Return of the Culture Wars?, Tim Johnson to announce retirement, Rubio in KY: No retreat, Bachmann denies ethics violations, Vitter outlasts scandal, Giffords" stepdaughter"s dog kills sea lion

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(swong@politico.com or @scottwongDC)

RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS? – Jonathan Allen writes for the hometown paper: “The culture wars are back, but this time with a significant twist: the left is picking the fights and, for the most part, enjoying being on the right side of public opinion. Five years after Barack Obama warned that anxious voters are just ‘clinging’ to guns and religion, wedge issues are cutting differently — more to the liking of Democrats. Gay marriage is the talk of capital city parties. Lawmakers are working across the aisle on immigration reform plans. And New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just committed $ 12 million to pressure Congress to tighten gun control laws.

– “Activists say the three issues — gay rights, guns and immigration — climbed to national attention after surviving battle-tests in the states and enjoying a shift in public opinion. Now Washington is just playing catch up. On Tuesday, moderate Democrat Mark Warner, of Virginia, became the most recent in a line of public officials to back same-sex marriage. One the same day, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, called the Defense of Marriage Act ‘discriminatory,’ noting that he went through a ‘process’ to arrive at that conclusion. … They join Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, a conservative Republican, who announced recently that he had converted to favor same-sex marriage because his son, Will, is gay.

– “The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week on the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, both of which ban same-sex matrimony. The cases might have been considered long shots even a few years ago, but now gay-rights activists are hopeful that the court will swing along with public opinion, which has moved unequivocally in favor of gay marriage.” http://politi.co/X64tlk

‘GAYS DESERVE EQUAL RIGHTS’ – Attorneys Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, who will argue in favor of gay marriage before the Supreme Court today, write in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: “The central question is whether a state may exclude gay and lesbian Americans from what the Supreme Court has called ‘the most important relation in life’—the institution of marriage. The answer is no. We represent two loving and committed couples. In many ways, our clients’ relationships are indistinguishable from our own: They have lives and homes together, they are raising children, they have jobs, they pay bills, they run errands. They experience together many of the joys and sorrows and laughter of life as a family in America.  But California has locked them out of the institution of marriage because they are gay. …

– “Because of their sexual orientation—a characteristic with which they were born and which they cannot change—our clients and hundreds of thousands of gay men and lesbians in California and across the country are being excluded from one of life’s most precious relationships. … withholding marriage causes infinite and permanent stigma, pain and isolation. It denies gay men and lesbians their identity and their dignity; it labels their families as second-rate.  That outcome cannot be squared with the principle of equality and the unalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that is the bedrock promise of America from the Declaration of Independence to the 14th Amendment, and the dream of all Americans. This badge of inequality must be extinguished.” http://on.wsj.com/14rRbTC

New York Times, “Cold, Wet Wait for Tickets to Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Cases,” By Jeremy W. Peters: “Being a witness to history can be messy business. And for those waiting outside the Supreme Court on Monday for one of the few coveted tickets to hear oral arguments in a pair of same-sex marriage cases this week, it was also cold, wet and tedious. … A spring snowstorm that blew through the capital on Monday seemed to do little to deter an eager few dozen people from huddling under soggy sleeping bags, plastic tarpaulins and oversize umbrellas as they counted down the final hours before the arguments began on Tuesday morning (the second case was scheduled for Wednesday morning). With about 20 hours to go, some had been there since Thursday night, moved by a sense of the moment and civic purpose. Others, like the Carters, had a less sentimental reason: They were being paid to wait for someone else. ‘It’s enough,’ Ms. Carter said, declining to say how much she would make.” http://nyti.ms/YR5etX

TEA PARTY SENATORS TO FILIBUSTER GUN-CONTROL BILL – Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz write in a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid: “‘We will oppose the motion to proceed to any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions,’ the three conservatives wrote in a copy of the signed letter obtained by POLITICO.”  http://politi.co/X62hu8

