Glenn’s list but Sunstein will be right after. Followed quickly by Holdren.
Good cuts of beef and pork have been really cheap this year.
We’ve cooked more steaks on the gill this year than any time over the last 12 years we have lived here. The wife just picked up some gorgeous NY Strips for $4.79 a pound. Last month we bought 2 whole 22 pound top rounds for $1.63 a pound, broke them down, vacume bagged it and filled the freezer. Ealier this year we picked up a pack of 6 flank steaks for $1.49 a pound.
I have a 9 pound Boston Butt on the smoker that’s ready to pull right now, that I picked up for $1.19 a pound.
These prices won’t be around for a lot longer, and if you have a good set of knives and a freezer, now’s a great time to stock up for winter.
Oh yeah...I took about 15 pound of that top round and made 3 batches of jerky too...
The problem is that a long time ago “you people” empowered government to use it’s immense cohersive powers to do good. The only problem with empowering a government to do good, is that the same government that is big enough to right a wrong is big enough to perpetrate an injustice. So shame on us.
If the staff of the Anti-Homophobia Czar ever show up at my place intending to apply a little reeducation, I’ll just tell them this guy (the Anti-Meat Czar) forbade me from allowing them to place a piece of meat between two buns.
That’s California. They get what they deserve. I’d love to see them try that crap in Texas.
Yes, it’s right in line with the radical left’s intentions in destroying our social fabric: we have been blessed with vast, productive lands, but they are hell-bent on making us as poor and ill-fed as the global average, all in the name of “social justice.”
You sir, OWE ME A KEYBOARD!
Post of the day!
Have the veal, it’s great! I’ll be here all week!
5.56mm
LLS
Honestly this would be too good to be true.
Screw with the price of American’s cheeseburgers and there will be hell to pay at the ballot box.
Google or wiki Whitman v. American Trucking Association.
Scotus has morphed into a nine person continuous constitutional convention. It rewrote Art 1 Sec 1 to: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be shared between the Congress of the United States and several hundred unelected, untouchable agencies filled with utopian true believers."
The Constitution is neither living nor breathing. It is dead.
Yeah, Obama took the “Bread and Circuses” too literally. He was thinking people would be happy with just the bun.
“We’ve cooked more steaks on the gill”
Is that a new version of surf’n’turf?
;^)
 |
Umm. I just had lunch. The veggie memo didn't get to me in time... |
From my In-N-Out Burger Double/Double stained hands....
(I'd post a pic of one of these succulent creatures, but my mouse or computer is hiccuping on me lately...won't let me right click to properties....damn)
Ooooo a 3 by 3 with Animal Fries does sound good about now!
As a LIFE LONG member of PETA I wholeheartedly DISAGREE with the poster and his message.
PETA==
PEOPLE
ENJOYING
TASTY
ANIMALS
I’d like to “nudge” this administration and all the czars back to where they came from, Chicago!
Mean while, Americans continue to buy arms and stockpile...
“Animal fries”
Does that mean they’re cooked in lard? If so, mmmmm...!
No...but bathed in secret sauce! Still rate an mmmmmmmmm!
There is room for all God’s creatures...Right next to the mashed potato’s.
We’ve been doing something similar for a couple of years now, only we buy the rib-roasts from CostCo. I get a steak for dinner every Friday and sometimes Saturday. ;>)
I don’t know what it costs to do it this way, but my Bride says that we are saving lots of money. This gives us 15 steaks and as we each eat only half of a steak, we get 30 meals out of one purchase of around $70. We still buy other cuts from time to time.
We also take one deer a year from my property, my son takes one and my daughter take another... if I didn’t mind breaking the law, I could harvest as many as 3 per year without hurting the head count around here. It helps to have 18 apple trees.. LOL
We are now raising our own chickens (26 birds) for eggs and will be raising meat birds in the spring.
I may get 2 head of beef to raise, we did that in years past. I might also buy a couple of meat goats.
