A teaser from Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker’s terrific summary of what lies ahead for Obama’s health reforms. Read it all here.

No one who has studied the medical market in recent years can fail to recognize the unhealthy consolidation that has taken place. An ironic coda to the public option’s demise was the release this February of the American Medical Association’s latest report on insurance competition. Its verdict? A “near total collapse of competitive and dynamic health insurance markets,” with more than half of metropolitan areas dominated by a single insurer enjoying at least half the market (up from 40 percent of areas in 2008). Of course, what the AMA neglected to mention is that massive consolidation has also taken place on the provider side, with most metropolitan areas dominated by a single hospital or flagship system.

Comparative-effectiveness research, changes in Medicare payments, encouraging greater competition through exchanges, even taxing high-cost health plans — none of this will seriously restrain costs without the creation of countervailing power to pressure consolidated insurers and provider systems to change their prices and practices. And the only place where this power can ultimately come from is the public sector. For better or worse, the ultimate fate of reform hinges on progressives’ efforts to rehabilitate American government…

From the McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — The number of naturally occurring microbes that eat methane grew surprisingly fast inside a plume spreading from BP’s ruptured oil well, an oceanographer who was one of the first to detect the plumes said Tuesday…

On the other hand…

However, the microbes also use oxygen in the water, and Joye said the repercussions of the resulting oxygen depletion aren’t yet known… They’re also looking to see if the microbes will draw down oxygen to levels that would make the waters unsuitable for life. The Gulf of Mexico already has dead zones created by nutrients from fertilizer carried from the Midwest by the Mississippi River.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, and therefore won’t. Here’s The Economist.

Maureen Dowd doinked Mr Obama Saturday with her silly-straw-like wit, faulting his “inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings.” Yeah, you know who would’ve killed as the president facing a deep-sea oil blowout? Philip Seymour Hoffman. Or maybe Meryl Streep. Did you see them in “Doubt?”

Ms Dowd’s involvement is fitting, as this may be the sorriest spectacle of content-free public hyperventilation since Al Gore’s earth tones. The difference is that in this case the issue is deadly serious; it’s the public discourse that is puerile. There is plenty of room for substantive critique of the flaws in governance and policy uncovered by the Deepwater Horizon blowout. You could talk about regulatory failure. You could talk about corporate impunity. You could talk about blithely ignoring the tail-end risk of going ahead with deepwater drilling without any capacity to cope with catastrophic blowouts. Precisely none of these subjects are evident in the arguments our pundit class is having. Instead we have empty-headed squawking over what the catastrophe is doing to Barack Obama's image…

At last a motive appears, glimpsed dimly through the mists. Look, it appears to be green, like BP’s logo. Perhaps it is concern for the environment, leading to some protective procedure gone horribly wrong? Nah, that doesn’t seem to be it. Whatever it is, though, it’s certainly green.

From the New York Times:

Evidence began emerging Wednesday that BP officials may have had an incentive to proceed quickly.

A member of the federal panel investigating the cause of the blast said that before the explosion, the company had hoped to use the Deepwater Horizon to drill another well by early March, but was behind schedule.

BP applied to use the Deepwater rig to drill in another oil field by March 8, said Jason Mathews, a petroleum engineer for the Minerals Management Service.

Based on an estimate of $500,000 per day to drill on the site, the delay of 43 days had cost BP more than $21 million by the day of the explosion on April 20, Mr. Mathews estimated.

A Transocean official — Adrian Rose, the company’s health, safety and environmental manager — confirmed that BP leased the rig for $533,000 per day. He could not confirm where the Deepwater Horizon was planning to go next, but he said it was going to undertake another drill, probably for BP.

Another death panel story, this one from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

At birth, Houston Tracy let out a single loud cry before his father cut the cord and handed him to a nurse.

Instantly, Doug Tracy knew something was wrong with his son.

“He wasn’t turning pink fast enough,” Tracy said. “When they listened to his chest, they realized he had an issue.”

That turned out to be d-transposition of the great arteries, a defect in which the two major vessels that carry blood away from the heart are reversed. The condition causes babies to turn blue.

