Under Jobs, Apple largely avoided the unseemly games of campaign contributions and lobbying.

Consider this extraordinary fact: despite being a $100-billion-a-year company in a rapidly changing industry, Apple never formed a political action committee.

Gov. Rick Snyder plans to direct doctors in Michigan to begin monitoring the body weight of their young patients and provide the data to a state registry in one of the most extensive government efforts to address the growing problem of pediatric obesity, the Associated Press has learned.

…The body mass index statistics for patients under 18 would be reported to the Michigan Care Improvement Registry but the children’s identity would remain anonymous. The state already requires doctors to report how many children are immunized.

This is all a part of Big Daddy’s “health and wellness” initiative that the governor will announce today. Tracking your child’s personal statistics in a government registry is one more step into tyranny under the umbrella of the “war” on obesity. Here’s a peculiar statement from the article: “The National Institutes of Health is funding research programs to see if pediatricians, in the 20 minutes they generally have with a patient in their office, can make a difference in patients’ behavior by offering advice on better eating and exercise habits.” And we are talking about pediatricians and family physicians who typically have little to no training in nutrition or weight management, or, they are fat, or even obese, and should not be giving their shoddy “advice” to anyone. Is the state going to require these doctors who give advice to report their BMI?

If you want something to listen to today, tune in to Jimmy Moore’s podcast with Dr. Tracey Green, an obese MD who knew nothing about nutrition (as with most MDs), and turned her life around by educating herself in the paleo/low-carb way. And she is a state health officer in Nevada who is penetrating the system and trying to bring real science and practicality to the state’s nutritional programs.

While most of the rest of the world is flat-out rejecting these manufactured toxins, the U.S. government, along with its corporate state giants (like Monsanto), has been trying to bully the EU, as well as other, smaller countries, into exporting the highly profitable GMOs. From the article, it is noted that one of the released cables (bold emphasis is mine):

describes a meeting between Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Thune (R-S.D.) and two officials from Spain, which is one of the only European countries currently growing genetically modified crops (Poland is the other). One of the Spanish officials noted that Spain “had a relatively ‘liberal’ view with respect to biotechnology. However, even in Spain, the technology was controversial and faced NGO opposition.” The two senators then asked “what influence Spain could exercise in Brussels [the de facto capital of the European Union] on the issue,” to which the Spanish officials responded “commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization to biotech imports.”

Note that Senator Grassley is a consistent advocate of the biotech industry, receives much in contributions from GMO king Monsanto (and ethanol king Archer Daniels Midland), and has long been fighting the EU on the GMO issue. In 2003, he advocated filing a legal case against the EU to challenge its moratorium on GMOs. The nerve of those French – and other Euros – to deny the Big Agra Complex and their dictates!

Remember that FDA Food Safety Modernization Act was just passed by Senate and then approved on December 21 by the House of Representatives. Grassley was a big supporter of this food tyranny bill which will give the federal government supreme power over the nation’s food supply while it chokes off smaller, local competition and backyard growers.

If you go to the website of the FDA, you will note its newly-created “Office of Foods.” This, along with the food “safety” bill, will give the Feds unprecedented power over the food and agricultural industry. The Food Czar is none other than Michael R. Taylor, Obama’s point man for securing profits for the Big Agra-Manufactured Food Complex. Taylor, in case you don’t know, is a former Vice President and Chief Lobbyist for Monsanto. Taylor began his career as a lawyer with the FDA, and from there he went to King & Spalding, a law firm that represented Monsanto. He then went back to the FDA as a deputy commissioner for policy so that he could oversee the FDA’s approval of Monsanto’s BGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone). Taylor then moved to the USDA. Then he was off to Monsanto.

Note that Monsanto’s top rBGH scientist, Margaret Miller, also moved on to the FDA where she, along with Taylor, moved the FDA forward to approve Posilac, Monsanto Corporation’s formulation of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbST or rBGH). Miller, while working for Monsanto, had submitted the Monsanto scientific report to the FDA for approval, and she went to the FDA prior to the approval. Her first task at the FDA was to approve her own scientific report she had prepared for Monsanto. Both she and Taylor were subjects of a GAO (General Accounting Office) investigation for their role in the approval, yet the GAO Report ended up dismissing any financial impropriety.

