Why Bush Raised the Mercury Level Limits

Please see this map:

The Electoral College vs Actual College



This meshes nicely with what my Republican friend told me: "The Republican Party is run by a handful of very rich people who are in it for their own best financial interest. They exploit ignorant and un-educated voters by getting them agitated over non-issues like gay marriage, to vote against their own best interests."


LA Times Poll Finds Bush Leading Among Less-Educated Voters, Not the Affluent

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Strikingly, Bush leads Kerry in the poll among lower- and middle-income white voters, but trails his rival among whites earning at least $100,000 per year.

Bush also runs best among voters without college degrees, whereas Kerry leads not only among college-educated women (a traditional Democratic constituency), but among college-educated men — usually one of the electorate's most reliably Republican groups in the electorate.

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For all the Democratic promises to protect the middle class — despite the traditional GOP identification as the party of the rich — Bush runs best among voters clustered around the nation's median income of roughly $43,000 per household, and Kerry is strongest among the least affluent and the most comfortable, the survey finds.

This pattern is vividly illustrated when minority voters, who tend to vote heavily Democratic, are separated from the results. The president dominates among white voters earning from $40,000 to $100,000 a year, winning about three-fifths of that group.

Lower-income whites like Bush's proposal for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but only a quarter of them believe his policies have helped the economy. And they split almost evenly on whether the president made the right decision by invading Iraq.

More:
http://blog.radioleft.com/blog/_archives/2004/10/27/168527.html


Lower IQ levels linked to mercury exposure in the womb costs the United States $8.7 billion a year in lost earnings potential, according to a study released Monday by researchers at a New York hospital.

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Using work examining the effects of lead exposure on IQ, researchers determined that even a 1.6-point drop in IQ could cost a person $31,800 in lifetime earnings because of missed educational opportunities or jobs

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The Food and Drug Administration has warned that high levels of mercury in albacore tuna and some other fish can pose a hazard for pregnant women. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 8 percent of American women of childbearing age have enough mercury in their blood to put a fetus at risk.

Mount Sinai pediatrician and lead researcher Leonardo Trasande estimated that between 316,588 and 637,233 children are born each year with umbilical cord blood mercury levels linked to IQ loss.

More:
http://www.lcv.org/News/News.cfm?ID=3749&c=27


EPA cooked mercury rule, agency inspector reports
Staff ordered to work backward from goal to justify the proposal

Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post

Friday, February 4, 2005


Washington -- The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration's free-market approaches to power plant pollution, a report released Thursday by the agency's inspector general showed.

EPA staff members were instructed by administrators to set modest limits on mercury pollution and then had to work backward from the goal to justify the proposal, Inspector General Nikki Tinsley's report said.

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The agency's plan made clear that the EPA preferred to regulate mercury in a manner similar to the proposals in President Bush's "Clear Skies" legislative initiative, which has been bogged down in Congress. This cap-and- trade approach calls for a system whereby polluters must meet collective pollution control targets but can trade credits so that not all plants must meet the same standard. The proposal intends to set overall reductions in mercury of about 29 percent by 2010 and a total reduction of 70 percent by 2018.

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The inspector general's report criticized both ideas. It said the free- market approach did not fully account for "hot spots" -- regions that could end up with more pollutants under the cap-and-trade system -- and several specific health concerns, including the effect on American Indian tribes.


More:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/04/MNG7AB5T7I1.DTL





Also:
The Junk Science of George W. Bush

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Nation. Posted February 26, 2004.

Flat-earthers in the Bush Administration -- along with hired guns and conservative think tanks -- are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition.
http://www.alternet.org/story/17949

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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.

The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted "outside" for "inside." She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her. In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for extinction. According to Kelly, "The morale is very low among scientists here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the Klamath."

More:
http://www.alternet.org/story/17949



Bush's Crimes Against Nature

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Eugene Weekly. Posted October 7, 2004.

The hundreds of major environmental roll-backs promoted by the Bush administration over the last three and a half years are part of a deliberate attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

Editor's Note: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental attorney. His new book is "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy." On Sept. 23, he made an impromptu appearance in Eugene, Oregon. Below is an edited transcript of his talk.

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Last week the federal EPA announced that in 19 states it's now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish because of mercury contamination. In 48 states it's now unsafe to eat at least some of the fish or most of the fish, and Oregon is one of those.

We know a lot about mercury now that we didn't know 10 years ago. We know that one out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for autism, blindness, mental retardation, cognitive impairment, heart, liver and kidney disease. I have so much mercury in my body – I got levels tested recently – that I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who's a national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels, which are three times the safe levels, would have a child with cognitive impairment. He estimated a permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points in her children. He said the science is very certain. Today there are 630,000 children born in this country every year who've been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.

