Shuck Bush

5 April 2007

Bush has does it again with his choice of appointees made during a Congressional recess. I can live with Sam Fox, who helped fund the Swift Boat campaign, as ambassador to Belgium, although the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opposed him. It galls me to see that he has appointed Andrew G. Biggs as deputy director of the social Security Administration. Biggs is a strong supporter of privatization. Thank goodness the appointment is only through 2008. Last but not least is Susan E. Dudley, appointed as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This gal is a real case. She wants to change or block regulations proposed by government agencies. She feels that it is more cost effective for people who are sensitive to pollution to stay inside during smoggy days, rather than have the government get polluters to clean up emissions. Doesn’t she realize that more and more people are becoming sensitive to bad air? With the growing number of smoggy days, are workers to stay home? Come on now! The Commander in Chief strikes again.

I quote a portion of Dudley’s ideas from an article written by Joel Havermann, a Times Staff Writer, that I read in today’s latimes.com. “Although Dudley’s new job is more obscure than those to which Biggs and Fox were appointed, it is also potentially the most powerful. The budget office’s regulatory shop acts as a funnel for all regulations emanating throughout the government.

In congressional testimony, Dudley has favored dispensing with costly air pollution controls and initiating a pollution warning system “so that sensitive individuals can take appropriate ‘exposure avoidance’ behavior” — mostly by remaining inside.

She opposed stricter limits on arsenic in drinking water, in part because she argued that the Environmental Protection Agency’s calculations of the costs and benefits overvalued some lives, particularly those of older people with a small life expectancy”.

As a senior citizen, I take umbrage that my life is overvalued, so it’s OK for me to be exposed to arsenic in drinking water. Wow, she sounds like Nazi Germany. In my opinion she needs to be shucked along with Bush…Joan Lough

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