– Wayne LaPierre may be the public face of the NRA, but Jim Baker is the group’s man in Washington, POLITICO’s Anna Palmer writes.  “It’s a strategy that plays both the inside and outside games. LaPierre rallies the masses on cable news, Baker works the halls of Congress and behind it all is a grass-roots network of 5-million NRA supporters who mobilize fast. Many big interest groups have the same playbook, in which a fiery front man offers a public face, while a trusted inside-man works the halls of Congress where deals really get made — or blocked. Baker, known as a respected Second Amendment expert, built his power base over decades by working the halls of Congress, earning the trust of Democrats and Republicans — and putting real money behind his word and into the coffers of reelection campaigns.” http://politi.co/14qqzSY                                       

TIM JOHNSON TO ANNOUNCE RETIREMENT TODAY – Reuters’ Margaret Chadbourn reports: “Senator Tim Johnson, the Democratic chairman of the powerful banking committee, does not plan to run for re-election when his current term ends in 2014, two sources familiar with the matter and a Capitol Hill staffer said on Monday. Johnson, 66, a three-term senator from South Dakota, has scheduled a news conference for Tuesday in his home state to discuss what his aides described as ‘his future plans.’ His retirement would leave a vacant seat in a conservative-leaning state that could be difficult for Democrats to defend as they try to protect their majority in the Senate. Political analysts expect Johnson’s son, Brendan Johnson, who is South Dakota’s U.S. attorney, to emerge as a potential Democratic candidate in the 2014 election. The younger Johnson has not announced any formal plans to seek the Senate seat. Former Democratic Representative Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, who lost a bid for reelection in 2010, is another leading choice to run if the incumbent senator retires, analysts said.” http://yhoo.it/10JcPQ3

–Johnson becomes the seventh senator who will not seek reelection in 2014. The others are: Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.).

RUBIO IN PAUL’S BACKYARD: WE CANNOT RETREAT FROM THE WORLD – POLITICO’s Manu Raju in Louisville, Ky.: “Florida Sen. Marco Rubio swung by Rand Paul’s home state here on Monday where he effectively made one thing clear: He’s no Rand Paul — particularly on foreign policy. In a soaring speech on the University of Louisville campus, Rubio made the case for American military might around the world, vowing that the U.S cannot ‘retreat’ from international conflicts, must encourage democracy and continue spending money overseas aimed at bolstering the country’s image. …Rubio’s remarks come just as Paul has been trying to clamp down on federal dollars spent on foreign aid and as the Kentucky freshman has been pushing for a “less aggressive” American role in the world — as the two prospective 2016 rivals continue to lay out competing visions of the GOP’s future.

– “‘We can’t solve every humanitarian crisis on the planet, we can’t be involved in every dispute, every civil war and every conflict,’ Rubio told a concert hall filled with young adults and middle-aged Kentucky voters. ‘But we also cannot retreat from the world. It’s not that America will continue to function as the world’s police officer. The problem is that like anything in the world: If you pull back from it, a vacuum will be created.’ Rubio added: ‘The alternative to U.S. [engagement] on the global stage is chaos.’” http://politi.co/109oQKS

– For the Senate GOP, the tail is wagging the dog, NYT columnist Frank Bruini writes in a piece titled “Rand Paul’s Loopy Ascent: “Rather than [Ted] Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, humbly taking cues from John Cornyn, the senior senator, Cornyn labors to match the supercilious upstart scowl for scowl, and even followed Cruz’s intemperate lead to cast one of only three Senate votes against John Kerry’s confirmation as secretary of state. And Mitch McConnell, who is not only Kentucky’s senior senator but also the Senate minority leader, seems to worry more about Paul, the state’s junior senator, than vice versa.” http://nyti.ms/13sEQz5

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GOOD TUESDAY MORNING, MARCH 26, 2013, and welcome to The Huddle, your play-by-play preview of the day’s congressional news. Send tips, suggestions, comments, complaints and corrections to swong@politico.com. If you don’t already, please follow me on Twitter @scottwongDC.

