Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said today it was appropriate for West Coast residents to buy iodide tablets as a precaution in light of the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan.
This is ridiculous. Americans will not be exposed to significant amounts of radiation from Japan and so there is no need to scare people.
I’m not sure whether she’s just scaring people in order to help kill off nuclear power in the U.S. or whether she is really that ignorant. But whichever, Regina Benjamin needs to go.
At today’s House Energy and Commerce Committee mark-up of the Upton-Inhofe bill to strip EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, Rep. Lois Capps (D-Calif.) tried to defend the EPA by offering a recent American Lung Association poll that purports to show public opinion favoring the EPA.
What Congress needs to know, however, is that the American Lung Association is bought-and-paid-for by the EPA. In the last 10 years, the EPA has given the ALA $20,405,655, according to EPA records.
The master-servant relationship between the EPA and ALA extends back to at least the early 1990s. As John Merline reported in Investors Business Daily (Jan. 28, 1997), between 1990 and 1995, the EPA gave the American Lung Association $5 million — even though the ALA was suing the EPA at the time. Although not many grantors give grants to organizations that sue them, at least in the regular world, the EPA likes to be sued by its buddies because such lawsuits invariably expand the agency’s powers.
So it’s not really surprising (or meaningful) that the ALA issued a poll supporting the EPA.