Dubya's Junk Science

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a guest on the Diane Rehm show this morning talking about his new book, and had such disturbing news about the President's environmental policies, that I had to share this article we wrote:

The Junk Science of George W. Bush

Excerpt:

As a favor to utility and coal industries, America's largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on children's health of mercury, finally releasing it in February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children.

He also went on to talk about 25% of New York's black children having asthma, thanks to pollution. For all of their rhetoric about protecting the lives of the unborn, you'd think they'd put pollution, more than abortion, in the spotlight. But protecting the unborn assumes that folks can actually reproduce:

Excerpt:

.....last November the EPA cut a private deal with a pesticide manufacturer to take over federal studies of a pesticide it manufactures. Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in America. First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as a potential carcinogen associated with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government's "safe" 3 parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs. And this year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found reproductive consequences in humans associated with Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm communities that are 50 percent below normal. Iowa scientists are finding similar results in a current study.

The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening findings not by banning this dangerous chemical, as the European Union has, but by taking the studies away from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving the chemical's manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta, control over federal research.

I watched the RNC Convention all week and was very disturbed by what I saw. Reading info like this just amplifies what I was feeling all week long: I am more afraid of Dubya than I am Osama. On so many levels, Bush represents an attack on my civil liberties, my safety, my rights and my health.

And he's leading in the polls.

I think I am beyond frightened at this point.