Surgery would correct it, but within days of Houston’s birth March 15, Tracy learned that his application for health insurance to cover his son had been denied. The reason: a pre-existing condition…

It used to be the practice at the old Washington Daily News to write things like, “Police identified the murder suspect as Howard Ignoto, of the 1700 block of Maple Street.” If a more precise address turned out to be even a single digit off, a bedridden 90-year-old bishop’s widow would inevitably be living at that number. Our lofty journalistic principle was therefore, “It is better to be vague than wrong.”

The Epicurean Dealmaker suggests following the same principle when it comes to resolution authority to discipline Wall Street houses judged too big to fail, and his reasons are equally practical:

I like the fact that the proposed resolution authority is currently vague and undefined. I think it should be written into law in as vague and undefined a manner as possible. That would make it much more effective in combating the next (inevitable) financial crisis…

For another thing, vagueness will offer regulators discretion.

This will have two salutary effects. It is well known that financial institutions — like sophisticated businesses everywhere — are expert at structuring their business practices to satisfy the letter of the law, while evading its spirit and intent with maximal effect. The more specific laws and regulations become, the easier it is for these institutions and their in-house and outside counsel to find their way around them.

Should legislation authorizing resolution authority be too specific — in the tools, techniques, and processes regulators are allowed to use in identifying and winding down financial institutions in distress — then you can bet your bottom dollar those firms will exploit this fact to skew the game in their favor. In contrast, purposely vague and undefined resolution authority will not offer its potential objects as many preemptive opportunities to evade its intended jurisdiction or consequences.

In addition, regulatory discretion would foster what I would view as a healthy increase in uncertainty among financial institutions and their stakeholders. Should, for example, a regulator have the authority to unilaterally abrogate, modify, or suspend any and all prior contracts or securities arrangements entered into by a financial institution undergoing resolution — as some might suggest — you can just imagine how much more cautious investors, lenders, and counterparties would become in their dealings with any financial institution potentially subject to such a regime in the future.

The cost of funding financial institutions would undoubtedly rise, as investors become sensitized to increased contractual risk. Firms in obvious distress would see their cost of financing skyrocket and their counterparty business dry up, as no-one with a contractual claim could rest assured it would receive exactly what it was otherwise entitled to in a resolution wind up. But then again, firms in obvious distress see that happen anyway. The point is that regulators charged with cleaning up the mess would not have their hands completely tied by contractual arrangements entered into by others when the failing company was healthy…

The Washington Independent reports:

Speaking to reporters at the Capitol moments ago, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) seemed surprised by his own endorsement three months ago of a Medicare buy-in proposal he now opposes — saying that he finally saw the video “last night,” as if it were someone else who granted the now-infamous interview to The Connecticut Post in September.

Stuck in a corner, he offered two explanations. (1) He first said that it appeared like his September comments referred back to his endorsement of the Medicare buy-in 2000, when he was running as the vice-presidential candidate on the Al Gore ticket.

“I finally got to see that on TV last night,” Lieberman said, “and it looked to me like I was referring back to things I had supported in the past to make that point that, though I was against the public option, I was not against health care reform.”

(Nevermind that the Post interview was conducted clearly in the context of the current health-care debate.)

And (2) he argued that the comments were made before the Senate Finance Committee had introduced its reform bill, which grants generous insurance subsidies to folks aged 55 to 64. (Nevermind that the Senate HELP bill, which passed earlier in the summer, contained similar subsidies and everyone knew that the Finance bill would follow suit.)

He didn’t seem to mind that the explanations were contradictory.

Only two conclusions remain. Either Lieberman is an amnesiac, or he is a posturing, pompous, preening, self-satisfied and self-deluding little popinjay — a sociopathic liar and spotlight-seeker who would shame the United States Senate if such a thing were possible and has certainly shamed the State of Connecticut.

And he is not an amnesiac, although he plays one on TV.

Here he is once more with his soulmate and BFF; I love this picture.

