LA Weekly

Bush has nominated Samuel Bodman for Energy Secretary.

According to Bodman's Senate confirmation hearing testimony yesterday, he wants to drill through ANWR, he wants to stuff nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain and he wants nuclear power all over the globe. He'll also help keep your dirty car on the road.

According to the Sierra Club:

Dr. Samuel W. Bodman's oversight of NOAA while Deputy Secretary of Commerce gave him first-hand experience with the consequences of global warming. He was literally in charge of watching the polar ice caps melt.

Amy Goodman interviewed Joan Claybrook about the overarching Bush philosophy:

AMY GOODMAN: You were Transportation Secretary under President Clinton?

JOAN CLAYBROOK: No, I regulated the auto industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Regulated the auto industry. How have things changed since then?

JOAN CLAYBROOK: Well, they're deregulating these days, rather than regulating. Attempting not to enforce the law. They are all sorts of proposals on the table by the Bush administration for things called peer review, which is an attempt to glue up the regulatory process and make it regulation impossible to achieve. And they are also actually doing a lot of deregulation in environment areas, and air pollution, for example. They're not enforcing the law. They're cutting back on the funding, so they're starving these agencies to death. They're insisting on cost benefit analysis before can make a decision, but they don't collect benefit data, they only get the cost data from industry. This is really harmful to the American public. Drugs. Public Citizen monitors the FDA very, very carefully, and they have been approving drugs at a rapid rate that they're now having to withdraw them, Vioxx and Celebrex and a lot of other drugs are now having to be withdrawn or special labeling on them about the harm that they can cause.

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