Junkfood Science: No fat people allowed: Only the slim will be allowed to dine in public!

This babe has her first link to Steve Milloy's Junk Science, which means she's either part of the PR astroturf or too misinformed to be of help. Generally these articles are used to create support for some bill whose real objective is to keep toxic %$#@ going into food while claiming to protect some consumer right.

Steven J. Milloy is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. From the 1990s until the end of 2005, he was an adjunct scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

Milloy runs the website Junkscience.com, which is dedicated to debunking what he alleges to be false claims regarding global warming, DDT, environmental radicalism and scare science among other topics.

The Junkscience web site was supposedly run by a pseudo-grassroots organisation called TASSC (The Advancement for Sound Science Coalition), which initially paid ex-Governor Curruthers of New Mexico as a front. Milloy actually ran it from the back-room, and issued the press releases. Then when Curruthers resigned, Milloy started to call himself "Director" (Bonner Cohen - another of the same ilk also working for APCO - became "President")

Initially all of this was funded by Philip Morris, as part of their contributions to the distortion of tobacco science, but later they widened out the focus and introduced even more funding by establishing a coalition -- with energy, pharmaceutical, chemical companies. TASSC's funders include 3M, Amoco, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Motors, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lorillard Tobacco, Louisiana Chemical Association, National Pest Control Association, Occidental Petroleum, Philip Morris Companies, Procter & Gamble, Santa Fe Pacific Gold, and W.R. Grace, the asbestos and pesticide manufacturers.

TASSC was then exposed publicly as a fraud. And so Milloy established the "Citizens for the Integrity of Science" to take over the running of the Junkscience.com web site.

House Bill 282 was introduced in the 2008 Mississippi legislative session on Friday by Representative W.T. Mayhall, Jr., a retired pharmaceutical salesman with DuPont-Merk. Its co-authors are Bobby Shows, a businessman, and John Read, a pharmacist.

This is an industry sponsored bit of legislation that was done to achieve a specific objective. Either with some rider or to create a polarizing support for some other bill that has something in it for them. Maybe it's to promote sales of a drug treatment for weight loss, but nothing this stupid sounding goes to the proposal stage without big money behind it.

songbird6, Pamela,

In the words of Ronald Reagan, Here they go again. A retired pharmaceutical rep? He's not retired, he just got himself planted into the legislation machine. I think you're right Pamela, a ridiculous bill, followed by a suggestion of a "Safe" pharmaceutical and more humane solution to this epidemic of obesity, I definitely sense a sales pitch coming. Let's not forget that this "coalition" is what's causing the obesity in the first place, their strategy is: Cause it, then treat it, a win-win profit generating practice, and what do the people do? They thank them for it!