People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is taking to America’s courts to give animals legal “rights.” You might remember the utterly frivolous lawsuit filed by PETA against Sea World, which argued that the park’s famed killer whales were in fact “slaves” under the 13^th Amendment. A federal judge in California held a hearing in that case yesterday, and reports suggested he was rightly skeptical of PETA’s arguments. Experts predict PETA will fail, but winning isn’t entirely the point: PETA just wants news hits, and it has won plenty of them.

And elsewhere, PETA just lost a (legitimate) case in a Florida court. A former police officer sued PETA, claiming the group violated a confidentiality agreement. A jury found that that breach cost the officer his job, and awarded the ex-cop $155,000. PETA can’t seem to win in the court of public opinion—and apparently it isn’t doing so well in real courts, either.

Should we gloat? Sure—but we should also recognize that in the long run, PETA wants cows to have legal standing to sue ranchers, dogs to have standing to sue their owners, and mice to have standing to sue AIDS researchers. If PETA wins, this will be a lucrative racket for PETA’s legal staff, but a bad prospect for those of us who don’t believe that “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

Scarily, as our Executive Director Rick Berman told CNN’s Global Public Square blog last week, these radicals actually have a lot more backing than you might think:

While this is the next generation, the animal rights philosophy has already manifested itself in positions of power. Cass Sunstein, who runs the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has written that animals should be given standing to sue humans in court (presumably with taxpayer funds for court-appointed lawyers).

“[A]nimals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law,” Sunstein has written. “Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf.”

The American people don’t want to give PETA lawyers tax money to “represent” Bessie in ruining Old MacDonald, and they certainly don’t think that whales are slaves. Hopefully, the federal judiciary has more sense than at least one high-ranking federal bureaucrat and will treat the Sea World suit as the joke that it is.

Coffee – Coffee obviously falls under CSPI’s beverages-containing-caffeine rule, so it’s no surprise that CSPI co-founder Michael Jacobson complains about people socializing over coffee. CSPI’s in-house food policies are so strict that Jacobson once reportedly intended to get rid of the office coffee machine—until one-third of his employees threatened to quit.

Milk – “[T]he beginnings of clogged arteries, an early sign of heart disease, are seen in children as young as 10 years old!” CSPI warns as part of its anti-2% milk campaign. CSPI claims it’s arguing for variety– when at the same it is arguing against serving students any milk other than plain low-fat milk. (How have those flavored-milk bans been working out, CSPI?)

Juice – In its newly released Nutrition Action Healthletter, CSPI launched an attack on juice, claiming the health and nutritional information on labels is misleading. Many kid-friendly favorites are named and “shamed” for promoting the health benefits associated with its contents. CSPI apparently thinks some juice is acceptable, but will still gripe about juice anyway.

Alcohol - The group’s Healthletter also has asserted that “the last thing the world needs is more drinkers, even moderate ones.” CSPI wants hefty increases in beer taxes, increased restrictions on adult-beverage marketing, and even poster-sized warning labels placed in restaurants. George Hacker, who leads CSPI’s anti-alcohol effort, has even accused winemakers of “hawking America’s costliest and most devastating drug.”

Soda – In a further effort to restrict student’s choices, CSPI wants to ban soda in schools. CSPI also promotes the flawed idea that soda taxes are the way to fight obesity, and it wants to put warning labels on soft drinks it dubs “liquid candy”.

So what exactly can we drink? If you follow the strict and often flawed rules of CSPI the answer is practically nothing. Maybe wheatgrass shots make CSPI’s list. Coming from a group whose founder said that “a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day” is “basically a wonderfully healthy diet,” we can’t feign surprise.

CCF Senior Research Analyst J. Justin Wilson sat down with NBC Nightly News to inject some common sense into the sugar debate. He told NBC, “We need more personal responsibility and giving people the honest truth … calling sugar toxic does not actually get us to a healthier society.”

Unfortunately, calling sugar toxic makes for spectacular headlines and gets the researchers making this radical claim a wide audience. It’s also irresponsible, as it promotes hyperbolic conclusions rather than sound science.

With “public health” the justification for “Twinkie Taxes,” a “war on salt,” and even hauling fat kids into foster care, it’s time somebody told the activists to knock it off. Watch the whole segment at the link.

Today, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is calling out People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) latest hypocritical advertising campaign in New York City, which features actress Penelope Cruz giving the “cold shoulder” to wearing fur. While PETA lectures New Yorkers with a half-naked celebrity and phony “animal rights” message, it also continues to run a slaughterhouse in its own Norfolk, VA headquarters.

