It gives you a good feeling when a politician you voted for wins and then makes a statement that confirms exactly why you voted for them.

I had such a moment this weekend while watching President Obama's weekly address on his plans to improve the disgraceful state of food and medicine safety in our nation. ...

It is a shame and a crime that have to worry for even one second whether the food or medicines we purchase will make us sick or even kill us. But the recent scares than have caused massive recalls of spinach, tomatoes and peanut products have shown us that anything we buy these days can kill us.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this deplorable situation. But I can recall the first time I ever heard the idea that the federal government was bad and had to be shrunk down to size - Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in the 1980.

Reagan and his cohorts convinced the American public that government oversight was too costly and unneeded. The marketplace would keep check on the bad guys, they argued. Let's get government out of your life. Now those deregulation chickens have come home to roost.

All I know is that the same wave of government deregulation championed by Reagan and continued through eight years of the Bush Administration has created the environment where crooks like Bernie Madoff avoid serious scrutiny from financial regulators and food producers can put out poison peanuts thanks to slack oversight of the national food supply.

Its funny that we will hear screams from the same Republicans that created this mess that President Obama is going to be spending too much money to fix this oversight problem. They will say he is mortgaging our children's financial futures to bloat the government and create red tape.

As far as I'm concerned, we can ignore any GOP protests of that sort. No price is too high to pay for safe food. Peanuts shouldn't kill.

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Paul Shepard blogs the Democrat side of politics for Black Voices. He has been a journalist for 16 years: on the national urban/minority affairs beat for The Cleveland Plain Dealer and for AP in Washington, D.C. He now runs his own public affairs firm, Shepard Strategic Communications.