Blog post because I feel like I should

Dear Readers,

I've got 18 followers now. How nice! Welcome and thanks for your interest.

NAIS seems to be quiet right now, though it isn't dead by any means. We're seeing a scattering of articles like this one NAIS: Simpler Technology Fuels Fire, by William Pape on Nov 14, 2009. Pure propaganda by the executive vice president of AgInfoLink which is in partnership with USDA to provide NAIS compliant services.

Worth watching right now is S. 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act. The Senate HELP committee is due to work on the bill, doing the mark-up, on Wednesday. Here are a few articles about it:
Drew Joseph: Small farms fear food safety bill will further industrialize food
and
Coalition to Senate: Move on Food Safety Be sure to read the comment at the bottom of this article. It says it all, just what we need to be paying attention to.

And another...which should raise the hackles of any farmer or homesteader who likes to take grants. Growing Safe Food Act of 2009 S. 2758. The wording is right out of WHO and OIE's Guide to Good Farming Practices.

It just seems that every day something more urgently disastrous comes out of Washington. Now, and this just in:

President Obama, White House Climate Czar Carol Browner, and their Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are not waiting for Congress to pass cap-and-trade.

The enormous grassroots reaction to the outrageous Waxman-Markey energy tax bill passing the U.S. House has slowed Senate progress to a crawl. While cap-and-trade remains a major threat (especially with new "tri-partisan" negotiations betweens Senators Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman), the biggest threat of huge new energy taxes and government controls right now comes not from legislation, but regulation.

Based on a legal theory originally conceived by Climate Czar Carol Browner in the late 1990s, Obama's EPA is moving ahead with greenhouse gases regulations under the 1970 Clean Air Act even though in 1970 global warming hadn't even been invented yet, and the doom-saying scientists were instead warning of an impending ice age!

Click here to help stop EPA's power grab!

Do you feel it, too? It's coming down around our ears. It's like an avalanche.