Two leading anti-war journalists are challenging MoveOn, one "of the most prominent anti-war voices," to turn its activism against Democratic Party presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein write, "We should direct our energy where it can still have an impact: the leading Democratic contenders. ... While Clinton and Obama denounce the war with great passion, they both have detailed plans to continue it." But why would MoveOn pressure the Democrats when getting them elected is their number one priority? Blaming the Iraq war on the Republicans and avoiding criticism of Democrats has been MoveOn's strategy for years. MoveOn is now raising and spending millions of dollars to elect Barack Obama, but has made it clear it will support Clinton if she is the nominee. Furthermore, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes of Hildebrand Tewes Consulting simultaneously run MoveOn's anti-war coalition, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI), while also employed by Obama as two of his top campaign officials. Tom Matzzie, previously the top lobbyist for MoveOn and AAEI, is trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the Campaign to Defend America, a new organization run by him and MoveOn's founder Wes Boyd to attack John McCain. Simply put, MoveOn refuses to pressure the Democrats because they are the Democrats.

The lead author of the largest lung cancer screening study ever performed has come under fire for accepting cigarette company funding for the study. Dr. Claudia Henschke, chief of the Chest Imaging Division at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, stunned the lung cancer research community by concluding that 80 percent of lung cancer deaths could be prevented by the widespread use of computerized tomography (CT) scans. Small print at the end of the New England Journal of Medicine article describing the study results noted only that the study had been partly financed by the Foundation for Lung Cancer: Early Detection, Prevention and Treatment. However, the foundation was underwritten almost entirely by the Vector Group, the parent company of the Liggett Group, Inc., manufacturer of Eve, Liggett Select, Grand Prix, Quest and Pyramid brand cigarettes. Researchers and universities are increasingly creating foundations and institutes as a way to shield information about their funders from the public, publishers and the press, reports the New York Times.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair Deborah Platt Majoras will leave her government post to work for Procter & Gamble (P&G), the largest U.S. consumer products company. Even though Majoras has excused herself from FTC matters that may impact P&G and will need to follow a year-long "cooling off" period, Multinational Monitor's Robert Weissman is concerned. "P&G is the leading company involved in 'buzz marketing,'" he writes. When Commercial Alert petitioned the FTC to investigate buzz marketing as "fundamentally fraudulent and misleading," the watchdog group cited P&G's teen buzz marketing division, "Tremor." Majoras's FTC agreed that the "assumed independence" of a buzz marketer might mislead consumers, but decided against further investigation or action. "The P&G case -- involving a quarter of a million teens who are not instructed to disclose their relationship with the company -- apparently was not noteworthy enough," Weissman concludes. An FTC ethics staffer said of Majoras's new job, "It is how things work. The nature of the business is the revolving door."

According to the Tennessee Ethics Commission's staff, a public relations firm that set up a front group that's encouraging people to contact legislators needs to register as a lobbyist. At issue is a proposal to allow Tennesseans to order wine over the Internet. The Tennessee Wine and Spirits Wholesalers, which opposes the bill, hired the prominent Nashville firm Seigenthaler Public Relations. The firm set up a website for the group "Tennesseans Against Teen Drinking." The group describes itself as "a statewide coalition of concerned Tennesseans," but "only the liquor wholesalers have provided funding so far." The group's website allows visitors to send state legislators "prepared e-mail messages opposing Internet wine sales and the sale of wine in grocery stores," saying doing so "would promote drinking by juveniles." The PR firm's president warned that requiring lobbyist registration would "lead to the chilling of free speech." But one of the legislators who requested the Ethics Commission opinion said it differentiates between "citizen groups" and PR firms hired "to create what was really not another entity; it was just a name." The Ethics Commission delayed its vote on the matter.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that a particular chemical in plastic was not harmful, they used scientific studies to prove it. But they relied on just two studies that were funded by the Society of the Plastics Industry, a subsidiary of the American Chemistry Council. On the other hand, they ignored "hundreds of government and academic studies showing a chemical commonly found in plastic can be harmful to lab animals at low doses." Of those two industry-funded studies, one "has never been published, and therefore never subjected to peer review; the second has been heavily criticized by researchers who say the results are inconclusive because of flawed experimental methods." This only came to light when Michigan Democrats Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bart Stupak, who leads a subcommittee, launched an investigation into the use of bisphenol A in containers used by infants and toddlers. "Anila Jacob, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group ... said she was surprised that the FDA so openly admitted to relying on those two studies, particularly when one of them has never been published or released to the scientific world for review. 'There's a lack of transparency here,' she said, adding that the agency's reliance on these studies 'doesn't serve the public.'"

Graphic by Carlos LatuffTwenty Army National Guard public information officers based in Madison, Wisconsin, will soon begin a year-long stint at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Commander Rick Morehouse said their mission would be to "get the current image out. ... The media of the world and families need to know what's going on right now, not what happened six or seven years ago. ... The prisoners are being treated very well." Gene Grabowski of Levick Strategic Communications, a firm that works for the families of some Guantanamo detainees, criticized Morehouse's statement. Saying "prisoners [are] being 'treated very well' is entirely beside the point," he told O'Dwyer's PR blog. "As our clients have said repeatedly over the past few years, it wouldn't matter if the prisoners were being kept in a four-star hotel, their detainment without criminal charges is unjust. And the Supreme Court has said so -- twice."