Our government is decaying

From Daily Kos
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Secrets

Secret laws. Secret courts making those secret laws. Secret programs created by secretive agencies to find out what Americans might be communicating in their private lives, activities that we might or might not intend to be secret.

The past month's worth of revelations about the extent to which we are subject to the prying eyes of the state, and the promise of much more to come in the way of NSA programs, has sort of tuned my ear to the stories that might otherwise flicker by in the news day. The stories about what's being kept from us from pretty much every level of our government. And it seems to me that it's getting just a little bit out of control.

Here's a fun, and by fun I mean vaguely horrifying, story from Iowa, that's affecting the nation. The Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals has determine that 372 people around the country were sickened in an outbreak of a diarrheal disease by "a prepackaged salad mix containing iceberg and romaine lettuce, carrots and red cabbage." The producer of that salad mix, though, is being kept secret. The salad mix, officials said, was off the shelves before they figured out that it was the cause of the outbreak, and besides that "Iowa law restricts the state from releasing such information if there is no public health benefit." Except that "Whether the product is still on shelves nationally isn't known." Okay, then. To be on the safe side, maybe mix your own salad greens for now