Fumigating Fetuses

Conrad Burns must have gotten quite a rush from his sneaky backroom deal that sent wild horses off to die for the oil and gas companies because he is promising to do another sneaky underhanded deal. This time he wants to use taxpayer dollars to poison fetuses and babies with pesticides.

Ordinarily, approval by both the House and Senate would ensure the language is retained in the final version of the bill. But GOP floor manager Conrad Burns, R-Mont., opposed Boxer's amendment, and as the lead Senate negotiator on the bill he is well-positioned to kill it in future talks with the House.

Burns countered with an amendment, adopted 57-40, allowing human testing to continue but instructing the EPA to study if it's being conducted ethically and whether the benefits outweigh the risks to volunteers.

The EPA is developing rules, slated to be issued by 2006, on the use of human subjects for testing pesticides in the wake of a 2003 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that sided with pesticide manufacturers. The court ruled that the EPA cannot refuse to consider data from manufacturer-sponsored human exposure tests until it develops regulations on it.

I am beginning to think he's pushing this through now, because there are no legal limits to it so the chemical companies can get away with murder, and because our Senator is so darn *ahem* ethical, I'm sure this doesn't have a darn thing to do with his insistance that we use taxpayer dollars to dose children instead of something like funding Veterans health care.

• $5,000 from DuPont
• $3,000 from the American Crop Protection Association
• $1,000 from Bayer Crop Science
• $1,000 from Monsanto