Despite years of public outrage over PETA’s euthanasia program, the notorious animal rights group has continued to kill adoptable animals in its shelter at an average of 42 pets every week. According to public records made available by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), a total of 25,840 pets have died at the hands of PETA workers since 1998.

“PETA is far more concerned with funding its media and advertising antics than finding suitable homes for these dogs and cats,” said J. Justin Wilson, CCF’s Senior Research Analyst. “It’s about time PETA’s ‘shelter’ is reclassified as a slaughterhouse.”

Though the group rakes in millions of dollars a year, a recent audit of PETA’s operation found it did not even meet its own published guidelines on running a good shelter. The VDACS inspector astutely described the shelter, which is allegedly open to the public, as a “euthanasia clinic.” A review of 290 of PETA’s animal records found that 245 animals taken in – 84 percent – were euthanized within 24 hours.

“If they did their own research, celebrities like Cruz would turn a cold shoulder to PETA’s media stunts. The animal rights group’s brand is about as toxic as its so-called shelter,” Wilson continued. “Over 25,000 euthanized pets and counting? That’s a lot of fur.”

The food police and nanny-state regulators now seemingly want to double down with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) asking for public comments on approaches to reducing sodium consumption. But newly submitted comments by Niels Graudal and Gesche Jϋrgens may prove a fatal blow. The medical researchers, who published the most comprehensive review to date on salt studies, warn the FDA that recommendations to reduce salt consumption may kill people instead of saving them.

The Center for Objective Health Policy, the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Hypertension, and scores of other organizations, professionals, and concerned citizens believe the feds should keep their hands off of salt (they outnumber supporters by a 9-to-1 ratio, according to the Salt Institute). The possible drawbacks of lower sodium diets were documented in six different studies in 2011. Add in the scores of negative comments the FDA received, and you’d think regulators would surrender—even if the stubborn activists won’t.

That is in fact the Orwellian musing of Dr. Robert Lustig, whose new commentary in the journal Nature calls for, among other draconian infringements on personal choice, massive taxes on sugar-containing foods, laws to restrict the amount of sugar in food, and even carding people who buy soda.

What’s all the fuss about? Lustig claims sugar is as “toxic” like tobacco and alcohol and should be controlled like adult beverages. Last year The New York Times Magazine featured Lustig’s radical claims of “toxic sugar” in a piece written by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation “independent investigator.” (Remember that group?) His lecture on the “Bitter Truth” of sugar has over a million YouTube views. It didn’t matter that most responsible researchers (like one who called Lustig’s claims “a humbug”) didn’t give the idea credence: Lustig got his name in the newspaper. (The headline “Sugar’s Okay, Just Don’t Eat Too Much” just doesn’t have the same ring as “Is Sugar Toxic?”)

Food activists have a habit of saying things so outrageous that they just boggle the mind. Whether it is vegan activist Neal Barnard calling cheese “dairy crack” or the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) calling salt “the deadly white powder you already snort,” the American public can always count on the food puritans to speak the unbelievable and reveal their true desires. Calling a massive expansion of the “public health” apparatus “undo[ing] the nanny state” and calling sugar the equal of alcohol and tobacco surely adds to this pantheon of the absurd. You’d find more sanity on a PETA billboard.

Mercifully, these three researchers don’t speak for the medical community as a whole. One professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City told ABC News that “Sugar does not cause obesity and diabetes.  Excess causes those, and it doesn’t matter where the excess comes from.” And a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association asked the question we’ve been asking for some time, namely, “What about lack of physical activity?” The whole tenor of Lustig’s piece led a Sydney University dietitian to tell The Australian, “I’m disgusted that Nature would publish this.”

That’s because it’s totally irresponsible. It doesn’t take an M.D., M.P.H., or Ph.D. to know that comparing a candy bar to a bottle of vodka defies common sense. Should there be a special government store for tonic water and fruit juice like the government liquor stores in many states? Should serving cake at a child’s birthday party be a criminal offense? We can only imagine the experience of the poor children who visit Lustig on Halloween.

Now that his name is plastered across the papers from Australia to Canada, Lustig wants his ideas made law, which (contrary to his Orwellian claims) would only empower the nanny state. It shouldn’t be surprising that former “Socialist Scholars Conference” speaker  Marion Nestle  told WebMD the article is a “wake up call” and Kelly “Twinkie Tax” Brownell claims that “this … suggests there is something different about sugar.” Since the only tool the public health activists choose to wield is the hammer of government regulation, their world is full of sweet, sugary nails.

Today, the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is firing back against a Comment piece published in this week’s edition of Nature by Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt, and Claire Brindis that calls for strict regulations and high taxes on products containing sugar. The authors argue that sugar is “toxic” to our health and should thus be regulated like alcohol or tobacco.

