Asbestos: Ignore It And Maybe It Will Go Away
That seemed to be the post-9/11 EPA approach to cleaning up my old neighborhood in lower Manhattan. According to a Salon.com story by Abrahm Lustgarten:
ìIn a January 2003 draft report of a scathing, as yet unreleased assessment of the EPAís response in lower Manhattan, the agencyís own Inspector Generalís office concluded that the EPA did not have the proper information to assure residents that the air was safe to breathe, that the standards the agency set for asbestos levels were unusually low and inconsistent with EPA regulations, that the clean-up was compromised by cost-cutting, and finally, that the Bush administration played an unusual and inappropriate role in editing and shaping all of the information released by the EPA to the public.î
So, Bush is "editing" the EPA's output. Hasn't he done this before?
Of course, Republicans have always been lax when it comes to those pesky EPA regulations about those annoying trivialities, like breathable air and drinkable water. So annoying. It's no wonder house whip (whatever the house whip is) Tom Delay called the EPA "the gestapo of the Government." Personally, I thought the IRS owned that title. Or after the Waco debacle, maybe the ATF is it. What do you guys think?
Patrick at August 15, 2003 11:16 AM