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Study: Flu Viruses Travel on US Roads and Railways

by AlRyriekyiro Posted on June 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Viruses are hitching a ride with commuters on the nation’s roads and railways, adding to the chaotic movement that makes seasonal outbreaks difficult to track and contain.

In a study published Thursday in PLOS Pathogens, researchers at Emory University tracked genetic variations in two strains of influenza between 2003 and 2013. They concluded that states highly connected by ground transit tended to have similar genetic variations of the flu, and they matched their findings with illness case data that showed closely timed epidemic peaks in those states. The researchers believe ground transit connectivity may be a better indicator of where a disease is likely to spread than air travel connections or even geographic proximity, though they say both remain important factors.

The US Interstate Commuter Network shows the number of people traveling daily between states for work. Courtesy of Bozick, CC-BY

Modern transport networks complicate the movement of viruses: In the past, contagion moved person to person and village to village, resulting in “wave-like patterns” of genetic variation that correspond to geographic distance, the report says. But with 3.8 million people in the United States taking ground transportation across state borders each day and 1.6 million doing so by air, the spread of illness has become far more chaotic: Transcontinental flights help foster bicoastal outbreaks, while well-traveled commuter corridors between Kansas and Missouri may mean those states share illnesses as neighboring areas go unscathed.

Researchers found that “commuting communities,” divided into colored regions, tended to span state borders. Travelers carried influenza along with them. Courtesy of Bozick, CC-BY

The researchers hope their study, which they believe to be the first of its kind at the scale of the continental United States, will help epidemiologists better understand influenza’s seemingly unpredictable spread.

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Study: Flu Viruses Travel on US Roads and Railways

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The Feds Say One Schmuck Trading From His Parents’ House Caused a Market Crash. Here’s the Problem.

by Dominic58J Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Giacomo Marchesi

On Tuesday, the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a key Wall Street regulator, blasted out press releases declaring a great victory in their war on illegal manipulation of financial markets. The reason for the feds’ braggadocio? They think they’ve caught the guy who caused May 2010’s “flash crash,” a market seizure that vaporized a trillion dollars in shareholder value in a matter of minutes.

Federal regulators say that Navinder Singh Sarao, a 36-year-old British futures trader whose company was reportedly based in his parents’ home, illegally placed huge sell orders he never intended to complete, artificially driving down the price of a key futures contract so he could later swoop in to buy it cheaply. (This is called “spoofing” in financial jargon.) There’s one big problem, though: By charging Sarao with “contributing to the market conditions that caused” the flash crash, federal regulators are changing their story about what really happened to financial markets five years ago.

Here’s the background. In the days and weeks after the flash crash, the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside other regulators, worked diligently to figure out what had happened. The flash crash was chaos: Liquidity evaporated, the same stocks traded at both a penny and at $100,000, and CNBC hosts freaked out even more than usual. (Prices eventually returned to normal, and the SEC canceled some of the weirdest trades.)

The flash crash was essentially over in five minutes. But it took regulators nearly five months to come up with a theory about what happened. And in late September 2010, when the SEC and the CFTC—the same agency now charging Sarao with causing the crash—released a joint report on what happened, they didn’t mention spoofing, let alone Sarao. Instead, they blamed a large trade by a firm out of Kansas City.

It’s not even clear that the feds’ new explanation is correct. As Matt Levine notes over at Bloomberg View, regulators believe that Sarao continued to place massive fake sell orders in the years after the flash crash, but somehow that activity never triggered another crisis:

If regulators think that Sarao’s behavior on May 6, 2010, caused the flash crash, and if they think he continued that behavior for much of the subsequent five years, and if that behavior was screamingly obvious, maybe they should have stopped him a little earlier?

Also, I mean, if his behavior on May 6, 2010, caused the flash crash, and if he continued it for much of the subsequent five years, why didn’t he cause, you know, a dozen flash crashes?

So I mean…maybe he didn’t cause the flash crash?

But in some ways, it doesn’t particularly matter whether regulators’ new theory is correct. What matters is that it took so long for them to develop it.