Why the Medicare buy-in is a fine idea — probably better than an anemic “public option” that has been practically strangled pre-birth by the insurance lobby. This from Gooznews.

…The decade before people enter Medicare (55 to 64) is the time of life when many people develop the chronic diseases that will make them the most expensive patients in Medicare once they get there. Diabetes, heart disease and many cancers often emerge in late middle-age. Intervening when the warning signals of these diseases first appear can moderate or even eliminate many of these costly conditions.

Medicare is the ONLY insurer with a long-term interest in engaging in this kind of health care system-delivered secondary prevention. Every other insurer has a self-interest in kicking the can down the road because they know it will be the government and taxpayers that ultimately pick up the tab when those chronic conditions become the most costly…

Ripley has a terrific post up at Whiskey Fire. Read it all here. Teaser follows:

…Of course, living in Smalltown, USA means kids and families will experience those things that kids and families everywhere experience as children grow up - skinned knees, stubbed toes, stomach cancer, Crohn’s disease, leukemia, brain tumors, massive skin grafting after a fire... you know, those boo-boos that define childhood.

Here’s a slightly gruesome, only slightly off-topic question for you: What’s the best way to market your band in a small town? Answer: Wait for some kid to get sick and play at their benefit! Seriously…

Looking at the bright side, here’s Maggie Mahar, at Health Beat:

For example, under the House bill, a family of three making $32,000 a year would pay $1,360 in annual premiums for good, comprehensive coverage; under the Senate Finance Committee bill, that family would be asked to lay out $2,013. Today, without reform, if that family tried to buy insurance, it would find that the average plan costs $13,500. For this household, the current legislation makes all the difference.

Too often, the press suggests that such a family would be expected to pay $10,000 out of pocket to cover co-pays and deductibles. That just isn't true.

Even if the entire family were in an auto accident and racked up $200,000 in medical bills, at their income level, the House bill caps out-of-pocket expenses at $2,000 a year. Under the Senate Finance bill, the family would have to pay $4,000.

Moreover, under both bills, there are no co-pays for primary care. Even private insurers cannot put a $25 barrier between a family and preventive care.

I have a contact in the health insurance industry who tells me that the great under-discussed elephant in the parlor of the current healthcare debate is how much doctors charge for their services. So let’s discuss it. Take a look at the stunning charts in the article from which this is an excerpt, bearing in mind that the other countries deliver better results by practically any measure than our own system does.

Less, it turns out, really is more.

…There is a simple explanation for why American health care costs so much more than health care in any other country: because we pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same — the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need — but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

In other countries, governments set the rates that will be paid for different treatments and drugs, even when private insurers are doing the actual purchasing. In our country, the government doesn’t set those rates for private insurers, which is why the prices paid by Medicare, as you’ll see on some of these graphs, are much lower than those paid by private insurers. You’ll also notice that the bit showing American prices is separated into blue and yellow: That shows the spread between the average price (the top of the blue) and the 90th percentile (the top of the yellow). Other countries don’t have nearly that much variation, again because their pricing is standard…

From David Sirota. Sounds about right to me:

So the notion that Snowe’s vote — or any GOP vote — is inherently pivotal to health care reform is a fantasy created by the Beltway media and the Democratic congressional leadership. The former is desperately trying to manufacture headline-grabbing drama; the latter is looking for a Republican excuse to water down the bill and protect corporate interests — all while absolving Democrats of legislative responsibility…

…if you’re a health insurance company. Astonishing. Something else I unaccountably never knew:

As the debate over health care reform rages on, there’s been almost no attention to the fact that health and medical malpractice insurance companies since 1945 have been exempt from the federal antitrust laws aimed at keeping every other private market competitive. The McCarran-Ferguson Act has allowed insurance companies to dominate markets and reap enormous profits, according to several witnesses who testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning.

As Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) explained at the hearing, the health insurance industry — unlike any other private industry in the country — is allowed to engage in price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation, all of which would violate the law if any other sort of company did it. Last month Leahy introduced the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009, which would repeal the antitrust exemption for health insurance and medical malpractice insurance providers. Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) are co-sponsors.

