EPA Is Hiding Proof That a Widely Used Chemical Causes Leukemia

Under the Trump/Pence regime, the EPA has ceased worrying about protecting the environment and the health of American citizens.  Instead, its focus has become one of protecting industries and allowing the destruction of the environment.  Now, endangering the lives of citizens can be added to the EPA's agenda.  While Scott Pruitt has resigned as head of the agency, do not expect things to improve as long as Trump/Pence remain in power. As a number of news outlets are reporting, the EPA is suppressing the release of its finalized its conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia and other cancers.  Better to protect industry and chemical companies than the lives of both American children and adults.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this disturbing malice towards the safety of citizens.   Here are article highlights:

During a Senate hearing in late January, Ed Markey asked then-EPA director Scott Pruitt about a little rumor that he’d overheard. “It’s my understanding,” the Massachusetts senator said, “that the EPA has finalized its conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia and other cancers and that [the] completed new assessment is ready to be released for public review, but is being held up.”

Formaldehyde is one of the most ubiquitous industrial chemicals in the United States. It’s in much of the wooden furniture that Americans sit in, the body wash they clean themselves with — and, for those who live in the vicinity of a major refinery, the air that they breathe. And here, the director of the agency responsible for protecting the American people from toxic chemicals was saying, under oath, that he was vaguely aware of a report linking formaldehyde to a variety of terminal illnesses.

If that report were released — and its findings independently verified by the National Academies of Sciences — then the EPA would strengthen restrictions on the chemical’s use, while cancer patients could draw on the findings in class-action lawsuits. The effect of all this would be to force industry to reduce its reliance on formaldehyde — and thus, to reduce the number of Americans who suffer from the ravages of Leukemia, nose and throat cancer, and a variety of less severe respiratory ailments.

[O]n Friday, a blockbuster report from Politico offered some insight into the cause of the EPA’s silence.

On January 24, the EPA’s top officials took a meeting with the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel — an industry group representing a variety of firms, including Exxon Mobil and a Koch Industries’ subsidiary. Two days later, the panel’s leader Kimberly Wise White wrote the EPA a letter, saying, “As stated in our meeting, a premature release of a draft assessment … will cause irreparable harm to the companies represented by the Panel and to the many companies and jobs that depend on the broad use of the chemical.”

In November 2017, Pruitt had removed multiple academic scientists from the EPA’s influential Science Advisory Board. He replaced with industry advocates — among them, Kimberly Wise White.

EPA officials who spoke with Politico say that the “scientific advice” of White and her ilk has led the agency to suppress the draft report on formaldehyde, as part of a broader “campaign to undermine the agency’s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals.”

That campaign has included a proposal to limit the EPA’s use of certain kinds of data on human health — while maintaining a special exemption for confidential, industry-funded studies that contain such data. Pruitt and his aides have also sought to postpone the release of a Health department study that suggests nonstick chemicals pose health risks, even at levels that the EPA had previously deemed safe — and, last May, the passionately “pro-life” EPA director overruled his agency’s scientists, and declined to ban a pesticide that’s been linked to fetal brain damage.

Trump’s appointees aren’t trying to subject the EPA’s report to independent scrutiny — they’re trying to prevent such scrutiny. As Politico explains: By blocking the report at the first step of the IRIS review process, political appointees are keeping it from being reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, an independent panel of the country’s top scientists that must weigh in on all such risk assessments.

Pruitt is, of course, gone; his personal corruption having become too much of a distraction from his agency’s vital mission of helping the Republican Party’s donors evade financial responsibility for poisoning Americans.

But that mission is safe in the hands of the EPA’s new acting director, Andrew Wheeler. As staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, Wheeler worked to delay an earlier version of the EPA’s formaldehyde analysis – and went on to profitable career as chemical industry lobbyist.

[A] recent Gallup poll found a supermajority of voters saying that the government is doing “too little” to protect the environment, while 57 percent of respondents said the government should prioritize environmental protection over economic growth.

[T]he public is already inclined to believe that Republicans are too deferential to polluters. Thus, Democrats would be wise to campaign against the GOP’s policy of “giving more Americans cancer and fetal defects for the sake of keeping chemical manufacturers’ regulatory compliance costs low” this fall.

