BUSH IGNORES SCIENTISTS....FILM AT 11....

'BUSH IGNORES SCIENTISTS....FILM AT 11....I know this will come as a shock, but a group of scientists claimed yesterday that the Bush administration is ignoring their recommendations and twisting their research results:

In an unprecedented action, the Environmental Protection Agency's own scientific panel on Friday challenged the agency's proposed public health standards governing soot and dust.

....Some panel members called the administrator's actions "egregious" and said his proposals "twisted" or "misrepresented" their recommendations.

....Cal/EPA's air pollution epidemiology chief, Bart Ostro, charged during the teleconference that the EPA had incorporated "last-minute opinions and edits" by the White House Office of Management and Budget that "circumvented the entire peer review process."

He said research that he and others had conducted also had been misrepresented in the EPA's lengthy justification for the proposed new standards.

In an interview later, Ostro said he was referring to marked-up drafts of Johnson's proposals that showed changes by the White House budget office and language that was "very close to some of the letters written by some of the trade associations."

Sigh. I hardly even know what to say about stuff like this anymore. Of course the language was
"very close" to letters written by trade associations. The modern Republican Party doesn't do policy anymore, they just farm it out to K Street.

Maybe Chris Mooney will follow up on this later. It's his beat, after all."
Washington Monthly