Monday Roundup: Shady Appointees, Shifty Spokespeople and Shoddy Work
We have lots of Elaine news from the last week, so kick back and check out what we have on our shady, shifty, shoddy Secretary of Labor.
Shady Appointees: Elaine lets appointee hide behind diplomatic immunity. Last month, Elaine met with the NAFTA council—the body that could waive diplomatic immunity for lobbyist and former official Mark Knouse. Knouse is the one whose numerous questionable expenses—nearly $10,000 in travel expenditures and about $1 million in shady contracts and vendor payments—forced him to resign. So did Elaine bring this to the NAFTA council? You guess.
Shoddy work: House votes to force Elaine to act. In April, we reported on a House hearing held because Elaine’s OSHA has failed to create comprehensive combustible dust regulations. Last week the House of Representatives got fed up, and voted to require OSHA to write safety standards for combustible dust in workplaces.
Federal regulators would have to come up with new ways to prevent combustible dust explosions in factories under legislation passed by the House… The bill now goes to the Senate, but the White House already has said President Bush would veto it. Despite worker deaths, Congressional votes, Elaine and her buddy President Bush still don’t seem to think combustible dust is a problem.
Shifty spokespeople: Reacting to repeated calls for a stronger OSHA, Edwin G. Foulke Jr., assistant secretary of labor for OSHA said:
Election-year political theater cannot mask the truth that under this administration, workplace illness, injury and fatality rates are the lowest in OSHA’s history.
Is this the DOL’s new slogan? (see: here, here, here, and of course here) Come on, we all know that those injury rates are only as low as you make them appear. And even Elaine’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that workplace fatalities are now on the rise. Elaine and Co. may be pretty bad at protecting workers, but they sure are good at getting their own people on message.
Oh, and Mitch McConnell has a new ad: Apparently Mitch says he’s always stood up for nuclear facility workers. We can’t say as much for Elaine: it took the DOL an incredible seven years to help Cold War-era nuclear facility workers exposed to radiation. The DOL mismanaged the compensation program for the workers at Rocky Flats compensation program and initially denying them the compensation and medical coverage they deserved.
