Praise God From Whom All Pesticides Flow

Only after Senator Barbara Boxer threatened to hold up the confirmation of Stephen Johnson as the new administrator of Bush's Environmental Protection Agency did the EPA decide to scrap its planned "Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study" (the initials of which deceptively spell out "CHEERS").

CHEERS was designed to study the impacts on poor black children in mostly-black neighborhoods in Duval County, Florida, of pesticides and other toxic chemicals. The families of these children were to be paid $970 to continue using pesticides and other toxic chemicals in their homes, while the EPA monitored the children's blood and urine. Human guinea pigs? Pshaw! It's amazing what poor (and under-informed) citizens will let the government do to their children, and for so little money.

Meanwhile, and just in blessed time, Sen. Bill Frist announced that he would take part with prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's judicial nominees. Experiment with toxic chemicals on children ... God bless you for being the most Christian president in the history of the universe! But oppose the mullahs on a handful of extremist judges ... yer going straight to hell.

Whatever plan for America God might have, it's clear what Rev. James Dobson and Rev. Rick Scarborough and their fellow fanatics have in mind: get the right rigid Bible-thumpers into judicial robes, and watch women's right to abortion go the way of the whooping crane.

But as Frank Rich says in his brilliant NYTimes column today on the scandals of the Holy Tom DeLay, "the religious trappings add a note that distinguishes these Beltway creeps from those who have come before: a supreme righteousness that often spirals into anger and fire-and-brimstone zealotry that can do far more damage to America than ill-begotten golf junkets."