Hey, guess who got a mention in Salon today? If you’re visiting via the Salon link, I hope you’ll stick around.
I can’t remember if I linked to Mark Levine’s Q&A; about the Supreme Court decision in Gore v. Bush, but I had problems with the earlier versions due to some errors of fact that I noticed. Apparently thousands of other people did, too, and let the author know about it. Anyway, here’s the updated version. Absent any consideration of the ultimate result of the Supreme Court’s decision, I think that the reasoning they used to render it was tortured and out of keeping with the law. I think that Levine’s essay raises some valid points, but I also think it’s a bit too severe – I don’t believe that the Supreme Court Justices are as nefarious as he portrays them to be.
The USDA has finally issued its standard labelling organic food. Thanks to bunches of comments sent in by citizens (including my wife and I), the USDA scrapped an earlier, very lax version of the regulations that would have allowed things no right-thinking person would refer to as organic be labelled as such. Nice work. I also credit Sara Moulton of the FoodTV Network for urging people to write the USDA complaining about the bad version of the regulations on her cooking show.
Here’s a good example of the pro-business defanging of pro-consumer legislation. The federal government is passing a new law greatly increasing the privacy standard for medical records, but the employers and insurance companies will be able to require patients to waive those privacy rights in order to be eligible for their health plan. So what’s the point of the rules in the first place?
Are you interested in working on an open source project for the good of the environment? EcoAccess is looking for interns this Spring to help them build tools for environmental research and education using Python and Zope.