Remember that Monsanto sued retailers and dairies for advertising that their milk was “rBGH-free.” That’s because Michael Taylor, while he was at the FDA, wrote the labeling guidelines for the FDA that prevented the advertisement of dairy products as being rBGH-free. Oakhurst Dairy was the first dairy company to reject artificial growth hormone and advertised its milk with the label, “No Artificial Growth Hormone Used.” Since then, Oakhurst has been forced to add the disclaimer: “FDA states: No significant difference in milk from cows treated with artificial growth hormone.”

Do you remember the story about the US Supreme Court hearing arguments in the Monsanto v Geertson Seed Farms case earlier this year? Clarence Thomas did not view this as a conflict of interest even though he worked for Monsanto, as an attorney, for 4 years. Yes, the revolving doors between Big Agra and the US government are rivaled only by the revolving doors between the government-defense industry and government-Big Pharma.

Additionally (yes, there’s more….much more), WikiLeaks docs also show that the US government is also pressuring the Vatican to make pro-GMO pronouncements because there is tremendous resistance to GMOs among Catholics in the developing world.

Rep. Joe Sestak defeated five-term incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary election Tuesday. Mr. Specter is the third incumbent in as many weeks to lose his re-election bid in an intra-party contest.

You wrinkled, old piece of totalitarian shit – good riddance.

Beginning Friday, shoppers in search of toothpaste, deodorant and laxatives at more than 6,000 drugstores across the nation will be able to pick up something new: a test to scan their genes for a propensity for Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, diabetes and other ailments.

The test also claims to offer a window into the chances of becoming obese, developing psoriasis and going blind. For those thinking of starting a family, it could alert them to their risk of having a baby with cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs and other genetic disorders. The test also promises users insights into how caffeine, cholesterol-lowering drugs and blood thinners might affect them.

While the FDA is drooling to declare this “illegal,” and wrongly so (because the FDA never does anything good or right), such a genetic “self-assessment” in the hands of dependent Americans who are hooked on Big Pharma’s “magic” will be a huge windfall for …… well, Big Pharma and the monopoly medical establishment. Can you imagine all of the self-diagnosed “diseases” people would ultimately suffer from, and all the pills that will be needed to steer clear from all of the (purported) propensities toward illness and disease?

Note that the FDA appears to be fine with approving “anti-obesity” drugs.

Donation cards are not the answer for kidney transplants, and here’s why (Thanks to Dr. Sally Satel for sending me a copy of her excellent book “When Altruism Isn’t Enough,” from which this quote comes.):

Of the roughly 2 million Americans who die annually, relatively few possess organs healthy enough for transplanting. The number is estimated to range between 10,500 and 13,000, representing less than 1 percent of all deaths each year. … (Incidentally, this built-in constraint on the number of potentially transplantable kidneys underscores the reason a “presumed-consent” law … is unlikely to yield a huge windfall of transplantable kidneys.)

If you factor in the thousands of people who never get on the kidney waitlist (Thanks to Andrew Conte and Luis Fabregas at the Tribune-Review for continuing to shed light on this issue.), and the people who die each year waiting, it is clear that less than 15,000 organs per year will never cut it.

And the percentage of healthy kidneys will surely continue to drop as the population becomes more sick and more obese, and as more people rely on Big Pharma’s life-destroying pills to get them up and about each day. For an overview of the massive and failed kidney bureaucracy, see this article from 2009 on the Tribune-Review. The vast majority of people needing transplants are never put on the waiting list, but even so, that waiting list, managed by state and the medical establishment, is not the answer. Once again, the socialist-altruistic government-medical complex, with all of its oppressive social planning, manages to unnecessarily kill people while purporting to have found a better way.

That said, concerning the government’s goals for nationalized-socialist-redistributionist health care, Monty Python got it right on this issue, too.