As I reported in January 2013, today’s financial markets move so fast that regulators can’t even monitor them in real time, let alone intervene if something starts to go wrong. Sophisticated trading algorithms can buy and sell financial products faster than you can blink—all without human intervention, let alone real-time human judgment. When something does go wrong, it can take months or years to figure out what happened. “A robust and defensible analysis of even a small portion of the trading day can itself take many days,” Gregg Berman, who wrote the 2010 SEC/CFTC report, told me in 2013.

Since real-time intervention by human regulators is impossible, regulators have to rely on automatic measures—fail-safes that stop trading if prices rise or fall too fast, for example. But these sorts of automatic braking systems are, by definition, designed in response to the previous crisis. “We’re always fighting the last fire,” Dave Lauer, a market technology expert who has worked for high-speed trading firms, said in 2013. As I wrote then:

Years of mistakes and bad decisions led to the 2008 collapse. But when the next crisis happens, it may not develop over months, weeks, or even days. It could take seconds.

More here.

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The Feds Say One Schmuck Trading From His Parents’ House Caused a Market Crash. Here’s the Problem.

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Arkansas Will Force Doctors To Tell Women Abortions Can Be "Reversed"

by JosetteSeely Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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As conservative lawmakers pass a record number of anti-abortion laws, it is staggering to consider how many require doctors to tell patients information that has no basis in science. Five states now require abortion providers to inform women about a bogus link between abortion and breast cancer. Several states mandate that doctors say ending a pregnancy can lead to mental health conditions like clinical depression—another falsehood, in the eyes of most mainstream medical groups.

Now there’s a new crop of legislation to add this list: laws forcing doctors to tell women planning to take abortion-inducing drugs that they may be able to change their minds mid-treatment.

On Monday, Arkansas became the second state to pass such a law, just over a week after Arizona’s Republican governor signed a similar measure. A spokeswoman for Americans United for Life, the legal arm of the anti-abortion movement, confirmed that both laws are based on the group’s model legislation.

Critics have slammed these bills as propagating a lie based on “junk science.” According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), “Claims of medication abortion reversal are not supported by the body of scientific evidence.”

Americans United for Life has not only backed the bills, but has enthusiastically endorsed a new procedure pioneered by George Delgado, a pro-life doctor who claims to have reversed abortions.

Most drug-induced abortions require two pills taken a few days apart. The initial dose, of mifepristone, blocks the progesterone hormones that help sustain the pregnancy. The second dose, of misopristol, causes contractions that flush out the pregnancy. Delgado says he’s stopped abortions by injecting supplemental progesterone between the two rounds of medicine. The evidence backing his discovery, however, is incredibly thin. As Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic:

Women who only take the first pill already have a 30 to 50 percent chance of continuing their pregnancy normally, according to ACOG. The progesterone advice is based on a study by Delgado in which he analyzed six case studies of patients who regretted their abortions and were given progesterone. Four out of the six patients went on to deliver healthy infants. In other words, the limited evidence we have suggests that taking progesterone does not appear to improve the odds of fetal survival by much. The abortion pill binds more tightly to progesterone receptors than progesterone itself does, one reproductive researcher told Iowa Public Radio, and thus the hormone surge is unlikely to do much of anything.

As Cheryl Chastine, an abortion provider at South Wind Women’s Center in Kansas, put it recently, “Even if these doctors were to offer a large dose of purple Skittles, they’d appear to have ‘worked’ to ‘save’ the pregnancy about half the time.”

That’s why, on the small chance that a woman does regret her abortion midway through, ACOG-affiliated doctors say they would simply tell her not to take the second pill.

The injections might not only be useless—large doses of progesterone can actually be dangerous: “There can be cardiovascular side effects, glucose tolerance issues, it can cause problems with depression in people who already had it,” Ilana Addis, a gynecologist who opposed the Arizona measure, told The Atlantic. “And there are more annoying things, like bloating, fatigue, that kind of stuff. It’s an unpleasant drug to take.”

The new Arkansas law requires the state’s health department to write up information on abortion reversal for doctors to make available to patients, and it’s not yet clear if the health department will promote Delgado’s specific method. Meanwhile, Arkansas Right to Life is already promoting the services of doctors who are “trained to effectively reverse” abortions, and more than 200 physicians around the country have told pro-life groups that they are willing to conduct the procedure.

