Drugs, birth control, police brutality and other links.

•The FDA has asked drug companies to stop selling antibiotics to fatten livestock. Consumerist concludes the unimpressed reaction from the stock market is a sign of how toothless it is.
•Digby reminds us that despite right-wing claims all women who use contraceptives are slutty, more married women use birth control than singles (mostly because as a group they’re more sexually active).
•A court has approved a company’s request to subpoena Amazon reveal the names of some anonymous reviewers. The company in question says the reviews are part of a negative campaign to discredit it.
•We have an infrastructure that’s aging and breaking but politicians aren’t willing to maintain it.
•This Ruthless World says no, motherhood is not “the world’s toughest job” because it’s not a job in any definition of the world.
•A new religious exemption for businesses—this time against allowing workers to unionize.
•Tumblr says someone posting footage from an illegal toilet-cam isn’t grounds for taking down the site.
•Whistle-blower Edward Snowden says checking out the occasional private explicit video is a fringe benefit for the patriots in surveillance. This is not surprising: I’ve heard the same thing about cops and IRS agents abusing their surveillance powers (checking out exes or daughter’s boyfriends for instance).
•I’ve posted here about the GOP’s sudden eagerness to deny its war on women. Here’s one tactic for having the cake and eating it too: push legislation reaffirming women’s right to birth control while supporting the right of employers not to have their insurance cover it. Which is close to the anti-abortion tactics: don’t outlaw it, just make it harder and harder to get (as I’ve mentioned before, some employers now claim even signing a form to say they won’t provide coverage violates their rights). Case in point, Ohio legislator John Becker favors a)a bill that won’t let women pay for abortions with their insurance and b)a bill that won’t let women who have Medicaid or public-employee insurance use it to cover IUDs. On being told IUDs don’t call abortion, Becker’s brilliant explanation was that “I’m not a doctor. That’s just my opinion.”
•A police officer puts a man selling bootleg cigarettes in a chokehold. He dies. It happens with chokeholds, which is why cops aren’t supposed to use them. Right-winger AJ Delgado tells readers that police brutality was fine when cops beat up liberal protesters, but that was then and now cops have a union, so that’s bad. And modern cell-phone video makes it impossible to ignore the violence (as noted at the link, the only way to ignore the violence against civil-rights protesters was to close your eyes, which some conservatives were happy to do).