It is a great time to be a kid. When I was young, my parents didn’t buy me date rape drugs as a present for Christmas, which means I couldn’t fall into a coma and wake up with no memory of what happened. Life sucked like that. We did have lead, but it was mostly in paint, not in toys, backpacks and dishes. Now lead is blowing up big time and it’s everywhere.

Yesterday we learned that a popular toy named Aqua Dots contains little beads that, if ingested, turn into “hydroxy butyrate,” a date rape drug.

It’s called teaching kids how to party young.

The toy is also very popular in Australia, where it is called “Bindeez,” because they are weird. It was named toy of the year at some Australian toy function. But they also like the boomerang, so whatever.

Aqua Dots is a very hot toy for Christmas. I think China’s plan is to kill us with shoddy products, so obviously we should bomb them.

Exactly when does this end? Are the Chinese going to spray cyanide on lollipops?

The recalled products include:

Great, I've been rubbing "Big Red" on my balls daily for about a year. Lead is especially harmful to young children and can cause brain damage. Brains are sort of important. Putting lead paint on the surface of toys that kids love to shove in their mouth and up their anuses is a pretty bad idea. Last year Mattel recalled 21 million Chinese toys.

Now Consumer Reports is recommending people immediately stop using a variety of products.

Some of the items Consumer Reports listed have not even been included in recalls.

Huh, I wonder if any caps didn’t end up in a kid’s mouth?

Consumer Reports used lead testing kits that people can buy for home use. After a positive result, they did more testing in a lab. It’s obviously great to have a private business telling us which products we should avoid, but wouldn’t it be even better if our government stopped these products before they reached little Timmy and he sucked on them for 2 years, turning him into a moron? If only we had an agency called the Consumer Product Safety Commission, none of this would happen, right? Well, not in our “Business get to do whatever it wants" world.

Mmm, smell that? It’s the Ron Paul no government world. Ask that baby how it feels about no regulation after it wakes up from its coma. The CPSC has chosen a brilliant path of allowing businesses to impose “voluntary” standards and not to take legal action against companies that refuse to recall dangerous products. They work for you!

Bush’s choices to lead the CPSC have been, as expected, business folk. Current director Nord was a corporate lawyer for Kodak and previous director Stratton created a foundation, which advocates limited government and supports free-market economic principles. Yay! Ron Paul 08!

Not surprisingly, the CPSC is now blatantly disregarding governmental regulations. But, hey, what agency under Bush isn't?

And make no mistake about it, this is something we can lay at the feet of our terrible president. Under Clinton, the chairman of the CPSC only traveled at the expense of the agency or a media organization that wanted the chairman there to announce a recall.

The great thing about CPSC is that under Bush the agency seems to have taken a new role: Actually helping businesses to harm people.

The guys who worked under Clinton were a bit shocked.

But don’t worry, George Bush is going to protect us.

Maybe you shouldn’t put the people who spent their careers working for corporations in charge of agencies who fight for consumers against corporations, you fucking asshole.