Molly Ivins May 23

AUSTIN — Parliamentary ruling of the week: "The mendment to the mendment has been mended, and the mendment is passed — somehow." —House Speaker Pete Laney at about 8:45 p.m. Thursday.

You won't hear a ruling like that in the House of Commons.

Worst Idea of the Week: Republicans in Washington announced they had a brilliant new weapon to use against Vice President Al Gore, on whom they have now set their sights — wit, particularly satire, ridicule and mockery. Ever one for the promotion of humor in public life, rushed I to C-Span to hear the flowering of their bon mots, barbs and zingers. Oh dear. My. My. My. Bless their hearts. How unfortunate.

Watching Republicans try to give birth to something funny is like watching an elephant in labor. The high point of the humorfest was when Rep. John Doolittle of California, a budding Bill Maher, said snappily, "And Gore even believes in global warming — a crisis found not to exist! This is nothing less than environmental socialism!"

That had us all rolling in the aisles, of course. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, the Republican crown prince, had just suffered a conversion experience on the issue and announced May 13, "I believe there is global warming."

A few weeks earlier, Bush had said, "The science is still out" on global warming, but, he announced, "I've had some briefings recently, and I'm becoming more convinced that the science proves there's global warming." A fact presumably vouched for by Republican scientists. However, Bush's conversion upset the American Petroleum Institute and Texas Citizens for a Sound Economy. It's not easy to be the front-runner.

In other unhappy environmental news, we find genetically altered plants creating an alarming side effect. Scientists at Cornell University have discovered that when the pollen from Bt corn, a genetically altered strain, is eaten by the larvae of Monarch butterflies, it kills nearly half and stunts the rest.

Twenty million acres of Bt corn will be planted this year, mostly in the Midwest, the critical breeding area for the Monarch.

As has been reported here before, transgenic plants are the subject of enormous controversy and protest in Europe, and in Canada, Bt corn is already regulated so that it has to be planted in a checkerboard pattern with non-Bt corn to create a refuge for insects.

Representatives from Monsanto, Novartis Agribusiness and Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. naturally rushed to challenge the findings of the laboratory study. The corn strain is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the companies.

I especially liked the guy from Novartis, who told The New York Times, "Even if Dr. (John E.) Losey's results are real, which they could be, the exposure is still minimal, and the impact is extremely small, if any." How would he know: The long-term effects of Bt transgenic plants on the Monarch population have never been studied.

What we have here is not an unanticipated, unforeseeable, freak consequence of the genetic alteration of plants. The reason people in Europe and elsewhere are so upset about genetically altered food is that you could see this one coming.

By "this one" I do not mean the Monarch butterfly problem specific to Bt plants but the generic problem. If we start messing with the genetic structure of plants, we are simply bound to lose something or hurt something critical. Suppose, for example, we noticed after a few years of planting Bt plants all over the world that they killed off bees and nothing could be done to bring back the bee population.

We are, after all, looking squarely in the maw of the Y2K problem, something between a headache and a nightmare caused by the fact that many, many, many very smart people overlooked something as plain as the nose on your face for a very long time.

Considering the political clout of giant companies like Monsanto, how many environmental disasters will take it in the future before we finally regulate genetically altered plants?

With transgenic plants, we don't know specifically how they will alter the balance of nature, but we know that it will happen.

Murphy's Law (anything that can go wrong, will go wrong) is not the applicable rule here: It is Ryan's Law, which is that Murphy was an optimist.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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