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dgermann
September 20th, 2006, 04:27 PM
Hi--

I really got a kick out of the first paragraph of this (http://willrogerstoday.com/weekly_comments/index.cfm) .

Thought you might, too.

Judy G. Russell
September 20th, 2006, 11:54 PM
I liked this part better, quoting Will Rogers about Congress:
"We cuss 'em and we joke about 'em, but they are all good fellows at heart, and if they wasent in (Congress), why, they would be doing something else against us that might be worse." Saturday Evening Post, July 24, 1926

Lindsey
September 21st, 2006, 04:35 PM
I really got a kick out of the first paragraph of this (http://willrogerstoday.com/weekly_comments/index.cfm) .
Somebody else made some skeptical comments about that "security ditch" a day or two ago; must have been either Keith Olbermann on "Countdown" or Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show". Back to the future, isn't it? Like the walled cities of the ancient world or the middle ages. :(

Some subsequent paragraphs of Randall Reeder's comments for that week were problematic, and not always all that funny. The bit about the E. coli contamination of fresh spinach, for example. He used it to rant about organic farming, but the truth of the matter is that none of those cases has been traced to organically grown spinach; all of the known sources are conventionally grown spinach.

He complains that organic farmers "don't use any chemicals" on their crops, but I don't know of any chemical you could apply to the crop itself that would take care of E. coli. (And if there is such a thing, the conventional farmers apparently aren't using it anyway).

"The E coli likely came from 'natural fertilizer' in the irrigation water," he says. Contaminated irrigation water is certainly a possibility, but the same irrigation water is used by both types of growers, and it has been an ongoing problem for growers in the Salinas Valley for at least a decade; somewhere I saw that there have been some 20 cases of produce contaminated from irrigation water in that area in the last 10 years or so.

The truth is that farmers who want to use the "organic" label have to meet stricter standards, from the field to the market, than conventional growers do. For instance, they are not allowed to use animal manure (a significant source of E. coli); conventional growers are. So Reeder's dissing of organic produce is entirely unjustified.

Sorry, I don't mean to rain on your parade, but that paragraph in particular really bothered me.

--Lindsey

ndebord
September 21st, 2006, 09:25 PM
Hi--

I really got a kick out of the first paragraph of this (http://willrogerstoday.com/weekly_comments/index.cfm) .

Thought you might, too.

Doug,

Oh yeah, a ditch will really do the trick. This would be like circling the wagons (if they had any) at the Little Big Horn.

<sigh>