Imagine you’re in charge of the department of agriculture in an country whose farming industry as well as dietary habits depend heavily on cattle farming and you have just discovered the third case of mad cow disease – what do you do?

It’s easy. You just look away and hope you’ll find something to help the consumers do the same. I’m just not sure it will work as well as it used to. It seems, Americans are slowly coming back to their senses.

Reuters AlertNet – US plans to scale down mad-cow testing

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) – The Agriculture Department is drawing plans to scale down its mad cow surveillance program that found two of the three U.S. cases of the disease, including one this week, two USDA officials said on Wednesday.

In addition, they said USDA would rely on private-sector incentives to inspire producers to join a separate cattle tracking system to track down suspect animals in future outbreaks of livestock diseases.

Will America ever be able to have a grown up discourse about abortion? It’s a serious and difficult issue involving a lot of complicated aspects, it is, just as the South Dakota representative interviewed by Time.com’s Nancy Gibbs states, a question of “balancing rights”. Quite right – but then again, why did he and his fellow lawmakers come up with a law that seems utterly inadequate to do just that, but very appropriate to make it to the newly staffed supreme court as quickly as possible…

I particularly like the part where the representative explains that an abortion is not an abortion as long as the women does not/cannot positively know she’s pregnant…

TIME.com Print Page: Nation — When Is an Abortion Not an Abortion?

I talked to Representative Roger Hunt, the main sponsor of HB 1215, about why the bill was written as it was. Why, for instance, did they reject the standard exception to protect the health of the mother? Because, he says, that phrase is far too stretchy. ‘If we were talking of pure, serious health concerns,’ that would be one thing, Hunt said. But ‘health’ can mean economic health, mental health. ‘It becomes an open barn door for anyone who wants an abortion. We might as well not have the legislation at all’.

But what about cases of rape and incest, where there is overwhelming public support for allowing abortion as an option? Here the lawmakers admit that they carved out a little gray area. Hunt notes that the bill forbids doctors from prescribing any drug or doing any procedure on a pregnant woman ‘with the specific intent’ of ending a pregnancy. It also protects the right of women to use ‘a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical, if it is administered prior to the time when a pregnancy could be determined through conventional medical testing…’

In other words, a woman presenting herself to an emergency room immediately after a rape, Hunt says, would be able to use emergency contraception; the trick is that she has to do within the first few days after the assault, before any test can determine whether she was pregnant in the first place. The lawmakers concluded that it’s OK for a rape victim to have an abortion, so long as she doesn’t know for certain that she’s doing it.

So why not have an exemption for all rape victims, including the ones who are too shattered to report an assault right away? Hunt calls it “a fine line that we’re walking, but some of this is just to show that we’re being fair and reasonable. In cases where we cannot determine if there’s an unborn child or not, we’re trying to be sympathetic to a woman who alleges she’s been raped.’ But the sympathy expires after about a week. ‘Very honestly,’ Hunt adds, ‘We don’t want to have a lot of abortion clinics questioning a woman and having the woman say ‘well, I was raped four months ago, I need an abortion.’ We’re trying to be sensitive to women who are legitimate rape victims—and not give abortion clinics a chance to commit fraud on system.’

‘It’s so hypocritical it just blows my mind,’ Planned Parenthood’s Looby counters. ‘They understand that this is a problem for the public, so they had to come up with a way to get around that and this is their attempt to do so.’ The majority of rape victims, she notes, are victims of date rape, and the majority of incest victims are quite young. ‘They don’t present themselves at a hospital or doctor’s office to ask for contraceptive measures to prevent pregnancy,’ she says. ‘So I think it’s very disingenuous of him to suggest this is an exception for rape and incest. It’s not.’

Now look at this, David Ignatius, writing in the Washington Post – a paper characterised by some as the upscale PR office of this American administration (just look at how the arrogance claim comes coupled with “the most righteous politians”) – invokes An Arrogance of Power to explain the Dick Cheney’s silence after the shooting accident.

There is a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment. That arrogance of power is on display with the Bush administration.

The most vivid example is the long delay in informing the country that Vice President Cheney had accidentally shot a man last Saturday while hunting in Texas. For a White House that informs us about the smallest bumps and scrapes suffered by the president and vice president, the lag is inexplicable. But let us assume the obvious: It was an attempt to delay and perhaps suppress embarrassing news. We will never know whether the vice president’s office would have announced the incident at all if the host of the hunting party, Katharine Armstrong, hadn’t made her own decision Sunday morning to inform her local paper.

Clearly, from a PR standpoint this incident was handles in the worst possible way. But this is not some straw breaking a Cheney’s back, this is a Trent Lott moment. We’ll see soon enough.

Speaking of straws… this might be one (via Brad DeLong).

Seriously, I’m starting to think that the US Vice President Cheney might have to step down because of the shooting accident… just look at the quote from Yahoo! News –

WASHINGTON – Vice President
Dick Cheney apparently broke the No. 1 rule of hunting: be sure of what you’re shooting at. …
Hunting safety experts interviewed Monday agreed it would have been a good idea for Whittington to announce himself – something he apparently didn’t do, according to a witness. But they stressed that the shooter is responsible for knowing his surroundings and avoiding hitting other people.”

Posing as a tough guy while not being able to shoot straight is something I imagine doesn’t go down well with a significant part of the VP’s constituency… it would be a blow to the administration, of course, but it’s just the kind of thing that cannot happen to a White House already on the defense. Sure, the President has been a little less under fire lately, after all, he pledged to spend the equivalent of about 3 hours of Iraq-money on figuring out a way how reduce the American dependency on oil. But still, with the positioning for the next race already in full swing, this is just the kind of thing that a President cannot afford.

While Cheney stepping down over this would prove each and every prejudice about the irrationality of US public discourse right, you’d just have to admire the irony – he’s been an active part of an administration which, slowly even by their own account, has been busy shooting without knowing what they were shooting at for the last 4 years. And now that did not intend to do that for once he’s actually hitting someone – and, in a way, himself, of course.

Gentle readers, I know I’ve been neglecting this lovely little kind-of diary recently, so, first off, welcome to the 2006 edition of almost a diary. And just in case you were wondering what to avoid this year – here’s my advice: don’t go hunting with Dick Cheney.

Cheney Shoots Fellow Hunter in Texas Accident

“The vice president was concerned,” said Mary Matalin, a Cheney adviser who spoke with him yesterday morning. “He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.”

PR people… He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to? Quite frankly, I bet he wasn’t supposed to shoot the guy. But on the other hand, now we know that Mr Cheney can indeed feel bad about something… or do we?