I fish for Chinook, King salmon, Halibut, Lingcod, Sea Bass and other bottom fish. Family members keep us supplied with Dungeness crab and various types of clams....steamers and razors.
If the government thinks it’s going to change my meat eating habits, they are going to have to kill me.
That is so cruel of you to post that. We already have Lingcod out for dinner and now I want one of those..... grrrrr
Livestock production is about a lot more than meat. It's about chemicals, leather, medicines, textiles, glues, and essentially modern technology -- beef byproducts find their way into all kinds of things. Of a slaughtered beef animal, virtually every smidgen of that critter is used for something.
Dairy is another nutritionary staple produced by livestock, and from a chemical point of view, is vital. We human beings have to have vitamin B 12 to keep our bodies, specifically our brains, functioning, and as far as I know, the only source of B12 is from animal-based foods including meat (fowl, mammalian, seafood, even insect legs in honey, no dif; hence vegans don't eat honey), dairy, and egg yolks. People who go all vegetarian or vegan who have any sense at all supplement B12. I cannot imagine that the manufacture of artificial B12 avoiding the use of animal products is anything but a long, resource-expensive propostion. Yet ending livestock would certainly require major investment in B12 supplement production for the health of Americans.
This as opposed to livestock ruminants, such as cattle and sheep and goats, whose digestive systems are designed to convert crude grains that humans cannot digest nor derive much food value from, into a vast array of products, nutritional, chemical, medicinal, and even textile -- wool and leather come to mind. From grain grown in areas where the propspect of growing crops for human consumption would be a tremendous usurping of land and water resources, we get livestock.
The anti-meat "cruelty-free" fools have told the lie often and loudly enough, that many sadly believe that livestock uses horrific gallons of water. I knew a livestock rancher who actually did the math, and sat chuckling at the absurdity of it. Meanwhile, non-livestocking folks forget entirely that non-leather products are like as not, grown. Those cotton Hawaiian shirts, those eco-friendly non-leather all-hemp boots, those canvas bags instead of "cruel" leather, are derived from crops that have to be grown and harvested and take water away from existing places. Think of all the cute little critters that are displaced when 500 acres of land, anywhere, is cleared for cultivation-heavy cropland.
We use our common sense, and DUH!!!! Livestock is far and away the most sensible use of natural resources. Those who think it "cruel" are clinging to a little-girl mindset, but it is a dangerous mindset, in fact, a DEADLY mindset.
The push against meat and animal products threatens the very physical health of Americans. God help the 13-year-old girls who have decided to go Vegan and don't supplment like pros. They are virtually guaranteed osteoporosis by their mid 30s.
The anti-meat ethic is foolish but more crucial, dangerous.
Oh! That’s about the only thing I miss now that I’m not living in California. No burgers here compare to In N Out’s.
But does this mean that O can’t live it up at his WH parties where he serves Wagyu Kobe beef???? It was reported that it costs $100 a lb but I looked it up on Japan’s Wagyu site and it was $187.00 a lb several months ago.
As a matter of fact we do gills on the grill here too...(pardon my spelling...).
A friend of mine brought me a 9 pound steelhead (that’s a BIG rainbow trout to the uninitiated...) last year and I just put some onion and lemon slices in the body cavity with a little salt and pepper, and grilled it to perfection for dinner that night. Whole fish (yes, head and all...) are particularly easy to grill and the flavor is amaxing.
I cook on cast iron heated with hardwood charcoal. I use briquets to get things started, and add mesquite charcoal for some extra flavor. I have a source where I can get a 50 lb bag of mesquite for about $13, and it’s worth it!
I’ve got my requests out to a few of my hunter friends to let them know I’ll be glad to take any venison they don’t want this year. I’ve got a good meat grinder and a great recipe for pemmican, and I sure would like to put up 20-30 pounds of raw venison as pemmican jerky this year. My wife vacume bags it once it’s dry and cool, and it will keep almost forever like that.