H/T to Hendrik Hertzberg for pointing me to this great musical comment on America’s crippled and corrupt health care system:

When Obama said he planned essentially to fine everybody who wouldn’t buy health insurance, was your first reaction to think “How is that fair?”

Here’s Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal, telling you how. Pay particular attention to the fact that an almost identical proposal was advanced by two Georgia Repubican legislators in 2007. And by Senator John McCain in his campaign for president.

All three are naturally against it now, their true aim being not to solve the health care problem, but to drive Obama from office in 2012.

Bookman’s explanation starts this way:

Let’s say you’re a 25-year-old healthy male who doesn’t feel it necessary to spend money on health insurance. You’d rather spend it on other things, such as beer and a hot new car. Suddenly, you blow out your knee in a game of touch football and need surgery you can’t afford…

Republican Tom Coburn is a medical doctor, a church deacon, and the junior U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Here he is on Meet the Press yesterday:

Look, the, the idea that we ought to talk about our future health and what our family and what we want done is a good idea, it’s legitimate. What is not legitimate is having government even weigh in on it. It is intensely personal; your health care, your plans, your family. There is no role for government in that. And where we’ve seen a role — and, and this happens all the time, which goes to one of the things that never gets talked about in health care — is we have statements, living wills. We have people who have made those very tough decisions. And then, because they’ve made them, but because of the malpractice situation and liability, they’re ignored. And we still intubate and put people onto ventilators that never wanted it because a family member threatens through a situation, even though you have that end of life counseling there.

Help me out here. Does Coburn mean, for instance, that government should keep its grubby paws off a woman’s decision to have an abortion? That he would defend Dr. Kerkorian? Would he oppose any effort by “the government” to punish medical malpractice? To regulate or otherwise control drugs and their prescription by doctors? Does all that stuff about ventilators and intubations mean anything, and if so, what? That he wants death panels but only if he’s on them?

…pictured here at a town hall meeting in Romulus, Michigan…

On Wednesday our freshman Democratic congressman, the excellent Chris Murphy, held a rally in Simsbury, Connecticut. In the crowd were a number of just plain folks rising up from the grassroots to petition for a redress of their grievances against healthcare reform.

Note particularly the disinterested citizen in the blue polo shirt with the logo of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield on the sleeve. His sign, which he carefully points out is handmade, reads, “We Don’t Want Gov’t Run Healthcare.” (H/T to My Left Nutmeg.)

Watch closely at the very beginning, as the polished debater in the red cap gets his lines from Coach before vomiting them up:

Ignore that tiresome squabbling in Washington about whose health insurance plan is better and get yourself down to Big Bob’s Healthcare Emporium. Big Bob’ll fix you up with some healthcare that will knock your socks off. And for a price even a deadbeat Democrat could smile about.

Let’s start with this week’s special: Bob is offering a deeply discounted starter family plan for an unbelievable $28.50 a month. No deductible, no co-payments, no exclusions, no problems. The plan covers everybody in the family from Granny on down to Baby Snookums — doctors, hospital, medicine, transportation, rehab, home care, prosthetics, dentures, you name it, it’s covered. Covers up to 72 family members including first cousins once removed and second cousins. With a plan like this you can’t afford not to get sick. After the first month, rates may increase slightly, but, hey, there’s no free lunch, right?

And wait’ll you hear about this baby. A nifty plan that’s drawn a lot of attention recently is the Bankers ’n Brokers bonus plan. This one is restricted to members of the financial fraternity/sorority but it’s so good you’ll want to start thinking about switching careers. Here’s how it works.

You give Big Bob a million bucks and he insures your ass six ways to Sunday. Bob invests the million with his pal Bernie the Mad Off and Bernie doubles the million in about a year. Bob keeps the earnings and returns your original million less administrative fees, a small commission, insurance premiums, miscellaneous expenses, and a few other minor costs not worth mentioning.

Your net adjusted gross net still represents a tidy pile of green and you’ve had the security of knowing the costs of your breakdown, your cocaine rehab and your defense counsel would have been fully covered. This is not a plan for the financially skittish.

