There are two or three problems with the premise. First, children are not diagnosed with autism at birth. Given the typical age of diagnosis, it could easily take five years before changes in the makeup of childhood vaccinations make themselves felt. And that’s assuming the mercury has really been gone from the vaccines as long as we’re told. (In fact, vaccines with thimerosal could be sold for as long as a year after the manufacturing changes, whereupon they could still sit around on shelves for months. Far from this being unlikely, the reason thimerosal was used in the first place is because large batches of vaccines can sit around for months -- single-dose bottles that are used once and tossed upon being pulled from the fridge don’t require preservative.)

Finally, thimerosal is still being used -- in flu vaccines, for example -- and there’s still all that mercury in the dental fillings, waiting to affect kids (mostly boys, for some reason) who have a genetic inability to excrete the stuff.

Nonetheless, imagine my lack of surprise when the Missouri-based National Autism Association (NAA) announced on March 2 “New study supports mercury-autism link as documents surface showing CDC’s refusal to reduce mercury exposure through routine shots in 1999.”

“The National Autism Association (NAA) today joined other advocacy organizations in calling for Senate investigations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding its failure to remove thimerosal (mercury) from pediatric vaccines when given the opportunity in 1999,” the NAA announced at http://nationalautismassociation.org/press030206.php. “This comes following a study released this week showing reduced autism diagnoses coincide with the reduction of mercury-containing vaccines given to children.”

Could this study be what is sometimes referred to as “the smoking gun”? Or will it, in a classic case of circular logic, be dismissed because the CDC refused to fund it?

“The study, conducted by Mark Geier, M.D. and David Geier and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, shows reduced autism rates since the removal of mercury from most childhood vaccines,” the NAA reports. “These findings bolster voluminous studies and data confirming that increased use of mercury-containing vaccines in the 1980s and 1990s led to an epidemic of neurological disorders among American children.

“In July of 1999, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a joint statement advising mercury be removed from childhood vaccines ‘as soon as possible,’ ” reports the autism parents’ support group.

“Newly uncovered documents reveal that just weeks after the PHS/AAP recommendation, vaccine maker Smith Kline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) wrote to the CDC suggesting a significant reduction of mercury exposure to children through use of the thimerosal-free DTaP vaccine, Infanrix, which could meet the U.S. demand at least until mid-2000. The CDC’s refusal to accept this offer has left many in the autism community outraged.”

“Hundreds of thousands of children were denied access to thimerosal-free shots because of the CDC’s inexplicable decision to leave the mercury in,” stated NAA President Wendy Fournier. “This dereliction of responsibility to our children’s health is unacceptable. Congress must ensure this agency is held accountable for its role in the autism epidemic.”

“For over a year, this investigation has been conducted behind closed doors,” added Claire Bothwell, board chairgal of the National Autism Association, at a rally in Washington Thursday. “It’s time to bring this into the open where it belongs. If Congress doesn’t respond, parents will mount a campaign for an independent investigation of the CDC’s internal policies and conflicts of interest that permitted an entire generation of children to be overexposed to mercury."

Meantime, more bad news for mercury lovers, as researchers at the University of California, Davis "link thimerosal with immune dysfunction."

"A team of cell biologists, toxicologists and molecular bioscientists at UC Davis has published a study connecting thimerosal with disruptions in antigen-presenting cells known as dendritic cells obtained from mice,” http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=40052 reported on March 24.

“The study provides the first evidence that dendritic cells show unprecedented sensitivity to thimerosal, resulting in fundamental changes in the immune system’s ability to respond to external factors.

“When thimerosal, at a concentration as low as 20 parts per billion, alters the fidelity of normal calcium signals, dendritic cells show abnormal secretion of IL-6 cytokine -- a potent chemical signal that initiates inflammatory responses. Higher concentrations -- 200 parts per billion -- cause programmed death of dendritic cells, preventing them from maturing and doing their primary job of activating T-cells. ...

“Researchers and parents have previously proposed links between childhood vaccines and autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects language skills and social interactions. The UC Davis study indicates that in addition to being a direct neurotoxicant, thimerosal may also be an immunotoxicant, leaving the immune system vulnerable to microbes and other external influences."

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I believe every senator in Washington is now on record saying they favor some kind of “compromise immigration reform bill" which will “secure our border with Mexico.”

Here, I submit, is another great example of how the Alice-in-Wonderland creatures in Washington use words that seem perfectly clear to those of us with old-fashioned dictionaries -- as they’re meant to -- but that really mean something completely different to the congresscritters who use them as they wink, nudge, and cross their fingers behind their backs.

Ask any of these senators, who claim they want a law that would “secure our border” (because that’s what their mail tells them Americans overwhelmingly want) whether they’d favor a double chain-link fence, with big signs posted in English and Spanish every hundred yards, all the way along the border, broken only at 24-hour manned border crossings, with a 50-yard no-man’s land between the two fences, well planted with military contact antipersonnel mines.

I believe I can safely predict that at least 97 of them will react with horror, telling you “No one wants to do anything that extreme!” Instead, they favor putting thousands more border guards on the federal payroll, presumably to count the illegal aliens as they pour through. Maybe they could also hand out “Welcome Wagon” kits including Taco Bell discount coupons and voter registration cards.

Some will argue “It would be inhumane to kill thousands of unarmed civilians.” A) What do you think happened when we bombed Baghdad in our “shock and awe” campaign three years ago? And those people weren’t even trying to break any of our laws. B) Who says you’d have to kill thousands? Once the fence was built and the warnings went up, what do you think would happen to the trespassing rate after the first 20 idiots committed suicide by climbing the fence to find out if the marked minefields were real?

Cost? You’d hardly have to man it; it’s personnel that cost real money.

Did I just call for this to be done? I don’t think so. Libertarians generally support free movement of peoples, merely demanding that we get rid of mandated “welfare” benefits that attract deadbeats by taxing more productive citizens to fund “free” schooling and emergency-room health care for leeches and freeloaders. I greatly prefer that solution.

My only point is that any politician who claims he wants to “secure the borders,” who then proposes spending more millions of tax dollars to create more “border guard” jobs for the nieces and nephews of his campaign contributors -- without voting to authorize the use of mines and machine guns -- means by “securing our borders” something quite different from what he wants the average voter to believe he means.

And I say that means they’re “lying.” Again.