My new followers include @cdipas and @RepCardenas.

TODAY IN CONGRESS – The House and Senate are out for the two-week Passover and Easter recess.

VITTER OUTLASTS SCANDAL – Paul Kane reports in the Washington Post’s Style section: “Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) is suddenly in high demand. His banishment is over, his rehabilitation almost complete. Several years after acknowledging his ‘very serious sin,’ he has successfully adopted a higher profile in the divided U. S. Senate. Vitter is teaming up with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the chamber’s leading environmental advocate, to shore up levees and beach fronts from flood risk. He is working with one of the financial industry’s biggest thorns, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), on the latest bill targeting mega-banks and their ‘too big to fail’ status. When he’s not working across party lines, Vitter is throwing his increased seniority around in stronger ways: Last week he vowed to block President Obama’s nominee for Labor secretary until the administration releases documents about voting rights issues in Louisiana. Now Vitter’s name is atop most lists of possible GOP gubernatorial nominees for Louisiana in 2015 when Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) reaches his term limit.” http://wapo.st/ZSYoaD

– “Some senior Democratic and Republican advisers point to Vitter as the latest example of how — if a senator can outlast a scandal and win reelection — the Senate is a forgiving shelter where ‘sin’ is not in small supply. Vitter was lucky that he had almost 3 ½ years after the revelation of his entanglement with an escort service before he had to face voters again— enough time to work town halls and local fairs.”

BACHMANN DENIES CAMPAIGN FINANCE VIOLATIONS – Jon Avlon reports for The Daily Beast: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) “is embroiled in a litany of legal proceedings related to her rolling disaster of a presidential campaign—including a Office of Congressional Ethics investigation into campaign improprieties that has not previously been reported. The Daily Beast has learned that federal investigators are now interviewing former Bachmann campaign staffers nationwide about alleged intentional campaign-finance violations. The investigators are working on behalf of the Office of Congressional Ethics, which probes reported improprieties by House members and their staffs and then can refer cases to the House Ethics Committee. … Two other former staffers confirmed the existence of the investigation this weekend, and on Monday Bachmann’s campaign counsel, William McGinley, of the high-powered firm Patton Boggs, confirmed that the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) was looking into the congresswoman’s presidential campaign last year. ‘There are no allegations that the Congresswoman engaged in any wrongdoing,’ McGinley said. ‘We are … confident that at the end of their Review the OCE Board will conclude that Congresswoman Bachmann did not do anything inappropriate.’” http://thebea.st/Yc8nZB

SHELBY SACKS SIX APPROPS STAFFERS – Austin Wright and Jonathan Allen reports for POLITICIO: “Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby has ousted five Senate Appropriations Committee aides with strong ties to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, sources familiar with the purge tell POLITICO. One of the five aides, Rebecca Davies, had worked on Capitol Hill for decades. A sixth staffer, brought onto the committee by former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), was also let go, one of the sources said. Shelby succeeded Cochran as the top Republican on the spending panel at the beginning of the year.” http://politi.co/14qhRnM

– It’s not completely unprecedented for a new chairman or ranking member to replace staffers with their own people. When Sen. David Vitter took over as top Republican of the EPW Committee, he let go 12 staffers who had worked under his predecessor, Sen. Jim Inhofe. http://bit.ly/YBHU7f

SENATE DEMS LEAVE OBAMA HANGING ON CLIMATE CHANGE – Andrew Restuccia and Darren Goode report for POLITICO: “More than a dozen Senate Democrats have a message for President Barack Obama: If he wants to take dramatic action on climate change, he’s on his own. The latest evidence came from this weekend’s marathon series of budget votes, in which moderate and conservative Democrats sided with the GOP on the Keystone XL oil pipeline and against any prospects for a tax on carbon. In the two Keystone votes, the Democrats helped the Republicans prevail by filibuster-proof majorities — a clear sign that Obama will have little political cover from his party’s middle if he chooses to reject the Canada-to-Texas pipeline, as climate advocates are urging him to.” http://politi.co/14qmdLA