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Arkansas Will Force Doctors To Tell Women Abortions Can Be "Reversed"

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America Ranks in the Top 5 Globally—for Putting Its Citizens to Death

by AnnettaGrave Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’re No. 5! We’re No. 5!

America once again ranks among the top five nations in the world—in executions. Sigh. That’s according to a new report from Amnesty International, which also notes that more and more nations have been opting not to kill their convicts.

Amnesty tallies at least 607 known executions in 22 countries in 2014. The good news? That’s a 22 percent decline from 2013. Here at home, states dispatched 35 American citizens last year, a 20-year low—and four less than in 2013. But there’s no accounting for China, which executes more people than all other countries combined but treats the data as a state secret. (Amnesty made its count by looking at a range of sources, including official figures, reports from civil society groups, media accounts, and information from death row convicts and their families.)

Amnesty also reports a drop in the number of countries that carried out executions, from 42 in 1995 to 22 last year, although many more still have the death penalty on the books. The United States is the last country in the Americas that still puts people to death, but US citizens appear to be increasingly opposed to the practice. Only seven states executed convicts in 2014, compared with nine states a year earlier. The overwhelming majority of those executions—nearly 90 percent—took place in four states: Texas, Missouri, Florida and Oklahoma. (Georgia had two, and Arizona and Ohio had one execution each.)

Eighteen states have abolished the death penalty, but among those that have not, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming haven’t put anyone to death in at least a decade, Amnesty noted. Oregon and Washington have moratoriums on executions, and federal authorities have not put anyone to death since 2003.

The bad news is, from 2013 to 2014, the number of death sentences jumped nearly 30 percent globally, to at least 2,466. Amnesty points in part to Nigeria, which imposed 659 death sentences last year as military courts punished numerous soldiers for mutiny and other offenses amid armed conflict with Boko Haram militants. Egypt was also to blame for the increase, Amnesty said, as Egyptian courts handed down death sentences against 210 Muslim Brotherhood supporters in April and June.

In all, 55 countries sentenced people to death last year. Here, according to Amnesty, are the most notable:

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America Ranks in the Top 5 Globally—for Putting Its Citizens to Death

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What We Know About the Mysterious Suicide of Missouri Gubernatorial Candidate Tom Schweich

by VicenteSommers Posted on February 27, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday morning, Thomas Schweich, Missouri’s auditor and a Republican candidate for governor, died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. His death—coming moments after he had invited two reporters to his home later that day—shocked Missouri political observers, who point out that in addition to his beloved family and distinguished career in public service, Schweich, 54, had just won re-election to a second term as state auditor and was leading in early polls of the 2016 governor’s race. Why he would have taken his own life is a mystery to those who knew him. Just as strange is the predominant theory of what may have provoked his apparent suicide: rumors that he was Jewish.

In the days before his death, Schweich had been worried that the head of the Missouri Republican Party was conducting a “whisper campaign” against him by telling people that he was Jewish. Schweich was, in fact, an Episcopalian, but his grandfather was Jewish.

The police were called to Schweich’s home in Clayton, Missouri at 9:48 a.m. on Thursday. Just seven minutes earlier, Schweich had left a voicemail for Tony Messenger, an editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, inviting him to send a reporter to his home that afternoon. That morning, Schweich had also invited an AP reporter to attend this interview.

According to Messenger, Schweich had hoped to counter rumors that he was Jewish, which he believed were being spread by Missouri GOP chairman John Hancock in a bid to damage his candidacy. He feared misconceptions about his faith might hurt him with evangelical voters, according to a report by the New York Times. Schweich had been “agitated” discussing rumors about his faith earlier in the week, according to the AP reporter who had spoken to him minutes before his death.

Hancock responded on Friday to allegations that he was spreading misinformation about Schweich’s faith: “It’s plausible that I would have told somebody that Tom was Jewish because I thought he was, but I wouldn’t have said it in a derogatory or demeaning fashion.”

But would rumors about Schweich’s religion really have hurt him politically? A Jewish background doesn’t appear to be impeding another prospective GOP gubernatorial candidate. Eric Greitens, a Jewish former Navy Seal, launched an exploratory committee for a statewide campaign in Missouri this week. The Washington Free Beacon described him as “the great Jewish hope” in a recent profile about his entry into politics. Reports note that he might enter into the gubernatorial race, though he yet to announce which office he has his eye on.