These vegans just don’t know what they are missing....
Steelhead......
You’re not posting from Wisconsin, by any chance?
Lived in Green Bay four years, home of the most awesome seafood I ever knew, even after a later four years on the Chesapeake.
I may have strange tastes, but I would take fish over beef 75% of the time. Did you ever see the Simpsons episode where there was a court battle over the "all-you-can-eat" fish restaurant? Well, they patterned Homer's behavior after me.
I didn’t see the Simpsons episode, but seafood is my favorite... I do like my steak though. ;>)
I just finished dinner... the Lingcod was great. ;>)
I don’t care if it is a federal matter involving Czars in Washington. Cattle is a multi-billion dollar business in Texas and limiting it using endangered species act just would never happen. Maybe in California, it would be easier, but not in my state.
Pacifist Northwest, across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. My friend fishes the Deschutes River and they have a World Class steelhead run there.
The same area is also a hotspot for Bighorn Sheep; but they only issue a couple of permits by lottery for them....
Amen, Brad. I’m with you.
My curiosity in all of this government driven behavior modification is how “cowed” the American people are ... this government owns our children in the classrooms, the essential mechanics of determining what we drive and how much, what financing and insurance we get to use, how much of our working time actually belongs to us versus them (we work close to 5 months of out the year now for the government,) and with cap and trade and government healthcare getting ramrodded on us, they will own our DNA from birth and the air we breath.
The price of a cheeseburger is the least of our problems.
Amen. It amazes me that some FReepers still support giving the government broad powers for such vague purposes as "preserving the social fabric" or "reinforcing the community's values".
Even as those very powers are being turned against them.
No kidding Timm, a bunch of pretty smart, conservative people on this board who accept premises of what “good government” is that just shock me.
Good government seems to be defined as a hyper aware, well funded, machine that will coerce behavior deemed to be good, and will suppress behavior that is bad, and do this while scrupulously collecting, collating, and using data. Good government means it knows where everybody is, how much they make, and what they are thinking and doing so that policies can be implemented to adjust what people are thinking and doing if necessary. That’s sounds just chummy as long as your neighbors are still aligned with your thinking on what is good and what is bad. As soon as that alignment ends, and as soon as enumerated Federal powers are just kind of a joke (commerce clause) then you are screwed and anything is possible in an Athens or French Revolution styled democracy. You know two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for supper.
A lot of federal lands are leased to cattle ranchers throughout the west. I don’t know about Texas in particular but this will have an effect on cattle on federal lands
House votes to save wild horses, burros
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House has voted to expand the range of the nation’s wild horses and burros by millions of acres and to block a plan to kill thousands of the animals to prevent overgrazing.
The bill passed 239-185 Friday.
Supporters say the additional land and other measurers are needed to free thousands of mustangs and burros from holding pens and to prevent their slaughter.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-07-17-house-burros_N.htm
Well, they won’t get away with that in Texas. About 95% of land here is privately owned. The only public lands are a few National Forests in East Texas, and Big Bend National Park.
Before I’ll give up meat, I’ll hunt the king...er...caliph’s game and take his deers for my own table.
Some of the Zoidbergs of old were notorious poachers if the family stories are accurate.
I’ll be damned if the lords of the land are going to sup on kobe beef and I’m going to gnaw on a carrot stick just so that c(b)ass(tard) can nudge me into one of his little corrals with the other sheep.
California is 45.3% federal. Your right about Texas only 1.9%. I was surprised.
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/map-owns_the_west.jpg
Hutz: Mrs. Simpson, what did you and your husband do after you were ejected from the restaurant?
Marge: We pretty much went straight home…
Hutz: Mrs. Simpson, you are under oath!
Marge: We drove around until 3AM looking for another all-you-an-eat fish restaurant.
Hutz: And when you couldn’t find one?
Marge: We went fishing…
Hutz: Do these sound like the actions of a man who had all he could eat?
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