Radley beat me to it

Here's a petition I tried to get the local paper to print after all the noise everyone was making about banning fattening foods a coupla years ago. I see Radley had the same idea.

Now that other groups are coming out to protest their pet injustices like high calorie foods, the Ban Ultraviolet Ray Knowledge Alliance is ready to stand up and fight against another harmful, dangerous, expensive, and greed-driven threat to our children. In 2003, 54,200 new melanomas and 7,400 deaths are expected in the US. We need to stand up to the Big Sun-tanning Industry. Tanning salons, tanning beds, suntan lotion, resorts, public pools, manufacturers of shorts and short-sleeved shirts, golf courses, softball leagues, and a thousand other associates of this syndicate are addicting our children to a dangerous outdoor lifestyle. The cost to our healthcare programs is enormous.

We can follow the simple formulas so successfully exploited by anti-tobacco and anti-food advocates. We need to convince the public that petty considerations like adult responsibility, common sense, property rights, privacy, and the Constitution must not stand in our way: this is simply too important. With a tone of moral righteousness and some old-fashioned populist industry-bashing, our job is to vilify deep-pocketed companies or industries, laying the foundation for their future treatment. The ball won't really get rolling, though, until Trial Lawyers, Inc. start filing one nuisance suit after another, hoping to hit a big jackpot by exploiting the groundwork we lay now.

Then, when some Congressman or bureaucrat sees that there may be some money and political points to be made, the floodgates will open. One of the highly politicized offices like NIH, OSHA, or the EPA can fund a program like ASSIST, which sends federal money out to the states and into local communities to set up "grassroots" front groups. Masquerading as "concerned citizens", but actually comprised of health bureaucrats and grant program beneficiaries, they will build on our work with professional lobbying, demagoguery, and slick ad campaigns. We must be sure that they don't hijack the true agenda -- confronting the Solar Cartel and eliminating melanoma -- as happened with tobacco, where the new agenda is to lobby for taxes that are funneled straight back to the same public health bureaucrats. Those poor fools watched as the State Attorneys General agreed to a settlement that effectively cartelized the tobacco industry, while child tobacco addicts are still dying!

For the good of decent, patriotic, hard-working, tax-paying, American children, please support the Ban Ultraviolet Ray Knowledge Alliance in our efforts to stop the expensive, tragic, heartbreaking, evil, greedy, child-killing devastation caused by Big Sun.

Great minds, and all that. Oh, and great big hat tip to the French Genius.