On Friday, Messenger, who had a close source relationship with Schweich, revealed that in the days leading up to Schweich’s apparent suicide, the Republican candidate had discussed a desire to go public with accusations against Hancock. He had told Messenger that “his grandfather taught him to never allow any anti­-Semitism go unpunished, no matter how slight.” Messenger noted that anti-Semitisim is a factor in Missouri, the state that “gave us Frazier Glenn Miller, the raging racist who killed three people at a Jewish community center in Kansas City.” And he wrote, “Division over race and creed is real in Missouri Republican politics, particularly in some rural areas. Schweich knew it. It’s why all week long his anger burned.”

Kevin Murphy, the Clayton police chief, told reporters that there is no evidence that Schweich was under political attack or suffering from mental illness. Murphy also said it did not appear that Schweich’s death was accidental. He noted that the ongoing investigation would include interviews with Schweich’s friends and family, which has yet make a statement to the media about Schweich’s death.

The Missouri legislature gathered on Friday to mourn Schweich, who, before becoming Missouri state auditor in 2010, had served as chief of staff to three different US Ambassadors to the United Nations, as well as working on anti-drug trafficking initiatives in Afghanistan under during the George W. Bush administration.

There remain more questions than answers about Schweizer’s apparent suicide. “I have no idea why Schweich killed himself,” Messenger wrote in the Post-Dispatch on Friday. The only thing that seems clear is that there’s much more to the story behind his death.

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What We Know About the Mysterious Suicide of Missouri Gubernatorial Candidate Tom Schweich

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

by KellieBagot Posted on February 12, 2015

Mother Jones

Michael Hiltzik reports on Kansas governor Sam Brownback’s move this week to revive the culture wars:

Brownback’s latest stunt is to abolish state employees’ protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation. In an executive order Tuesday, Brownback reversed a 2007 order by his Democratic predecessor, Kathleen Sebelius, that had brought state anti-discrimination policies in line with most of corporate America and 31 other states.

….Possibly, Brownback is hoping to deflect attention from the disastrous condition of the Kansas state budget, which has been hollowed out by Brownback’s extremely aggressive tax-cutting. Income tax receipts continue to fall below Brownback’s rolling projections — the latest estimates show them coming in 2% below forecast made just last November.

….The economic suffering that Brownback’s policies have imposed on Kansans is bad enough; to add to the pain by removing protections against workplace harassment over sexual orientation is a new low.

As Hiltzik points out, there’s no special reason for Brownback to do this now. The anti-discrimination policy has been in place for eight years, and Brownback apparently felt no particular angst about it during his entire first term.

But things are different now. When he was first elected, Brownback promised that his planned tax cuts on the rich would supercharge the Kansas economy and bring about prosperity for all. That turned out to be disastrously wrong, and now he’s slashing spending on education and the poor to make up for the catastrophe he unleashed. This is understandably unpopular, so what better way to distract the rubes than to engage in a bit of gay bashing? That’ll get everyone riled up, and maybe they won’t even notice just how much worse off they are than they used to be. It’s a time-honored strategy.

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The Kansas Economy Sucks, So Let’s Do a Little Gay Bashing to Distract Everyone

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Saying Goodbye to Dean Smith, College Basketball’s Liberal Conscience

by JenniSmerd Posted on February 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Famed college basketball coach Dean Smith died Saturday night at the age of 83, after years of decline. His on-court prowess as the frontman at North Carolina from 1961 to 1997 is unforgettable: 879 wins, two national championships, 11 Final Four appearances, and a lasting legacy as a hoops innovator. But for many, it’s his off-court example—which manifested itself in something people in Chapel Hill still call the Carolina Way—that made him a legend.

Smith was an outspoken liberal Democrat who was anti-nukes, anti-death-penalty, and pro-gay-rights in a state that sent Jesse Helms to the Senate for five terms. (In fact, North Carolina Dems even tried to convince Smith to run against Helms.) His father, Alfred, integrated his high school basketball team in 1930s Kansas; years later, Smith would do the same at UNC, recruiting Charlie Scott in the mid-1960s to become the first African American player on scholarship there and one of the first in the entire South.

