Good News/Bad News October 10, 2002

By Matthew Wheeland, AlterNet. Posted October 10, 2002.

Finally! Some Good News! Our foes have retreated, taken three, maybe four steps back, and the light shines brightly on us! Let's enjoy it while we can, why not?

Striking a killing blow for clearheadedness, Los Angeles of all places has firmly rejected a plan to take water from the Colorado River (which, thanks to long-lasting drought conditions, doesn't run too deep these days to begin with) and store it in the desert! The CEO of the private company that was scheduled to profit from, er, take charge of the project, pouted and whined about the decision, but those are just the breaks, Mr. Forces-of-Evil.

Florida may not be able to run an election to save its skin, but its enviro-cred is on the rise: some Florida cops are going to drive hybrid patrol cars. The manager of Marion County's vehicle fleet is named Wyatt Earp, too.

More folks are choosing sides in the GM food battle: Brazil's left-wing presidential front-runner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has placed a "GM-Free Brazil" agenda on his platform. Brazil is currently GM-free, but facing pressure from Monsanto and other biotech companies to change its ways.

Meanwhile, Swiss farmers and environmentalists are fighting for a GM-food ban after the Swiss parliament turned down a five-year moratorium on biotech crops.

Will you permit us to be snarky for a moment? Thanks. After a land donation from the Richard King Mellon foundation, there are now 34,000 more acres of the ANWR to drill for oil in. Seriously though: that's good news. We're going to need that land once global warming turns the rest of the planet into a disease-infested desert.

Sorry, sorry. We're gonna need to be snarky for just one more moment. Thanks to lobbying from big-time health food producers, the USDA has introduced certification standards for organic products. While this will move Clairol's "Herbal Essences" back to the cesspool of industrial chemicals where it belongs, it's also going to open the door for the corporatization of organic foods. Huzzah, capitalism!

Moving on to your regularly scheduled Bad News snarkiness:

This is the WTF edition of GN/BN. There's lots of head-scratching Bad-News weirdness here. By WTF, we mean "Well, that's funny...". Of course. What else?

WTF #1: "Some consider it quackery." A Libertarian Senate candidate from Montana has turned blue from drinking colloidal silver as an immune booster. At least he's not gonna pass any laws preventing the marketing of just such quackery....

WTF #2: Meatpackers to FDA: "Can you just say 'differently molecularized' instead of 'irradiated' on the foods that you bombard with radioactive particles? Thanks."

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