Chimpy Pushing Industry Hired Gun To Head Consumer Product Safety Commission - WP

The White House is considering a scientist who has frequently testified and written on behalf of the energy, pesticide and tobacco industries to chair the nation's chief product-safety regulator. A White House spokesman declined to comment on plans to replace acting Consumer Product Safety Commission chairman Nancy A. Nord. Over the past two months, Bush administration officials have vetted several prospective candidates to lead the beleaguered agency, according to sources who were consulted about the candidates. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House has not made an announcement.

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Charnley is less popular with environmental advocates, who criticized her work on behalf of industry. In 2006, for example, she wrote an op-ed article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch opposing tougher restrictions on power-plant emissions in neighboring Illinois on behalf of Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a nonprofit group funded by utilities, railroads and mining companies. In 2004, she and a colleague wrote a letter to the technical journal Environmental Health Perspectives about a study on human testing of pesticides that they had co-authored without disclosing that it had been funded partly by pesticide makers. The journal's editor ran a disclosure after Charnley and her colleague disputed having a conflict of interest.

Charnley was also a consultant for the tobacco industry from the early 1990s through 2001, according to internal tobacco industry documents collected as a part of the 1998 master settlement between the industry and 46 state attorneys general.

"She's not thought of as a consumer advocate per se but as someone hired by industry to represent their point of view," said Lynn Goldman, a former assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, who has testified at hearings with Charnley. Charnley did not return e-mails or phone messages left at her office.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/25/AR2008012503075.html

Can't count on the Dems to stop it, though. Pelosi and Reid are too busy doing the chimp's bidding on the stimulus package to worry about consumers.

and then we can drag these fools out behind the Capitol and shoot them. I will volunteer to personally bust a cap on the EPA chief.