One thing I get a lot of is … articles off the web that readers think I may be interested in for purposes of blogging or writing. This great piece was one that came to me yesterday. The longer I have been doing this (12 years) and the more readers I have, the more articles I get. The network becomes huge. There is not enough time in the day to spend a huge amount of time on wading through them all, so I very quickly flip through them and absorb the ones I think are unique, or perhaps they are very much along my lines of special interest.

However, without this “service,” I’d never, ever have the time to see, read, and be aware of as much information as I currently absorb. I am an information hog – I suck up things very quickly, multi-task constantly, and thus I think I have a fairly high level of information efficiency. I love knowledge and constantly seek information. My readers allow me to see and read far more than I ever could on my own. Often, they are like front line filters. They may not blog or write, so they are joining the mission to inform and educate in a way that works best for them. I can’t look at every news site, every blog, and every article on hundreds of great websites. But my email box, no matter how overwhelmed, is sometimes this great station where all of this summarized info just lands and waits for me to review it. I find that I can wade through it all by making efficient use of time with my BlackBerry and/or iTouch, both of which assist me in multi-tasking or using dead time productively and keeping my email box organized.

Some people send me too much stuff and get off-base a bit, without thinking of how they should narrow down the amount of material they send me. However, I am usually hesitant to tell them to stop sending stuff because somewhere down the line, I wonder if perhaps they will take my pointers the wrong way and stop sending me interesting news articles, causing me to lose one of my front line warriors.

My point is that I appreciate these efforts on the part of readers, and I still encourage people to send me the important stuff they have been sending me over the years. Without them, I wouldn’t have timely access to all of the issues that matter so much to me, and all of us. My readers are a great network to have, and I wanted them to know that their services are welcome, encouraged, and appreciated.

I can think of two really dirty words that would please even Joe Wilson: “You Lie!” When I heard the payoff figure of $6B on the news, my eyebrows did an about-face on my forehead. GM CEO Ed Whitacre threw a party for the press, stating that GM paid off the government loans “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule.” Here’s the propaganda piece (commercial) from Mr. Ed for the Big Lie.

Newsbusters has a nice story on this that links to a Forbes story on this house of lies. GM received $50B in bailout funds while only $6.7B of that amount was deemed a loan (at 7% interest). As most folks know, most of the bailout money was given to GM, by the US and Canadian governments, in return for a large stake in the company. As to how the loan is being paid back, as Shikha Dalmia of Forbes explains:

As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as “working capital” in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money–government money–to pay back the government loan.

Additionally, as Dalmia goes on to say,

Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research, points out that the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5%) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government’s tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new–and bigger–DOE loan much more feasible.

The gist of this is – if you didn’t catch it – that General Motors will get a DOE loan at 5% to pay off its 7% loans, so essentially it is a refinance of debt, at a lower rate, with the Government playing banker with your money. Even the awful, pro-bailout Charles Grassley referred to this as the TARP Shuffle. In a letter from Grassley to Timmy Geithner, he stated:

On Tuesday of this week, Mr. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for TARP, testified before the Senate Finance Committee. During his testimony Mr. Barofsky addressed GM’s recent debt repayment activity, and stated that the funds GM is using to repay its TARP debt are not coming from GM earnings. Instead, GM seems to be using TARP funds from an escrow account at Treasury to make the debt repayments. The most recent quarterly report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP says “The source of funds for these quarterly [debt] payments will be other TARP funds currently held in an escrow account.” See, Office of the Special Inspector General for TARP, Quarterly Report to Congress dated April 20, 2010, page 115.

Furthermore, Exhibit 99.1 of the Form 8K filed by GM with the SEC on November 16, 2009, seems to confirm that the source of funds for GM’s debt repayments was a multi-billion dollar escrow account at Treasury—not from earnings.

Yet so many people, including those in the media, are swept off their feet by the lies. A really, really, really bad article on cars.com has the nerve to make this Mickey Mouse statement:

Essentially, GM no longer needs emergency government aid to stay afloat. While the taxpayer still has a sizable investment wrapped up in the automaker, GM has returned to decent health for the time being.