By Samantha Young/Kaiser Health News

A rogue industry. A gun to our head. Extortion.
That’s how infuriated lawmakers described soft drink companies – and what they pulled off in 2018 when they scored a legislative deal that bars California’s cities and counties from imposing taxes on sugary drinks.
Yet, despite its tarnished reputation, the deep-pocketed industry continues to exert its political influence in the nation’s most populous state, spending millions of dollars on politically connected lobbyists and doling out campaign contributions to nearly every state lawmaker.
The result? Bills long opposed by Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo and other beverage companies continue to flounder. Just two weeks ago, a measure that would have undone the 2018 deal that lawmakers so vehemently protested was shelved without a hearing.
“Big Soda is a very powerful lobby,” said Eric Batch, vice president of advocacy at the American Heart Association, which has petitioned lawmakers nationwide to crack down on sugar-laden drinks that health advocates say contribute to diabetes, obesity and other costly medical conditions.
“They’ve spent a lot of money in California to stop groups like ours from passing good policy,” Batch added. “And they’ve been doing it for a long time.”

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Posted on April 21, 2021

By David Rutter

Lar Daly, meet Jim Oberweis.
Jim Oberweis, meet Lar Daly.
Totally preposterous meets vainglorious nincompoop. The identities virtually are interchangeable. As TV prosecutor Hamilton Burger used to tell Perry Mason: “Incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial.”

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Posted on April 20, 2021

By The Uptown People’s Law Center

The latest report on health care in Illinois state prisons (PDF) was released to the public earlier this month. This report was created by Dr. John Raba, an independent, court-appointed monitor, as a result of the class action lawsuit Lippert v. Jeffreys, brought by ACLU of Illinois, Uptown People’s Law Center, and Dentons. This lawsuit alleged that the health care provided to prisoners in the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) is unconstitutional, and was settled in January 2019.
Five reports by independent experts have now been submitted to the federal court, each one finding serious defects in the health care Illinois provides to the people it imprisons. The latest report notes very little has changed since IDOC entered into an agreement to improve two years ago. The federal monitor suggests that the crisis needs the governor’s personal attention, a call shared by the lawyers for the prisoners.

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Posted on March 31, 2021

By Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

Few elite colleges in the midst of choosing their freshman classes like to admit how often they give preference to legacy applicants, a practice that largely benefits higher-income students and by some estimates can double or even quadruple an applicant’s chances of getting in.
That’s why I should not have been surprised that most colleges I asked about this wouldn’t talk about it or release their data. They have reasons: giving preferential treatment to the children of alumni who can most afford to pay clearly benefits colleges, and is not something they want to broadcast when the pandemic is complicating budgets and enrollment predictions.
And let’s face it: Exclusive colleges and universities with annual costs as high as $80,000 have already endured an awful lot of bad publicity. Weren’t the lies and cheating of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal supposed to usher in a new era of transparency, with all those promises of an overhaul to follow?

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Posted on March 20, 2021

By David Rutter

Stealing is wrong. I get that, but then I’ve never been close enough to a large pile of cash as to be tempted.
So I have cheaply bought morals.
But let us assume that stealing is wrong. On that valid and traditional proposition, we all should be aghast that Donald Trump, hereafter to be known as The Former Guy, persuaded Americans to give him $200 million to win several elections he already had lost.
This is “past posting” on a grand stage. Past posting allows a skimmer who knows who won the televised horse race to bet against others who don’t know who won when the replay comes on air.
It’s the Barn Fire Fund After The Horses Left.

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Posted on March 12, 2021

By Jonathan Cook/Common Dreams

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Harry is a perfect case study of how an important political debate about the corrupting role of the monarchy on British life gets shunted aside yet again, not just by the endless Royal soap opera but by supposedly progressive identity politics.
As so often, a focus on identity risks not only blunting our capacity for critical thinking but can be all too readily weaponized: in this case, as the media’s main take-away from the Oprah interview illustrates, by providing an implicit defense of class privilege.

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Posted on March 11, 2021

By David Rutter

By the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” measurement, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger is the buddy of upright-thinking Illinoisans everywhere. He’s a reformed buddy. A recovering nutjob.
He’s paid for his ticket to the dinner party of reclaimed right-wingedness. If Joe Walsh’s change of political heart can make him seem like a decent human being (we’re still keeping watch on that transformation) then the 16th District congressman from Kankakee is theoretically salvageable, too.

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Posted on March 2, 2021

By Tyler Lobdell/OtherWords

Smithfield is the country’s largest pork producer – and one of its biggest industrial polluters. But they don’t want you to think of them that way. Instead, the company likes to promote a conscientious, sustainable, family-farmer image, summed up with a simple catchphrase: “Good Food. Responsibly.”
In reality, the corporate giant relies on a sprawling network of polluting factory farms and slaughterhouses, responsible for widespread pollution of our air and water. And one of Smithfield’s most aggressive clean image initiatives relies on – if you can believe it – massive, leaky lagoons of pig manure.

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Posted on February 25, 2021

By The Center for Inquiry

A national science advocacy organization is urging pharmacists to be worthy of the trust that customers have placed in them to guide them in their health decisions by steering patients away from useless fake medicine in the form of homeopathy. The Center for Inquiry is asking the Joint Commission of Pharmacy Practitioners and its member organizations to ensure that these fraudulent products are treated as the snake oil they are.
“When they’re sick, American consumers turn to their pharmacists for their training, professionalism, and their personal connection to their communities,” said Nick Little, CFI vice president and general counsel. “One out of three customers suffering from an illness places themselves in the knowing hands of their pharmacist to tell them what treatment they should take. That is an incredible statement of trust in pharmacists’ expertise, and it is critical that they never betray that trust by recommending phony products that, at best, have no effect of any kind whatsoever.”
Homeopathy is an 18th-century pseudoscience premised on the absurd, unscientific notion that a substance that causes a particular symptom can alleviate that symptom when it is diluted to the point that it no longer exists, save for the “memory” nonsensically alleged to be retained by water molecules. It is established scientific fact that homeopathic treatments have no effect whatsoever beyond that of a placebo.

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Posted on February 24, 2021

By Parker Higgins/Freedom Of The Press Foundation

Journalists – especially those without institutional newsroom support – rely on tools from major tech companies like Google and YouTube for newsgathering, production and distribution as a matter of course. As these information giants publicly wrestle with controversial content moderation decisions that dominate headlines and congressional hearings, their decisions also run the risk of stifling routine reporting. When content is removed or an algorithm tweaked behind closed doors, news organizations and journalists are often left without any sort of transparency into the process or a clear path to appeals.
In the last month, Freedom of the Press Foundation and the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker experienced this first-hand, with the temporary takedown from Google Docs of an online database we’ve used to track more than 2,500 tweets by former President Donald Trump attacking the media. We’ve used this public spreadsheet for data analysis over the years, and provided it to readers and other journalists to do their own exploration of Trump’s anti-media tweets and their effect on press freedom.

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Posted on February 22, 2021