Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Safeway has adopted new policies to improve its animal welfare standards. This gigantic California-based grocery chain, with 1,743 stores in the U.S. and Canada, is bowing to some firm but gentle arm twisting from those friends to farm animals everywhere, The Humane Society of the United States:

“Safeway’s new policies represent important progress on basic animal welfare issues and will positively affect many thousands of animals,” said Paul Shapiro, senior director of The HSUS’s factory farming campaign. “Safeway’s move also sends a strong message to the agribusiness industry that it must rapidly move away from the worst factory farming abuses, such as intensive confinement systems and the conventional poultry slaughter method.”

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Anne Frank famously wrote “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.” Of course, she went on to die of typhus in a concentration camp, which may seem to undermine her benign view of mankind.

I bring all this up because, like Anne Frank, I want to believe that people are essentially good. That’s why I’d like to think that encouraging everyone to watch a new video from the Humane Society, “Overlooked: The Lives of Animals Raised For Food” will make a dent in the rampant animal abuse that’s standard operating procedure in American meat, poultry, dairy and egg production.

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Sure, Obama’s got Oprah, but he’s not the only candidate basking in the glow of a little star wattage. John Edwards got Kevin Bacon to warm up the crowd for him this Sunday at an Ames, Iowa high school cafeteria.

Edwards is the only candidate who’s called for a moratorium on building more factory farms like the humongous hog operations that have sprung up all over Iowa, creating huge manure lagoons that spew toxins into the soil and air. But can Bacon bring home the voters for Edwards? Bacon downplayed his influence to the Des Moines Register:

“”people will make up their own minds, not based on anything I say. But if there’s a couple more people here because I’m here, and they get a chance to hear what Senator Edwards says, that’s what’s important.”

For a crash course in the horrors of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) see the Meatrix.