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.

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Ouch. After two separate government reports in ten days slammed Elaine Chao’s negligence on mine safety, her hometown paper decided to speak up. The paper is rightly furious: Elaine Chao’s negligence is inexcusable. (The editorial’s last sentence is the best.)

Why the delay? Yes, there’s a shortage of required equipment. But also, coal operators say they can’t get a straight answer from the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration about what should be in their emergency response plans. But, the Government Accountability Office says enforcement of more than 350 citations written since 2006 by MSHA, for unsafe practices and conditions, varies widely.

What seems to be happening is that George W. Bush’s coal regulators, working under Labor Secretary Elaine Chao of Kentucky, are marking time until they get marching orders from the next administration.

If coal miners and their advocates, as opposed to coal industry givers, were part of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s re-election money machine, you might see some action.

Republicans like Big Coal. Their party took some $2 million from the mining industry in the 2006 election cycle alone. And Sen. McConnell objects to any suggestion that there’s something wrong with that.

Easy for Mr. McConnell and Ms. Chao to say. They don’t have to make a living in needlessly dangerous holes in the ground.

Read the whole thing.

Last week we reported that Elaine Chao shirked her responsibilities with a series of meetings that failed to address what really matters to America’s workers. After meeting with George W. Bush, Elaine addressed a group of Kentucky businesspeople in Washington, DC. Elaine Chao is married to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Republican Senate leader who is up for re-election in November; Elaine isn’t from Kentucky, but does reside there with her husband.

We dug a little deeper, and found something curious. Elaine Chao spoke to four Kentucky business groups on four separate occasions in the last five months. Here’s her itinerary:

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As we’ve noted, it seems Elaine is more interested in giving handouts to businesses than promoting decent labor policies. With unemployment on the rise and the housing market in a slump, you’d think Elaine would speak to America’s workers about these difficult times, and how she plans to help.  Nope.

It should come as no surprise that there were more “important” things on her mind.  After she met behind closed doors with George W. Bush and his economic team, Elaine gave a speech to the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce meeting in Washington, DC, once again ignoring her role as Secretary of Labor to promote business interests instead. She even bragged to the audience about the millions of taxpayer dollars doled out through non-competitive grants to big business.

While workers suffer in an economy on the verge of recession, Elaine’s priorities remain, as always, seriously out of whack.

Senator Mitch McConnell knows what women want. For Valentine’s Day 2006, Mitch presented his wife Elaine with an auditorium named in her honor - part of a $14.2 million earmark to enhance the Mitch McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, the Senator’s alma mater.

We went to the Elaine L. Chao Auditorium, housed in the bottom floor of the University of Louisville’s Ekstrom Library.

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