Why Are Black Pastors Water Carriers For Republicans Who Hate Them?

The very white GOP convention

Driving home from having dinner with friends I had on live coverage of the GOP convention on satellite radio and what do I hear?  Yet another black pastor carrying water for the Republican Party - I believe it was Pastor Darrell Scott of the New Spirit Revival Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.  The same party that has an national agenda of (i) enacting voter ID laws and other restrictions aimed at disenfranchising minority voter, (ii) opposing unions that might bring better pay to minority workers, (iii) cutting social safety net programs that aid countless minority voters, (iv) waveringly support police who kill black citizens, and (v) rolling back civil rights protections.  WTF is wrong with these black pastors?  We see a similar phenomenon here in Virginia where The Family Foundation, a hate group in all but formal designation with strong ties to white supremacists, manipulates black pastors as if they were trained circus dogs.  Do these pastors know nothing of the histories and agendas of those they are serving?  Does it take merely some short term flattery to get them to to betray the others members of their race?  Or is the promise of money what turns them into modern day Judas's?  I do not understand it.   They act akin to German Jews in 1930's Germany who would have support Adolph Hitler.  Are they really that stupid?  A piece in the New York Times looks at the reality of the GOP's lily white, anti-black convention.  Here are excerpts:

Mike Hill, a black Republican state representative in Florida, grew steadily more disheartened as he watched television clips of his party’s overwhelmingly white national convention lecturing African-Americans about the police and race relations.

There was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, nearly shouting Monday night that the police only wanted to help people, regardless of race. A sea of white convention delegates, cheering wildly as two black speakers ridiculed the Black Lives Matter movement and unconditionally praised law enforcement officers. And a series of speakers pushing Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order message and arguing, as he has, that the United States had lost its way.

“When a lot of white Republicans get together and bring up race, even telling black people how they should see police and the world, it evokes the worst kind of emotion,” said Mr. Hill, who supports Mr. Trump but decided to skip the convention.

For many black Republicans, the party’s convention has veered unexpectedly and unhappily toward lecturing and moralizing on issues of race, an off-putting posture at a time when Mr. Trump is staggeringly unpopular with minority voters. He drew support from zero percent of African-Americans in recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and he is struggling badly with Hispanics, partly because of his harsh language about Mexicans and immigrants.

In Cleveland, however, Mr. Trump and Republican Party leaders are focused on appealing to white voters, particularly white men who are critical to their electoral strategy in the Midwest and the South.

Black Republicans said they understood the thinking behind this, but argued that it was based on politics more than on helping people or strengthening the country.

And those who did speak from the podium seemed focused more on castigating black protesters, scolding other blacks for their behavior and exalting Mr. Trump than on trying to help Republicans make inroads with undecided or skeptical black voters.

This convention has fewer black delegates and speakers than any in two decades, according to several African-American Republicans who are regulars at party gatherings. The Republican National Committee could not provide definitive counts of delegates by race; one party official estimated that there were 80 black delegates, but that was based on an informal crowd count that might have included people on the convention floor who were not delegates. There are 2,472 delegates in all.

Some Republicans said privately that they were uncomfortable that convention planners had tapped black speakers to chastise black protesters in front of a mostly white crowd, which seemed to lap it up.

Other than the possible motivations noted above, the only other on I can think of is appeals to religion.  By definition, the deeply religious reject facts and objective reality in favor of belief in myths and legends. Perhaps these pastors are suckered by this ploy.  A last possibility is that the black pastors and Trump share a common trait- they are all con-artists who prey on the ignorant and gullible.  Perhaps they feel that Trump is a kindred spirit. 

