WND: "Vacate room when CFL bulb breaks"

When it comes to Big Govt dictating how we must live our lives, I'm reminded of the mournful words of Ed Grimley, "we're as doomed as doomed can be!"

How else are we to think when congress mandates a light bulb that contains mercury and it's necessary to vacate the room when the CFL bulb breaks:

Less than a month after the U.S. Congress passed an energy bill banning the incandescent light bulb by 2014, the UK Environment Agency issued guidelines calling for evacuation of any room where an energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulb is broken, releasing toxic mercury.

The warning comes a month before the British government begins its phase-out of tungsten bulbs, scheduled to be completed in 2011. The switchover to CFL bulbs will save at least five million tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year, the government said. (editor's note: this assumes CO2 is a BAD thing!)

Health experts warned this week that people with certain skin ailments will suffer from the new eco-friendly bulbs which cause conditions such as eczema to flare up.

Additionally, the bulbs have been linked to migraine headaches in some people.

There will be many more downsides to this newly mandated light bulb; be watching for them. If Big Govt is going to mandate which light bulbs you have to use and you passively sit back and allow them to do it, then you can count on more and more mandates in your life.

Congress and President Bush, who signed the bill into law, need to be held accountable for this nonsense.

If all this is new to you, then you probably missed this, this and this.

Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard wrote an objective piece in the Dallas Morning News, today titled Sucked in by the Swirl. It's well worth reading.

There are pluses and minuses to this expensive little bulb, but the market should be the final arbiter here, not Big Govt!