Clinton, recognizing this catastrophic national epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, which triggered a requirement that those plants remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost them less than 1 percent of revenues and it would have solved the problem. Well, this is the same industry that's given that $100 million to the president, and eight weeks ago President Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era regs, substituting instead regulations that the industry never has to clean up their mercury contamination.

So we are living today in a science fiction nightmare where my children and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthma are being brought into a world where the air is too poisonous to breathe – because somebody gave money to a politician. And where my children and the children of most Americans can no longer go fishing with their father and come home and eat the fish – because somebody gave money to a politician. And the mercury in the waters here in Oregon, the fish are too dangerous, particularly for children and women. Some of that mercury is coming the power plants, most of it's coming from old mining tailings and from Superfund sites. On the Willamette River, that's where the mercury's coming from. Well, guess what? The Bush administration has allowed the Superfund to go bankrupt, which means that those sites will probably never get cleaned up.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/20124/


Mad About Mercury

By Pat Hemminger, Common Ground. Posted September 15, 2004.

Concern over toxic mercury levels in the general population is growing – and it may be an even bigger health problem than most people anticipate.

Last April, at the first federally sponsored symposium on mercury and public health, Dr Jane Hightower of San Francisco's California Pacific Medical Center presented some alarming findings: nine out of 10 Bay Area residents who ate fish regularly had elevated blood-mercury levels and associated health complaints.

"People are having symptoms just like the hatters," says Hightower alluding to the 19th and early 20th century "mad hatters" who were exposed to mercury nitrate used to process fur pelts. "They have weakness, headache, stomach upsets, hair loss, allergy symptoms, and there's a question of autoimmune disease."

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Many women remain in the dark over mercury's potential dangers. Surveys show that over one-third of women of childbearing age don't know that eating mercury-tainted fish could harm their offspring. "Clearly the message is still not getting out," says Michael Bender of the Mercury Policy Project.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19903/



Bush Plan Falls Short on Mercury

by John Byrne Barry

For the past 30 years, the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Superfund program have cleaned up our air, waters, and communities, and held industrial companies accountable for their pollution. But some toxins, like mercury, have slipped through the cracks and continue to poison the nation's air and waterways. According to a recent report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, which analyzed EPA data, more rivers and lakes than ever before contain fish with unsafe levels of mercury. Under a Bush administration proposal deceptively titled "Clear Skies," many communities would be exposed to three times more toxic mercury from coal-fired power plants than if the Clean Air Act were simply enforced

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to reduce toxic emissions from power plants by making all power plants perform at the level of the cleanest plants, essentially making sure that all facilities use up-to-date air pollution controls and adopt the industry's best operating practices. In 2001, the EPA estimated that enforcing the law could cut power-plant mercury pollution from 48 tons today to about 5 tons by 2008. The Bush plan, by comparison, would allow three times more pollution. All but seven states have advisories in effect for mercury in fish. Only 27 did in 1993-that's a 60-percent increase. Kentucky leads the nation in the number of river miles under mercury advisory.

Once mercury is absorbed in water, it is ingested in small organisms, which are eaten by small fish that are in turn eaten by bigger fish. The concentration of mercury grows as the fish get bigger. Mercury is especially dangerous to children and pregnant woman, but it also poses a neurological risk to adults.

Even relatively tiny amounts can produce serious developmental delays in walking, talking, hearing, and writing. According to the EPA, approximately 8 percent of women of childbearing age have mercury levels in their blood that exceed 5.8 parts per billion. Children born to women with blood concentrations of mercury at that level are at risk.

More:
http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/200305/mercury.asp



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press contact: Jon Devine, 202-289-2361 or Dr. Jennifer Sass, 301-752-8069
If you are not a member of the press, please write to us at nrdcinfo@nrdc.org or see our contact page.

MERCURY POLLUTION COSTS U.S. ECONOMY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ANNUALLY, NEW STUDY ESTIMATES

Bush Administration's Lax Approach To Curbing Mercury Pollution Threatens Public Health, Says NRDC

WASHINGTON (February 28, 2005) -- A study released today by Mt. Sinai Center for Children's Health and the Environment is the latest evidence that the Bush administration's mercury policy -- especially its approach to power plant pollution -- is woefully inadequate to address the threat mercury poses to public health, said experts from NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). The study puts a dollar value on the economic costs of impaired brain development from mercury poisoning. The report calculated that the United States loses $8.7 billion annually in productivity, of which $1.3 billion is directly attributable to mercury emissions from U.S. power plants. (To download the study, click here.)

"Failing to clean up mercury pollution sentences our children to a life of lost opportunities," said Dr. Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at NRDC. "President Bush says he wants to leave no child behind, but his administration's policy on mercury leaves hundreds of thousands of our children behind."

The Mt. Sinai researchers based their calculations on mercury exposure data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and on studies that link elevated mercury levels with IQ loss. The study reports that approximately 300,000 to 600,000 children each year are born with mercury in their blood at levels associated with a loss of IQ.