Another favorite in this politically charged year is the Tell Obama To Go Stuff It Comprehensive Family Healthcare Insurance Plan. This one provides good basic insurance coverage for upscale, discriminating people who would rather not think about things that don’t concern them — like medical insurance for, well, you know, Them. Exclusive, expensive, this is insurance that feels like an Armani jacket and is worth every penny.

The Blue Dog Special. This plan was originally designed for those House Democrats who want to be known as progressive conservatives or conservative progressives. They want the advantages of being part of the Democratic Party along with the freedom to vote like fiscally responsible Republicans. They don’t need medical insurance because as Members of Congress, which you’re not, they have some the best coverage in the world, which you don’t. Bob gives this insurance to the Blue Dogs free for the PR value even though it has no PR value. That’s the kind of guy Bob is.

Then there’s Big Bob’s Own HMO, which offers a wide range of plans to suit just about everybody under the sun. The plans are much too complicated to go into here, but be assured they are as full of clever ideas for helping people through tough times as the plans offered by better known insurance companies. Don’t forget: When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

If it walks and talks like socialized medicine it is socialized medicine. Big Bob knows a thing or two about the practice of medicine in this country and he knows socialized medicine when he sees it. Bob says the plans the Democrats are fighting about are all socialized medicine in one form or another. Get the government into the picture and you can forget about decent health care in this country.

What about Medicare? people ask. Isn’t that the government? Nonsense, says Big Bob. If the government was involved, Medicare couldn’t possibly work as well as it does. The Government only pretends to run Medicare, Big Bob says. It’s actually run by fiscally responsible Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats.

Big Bob’s Healthcare Emporium is open 24/7. Don’t wait. Get down to Big Bob’s now before all the good healthcare insurance policies are gone.

As Congress considers various proposals for overhauling our health care system, it would be well for us to recall the words of former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, who once said, “This is the only country where poor people are fat.”

Ex-senator Gramm, who was known as the bankers’ friend for the many kindnesses he bestowed on the finance industry, brought a brand of “compassionate conservatism” to his politics long before George W. Bush was a gleam in the eye of the Republican Party leaders. Gramm never used the phrase, that we know of, and we don’t hear much about it anymore, but compassionate conservatism is at the heart of the debate over health care reform. What it describes, basically, is a political philosophy that might be summed up thus: We’ve got ours and screw you, Jack.

Congress itself has health care coverage that is better than just about any plan currently available to the public. President Obama has said everybody should have the same coverage as he and all the employees of the federal government, including senators and congressmen, now have. That would be fair, he said.

But “fair” is one of those wishy-washy and fiscally irresponsible notions that liberals are always using to confound their opponents in debate. Phil Gramm had it right: If poor people would take better care of themselves and not go around eating Big Macs with fries and swilling down Pepsi they would be a lot healthier and wouldn’t need health care insurance. Most of the time, when poor people get sick it’s their own fault. If they can’t be bothered to take care of themselves, why should we?

This is a powerful argument and one can only wish that Phil Gramm were still in the Senate to make it. But Phil had to follow his destiny. It wasn’t enough to lead the deregulation charge that made it easier for banks to wheel and deal, Phil secretly yearned to be a banker. And now he is, right there in Washington, D.C., where the best deals have the biggest wheels.

But even without the stalwart leadership of Phil Gramm, Congress seems more than up to the challenge of thwarting the new president’s attempt to foul up a perfectly good national health care system. Since losing so many seats in both houses, the Republicans faced the possibility of being flattened by a unified Democratic Congress. Fortunately, the Democrats are never unified and the party’s dubious leadership in Congress and the Senate seems to be faltering.

Obama, who may be too committed to the idea of bi-partisanship for his own good, has given so much ground to pressure groups from everywhere that the bill, now a thousand pages-long, is all but incomprehensible, much less effective. It is so complicated the Democrats conducted an hours-long seminar in the House basement to make sure its Members understood what the hell the bill provides.