This story, from a 2014 piece by the Washington Post‘s John Feinstein, has been making the rounds today. It’s worth re-reading:

…In 1981, Smith very grudgingly agreed to cooperate with me on a profile for this newspaper. He kept insisting I should write about his players, but I said I had written about them. I wanted to write about him. He finally agreed.

One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he first arrived in Chapel Hill. Seymour told me a story about how upset Smith was to learn that Chapel Hill’s restaurants were still segregated. He and Seymour came up with an idea: Smith would walk into a restaurant with a black member of the church.

“You have to remember,” Reverend Seymour said. “Back then, he wasn’t Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more.”

Smith agreed and went to a restaurant where management knew him. He and his companion sat down and were served. That was the beginning of desegregation in Chapel Hill.

When I circled back to Smith and asked him to tell me more about that night, he shot me an angry look. “Who told you about that?” he asked.

“Reverend Seymour,” I said.

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“Why? You should be proud of doing something like that.”

He leaned forward in his chair and in a very quiet voice said something I’ve never forgotten: “You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.”

RIP, Dean.

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Saying Goodbye to Dean Smith, College Basketball’s Liberal Conscience

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Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

by LynnePilkington Posted on February 5, 2015

Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

By on 5 Feb 2015commentsShare

This week, West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) signed a bill repealing the state’s renewable energy standard, which would have required major utilities to get at least 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2025.

It’s a clear win for right-wing activists, led by the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). They’ve been campaigning for years to roll back state-level renewable standards, mostly without success. But last year, they managed to freeze Ohio’s renewable standard at a less-than-ambitious level. And now they’ve had their first total success — a complete rollback of a renewable portfolio standard.

Ironically, it was under Tomblin’s tenure as Senate president that the standard was first passed. The West Virginia Coal Association, an industry trade group, also supported the legislation back in 2009 — and even helped write it — but has since turned against it, citing increased regulation of the coal industry. “We understand economic drivers and factors change over time, and the Act as it was passed in 2009 is no longer beneficial for our state,” Tomblin said. (Politics also change: West Virginia, once a blue state, is becoming increasingly Republican, and environmental regulation has, since 2009, become even more anathema to the GOP. In the state legislature, Republicans have put bolstering the state’s coal industry’s high on their 2015 agenda.)

Clean energy is also under attack in Colorado, where this week the Republican-controlled state Senate advanced a bill to weaken that state’s renewable energy standard, though its chances in the Democratic-controlled House are not so hot. Legislators in Kansas, Ohio, and Oklahoma are considering cutting back their renewable energy standards too.

Meanwhile, ALEC et al. are trying to roll back state net-metering policies, which make it more affordable for homeowners to have rooftop solar arrays. A bill being considered in Indiana “would slash net metering credits and add fixed charges to the bills of solar customers,” Greentech Media reports. But in this case, solar fans have some right-wing backers of their own, led by Tea Party activist and solar advocate Debbie Dooley: “Indiana Republicans should be championing free-market choice — not government-created utility monopolies,” says Dooley. “This is a deliberate attempt to kill solar and protect monopolies from competition, and this is going on in other states.”

This year, you can expect state-level clean energy battles to just keep getting more heated.

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Score one for ALEC: West Virginia is first state to repeal a renewable energy standard

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Grover Norquist Turns on His Anti-Tax Bae Sam Brownback

by ColemanCroteau Posted on January 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Grover Norquist—the president of Americans for Tax Reform and the man who for decades has served as conservatives’ leading anti-tax zealot —had seemingly found his ideal politician in Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. After Brownback was elected governor in 2010, he went on a mission to eradicate his state’s income tax—slashing rates across the board in two rounds of cuts and setting rates to drop further over the coming years—eventually to zero if everything clicked in place.

Read more about how Sam Brownback created a Kochtopia in Kansas.

Norquist loved it. He visited Topeka in 2013 to show his support during Brownback’s State of the State address. In an interview with National Review a year ago, Norquist touted Brownback as a strong contender for the 2016 presidential nomination.

But political allies often prove fickle. Brownback’s tax cuts have wrecked the state budget and forced the governor to propose raising taxes in order to avert fiscal calamity. And Norquist is now rallying conservatives in the Kansas Legislature to oppose the Republican governor’s plan.