While these statistics are staggering in themselves, the health and societal costs are likely to be much larger, said Dr. Sass. "The Mt. Sinai study limited its calculations to the costs associated with loss of intelligence only," she said. "There also are data from Europe suggesting that mercury poisoning is associated with increases in deaths from heart disease, which is the top killer in the United States."

In light of the health threat posed by mercury pollution, the Bush administration's weak plan to control power plant mercury pollution is "inexcusable," she said. This week a Senate committee is slated to consider the administration's power plant pollution bill, which would allow power plants to cut less mercury pollution than the Clean Air Act requires (for more information, click here). Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general recently reported that the agency's senior management ordered agency experts to develop weak mercury cleanup standards for coal-fired power plants (for more information, click here).

Power plants are not the only mercury pollution source for which the administration has failed to take strong action. Although chlorine manufacturers using an outdated mercury technology cannot account for the loss of dozens of tons of mercury they collectively use annually, the EPA has yet to address the problem, which it has called an "enigma" (for more information, click here). Likewise, the administration blocked progress in controlling mercury use and pollution around the world at a recent UN conference (for more information, click here).

The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, nonprofit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Founded in 1970, NRDC has more than 1 million members and e-activists nationwide, served from offices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

More:
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/050228.asp

Related Thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3223920

to be related to aerosolized mercury.

There is a theory that the decline of the Roman Empire was related to lead water pipes. It's plausible if not provable.

Lead found in Mexican candies
Officials say more testing needed


By Janine Zúñiga
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
July 4, 2002

{NOTE: THAT WAS IN 2002)

State health department officials said tests have determined that two Mexican candies – Chaca Chaca and Tablarindo by El Pecas – contain excessive levels of lead, but stressed more testing is needed before an official warning is issued.????

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Chaca Chaca, a popular spicy tamarind candy in a red wrapper, was found in three test samples to contain 20.79, 19.65 and 17.87 micrograms of lead.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration recommends that children under the age of 6 should consume on average no more than 6 micrograms of lead each day from all food sources.

One test of the Tablarindo candy found it contained 32.49 micrograms of lead, more than five times the recommended level. In another test, none was detected and in a third test 18.38 micrograms was found.

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State health officials last year announced several cases in which several California children tested high for levels of lead. There was a connection between the children and the Dulmex brand Bolirindo candy.

More:
http://www.environmentalhealth.org/News_LeadCandyConfirm.htm



FDA Statement
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Statement
April 9, 2004


Media Inquiries: 301-436-2335
Consumer Inquiries: 888-INFO-FDA

FDA Statement on Lead Contamination in Certain Candy Products Imported from Mexico

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is aware of a problem associated with lead contamination of some Mexican candy products being sold in the United States and is advising parents, care providers and other responsible individuals that it would be prudent to not allow children to eat these products at this time.

FDA has compiled information which indicates that candies and related products that contain significant amounts of chili powder may contain higher lead levels than other types of candy, such as candy that contains predominantly sugar. Examples of chili containing products include lollipops coated with chili and powdery mixtures of salt, lemon flavor and chili seasoning sold as a snack item.

In addition, tamarind, a popular Mexican candy item, can become contaminated with lead if it is sold in poorly made glazed ceramic vessels that release lead from the glaze into the candy.

It has been a longstanding objective of the FDA to reduce, to the extent practicable, consumer exposure to lead from foods. The adverse health effects of elevated lead levels in children are well documented and can result in delayed mental and physical development and learning deficiencies.

The FDA is taking action to reduce the risk of potential exposure of children to lead from these candy products. FDA believes that contamination of chili powder may be occurring at certain steps in the manufacturing process. FDA will be working with Mexican government and industry personnel to resolve this problem, and plans to establish more stringent guidance for considering regulatory action against candy products containing lead in the near future, as announced in a letter to manufacturers, importers, and distributors of imported candy on March 25, 2004. The letter is available online at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/pbltr.html.

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Friday, November 26, 2004

Kids take tainted candy issue to heart
Petition drive by L.A. students part of growing effort for action on lead.

BY JENIFER B. McKIM
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER



LOS ANGELES – The candy burned their throats. The spicy, salty powder they poured onto their hands and licked with their tongues made them feel sick to their stomachs.

Yet students from Boyle Heights kept eating the popular children's treats - as many as six a day - until they heard the products might be poisoning them with lead.

Then they took action.

Three former students from Hollenbeck Middle School in Los Angeles stood in front of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last month and asked officials to get tainted candies off the shelves.

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"Everybody in the alley eats that kind of candy," said Villada, whose group now plans to send letters to President George W. Bush and members of Congress. "We just want (the governor) to get that candy banned from right here."

More:
http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2004/11/26/sections/news/news/article_324120.php
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