This was a good sign for opponents of the bill. Nothing stops progress like confusion. Meanwhile, help arrived, like the cavalry, with the Blue Dog Democrats of the House. This right-thinking group of fiscally responsible, if sometimes misguided, Democratic Congresspersons has done its obstructionist best to ruin Obama’s reckless plans. With skillful wielding of the monkey wrench and generous deployment of flies to ointment, this estimable band of brothers and sisters is doing its best to discredit the Obama Administration.

With any luck they will so befoul the health care plan that Obama will not recover and his presidency, which some fools believe to have great potential, will be fatally weakened. This would be a kind of justice for a country where the poor people are fat and the head of state is skinny.

Here’s the money shot from an Associated Press story that the New York Times ran in today’s business section instead of on the front page where it belonged.

You have to admire the evil ingenuity and ravening greed of these people. Well, no, actually you don’t.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional investigators said Wednesday that two-thirds of the nation’s health insurance industry used a faulty database that overcharged patients for seeing doctors outside their insurance network, costing them billions of dollars in inflated bills…

More than 100 million Americans have plans that allow them to see doctors who are not part of their insurance network. For more than a decade, insurers submitted data to Ingenix to determine the typical cost for care received in such visits.

But Congressional investigators say companies would deliberately skew data to underestimate the costs of medical services, leaving patients to pay more in out-of-pocket expenses.

“The result of this practice is that American consumers have paid billions of dollars for health care services that their insurance companies should have paid,” according to the report of the Senate Commerce Committee’s investigative staff.

This doesn’t surprise me, but I hadn’t seen these figures before. They’re in a letter to the New York Times from David A. Balto, of the Center for American Progress.

I was disturbed to see your editorial suggest that the blame for “ever rising premiums” falls primarily on physicians. Let’s give credit where credit is due.

Between 2000 and 2007, the 10 largest publicly traded insurance companies increased their profits 428 percent, from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

During the same period, the number of insurers fell by nearly 20 percent, largely because of a huge wave of mergers that led to stunning consolidation. And premiums increased by more than 87 percent, rising four times faster than the average American’s wages.

Today, 95 percent of American insurance markets qualify as tight oligopolies. As in so many industries, blind reliance on free-market forces has failed the American public.

Clearly, doctors bear a responsibility to curb costs. But the real culprits are the middlemen who, after years of lax regulation, now have such a tight grip on the market that they can — and do — charge whatever they want.

Facts have trouble making themselves heard over the orchestrated noise from offstage, right. But here are a couple anyway, from Paul Krugman’s blog:

Everyone knows that lots of Canadians come to America in search of medical care. But what everyone knows is wrong: a careful study concluded,

The numbers of true medical refugees—Canadians coming south with their own money to purchase U.S. health care—appear to be handfuls rather than hordes.

On the other hand:

Driven by rising health care costs at home, nearly 1 million Californians cross the border each year to seek medical care in Mexico, according a new paper by UCLA researchers and colleagues published today in the journal Medical Care.

Seriously. Doesn’t the Supreme Court of the United States of America have anything better than this to do?

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal appeals court to re-examine its ruling in favor of CBS Corp. in a legal fight over entertainer Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction.

The high court on Monday directed the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to consider reinstating the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission imposed on CBS over Jackson's breast-baring performance at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Everybody else is giving advice to Obama, why not Francis Bacon? And so, from his essay “On Seditions and Troubles”:

A smaller number that spend more and earn less do wear out an estate sooner than a greater number that live lower and gather more. Therefore the multiplying of nobility and other degrees of quality in an over proportion to the common people doth speedily bring a state to necessity; and so doth likewise an overgrown clergy; for they bring nothing to the stock; and in like manner, when more are bred scholars than preferments can take off…

Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done chiefly by suppressing or at least keeping a strait hand upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing great pasturages, and the like.

A memo to all hands from White House chief of staff Joshua B. Bolton, dated May 9, 2008:

The President has emphasized that the American people deserve a regulatory system that protects and improves their health, safety and environment … We need to continue this principled approach to regulation as we sprint to the finish, and resist the historical tendency of administrations to increase regulatory activity in their final months…

Except in extraordinary circumstances, regulations to be finalized in this Administration should be proposed no later than June 1, 2008, and final regulations should be issued no later than November 1, 2008…

Agencies should provide adequate time for necessary analysis, interagency consultation, robust public comment, and a careful evaluation of and response to these comments.

