I get updates from Diana DeGette through the email machine tube. She tells me all the things that I want to hear, and lots of things I don’t want to hear. She’s told me about the evils of the war in Iraq, of the splendidness of Democracy, and so on. Today she’s told me about tomatoes. Why, in her own words, “sickness from the current salmonella outbreak has been documented in more than 1,000 people.”

For the sake of comparison, in 2006 alone, 72,507 people died as a direct result of having diabetes. 1.6 million developed the disease. 3,700 of those are children.

Okay, okay, the awful stomach nastiness that is related to salmonella is bad. It’s incredibly unpleasant. It’s sickness that is a result of a federal commission that has no teeth and cannot, in any secure way, ensure the quality of food in this country. They never have, they never will. They have no authority, no money, and no time to make sure that the food that is shipped around here each and every day is safe. We can’t track cattle we suspect have bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but we somehow should focus all our attention on these tomatoes.

And the diabetes thing? Oh, we run commercials and have a website featuring very old cartoon characters that even I don’t identify with telling kids about the food pyramid.

Okay. So long as we have all our bases covered. Thanks, Diana, for caring about what really matters. The tomatoes. Hopefully the Nanny State you so desire won’t cost too much.