Tuesday evening roundup

The biggest lies of the SC debate.

Burger King now delivers.

Calvin Trillin publicizes the Asshole Correlation Index.

Got pork?

Hog raising is a dirty business—and the environmental damage it creates has provoked rising opposition to Smithfield’s operations within US borders. In Virginia in 1997, federal judge Rebecca Smith imposed the largest federal pollution fine to that date—
$12.6 million—on the company for dumping pig excrement into the Pagan River, which runs into Chesapeake Bay. That year the state of North Carolina went further, passing a moratorium on the creation of any new open-air hog waste lagoons and a cap on production at its Tar Heel plant. In 2000 then–State Attorney General Mike Easley forced Smithfield to fund research by North Carolina State University to develop treatment methods for hog waste that are more effective than open lagoons. Despite North Carolina’s well-known hostility to regulating business, in 2007 Easley (by then governor) made the moratorium permanent. In the face of public outcry over stench and flies, even the anti-regulation industry association, the North Carolina Pork Council, supported it.

In Mexico’s Perote Valley, however—a high, arid, volcano-rimmed basin straddling the states of Veracruz and Puebla—Smithfield could operate unburdened by the environmental restrictions that increasingly hampered its expansion in the United States. Mexico has environmental standards, and NAFTA supposedly has a procedure for requiring their enforcement, but no complaint was ever filed against GCM or Smithfield under NAFTA’s environmental side agreement. Carolina Ramirez, who heads the women’s department of the Veracruz Human Rights Commission, concluded bitterly that “the company can do here what it can’t do at home.”

For local farmers like Fausto Limon, the hog operation was devastating. On some warm nights his children would wake up and vomit from the smell. He’d put his wife, two sons and daughter into his beat-up pickup, and they’d drive away from his farm until they could breathe without getting sick. Then he’d park, and they’d sleep in the truck for the rest of the night.

The no-longer-Colbert superPAC's bold ad. See the related interview:

The reactions to this awful J-Date ad are varied. I'm not going to close-read or analyze the ad; I'd rather focus on that second linked analysis of it. Everyone's entitled to the lessons she's learned from her own experiences, but I know so many women--including myself--whose experience has contradicted the idea that Jewishness (which is not the same thing as Judaism) is an indication of shared values or even spirituality. I know Jewish women--including practicing Jewish women--who are happily married to non-Jewish men or to men who are Jewish because they converted, to marry (so what does that tell you about Jewishness as a source of the shared values that brought them together?). I have a friend who is a devout Catholic, for whom it's important to date someone of any religion but who has a relationship with God. For my boyfriend, it was important to date someone who isn't very religious. In fact, my spiritual-but-not-religiousness--my belief in meditation--isn't something he really gets. I could joke about how we share Banana Republic as a place of worship... and we do. But my point is, even though he's not Jewish, he and I share values, more so than I could with many Jews I know. My point is, young Jewish ladies, date Jewish men if that's important to you, but be open to the possibility that there are lots of non-Jewish men out there who share your values and maybe even your spirituality.