ANOTHER BIG STINK

A scientific panel, the Institute of Medicine, says lawsuits against the government are "casting doubt on its authority to enforce food safety laws." But what to do about the problem? Um, gosh, er... ENFORCE FOOD SAFETY LAWS, maybe? Nope, that would be too simple. Instead let's have more laws to stop people from filing lawsuits against manure-spewing farms that destroy area residents' quality of life ("Bryan Burgess of St. Clair County has fainted from the stink of a hog farm near his home, and the creek he pictured full of children instead swims with E. coli."). But for the animal-abuse industry, that's still not enough: A county board has asked Minnesota to make all the state's feedlot locations top secret. The article notes that if this happens, "someone looking to buy a farm house, for instance, wouldn't have an automatic right to check records to see how close feedlots were or where the resulting manure is spread" (gee, wonder what they'll do once they find out? Hello, lawsuits!). The whole thing is supposedly predicated on fighting "terrorists," but the County Commissioner "wondered whether the county was labeling [animal-rights] activists as terrorists simply because they don't support animal agriculture." And the concept of hiding huge livestock operations from real terrorists is laughable. Even if they were too lazy to research the location info in other ways, they could, as one activist points out, simply "follow their noses."