– National Journal’s Coral Davenport looks at five small pieces of energy legislation that could pass Congress, from energy efficiency and offshore drilling to ethanol reform. http://bit.ly/10eTRhC

DOG BELONGING TO GIFFORDS’ RELATIVE KILLS CALIF. SEA LION – Alisha Gomez reports for the L.A. Times: “A dog that belongs to a relative of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords attacked and killed a sea lion along the Laguna Beach shoreline, police said Monday. A video of the violent encounter shows Giffords’ stepdaughter and husband trying to pull the canine from the limp mammal as the surf rolls in. A copy of the video was sent to The Times. Laguna Beach police received a call at 2 p.m. Saturday and arrived to find that the 65-pound American bulldog mix had broken free from its 18-year-old owner and attacked a beached sea lion on a public beach near the exclusive Montage Laguna Beach, Capt. Jason Kravetz said in an email. The video taken by a local resident shows Giffords’ stepdaughter struggling to free the sea lion.

– “Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, appears later in the video, running down and pulling the dog off the sea lion, both police and a senior advisor to Giffords confirmed. Kelly and Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, are vacationing in Laguna Beach.” http://lat.ms/X9jfsw

MONDAY’S TRIVIA – Wyeth Ruthven was first to correctly answer that Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois was the only U.S. senator to succeed and be succeeded by an African American senator. Fitzgerald beat Carol Moseley Braun and then retired and was succeeded by Barack Obama.

TODAY’S TRIVIA – David Heymsfeld has today’s question: Name two U.S. presidents who, four years before they were elected, lost a vote to become the vice presidential nominee of their party. First to correctly answer gets a mention in the next day’s Huddle. Email me at swong@politico.com.

GET HUDDLE emailed to your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile device each morning. Just enter your email address where it says “Sign Up.” http://www.politico.com/huddle/

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POLITICO – Top 10 – The Huddle

Return of the Culture Wars?, Tim Johnson to announce retirement, Rubio in KY: No retreat, Bachmann denies ethics violations, Vitter outlasts scandal, Giffords" stepdaughter"s dog kills sea lion

Nestlé Recall and Mafia Connections: 5 Things You Should Know As Horse Meat Scandal Grows

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By now you’ve likely heard about the horse meat scandal that is rocking Europe. As far as food scandals go, this one is intriguing. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve learned that the meat we buy may not be everything we thought it was. Remember “pink slime”? The only good news here is that, so far, it doesn’t seem to be an imminent health threat, although it does raise some very alarming questions. 

As food politics expert Marion Nestle wrote, “The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. Cultural identity? They (other people) eat horsemeat. We don’t.”

As Nestle explains, “Most Americans say they won’t eat horsemeat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.” Horse meat, however, is eaten in numerous countries around the world like China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as countries in Europe, including France and Switzerland. 

It’s one thing to knowingly eat horse meat; it’s quite another to have it slipped into your food. This opens a pandora’s box of questions about the food we"re buying. For starters: What else is in there (donkey and pig, and the list may grow)? What does it reveal about food safety and our complex food chain? Who is responsible for duping consumers, and how did they get away with it?

It turns out there is a lot we can learn from Europe’s surplus of horse burgers.

1. The Mighty Fall

The most recent news surfacing today is that Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world, has now been entangled in the scandal. The New York Timesreports that Nestlé is pulling two products sold in Italy and Spain: Buitoni Beef Ravioli and Beef Tortellini, as well as Lasagnes à la Bolognaise Gourmandes sold to catering companies in France.  

