1. Total Recount, or Hanging with Chad
In case you missed it, HBO recently put out a movie, Recount, in which Christopher Schmidt plays former Congressman John Sweeney during the 2000 Florida vote recount fiasco.
The lastest review on IMBD.com has this to say about the movie:
“Come on, “… the Bush brothers aren’t interested in a dignified process…” the movie makes Al Gore and the Democratic Party out to be Jesus Christ and his flock and it wasn’t that way! Can we please be honest??? … You had two good men who wanted to be President more than J. Edgar Hoover wanted new pantyhose! BOTH of them fought tooth and nail and who wouldn’t but the fact is that, in the end, Bush won the election and people need to let it go … my god … it’s been 8 years and we are still beating this dead and decaying horse.”
Read on to find out why I emphasized the last five words.
2. Hippophagy, or, They Eat Horses, Don’t They?
Sweeney’s other legacy is that he got horse slaughter for human consumption banned in the United States. Now the State of Kentucky is overrun with horses that people have abandoned because they can no longer afford to take care of them, and they can no longer sell them for horseburgers.
Fast food restaurant in Austria which serves McFillys
The prohibition against selling horses for food is not based on logic, but is clearly cultural. We eat Bossy and Bambi but not Barbaro. It makes no sense.
By the way, it’s too bad that Sweeney’s successor, Kirsten Gillibrand, named her new baby Henry instead of William. Headline writers would have had a field day if she had–Gillibrand Passes New Bill, etc.
12 Comments
May 28, 2008 at 10:22 am
Good post, Dan, thanks
May 28, 2008 at 11:19 am
FYI-
Sweeney never passed his bill to ban horse slaughter and the KY article was found to be false. Horses aren’t runnign down the highway. Horse slaughter is still legal in the US and Sweeney’s bill is still trying to pass Congress. I suggest you visit: http://www.awionline.org/legislation/horse_slaughter/index.htm
May 28, 2008 at 1:33 pm
If you are correct, then that’s good news on both fronts. No horses running loose in Kentucky, and Austrians and other foreigners can still eat their horseburgers.
May 28, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Wow! You are crediting Sweeney with passing a ban that doesn’t exist. Sweeney had nothing to do with shutting down the kill houses. The two in Texas lost a court battle when we so foolishly asked why a 1949 law was not being enforced. The good guys won that one. In Illinois, we passed a new law to shut them down. How can you give Sweeny credit for a 1949 law and a new law in Illinois?
Amazing that you are repeating false information about the abandoned horses in Kentucky. Even the governor weighed in on the articles. I guess the pro folks think if they keep posting something over and over again, people will believe it’s true.
May 28, 2008 at 9:36 pm
ThreeCollie is correct. The Kentucky story was written by Jeffrey McMurray, a college basketball stringer for the AP. It was falsely based on the contention that a band of horses running loose on a reclaimed strip mine in Eastern Kentucky were abandoned. They in fact were not, they were owned by Trish Hayes who was wintering them there. Hayes runs the Breaks riding stables in Breaks Virginia.
McMurray could have easily found this because there was an AP story just one month before his that told of teenage boys shooting some of the horses.
http://www.pet-abuse.com/cases/10686/VA/US/
There have been literally dozens of such false stories published in defense of horse slaughter, but like your post here they all come under the view of the anti-slaughter movement very quickly and the truth is just as quickly published. Try googling
“Deleting the Fiction” before you site another article of this type and you might save yourself some embarrassment. These stories are all debunked there along with police reports and other hard evidence.
ThreeCollies is also correct about the laws. You might be thinking about the Ensign Byrd amendment to the 2006 Agriculture budget which removed the funding for inspectors at the slaughter plants. It passed overwhelmingly, but was thwarted by a “pay for inspections” program that then USDA head Michael Johanns put into effect to circumvent the will of Congress. There was a law suit in which both the lower court and the appeals court found the USDA program illegal, but the USDA was appealing to the Supreme Court when Illinois passed a state ban that shut down the last plant.
And no, slaughter has not been reduced but merely driven over the borders to Mexico and Canada. But your last comment was also wrong. The Australians do not import our horse meat, they are a big exporter. And the Europeans are not lucky to still have our horse meat available either. If they knew there are no controls on the drugs in the meat they wouldn’t feed it to their dogs much less eat the stuff.
May 28, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Please correct my previous post by changing “Three Collies” to “Sue”. I just noticed I had mis-attributed those comments. Thanks
May 28, 2008 at 9:52 pm
The ban I reference above was a temporary one. Sweeney does take credit for it. He says, in the article referenced above, “A major victory was achieved when Congress voted last year to temporarily shut this foreign-owned industry down via my amendment to the 2006 Agriculture Appropriations Bill. ”
If the AP article is false, then please provide a link to an apology or correction by the Associated Press or a link to a reputable, non-PETAphile site that debunks it.
Horses should not be treated cruelly, meat should not be doctored, but those points have nothing to do with my point which is–I REPEAT-if we can eat cows, goats, sheep, deer, etc.; then it is hypocrisy not to eat horse.
Unless, of course, you are a vegan. Then you are not a hypocrite. Hitler was a vegan, and he wasn’t a hypocrite, but he did have a few other problems.
By the way, Austria and Australia are two different countries.
