Obama signs school nutrition bill

I joined host Garland Robinette today on New Orleans’ WWL to discuss the background to yesterday’s signing and the considerable shift from local to federal control that will result. As I pointed out, schools’ safety-driven fear of fresh ingredients (meat, poultry, eggs, greens, and so forth all pose some bacterial risk) has long been among the factors driving them toward bland and repetitive menus based on precooked, frozen or canned ingredients.

Below-average cancer rates found in town of Brockovich fame

After alarmist coverage about how the water supply of rural Hinkley, Calif. is laced with carcinogenic chromium 6, it may have surprised some L.A. Times readers to learn that the town’s cancer rate is actually a bit below average. One interviewed local family blames the pollution for a variety of ills ranging from stroke to cognitive deficits to miscarriage to tumors in a pet dog. When the movie “Erin Brockovich” came out, it was pointed out that workers at the utility plant where the contamination originated had a life expectancy exceeding the California average.

P.S. I see that Tim Cavanaugh of Reason is on the case too.

“One nation, under too many laws”

Philip K. Howard’s latest, for the Washington Post:

Once enacted, most laws are ignored for generations, allowed to take on a life of their own without meaningful review. Decade after decade, they pile up like sediment in a harbor, bogging the country down – in dense regulation, unaffordable health care, and higher taxes and public debt.

Time, he says, to revisit the “sunset law” idea, under which laws would expire unless affirmatively reenacted, and radical simplification as well.

AgSec Vilsack: no intention of banning bake sales

As the Associated Press reported recently, the school nutrition bill to be signed by President Obama today includes provisions giving the federal government authority to regulate (among much else) the frequency of school bake sales. Following a public furor, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack now says he has no intention of using the authority to do that — which may or may not signify much over the long term, since cabinet secretaries depart regularly and his successors will be free to revisit the issue. [ABC/KBOI, Kyle Wingfield/Atlanta Journal-Constitution] Local governments in places like New York City and even Iowa have lately been regulating or abolishing bake sales on nutritionist grounds. I joined Ray Dunaway on Hartford’s WTIC NewsTalk 1080 this morning to discuss the update.

“The Case Against the U.N. Women’s Treaty”

Contrary to mythmaking in some quarters, CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) does push participating governments to regulate family life and private conduct, it goes far beyond the current state of U.S. law, it is no mere hortatory exercise unlikely to affect future decisions by judges and others, it is not merely a way of pressuring countries whose record on women’s rights is inferior to that of the United States, and its force will not be rendered meaningless by the inevitable Senate declarations, reservations and understandings. [Christina Hoff Sommers, NRO; Julian Ku/Opinio Juris (“[Sommers] is certainly right that most international law scholars think the reservations have no effect and that there will be a push after ratification to get courts to recognize CEDAW and ignore the reservations.”)] More: Rachel Ryan, FrumForum.

December 13 roundup

“The Chocolate Library” vs. library bureaucrats

A New York law provides that new businesses cannot register names that employ words like “library”, “school” or “academy” without the prior approval of the state education department. The department declined to approve the application of a startup East Village confiserie that calls itself The Chocolate Library, so the owner has incorporated as Chocolate 101 while hoping for a change of heart on the registration issue. He called the dispute “ridiculous”: “No one is coming in here confusing us as a library.” [NYT “Diner’s Journal”]

Righthaven update

Having defeated a Righthaven suit filed against the political site Democratic Underground, lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation now would like the court to award attorneys’ fees. [Kravets, Wired “Threat Level”] Among the claims advanced by EFF in that case were that Righthaven had engaged in barratry and champerty, concepts familiar to many Overlawyered readers if in desuetude in some sectors of the legal world these days. It had also pointed out that some of the newspapers facilitating the suits themselves, or websites they operate, appear to engage in or encourage practices that might be considered wrongful under Righthaven’s theories, such as “cutting and pasting” potentially copyrighted text.

Separately, Groklaw has analyzed what happened in one sample case. Of the furor aroused by the lawsuits, “I think the benefits are worth the negative publicity,” said one executive with the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s owner at a September panel.

The entrepreneurial copyright litigation firm has also now signed up the Denver Post as a new affiliate, and has made a splash by suing the owner of the Drudge Report over its use of a photo allegedly swiped from the Colorado newspaper, an offense (if proven) presumably not as readily defended under “fair use” doctrine as some others over which it has sued.