Professional lobbyists are expanding their activities beyond the traditional cajoling of legislators in the halls of the Capitol and are now using election-season tactics -- like polling, "grassroots" rallies, radio, print and television ads, and social media like Facebook and Twitter -- full-time to push legislation. As a result, the PR and lobbying fields have exploded with firms that do all of the above and more. Instead of playing an inside game aimed at persuading legislators (as lobbyists have done for decades), lobbying firms' new tactics are aimed at persuading the general public to their side. These days, most prominent lobbying firms have added PR and communications divisions or acquired entire PR firms. It also works the other way around: prominent PR firms are branching out into lobbying. Big lobby firms now employ full-time election-season tactics to help lobbyists "take their case to the public" and win. The idea is to get the public to pressure legislators instead of working to pressure legislators themselves. PR professionals and lobbyists alike have found that it's easy and effective to mobilize the public to support a cause by using 30-second ads that appeal to emotions, while at the same time they can avoid having to explain an issue in any substantive way.

CMD's guest blogger, Jill Richardson, has done some ground-breaking reporting on the potential cause of the massive bee die-off.  According to Jill's investigation, leaked U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memos reveal that the agency gave conditional approval to pesticides now in wide use, without requiring adequate proof that they are safe to use around honeybees. In the wake of the new information, beekeepers are starting to blame the country's massive die-off of honeybees on the pesticides. A leaked EPA memo dated November 2, 2010, discusses Bayer CropScience's efforts to legalize use of its pesticide clothianidin on mustard seed and cotton crops. EPA gave conditional approval for the chemical in 2003 and let Bayer start selling it, but told the company that they needed to complete further safety testing by a certain deadline to get full approval. The  additional testing was to assure the chemical was safe to use around honeybees. Bayer failed to do the testing for years, and instead sought and received an extension of the conditional permit to use the chemical. When Bayer finally performed the study, they did it in another country, and on crops that aren't grown much in the U.S. Bayer also used bees that were located on a small patch of treated crops surrounded by thousands of acres on untreated crops -- a design that handed Bayer the result it wanted by making the chemical appear safe to use. EPA deemed the defective study acceptable and gave full registration to clothianidin in 2007. In November, 2010, when Bayer asked to extend use of the pesticide to more types of crops, EPA still did not comment on the inadequacy of Bayer's study. Beekeepers are incensed at this information, and along with others are asking why EPA allows pesticides to go onto the market before they have been adequately safety tested. They also wonder how sound the science around such studies can be when they are performed by the pesticide makers themselves.