• You have to be pretty geeky to enjoy this, but a sketch from today's Senate hearing on tracking federal contractors: http://bit.ly/18dJMz #

• The FCC's webcast is playing some sort of smooth jazz as we wait for today's hearing to start. You guys are allllllright. #
• Sen. Bennett practically rubbed a hole in his head trying to make sense of Vivek Kundra's explanation of who's "CEO" of gov't contractors. #

• It's funny how many commentators think that what Americans most need to know about Bill Safire is they attended his Yom Kippur break fast. #

• It's been a day, and I'm still laughing about that Lion King scene from "Modern Family." #

• .@whitehouse lawyers' react to NEA flap by telling agencies to not risk outreach that might raise questions. http://bit.ly/v1cYH #
• My main problem with "The Informant!" is that you never want to not hug Matt Damon. #
• Who pays for our food information deficit? The children. @usgao finds schools dishing problem foods for a week. http://bit.ly/4xn8Vb #

• Solid CJR Q&A with @rickperlstein on #acorn, and why the "ooh, a story!" approach fails so badly here. http://tr.im/zBXe #
• Just finished doing @brianlehrerlive on #acorn. Good segment, but pretty sure my hair was three kinds of goofy. It's way humid in NYC! #

• Pardon the rec, but I really enjoyed Tracy Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains" on Dr. Paul Farmer. http://tr.im/zqQy #
• Passed along without comment: the new McSweeney's iPhone app: http://tr.im/zqyN #
• RT @techpresident Andrew Breitbart's "Blob" Journalism | techPresident http://retwt.me/bGlD #

• Lord, it's hard to stay positive when you discover things like that the FCC doesn't have http://fcc.gov (sans "www") up and running. #
• RT @juliarosen: Pet peeve: calling "blog post" a "blog". You don't say you wrote a newspaper, when you wrote a newspaper article. // Amen. #
• I think I've almost got this watching football thing down, except I keep forgetting who won. Great game though! #
• Andrew Sullivan's (@dailydish) casual post on behalf of the print Atlantic expected to double this month's subscriptions. http://tr.im/zj76 #
• RT @techpresident The Invention of Net Neutrality | techPresident http://bit.ly/POEBI #

• Interesting timeline of net neutrality's politicization. Before online left's '06 push, was mostly an industry concept. http://tr.im/z9mW #
• On a second and third reading, this @nytimes' piece reads all wink-wink. Clever. Or just annoying. http://tr.im/z8cx #
• This @nytimes' piece on a supposedly buried Governors Island town calls for less sly incredulity and more outright WTF. http://tr.im/z8cx #

• "The sky is the limit and hell is the target." Much interesting context to the ACORN tapes, if I do say so. And so I do: http://tr.im/z4qy #
• The look on his co-anchor's face: priceless. http://tr.im/z4nF #
• Your shorthand guide to how some on the right see ACORN: Breitbart calls the tapes "the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society." http://tr.im/z4lB #

• You know, there should be more places where you can get soup. #

• From the food front: the time's come to wage an anti-bacteria campaign. http://tr.im/yNJf (me on @scienceprogress) #

When, this spring, Congress began actively considering a plan that had been floating around the House of Representatives for the far side of a decade, there was outcry from both the political right and the sustainable, local, small-bore food movement. In short, the proposal would focus the federal government's limited attention to food safety on ingredients that actually pose risks, with a underlying framework where, for the first time, food in this country is treated as if it has a history as it moves from the farm or factory to our stomachs, a history worth knowing and keeping written record of.

The conservative reaction against the measure is rooted a certain nervousness about government involvement in food's business side. But it isn't an anti-intervention reflex, at least not completely. Control over the food supply factors into more than a few theories about the point at which government control becomes objectionably repressive. Then there was the reaction from small farmers, foods, and advocates of the idea that agriculture should be able to thrive outside the industrial supply chain. That response was perhaps even more strongly negative. Their worry is that small agriculture just won't be able to bear up under anything other than government's lightest possible touch. Both angles, both threads of concern are honorable and respectable. But they are also ones that shouldn't, really, be triggered by what's actually in this bill (at least the House's version, which is the only that has pass thus far). That's the argument I explore for the good folks at Science Progress, in a new piece — one they actually let me start with an anecdote about astronauts:

Once you’ve made the decision to encase a few men in a metal pod and shoot the vessel into space, what you don’t want is to have something they eat make them sick. Astronauts in space already have suppressed immune systems, and the added complications of food poisoning and its attendant symptoms—dehydration, diarrhea—when both water and privacy are limited likely goes without saying. That’s why, in the late 1950s, just as NASA was embarking on the era of manned space flight, the agency went to its food supplier, Pillsbury, with a request: ensure that the food we’re feeding astronauts won’t have enough bacteria and other contaminants to make our astronauts sick. Pillsbury came through, crafting a science-based system that, for the first time, examined step-by-step how food was made, rather than the final product, with a focus on the riskiest ingredients and processes. By 1959, the problem of food-sickened astronauts was effectively kicked.

Back here on the ground, though, it’s still 1958.

Hope you'll give it a read. (Photo by snowriderguy under a Creative Commons licence.)

• Attending a rehearsal dinner tonight, which makes me laugh because for too much of my life I thought what you were "rehearsing" was dinner. #
• This week's Cape Cod news is a reminder that anybody who tells you anything certain about how sharks behave is lying. http://bit.ly/6A1Tn #
• Powerful story on Democracy Now this morning about another person electrocuted in Iraq, this one a 25 y.o. contractor. http://bit.ly/paGTU #
• It was my third or so day of work in the House. We evacuated, and once we got outside the building Capitol Police told us to run. #whereiwas #
• Aww, Deputy U.S. CTO Andrew McLaughlin committed to a (figurative) "carl.gov" inspired by @carlmalamud's call to open public records. #g2s #
• I think there's a consensus that broadband, ya know, rocks. But we seem to be talking around the question of how we get more of it. #gs2 #

• RT @timoreilly: Would have taken the gov't till 2025 to build twitter. // Maybe. But how long would it take biz to build the Internet? #g2s #
• .@carlmalamud just turned me onto something so deliciously geeky: http://www.recapthelaw.org, a Firefox plug-in that opens up PACER. #g2s #
• Interesting note from Macon Phillips on what he sees when he looks at whitehouse.gov: need for more traffic from inside the building. #g2s #
• Deep thought addendum: difference btwn DC and local gov't isn't scale, it's the orientation towards service, which is easier to "2.0." #g2s #
• Deep thought: it makes sense to hold Gov 2.0 Summit in DC because "locals" from elsewhere have much to teach: see utah.gov, bart.gov. #g2s #

• "Someone named Lloyd" is my new shorthand for when people are just generically terrified of the other. http://bit.ly/lNBPf #

• RT @cscannella: The things Levi Johnston says are terribly important. #