How the GOP Lost Its Way

As a former GOP activist - I was on a local city committee for 8 years - I remember a time when one did not need to be either a religious fanatic, a thinly veiled white supremacist, or driven by greed and obsessed with lower taxes to be a Republican.  Sadly, those days are long gone and I and many others - including a number of LGBT bloggers I know - fled the GOP where after the Christofascist take over, we are deemed not even fully human and certainly not entitled to any civil rights.  As I've noted before, my entire extended family more or less has fled the insane asylum that has become today's GOP.   I blame most of the change in the GOP on the emergence Christian Right as the real puppet masters of the party.  In Virginia, the Republican Party of Virginia has become a de facto branch of The Family Foundation, a virulently anti-modernity affiliate of Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council.  What I find especially chilling about the Christianist take over is that it has coincided with a level of selfishness and greed and intolerance that never used to be the principal hallmarks of the GOP.  A lengthy column in the Washington Post looks at this slide away form caring about the common good and the embracing of far right extremism.  Here are some excerpts: 

To secure his standing as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney has disowned every sliver of moderation in his record. He’s moved to the right on tax cuts and twisted himself into a pretzel over the health-care plan he championed in Massachusetts — because conservatives are no longer allowed to acknowledge that government can improve citizens’ lives.

Romney is simply following the lead of Republicans in Congress who have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual. But most important of all, conservatism used to care passionately about fostering community, and it no longer does. This commitment now lies buried beneath slogans that lift up the heroic and disconnected individual — or the “job creator” — with little concern for the rest.

Today’s conservatism is about low taxes, fewer regulations, less government — and little else. Anyone who dares to define it differently faces political extinction. Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana was considered a solid conservative, until conservatives decided that anyone who seeks bipartisan consensus on anything is a sellout. Even Orrin Hatch of Utah, one of the longest-serving Republican senators, is facing a primary challenge. His flaw? He occasionally collaborated with the late Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy on providing health insurance coverage for children and encouraging young Americans to join national service programs.

Conservatism today places individualism on a pedestal, but it originally arose in revolt against that idea.

The great American conservative William F. Buckley Jr. certainly understood this. In his book “Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country,” he quotes approvingly John Stuart Mill’s insistence that “everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit.” With liberty comes responsibility to the community.

Before the Civil War, conservatives such as Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay believed in an active federal government that served the common good. This included a commitment to internal improvements (what we now, less elegantly, call infrastructure), public schooling, and the encouragement of manufacturing and science. Clay, an unapologetic supporter of national economic planning, called his program “the American System,” explicitly distinguishing his idea from the British laissez-faire system. (The Club for Growth would not have been pleased.)

Civil War pensions — the first great social insurance program and a central Republican cause — were supporting about 28 percent of men 65 and over by 1910. In 1894, the program’s most expensive year, the pensions accounted for 37 percent of federal spending. Sounds like a massive entitlement program, doesn’t it?

And the first American version of socialized medicine was signed into law in 1798 by that great conservative president, John Adams. The Marine Hospital Servicefunded hospitals across the country to treat sailors who were sick or got injured on the job. There is no record of a mass campaign to repeal AdamsCare.

Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system and established the federal student loan program in the 1950s.   More recently, Ronald Reagan never tried to dismantle the New Deal and acknowledged, sometimes with wry humor, the need for tax increases. He was acutely alive to the communal side of conservatism.

In other words, until recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.

Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.

Bush’s unpopularity at the end of his term encouraged conservatives, including the fledgling tea party movement, to distance themselves from his legacy. They declared that Bush’s shortcomings stemmed from his embrace of “big government” and “big spending” — even if much of the spending was in Iraq and Afghanistan. They recoiled from his “compassionate conservatism,” deciding, as right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin put it, that “ ‘compassionate conservatism’ and fiscal conservatism were never compatible.”

 Obama, in the meantime, pitched communal themes from the moment he took office .  .  .   .   The more he emphasized a better balance between the individual and the community, the less interested conservatives became in anything that smacked of such equilibrium.

It’s why they cannot accept (as Romney and the Heritage Foundation once did) energetic efforts by the government to expand access to health insurance. It’s why, even after a catastrophic financial crisis, they continue to resist new rules aimed not at overturning capitalism but at making it more stable.

[W]hen we balance our individualism with a sense of communal obligation that we are most ourselves as Americans. The 20th century was built on this balance, and we will once again prove the prophets of U.S. decline wrong if we can refresh and build upon that tradition. But doing so will require conservatives to abandon untempered individualism, which betrays what conservatism has been and should be.

