For today the state of Wisconsin at the behest of the USDA drags an Amish farmer named Emmanuel Miller to court for obeying his religious principles.

Perhaps this moment will begin to intimate how the USDA has been operating and why the head of the USDA has become not a political choice but actually life and death for American farmers.

Mr. Miller is due in court today, this Wed. Dec. 17th, at 3:00 pm, at the Clark County Court House, 517 Court St. Neillsville, WI, for his initial court appearance....

In July 14, 2008 Attorneys for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund filed suit in the U.S. District Court - District of Columbia - to stop the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) from implementing the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a plan to electronically track every livestock animal in the country

The suit asked the court to issue an injunction to stop the implementation of NAIS at either the state or federal levels by any state or federal agency. Fund President Taaron Meikle said "We think that current disease reporting procedures and animal tracking methods provide the kind of information health officials need to respond to animal disease events. At a time when the job of protecting our food safety is woefully underfunded, the USDA has spent over $118 million on just the beginning stages of a so-called voluntary program that ultimately seeks to register every horse, chicken, cow, goat, sheep, pig, llama, alpaca or other livestock animal in a national database--more than 120 million animals. It's a program that only a bureaucrat could love," she added. The suit charges that USDA has:

1. never published rules regarding NAIS, in violation of the Federal Administrative Procedures Act;

2. has never performed an Environmental Impact Statement or an Environmental Assessment as required by the National Environmental Policy Act;

3. is in violation of the Regulatory Flexibility Act that requires the USDA to analyze proposed rules for their impact on small entities and local governments; and

4. violates religious freedoms guaranteed by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Judith McGeary, a member of the Farm-to-Consumer Fund board and the executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, noted that "Other mandatory implementations, which weave NAIS into existing regulatory fabric and programs, have occurred in the States of Wisconsin and Indiana where premises registration has been made mandatory; in drought-stricken North Carolina and Tennessee, where farmers have been required to register their premises in order to obtain hay relief; and in Colorado where state fairs are requiring participants to register their premises under NAIS."

Less than 10 years ago, a researcher stirred up controversy when he reported in the journal Oncology that cancer patients who took antioxidant supplements had poorer responses to chemotherapy and radiation.

You can now stop thinking about antioxidants. Forget all about them. That's the advice of "experts," according to a recent Associated Press (AP) article.