Nestlé is just the latest in the list of Europe’s top food companies involved. The story first broke in the UK and Ireland when major supermarket chains Tesco and Aldi were found to be selling beef products that contained horse meat. It spun from there. AdAge reports, “Burger King binned thousands of Whoppers and Angus Burgers, which were sourced from the same Irish beef supplier, Silvercrest, and Findus ‘beef’ lasagna was found to contain 100% horse meat.” 

Silvercrest has been fingered, as well as Liffey Meats in Ireland and Dalepak in Yorkshire, accordingto Felicity Lawrence of the Guardian:

Silvercrest and Dalepak are both subsidiaries of ABP Food Group, one of the largest beef processors in Europe.”

… Huge blocks of frozen meat at a cold store in Northern Ireland, Freeza Foods, which had been quarantined by officials suspicious of its labelling and state of packaging, were found to contain 80% horse. 

Other top food companies were implicated when the scandal hit France (more on that soon), but the presence of large food companies at the heart of the issue is troubling. While bigger companies are often able to offer products cheaper than small and local stores, some may be questioning if the savings are really worth it if consumers are getting duped. A look at the complex supply chain raises even more fears.

Lawrence writes:

Supermarket buyers and big brands have been driving down prices, seeking special offers on meat products as consumers cut back on their spending in the face of recession. The squeeze on prices has come at a time when manufacturers" costs have been soaring. Beef prices have been at record highs as has the price of grain needed to feed cattle. The cost of energy, heavily used in industrial processing and to fuel centralised distribution chains, has also soared. There has been a mistmatch between the cost of real beef and what companies are prepared to pay.

So, are we really shocked?

2. A Tangled Web

Horse meat has ended up in so-called beef products to varying degrees — some have been found to contain traces of horse DNA, which may have been the result of processing plants not properly cleaning equipment. And some products have been found to contain upward of 80 to 100 percent horse meat, which signals a much larger problem. 

Getting to the bottom of how this came about has involved a lot of finger pointing. In Ireland, the ABP Food Group blamed supplies in Netherlands and Spain, and later Poland. “Five weeks into the scandal and the links in the Irish chain have still not been fully established,” writes the Guardian"s Lawrence.” But this gets even more interesting in France, as she explains:  

Comigel had subcontracted its ready meal production to a factory in Luxembourg, Tavola. It was supplied with meat by a company called Spanghero. Spanghero had bought meat from a Dutch fraudster already convicted of passing horse off as beef, Jan Fasen.

The Dutch trader ran a company called Draap, which spelled backwards is paard or Dutch for horse. It was registered in Cyprus in 2008, with an offshore vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. It emerged during Fasen"s trial in Holland that he had supplied French companies with horsemeat imported from South America and Mexico fraudulently labelled as Dutch and German “beef” going back to 2007.

The horsemeat found in the recent tests on ready meals exported from France was said to have been sourced by Draap from Romania. The Romanian government has said its meat was legally exported correctly labeled as horse. The French government said Spanghero was the first agent to stamp the horse as beef; Spanghero has denied doing so deliberately. Fasen says Spanghero and French manufacturers were in on the deception from the beginning.

It turns out there may be a whole lot more criminal to this case.

3. Trouble in Romania

It just so happens that Romania may have an excess of dead horses on its hands. John Lichfield of the Independent reports that a change in traffic rules is to blame:

Horse-drawn carts were a common form of transport for centuries in Romania, but hundreds of thousands of the animals are feared to have been sent to the abattoir after the change in road rules.

The law, which was passed six years ago but only enforced recently, also banned carts drawn by donkeys, leading to speculation among food-industry officials in France that some of the “horse meat” which has turned up on supermarket shelves in Britain, France and Sweden may, in fact, turn out to be donkey meat. “Horses have been banned from Romanian roads and millions of animals have been sent to the slaughterhouse,” said Jose Bove, a veteran campaigner for small farmers who is now vice-president of the European Parliament agriculture committee.