Boycott the Knights of Columbus

Father Jeff Farrow has a new post on his blog that takes the Knights of Columbus to task for the organization's opposition to gay marriage. The Knights likewise need to be boycotted for their mindless ass kissing of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy notwithstanding the moral bankruptcy of the hierarchy as evidenced by the sex abuse scandal and deliberate cover up of the molestation of minors. The Knights were founded to protect families and children, yet the organization in its slavish brown nosing of corrupt bishops and cardinals - and yes Popes - has closed its eyes to threats and intimidation of families and abuse victims by members of the hierarchy. As a former 4th Degree Knight, I am ashamed now to ever have been affiliated with the organization in light of its more recent conduct. They have betrayed the vision of their founder and have thrown the children of LGBT couples on the trash heap. Here are some highlights from Father Jeff's post:

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Many priests have E-mailed me and expressed their rage and anger over the hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy in supporting anti-marriage equality legislation. They have often referred to the bishops as “old queens” who blithely support anti-gay efforts, because of their own self-loathing. One of the organizations, which the bishops have effectively employed to do their dirty work, has been the Knights of Columbus.

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So, what can priests do to fight the anti-gay agenda of the bishops and the K of C? Here is a short list:

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1) Borrow the full amount against your Knights of Columbus life insurance policy immediately. Take the check and invest the funds with an LGBT friendly fund. Do not pay back the loan. If every priest and K of C insurance policy holder were to do this, it would create a considerable capital drain on K of C and cripple their ability to write large checks to thwart LGBT legislation and ballot initiatives.

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2) If you are a layperson, write them at tell them why you have done this. If you are a priest, simply inform them that you have decided to use the funds to promote social justice.

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3) Pastors have the power to decide what is published in the Sunday bulletin and what is announced at Mass on Sundays. Do not let the K of C publish or announce.

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4) Pastors may grant or withhold permission for organizations to use church facilities for their meetings. Most parishes have very tight facility scheduling. Create a program and tell the K of C they need to meet elsewhere. Eventually, they will get the message.

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Economic boycotts helped bring down an unjust regime in South Africa and brought an end to apartheid there, it can work here too.

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To this list I would add avoiding contributing monies to the Knights' various charities and give the money to other charities that serve the same beneficiaries - and let the Knights know why you are doing so. Similarly, boycott the Knights' Lenten fish fries and other functions. And if you are a member of the Knights, resign and tell them why you are doing so.

Decrying the Catholic Church's Anti-Gay Hate

Growing up Catholic, I suffered at the hands of nuns and priests who strove to indoctrinate me and others that although supposedly God was a god of love, nearly everything was a path to Hell and eternal damnation. Things sexual were, of course, the most sure fired way to go to Hell of all. And homosexuality? The worse of the worse. It's taken me years to come to recognize the falsity of so much of what the Church tried to inculcate. Interestingly, the Buffalo News has a great opinion piece written by a life long Catholic who takes the Church to task for the anti-gay jihad pressed by Benedict XVI and the other bitter old men in dresses. It is sad that an institution that could do so much good spends so much energy demonizing other people. Here are some highlights:

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Now as a grandmother, I am very grieved that the Church that was so formative for me cannot be so for my adult children and their families. I am so proud of both of my grown sons. They are men of substance, men of honor and great fathers. One of them happens to be gay. He lives in Seattle with his husband. They are raising two adopted children.

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As any grandparent will affirm, grandchildren are one of life’s greatest joys. For my husband and me, our joy is clouded. The Church that was so central to our lives now preaches against our son and his family. This is not new, it is true, but the hurt was renewed when I learned of the active participation of the Catholic bishops in favor of the California proposition banning gay marriage. This is especially disturbing, since our son was married recently in California.

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My knowledge of the social gospel tells me that there are grave evils in the world that need the moral voice of the Church. For example, poverty, the distribution of wealth, war and torture cry out for serious attention. Instead of focusing on these weighty issues in important elections, the bishops try to denigrate families like my son’s.

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I wish for him and his beautiful children the support my family experienced back in the Riverside of the ’50s. Maybe tightly knit Buffalo neighborhoods are in a rose-colored past, but the message of the gospels should be eternal. It seems to me that the Church I was raised in taught the importance of love — love for all of God’s people.