Earlier this week, Norquist penned a letter to state lawmakers encouraging them to thwart Brownback’s proposal to raise taxes on liquor sales and tobacco products. Although Norquist hewed to his normal claims that taxes end up hurting the state’s bottom line, he also adopted a tactic that you’d normally hear from liberals: Don’t raise these specific taxes because they overburden the poor. “The fact is, so called ‘sin taxes’ like the cigarette tax and alcohol tax disproportionately impact consumers who can afford the tax increase least. A pack-a-day smoker would end up paying an extra $547.50 in taxes a year,” Norquist wrote in the letter, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “Kansans living along the Missouri border may opt to avoid the tax altogether by purchasing their tobacco products in Missouri—where the tax would be lower.”

A spokesperson for Americans for Tax Reform didn’t respond to several interview requests.

It’s a bit rich for Norquist to show concern for plight of low-income Kansans now. Spending on social services plummeted during Brownback’s first term in office. And the tax cuts that Norquist praised predominantly favored the state’s wealthy citizens—particularly thanks to a decision to zero-out taxes for nearly 200,000 privately held companies. An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last year noted that the total effects of all the tax code changes in Kansas in fact raised taxes by 1.3 percent on the bottom 20 percent of the state’s earners.

And although slashing state income taxes may have earned Brownback praise from the likes of Norquist and Reagan taxmaster Arthur Laffer, they left the governor in a tricky spot. There’s a $710 million hole in the state’s budget through June 2016. Brownback isn’t relying on tobacco and liquor taxes alone to close that gap. He has also proposed slowing down planned decreases in the state’s income-tax rates. But Brownback still vowed to stick with his original endgame. “We will continue our march to zero income taxes,” he said in this year’s State of the State address. Even when the evidence might suggest otherwise, conservatives like Brownback must still bow before the infallible altar of trickle-down economics.

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Grover Norquist Turns on His Anti-Tax Bae Sam Brownback

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Former Pepsi Lobbyist Will Help Overhaul School Lunch Program

by DelmarChestnut Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

Some political functionaries creep sheepishly through the revolving door that separates government from the industries it regulates—you know, maybe wait a few years between switches.

Not Joel Leftwich. Since 2010, he’s held the following posts, in order: legislative assistant to longtime Senate agriculture committee stalwart and agribusiness-cash magnet Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas); program manager in the federal lobbying department for agrichemical giant DuPont; deputy staff director for the Senate Agriculture Committee; and director of lobbying for PepsiCo. Now, after the Republican takeover of the Senate and Robert’s ascension to the chair of the Agriculture Committee, Leftwich is switching sides again: He’s going to be the ag committee’s chief of staff.

And all just in time for the Congress to perform its once-every-five-years overhaul of federal nutrition programs, including school lunches and the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food-aid initiative. Back in 2010, President Obama signed a school lunch bill, generated by a Democratic-controlled Congress, that banished junk-food snacks from schools and stipulated more fruits and vegetables in lunches. Leftwich’s once-and-current boss, Sen. Roberts, has been a persistent and virulent critic of those reforms.

As for Leftwich’s most recent ex-employer, Pepsi—whose junk-food empire spans from its namesake soda to Lays and Doritos snacks—its take on the issue of school food is embodied in this flyer, uncovered by my colleague Alex Park. It touts Cheetos as a wholesome snack for school kids. PepsiCo showers Washington in lobbying cash—note how its expenditures jumped in 2009 and 2010, when the last school lunch reauthorization was being negotiated in Congress.

In other revolving-door news: Mike Johanns of Nebraska recently retired from the Senate, where, from his perch on the ag committee, he joined Sen. Roberts in pushing the agribusiness agenda and sopping up industry campaign donations. Before that, he served as USDA chief for President George W. Bush. Now? Days after his retirement comes news he will serve on the board of directors of agribusiness giant John Deere—a position that pays at least $240,000 per year in compensation and stock, Omaha.Com reports. But don’t worry: “Johanns stressed that he won’t be doing any direct lobbying of his former Capitol Hill colleagues or their aides on behalf of the company.”

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Former Pepsi Lobbyist Will Help Overhaul School Lunch Program

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