You are absolutely right. The Times has its right to determine what is news for its pages. We all know of NIMBY where no matter what is proposed there will be a significant protest. The safety of the Yucca mountain is depository was settle decades ago, but anti-nike activists keep coming up with potential scenarios starting 100,000 years from now. Secondly, there general standards for handling lead that would instill fear to an average person. Then there was a death in Minnesota of a child who swallowed a lead trinket. Certainly risk of death of children trumps risk of loss to handicraft firms. Arguably CPSIA is not the story that Mr. Olson claims it to be. But mr. Olson is right, and the Times made a colossal editorial mistake again.

Where the Times failed this time is that it did not test these assumptions above. How many lead trinkets are there? How many children have been injured? If just one, perhaps there is more to that story from Minnesota than lead poisoning.

Just how much of a book is consumed by any child. Children mostly slobber on books instead of ingesting them. Are there any cases of children being harmed by lead poisoning from books, stuffed toys, etc.?

Lastly, bicycles are banned because of the brass in the values in the air stems. Good Grief When is enough, enough?

Who are “these groups” to which Ms. Cowles refers? Large companies have accomplished exactly what they would like and will only see their profits rise as competition wanes. As an example Mattel is granted the right to their own testing, while the rest of us wait to see what a certified lab actually looks like.

What is it exactly Ms. Cowles believes, the small crafters are incapable of grouping together to fight a overzealous law that will bankrupt them while not making children any safer?

It is disturbing that our government has been so disdainful of small business with this law, from the CPSC director telling us that all us “mommy bloggers” got it wrong last year and now that small business is simply a tool of, of whom I’m not clear.

Why can these groups not understand the devastation they are wreaking on what should be the core of American entrepreneurship.

Eventually the “astroturf” is going to grow so high that the Times and its supporters will be left behind in the grass, with no idea where to go next…

The reason the NY Times is circling the drain is the order in which they have listed their core purposes. Number 3 should be number 1, number 1 should be 2 (and how they achieve 1). Number 2 is what we should expecrt of any company and 4, what the heck does 4 even mean? In other words, their priorities are in the wrong order.