You may have heard last week that the USDA has refused a please from a small boutique beef processor (Creekstone) that wanted to test all 1,000 cows it processes each day for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more colloquially known as "mad cow disease." By doing so at their own cost, Creekstone could again ship high-end Black Angus beef to Japan, which has banned all beef from the US until each animal is tested, since one animal was found last year to carry the disease. Without the tests, Creekstone will go bankrupt and lose hundreds of high-paying jobs in a Red state.

Dwight Meredith at Wampum has the full story on how the big beef producers are opposing this, not out of science, but for seeing a chance to put annoyances like Creekstone out of business - and how their pals in the Bush administration are going along with it. My favorite part:

USDA officials say that they sympathize with Creekstone and similar operations hurt by the bans imposed by Japan and other nations, but that agreeing to the company's request could imply there is a safety issue with American beef and usher in an era of expensive testing that has no scientific justification.

The issue is not the effectiveness of the testing itself, as Creekstone would be working under the auspices of an academic lab that the USDA has approved for mad cow testing. Rather, the agency objects to the very idea of testing every animal, including younger ones.

A blogger with more free time could probably break the back of this story by looking up the myriad times the GOP has advocated drug testing for every single person in a given profession or school, arguing that testing everyone is the only scientific way to be sure there are no drugs in play, and that a "reasonable suspicion" that a pilot or even a marching band member is using drugs is in no way necessary to compel their participation in the tests.

Heck, just pointing out that the Bush administration screens the names of all US airline passengers and prohibits some from flying should work, since there's no "scientific evidence" that such a system has ever found a single terrorist or terrorism suspect, right?

At this stage of the Bush administration, it's not even so much that they lie as the first resort, it's that the lies are so transparent and hypocritical.

(I'm just trying this to see how it works; it always makes me laugh on Oliver Willis' site)

...this week was going just fine, right on track, until about 11PM Wednesday night, and then I blinked and it was 9PM Friday.

This kind of week shakes my belief in the space-time continuum.