May 29, 2008 at 7:49 am
Repeat all you like, the animals you mentioned are an accepted food source in this country. Horses are not. They are not raised or bed as food animals but as sport, companion and work animals. If you want them treated like livestock, then they should be held to the same regulations as livestock. How do you think the racing industry will take it when you tell them they have to withdraw drugs? How about the mounted police? How will they keep the horses fit and healthy without the necessary drugs? Theraphy horses? How about having to provide coggins and papers with chain of ownership? None of that is required for slaughter bound horses.
BTW-PETA is not involved in the anti slaughter efforts. The legislation you mentioned did not shut down the slaughter houses. When the legislation was upheld, all three operated under an appeal. It took the state laws to shut them down.
May 29, 2008 at 9:11 am
All of your arguments simply go around my argument that there is no reason why horsemeat should be treated any different than any other kind of meat. In fact your comment underscores my claim that our revulsion to horsemeat (along with dog meat, fried parakeet, etc.) is simply cultural.
Many of the same arguments that you use are used also against eating beef.
Please note also that I never claimed that PETA was involved, and John Sweeney did get slaughter banned temporarily.
You are living proof that most Americans are literate, but they can’t read.
May 29, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Mediumrarebooks,
As to your faith in AP, the ridiculous McMurray article was an AP story. I personally wrote every AP Bureau chief in the US with the facts correcting that story. Given that it was their own story (about the shootings) that refuted the ownership of the horses, you would think they would have replied but they did not.
McMurray’s story was absurd on many fronts. For example, it was written just weeks after the first closings but claimed the horses had been accumulating at the strip mine for years because of a reduction in slaughter caused by animal rights groups. In fact, slaughter had more than doubled between 2002 and 2007.
The AP has published a number of untrue and inaccurate stories on the subject. I particularly liked the AP story out of the Oregonian that claimed that claimed 9 horses were abandoned on the farm of a Mr. McKinsey because of the closing of the plants. We got the police report and it said that only one horse had been reported, and that by the man’s granddaughter. They never found that horse and the case was marked “unfounded”. Believe the AP at your peril. They are not what they used to be.
As to the “temporary bill”, that is in fact exactly what I was explaining, but it was not a “law” in the conventional sense, but a budget amendment. It did not outlaw horse slaughter but merely cut off the funding for required inspections at USDA plants.
Normally there is an Agriculture budget bill every year, so any amendment to it, like the Ensign/Byrd (Senate sponsors) or Spratt/Sweeney/Whitfield (House sponsors) amendment would run only for the budget year. Some years they do not pass new budgets but rather continuing spending resolutions that keep the same budget. In that case the amendment continues as it did in 2007. The new bill does not provide funding for ante-mortem inspections either.
All that said, Vicki is correct in that it did not stop the slaughter of horses because it was beat to the punch by the state laws in Texas and Illinois. Not only that, but the amendment does not affect exports. Exports have completely made up for the closing of the US based plants. In January we exported 9,944 horses for slaughter as opposed to 9,975 for the previous January (before the plants closed). Thus there was no permanent decrease in slaughter, just a change of location.
As to “Austria” vs “Australia”, I did misread that. Even so, our horse meat is exported to Belgium and France, not Austria.
May 30, 2008 at 12:56 am
mediumrarebooks,
I will take another moment to respond to your comments about an aversion to different meats being cultural. That is true, but so what? Is it not the right of a society to protect animals that they consider to be within their circle of compassion? You do realize that humans are animals too don’t you? Are we hypocritical for not eating each other?
Secondly, horses are not raised as food animals. Most of the drugs we use on them like Phenylbutazone, are prohibited for animals intended for food. Basically, American horse meat would long ago have been prohibited if we were feeding it to our own population.
Finally, your comment about Hitler being a vegan was the worst kind of associative illogic. There is no causative relationship between his diet and his evil madness.
First, he was not a vegan but a vegetarian (there is a difference). Even in that he was not pure as he sometimes ate ham, pork dumplings and sardines.
But the reason he was a vegetarian was that he thought meat was bad for people, not that he cared about the animals. He always talked about his health (how much he used to sweat before giving up meat, etc) in regard to his vegetarianism, he never spoke of the plight of animals. He liked to say that if you offered a child a choice between a piece of fruit and a piece of meat it would take the fruit because it instinctively knew it was better.
For someone as well read as you, I am surprised you would play the Hitler card. It is almost always a bad idea and comes across as grasping.
May 30, 2008 at 5:59 am
I will be closing comments on this post because I have little time to answer people who are unable to read. Let me just say this, I don’t believe horses are human, which may account for our differences in belief.
Also I did not say or even imply that Hitler’s unwillingness to eat meat had anything to do with his madness. My point was simply that vegans and people who believe we should be allowed to eat any kind of meat are the only ones not hypocritical on this issue. Those who believe it’s okay to eat some meats and not others are hypocrites.
Nor did I say that meat was exported to Austria, but it’s obvious that they eat it there.
All of your comments about mistreatment of horse, drugs used in horses, etc. are issues that my post did not touch on. Obviously, if horsemeat were to be sold in the U.S. it would have to meet certain standards.
It truly is sad to see educated people unable to read a post without reading into it all of their own prejudices, rather than read what it is actually saying.
I also do not believe that AP is infallible, but I have seen AP correct and apologize for stories more minor than the Kentucky horse one. And who should the average reader trust more–AP stories or press releases from animal rights organizations that have an axe to grind.
Comments are closed.