How’s that working out for you, Josh?

WASHINGTON — The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job…

With the economy tumbling and American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush has promised to cooperate with Mr. Obama to make the transition “as smooth as possible.” But that has not stopped his administration from trying, in its final days, to cement in place a diverse array of new regulations.

The Labor Department proposal is one of about 20 highly contentious rules the Bush administration is planning to issue in its final weeks. The rules deal with issues as diverse as abortion, auto safety and the environment.

One rule would make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas. Another would reduce the role of federal wildlife scientists in deciding whether dams, highways and other projects pose a threat to endangered species.

Let’s see you argue with this, from Eye of the Storm:

i’m going to say this one time, and then i’m going to shut up. re: bristol palin. the american liberal is, — seriously, literally — pro-abortion and anti-choice, believes essentially in mandatory abortion. what does the average liberal mom do when her 16-year-old daughter shows up pregnant? drags her immediately to the abortion clinic, whatever the daughter’s (or the babydad’s, of course) misgivings.

the american left thinks that bristol palin having her baby is, actually, morally wrong. and more to the point, it shows something terrible about her mom, who had a moral obligation to make her daughter have an abortion. and one reason for this is that if you have a baby when you’re 16, you will likely slip out of our class. you’ll go live with joey, the kid who wants to be a mechanic. you’ll take classes at the community college instead of heading off to a decent school. you’ll end up in a housecoat with a houseful of wailing babies, listening to faith hill.

what haunts the imagination of the american liberal: my family, in the next generation, will be white trash. maybe it would be more interesting to look at these sorts of motivations than to try to figure out “when human life begins.”

In 1992 Paul H. Rubin of the Heritage Foundation published an article seething with the poisonous snake oil of ideological drivel:

Provisions of proposed legislation could be harmful to consumers. H.R.3642, for example, increases FDA’s powers to issue subpoenas, demand record-keeping and inspections, issue recalls and embargoes, and levy fines. All of these powers would lead to increased costs of doing business for firms regulated by the FDA, which would be passed on to consumers. But even more important, the threat of FDA intervention and the increased risk of loss of trade-secret protection would discourage firms from developing and marketing new products, denying these to American consumers who could be helped by them.

In 2008, a Democratically controlled Congress issued legislation of a nature decried by the likes of the Heritage Foundation so many years ago. Fortunately, this legislation was not vetoed by George Bush (this time). On August 14, 2008, President Bush signed into law the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (the “Act”). This legislation,sponsored by Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR), comes a year after last summer’s recalls of millions of toys.

And now the CPSC has had a chance to act on that legislation, but unfortunately too late for the parents of one child, who could have been saved had the CPSC taken steps to issue its own recalls earlier.

As reported in the Linglestown Gazette in Central Pennsylvania, the CPSC has issued a recall involving an infant bassinet.

Attention parents of infants – If you are using a “close-sleeper/bedside sleeper” bassinet made by Simplicity, be sure to check out the two links below to see if your model is the one that has caused the death of at least two infants:

* U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission press release (includes photo), dated Aug. 27, 2008

* Washington Post article, dated Aug. 29, 2008

Hopefully the next step Congress can take is to create a process whereby hedge funds can be prevented from stepping in and buying out companies in an attempt to evade legal and financial responsibility for companies and financial interests that create improperly designed products that kill, injure and maim consumers, particularly the most vulnerable members of our society. And the only chance that it will happen is for a strong Democratic majority to start rebuilding the legislative and regulatory infrastructure that was destroyed by the Republican Congress from 1994 to 2006. And there’s much work to be done to make it happen.

Update: I tend to be ever the optimist because I choose to be, but for a somewhat different analysis, Democracy Lover provides a refreshing (to me anyway) but cynical alternative view to the somewhat cheerful and hopeful view that I present here.