• In my free time, I watch West Wing reruns. In his free time, Henry Waxman overhauls the U.S. food safety system. http://tr.im/uQyK #

• Nat. Taxpayer Union's word cloud dings D health bill for 127 uses of "regulation" — less/word than R '03 drug plan. http://tr.im/uM9y #
• Home-grown tomatoes and *Bud Light*? Only one man is demonstrating half-way respectable beer taste here. http://tr.im/uLMk #
• A car alarm in our neighborhood rang all night, quiet just long enough to fall back asleep. Beware sleep-deprived north Park Slopers today. #

• WaPo Debuts New Mobile Site
  WaPo's new mobile site now has two dedicated editors.

• The News About the Internet – The New York Review of Books

• Interesting stuff from the NYT on war-time hunches and the ability to see things others can't: http://tr.im/usP4 (via a bunch of people) #

• Forgive the self promo, but I tried to shed some light on Clinton's new "21st century statecraft" for @theprospect: http://tr.im/ugwC #

The American Prospect is featuring a piece from yours truly, which I'm thrilled about. The subject is the State Department and 21st century statecraft. If you get a chance to take a few minutes to give it a read, I'd much appreciate it. Like most of what I write, this piece grew out of something provocative on the scene that caught my attention but that I didn't quite understand. In this case, it's the new emphasis by Hillary Clinton and her team on using technology to accomplish the State Department's mission. I got to spend a day hanging around the State Department last month, trying to make sense of it.

Around Foggy Bottom, they call the approach "21st century statecraft." You'll also hear it talked about in the foreign policy world as part of a smart power approach. It's an umbrella that covers everything from getting embassies on Facebook to keeping Twitter up and running during the post-election conflict in Iran to connecting women in Afghanistan to mobile banking networks. Some of it is straightforward. Some of it is unproven. Some of it might make you scratch your head and say "you know, that just might work."

But what I think I found out is that the the interesting context here is that, while much of this is the sort of pure development work that USAID has for the last fifty years, the driving vision for 21st century statecraft is about something more inherently strategic. It's about actively creating human-to-human connections that are themselves not political on their face, but that create the networks that can support political change. That's the hope, at least.

Again, I hope that you might take a few minutes to give it a read.

• Seemed like a nice way to wrap the week would be to buy a duck. Actually, a whole flock of them. http://tr.im/tUA2 #

• One good things about not having kids yet is not having to explain to them the existence of Lou Dobbs. #
• Finding that SCOTUS is less 3rd branch of govt than island unto itself. No cameras, natch, and oral arguments audio released just 1x a year. #
• Quick first look at the Data.gov expansion: http://tr.im/tRZU Massive growth, but it's more link clearinghouse than data catalog. #
• Data.gov situation cleared up. As @nxthompson points out, the new feeds are "GeoData" sets. #
• Orszblog tells me Data.gov topped 100k feeds this a.m. http://tr.im/data100k I only see 391. Orszblog no lie to me! #
• Honest to god, my high school has a far better website that the United States Supreme Court does. It's just not right. #
• Heh. RT @fmanjoo: I really thought Crash made these kinds of conflicts a thing of the past / Alas, its message was too nuanced, too subtle. #

• I should have said this at the time, but it blows my mind that Obama gave away today's headline. "Skip Gates? 'Course I have an opinion…" #
• Oy. O conflates process and secrecy to sidestep health meeting transparency: "Don't think there are a lot of secrets going on in there." #
• You know, Pink's "Dear Mr. President" hasn't aged all that well. #

• Realizing I won't have a moment's peace until I watch all 14 episodes of "Firefly." Should probably just take tomorrow off and get it done. #

• To Help Change Food Policy, Michelle Obama Looks to Children
  What comes after the White House garden.
• Why are Americans fat? : The New Yorker
  A books review of sorts, full of meaty stuff.

• Did a quickie chart off of new USDA data on GMO adoption. Oh, my friend, you are *so* eating them, you are so eating them. http://tr.im/sR1f #

(I started writing this up for this here blog, and then decided to post it on HuffPo, but I wanted to drop a copy here too.)

So last night I devoted some free time to two of my great loves — open government data and food policy — and checked out the data on the rate of U.S. adoption of genetically-modified food crops in the United States that was released by U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this month. Now, you can talk about the changing nature of the U.S. food supply until you're blue in the face. Or you can point to the numbers. And in this case, the USDA's new data on the U.S. adoption of genetically-modified food crops is so off the charts that there was little choice but to make a chart:

Wowza. The blue line represents soybeans. The red line is corn. What we're looking at is the growth in the percentage of all the acres of U.S. farmland used to raise the respective crops that is now used to grow what's known as Herbicide Tolerant, or HT, varieties. HT crops are designed in a lab to be resistant to chemical herbicide; the best-known HT brand are Monsanto's Roundup-Ready products. Sprayed on a non-modified plant, Roundup kills. But HT are engineered to be able to tolerate the herbicide, allowing for weed control through blanket-spraying of farm acres. For years, food advocates and food producers have been arguing over the merits and risks of HT crops. Monsanto, for example, has engaged in a long battle with food advocates over whether or not it should develop strains of genetically-engineered wheat.

But what's clear from the new USDA numbers is how quickly the U.S. food supply is changing, whether we eaters like it or not. The simple fact is that for many of us, the food we eat today is simply different than what we ate as kids. When I was a sophomore in high school back in 1996, for example, just 3% of farmland used to grow corn was given over to HT varieties of the crop. Today, 68% of U.S. farmland used to grow corn grows corn that is genetically engineered to be HT. The leap has been even greater for soybeans — from 7% in 1996 to a whopping 91% in 2009.

We might, as American eaters, still be having a healthy debate about whether we want to eat genetically-engineered corn, soybeans, and other foods. But the USDA data shows that our farmland is much farther along in making up its mind.

• How to Remake BusinessWeek?
  The last 5% of journalism (polishing, tweaking, getting it perfectly right), and whether it can be afforded any more.
• In Battle to Land Embattled Governor, Messages Show Extra-Sharp Media Elbows
  Wooing Mark Sanford.
• Scola's Ten Lessons from Iran, Some Big, Some Small | techPresident
• Malcolm Gladwell Reviews "Free" by Chris Anderson
  Is Free a principle worth embracing? Dunno, says Gladwell: "The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws."

• Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism

• Ha. Thanks @Afine and @tomwatson for the rhyming help. Y'all are regular poets. But I thinking now I'll go the pun route: "Oyez or Oh No?" #
• Trying, without much success, to find something that rhymes with "oyez." #

• Monsanto Acquires Firm to Extend into Wheat
• Going Deep
  In order to get the story on what it's like to be a corrections officer inside a prison, this guy took the test to be a guard and then — two years later — spent a year working inside Sing Sing. That, my friends, is commitment to your craft. Or it's insanity. I'm not sure which.

• Specter wraps his #sotomayor hearing opening by calling for televising/streaming Supreme Court proceedings. #opencourts #
• Thinking I might use this break in the Sotomayor hearing to have a wee meltdown. http://tr.im/s9bc #
• Congressional opening statements should first have to pass through an American Idol-like preliminary vetting round. #
• Was very excited all weekend about a plan to ask folks to post photos of kids' school lunches. Realized only this morning that it's July. #