While the explanation of where some of the horse meat could have come from is straightforward, how it got to dinner plates is not. As Lichfield explains, “It came from abattoirs in Romania through a dealer in Cyprus working through another dealer in Holland to a meat plant in the south of France which sold it to a French-owned factory in Luxembourg which made it into frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries.”

4. Blame the Mafia

From here, the story just gets weirder. Jamie Doward reports for the Observer that organized international gangs are suspected of involvement in the scandal. Doward writes:

Experts within the horse slaughter industry have told the Observer there is evidence that both Polish and Italian mafia gangs are running multimillion-pound scams to substitute horsemeat for beef during food production. There are claims that vets and other officials working within abattoirs and food production plants are intimidated into signing off meat as beef when it is in fact cheaper alternatives such as pork or horse. …

“I"m concerned that this is an international criminal conspiracy here and we"ve really got to get to the bottom of it,” [Britain’s environment secretary Owen Paterson] said.

5. Rethinking Our Food

So, we found out that beef products may contain horse, and also pig, and possibly donkey, as well. What to do with that information? For some people, it means buying less meat or from different sources. Reuters reported that 60 percent of people it surveyed in the UK said they were turning to local butchers for their meat and 25 percent said they would buy different cuts instead of processed meat. 

AdAge reported that sales of frozen burgers dropped 40 percent in the beginning of February, while the meat-substitute Quorn saw a spike in sales of 10 percent. Emma Hall writes that, “More than two-thirds of British adults said they would be less likely to buy frozen meat products in the future.”  

The biggest effect so far has been a drop in public trust. But after countless food safety scandals over the years, some of them deadly, why do we trust a system that’s needlessly complex?

“The food and retail industries have become highly concentrated and globalized in recent decades,” Lawrence writes for the Guardian:

“A handful of key players dominate the beef processing and supermarket sectors across Europe. They have developed very long supply chains, particularly for their economy lines, which enable them to buy the ingredients for processed foods from wherever they are cheapest at any point, depending on exchange rates and prices on the global commodity markets. Networks of brokers, cold stores operators and subcontracted meat cutting plants have emerged to supply rapidly fluctuating orders ‘just in time.’ Management consultants KPMG estimate there are around 450 points at which the integrity of the chain can break down.”

That’s worth repeating — there are 450 places where something could go wrong before your food gets into your hands.

If there was ever a reason to eat more locally produced food and to know where your food comes from and who grows and processes it, this would be a damn good one because this extends far beyond just meat products, and far beyond Europe.

Tue, 02/19/2013 – 12:20  
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Nestlé Recall and Mafia Connections: 5 Things You Should Know As Horse Meat Scandal Grows

"Hubris": New Documentary Reexamines the Iraq War "Hoax"

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A decade ago, on March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq that would lead to a nine-year war resulting in 4,486 dead American troops, 32,226 service members wounded, and over 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. The tab for the war topped $ 3 trillion. Bush did succeed in removing Saddam Hussein, but it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and no significant operational ties between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. That is, the two main assertions used by Bush and his crew to justify the war were not true. Three years after the war began, Michael Isikoff, then an investigative reporter for Newsweek (he’s since moved to NBC News), and I published Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, a behind-the-scenes account of how Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their lieutenants deployed false claims, iffy intelligence, and unsupported hyperbole to win popular backing for the invasion.

Our book—hailed by the New York Times as “the most comprehensive account of the White House’s political machinations”—was the first cut at an important topic: how a president had swindled the nation into war with a deliberate effort to hype the threat. The book is now the basis for an MSNBC documentary of the same name that marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. Hosted by Rachel Maddow, the film premiers Monday night in her usual time slot (9PM ET/PT). But the documentary goes beyond what Isikoff and I covered in Hubris, presenting new scoops and showing that the complete story of the selling of that war has yet to be told.

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Politics | Mother Jones

"Hubris": New Documentary Reexamines the Iraq War "Hoax"

Keiser Report: The Birth of a Scandal (E403)

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Keiser Report: The Birth of a Scandal (E403)