Pennsylvania residents, take note: SB 1180 would not only create a database of Pennsylvania citizens' drug prescription records -- which couldn't possibly be abused, amirite? -- but would permit prosecutors to access those records only with a "reasonable suspicion" of a crime, which is actually a fairly weak standard. Typically law enforcement only can search records with the "reasonable suspicion" standard when the folks shouldn't reasonably expect to have any privacy regarding those records. Ask yourself how many of your friends and family know exactly what drugs you're taking and why and you'll see that you do, in fact, have some considerably expectation of privacy with your drug records, no matter what prosecutors want you to think. Hence the Pennsylvania ACLU helps you tell your Pennsylvania state legislators to demand that law enforcement get a warrant before searching through your pharmaceutical records. Call me old-fashioned, but it really shouldn't be that hard to get a warrant if you need one.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to enact the strongest carbon emissions standards for existing power plants, then both Friends of the Earth and CREDO help you do that. Both action alerts find the EPA's proposed rule too weak, and both contain useful information; you may want to combine information from both action alerts into one comment. I've been mostly sanguine toward the Obama Administration EPA (versus, say, the Obama USDA and the Obama FDA, which are both terrible and maybe even worse than their Bush Mobb counterparts), but it is possible that the Obama Administration has, again, decided to open negotiations with its fallback position, and the energy corporations who wrongly claim that ZOMG REGULASHUNZ KILLZ TEH JOBZ!!!! will see such a proposal as a signal that they can push their nonsense even harder. But we can also choose to see the Obama proposals as signals that we must push harder, and act accordingly.
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