Lustig and his co-authors put forward laughable suggestions such as placing an age restriction of 17 on the purchase of sugar-sweetened beverages and regulating when and how retailers can sell packaged products containing sugar.

“This is social engineering at its absolute worst,” said J. Justin Wilson, CCF’s Senior Research Analyst. “To suggest that Americans should be carded when they try to buy a soda or a snack is not only outrageously absurd, but an ineffective solution to slimming Americans’ waistlines.”

Study after study demonstrates that targeting a single ingredient as the primary cause of obesity is the wrong approach to weight loss. Weight gain is a function of simple mathematics: calories “in” (food) exceed calories “out” (exercise). Of course, food scolds, like Dr. Lustig and many others, concentrate their policy making efforts largely on only one side of the equation (calories in).

Just because some like to have an extra brownie at lunch doesn’t mean every American is hooked on sugar. In fact, a newly published study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that Americans are eating 3.5 percent fewer calories today than they were in 2000, and have cut their sugar intake by six teaspoons per day.  That’s a voluntary change that ordinary people have made. Furthermore, resent research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that the obesity “epidemic” seems to have leveled off.

“Obesity is a complicated issue with a myriad of solutions,” continued Wilson. “Suggesting that simply cutting out one ingredient is the answer to weight loss shows just how out-of-touch Dr. Lustig and his co-authors’ harebrained proposal truly is.”

The latest target is Frito-Lay, which claims that its Sun Chips and Tostitos snacks are “all-natural.” They also apparently contain GM ingredients. The Frito-Lay suit isn’t the only one of its kind. A similar claim was filed in California last year. To the trial bar, it doesn’t matter that there’s no credible evidence that GM food is harmful, because they see a $5 million payday.

Interestingly, unlike the term “organic,” the word “natural” (with a few exceptions for meats governed by USDA labeling rules) is not formally defined under federal food labeling rules. (If Frito-Lay applied an “organic” or “GMO-free” label, it might be a different story.) If Frito-Lay is on solid regulatory compliance grounds, it wouldn’t be the first time that an activist food lawsuit came up empty. (Who’s betting that the media will notice if that happens?)

It’s worth noting as well that the principles behind genetic modification, including the manipulation of crop and livestock genetics for human benefit, are quite old. Gregor Mendel famously discovered the basic principles of hereditary genetics using pea plants back in the 1800s. Before that, farmers chose the best animals as breeding stock and planted the hardiest crops. The only aspect that changes with the scary-sounding science of GM crops is that selective breeding (human-assisted evolution) takes less time and more specific desirable traits can be promoted or inserted.

But don’t tell that to the trial lawyers or food activists. There’s money to be made, after all.

However, The Oregonian - the largest paper in the state - is skeptical that the tax could slim down residents, and an NPR food blogger also questions the real-world effects of such a tax. The skeptics certainly seem to have it right: A recent study found that a nationwide penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would only reduce consumption by just nine calories per day, and according to the National Cancer Institute only six percent of the average person’s daily calories come from sugar-sweetened beverages.

The lack of concrete evidence in favor of the tax - and the recent failure of similar legislation to pass in California, Illinois, Philadelphia, and Rhode Island, to name a few - should be a clear signal for the food police and lawmakers to reassess the tax’s merits instead of listening to outdated advice.

Most people do not know that HSUS doesn’t operate a single pet shelter, or that it has an agenda that resembles PETA’s. In fact, a recent poll shows that 71 percent of Americans mistakenly believe HSUS is a pet shelter umbrella group.

Since the launch of our popular HumaneWatch.org project almost two years ago, we’ve made a number of startling discoveries about HSUS. We’ve consolidated the best into a new handout: “9 Things You Didn’t Know About HSUS.” Not only does HSUS not run a single pet shelter, but we found that more than 85 percent of animals shown in HSUS’s TV fundraising appeals that ran between January 2009 and September 2011 were cats and dogs. This type of deceptive advertising only furthers the confusion surrounding HSUS’s involvement with hands-on pet care.

Also updated in “9 Things” is the fact that beyond the now-closed Katrina investigation, six members of Congress have called for a federal investigation of HSUS. The controversy around HSUS’s involvement with Michael Vick also has been updated to include the tidbit that HSUS’s CEO has remarkably said that convicted dogfighting kingpin Vick “would do a good job as a pet owner.”

To learn more shocking facts about the Humane Society of the United States you can watch our video, find the complete updated list here, and the earlier list here. Run a veterinary clinic? Volunteer at an animal shelter? Be sure to print a few off and spread the word.