Family & medical leave under attack

The New Standard is reporting that workers' rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act are under attack. Good piece, although one form of attack wasn't mentioned: the FMLA figured prominently on the White House's hit list of regs to be weakened or eliminated.

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Cheap gas, anyone?

The Department of Energy released its new outlook for fuel prices, and they again project that gasoline prices will remain in the neighborhood of $2.25/gallon. So file this under "wishful thinking": OMB's recent report on the costs and benefits of regulations uses a lowball figure of $1.10-$1.30, possibly to minimize the benefits from improvements to fuel economy regulations. See OMB Watch's comments on OMB's report for more information.

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Foxes in the henhouse: BLM drilling permits

"Consultants paid by the oil and gas industry have been volunteering to work for the Bureau of Land Management's Vernal[, Utah] office for the past five months, expediting environmental studies to keep pace with a glut of drilling requests in the region," reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Five consultants paid by the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States have volunteered to work through "a backlog of about 400 permits." The Vernal BLM office receives the second-highest number of drilling applications in the country.

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Recently in the news

Check out some of the latest news articles of interest to regulatory policy: Assault on Science:
  • Chris Mooney, "Some Like It Hot," Mother Jones, May-June 2005 Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.
  • Bill McKibben, "Climate of Denial," id. One morning in Kyoto, we won a round in the battle against global warming. Then special interests and pseudoscience snatched the truth away. What happened?

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Real environmental review?

A new article explores the relationship between NEPA, the APA, and judicial deference to agency claims and asks whether it is acceptable for agencies conducting NEPA reviews to get away with listing their environmental considerations in the administrative record even though they have in fact given zero weight to those considerations. From the abstract:

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The Going-Out-of-Business Myth

The public needs regulatory safeguards to protect our health, safety, environment, civil rights, and welfare. Corporate special interests, however, have an interest in avoiding spending a single dime to improve their destructive behavior. Again and again, when new regulatory protections have been proposed, corporate lobbyists have argued that business would be bankrupted and forced to go out of business. Again and again, they have been proven wrong. Download our fact sheet "The Going-Out-of-Business Myth" to learn just how wrong they have been time and time again.

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Water on the knee, manganese on the brain

Manganese is dangerous to humans at high levels. Although we are all exposed to small amounts every day, at higher levels manganese is toxic to the nervous system and can lead to a Parkinson's-like disorder. It's already regulated in our drinking water. A new study reveals that we are at risk not just by drinking it but also by inhaling it... in our bath water: A new analysis based on animal studies suggests that showering in manganese-contaminated water for a decade or more could have permanent effects on the nervous system.

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The latest bad news

  • BushGreenWatch is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a permit last week that will allow the Coeur d'Alene mining company to discharge mining waste from a proposed gold mine into a lake in the Tongass National Forest near Berner's Bay in Southeast Alaska, paving the way for mining companies all over the country

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Sinking science at oceans agency

Politicos are editing or suppressing scientific conclusions about fisheries and marine wildlife, according to a survey of agency scientists conducted by PEER and Union of Concerned Scientists:

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Mad cow cover-up (again)

The New York Times is reporting that Friday's announcement of the second confirmed case of mad cow in the U.S. was delayed ... for seven months! Although the Agriculture Department confirmed on Friday that a cow that died last year was infected with mad cow disease, a test the agency conducted seven months ago indicated that the animal had the disease. The result was never publicly disclosed.

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