Politics: Too Many Dr. Evils

I have had entertaining conversations with friends about which member of the Bush administration should be designated Dr. Evil. There's John Poindexter, convicted but rap-beating Iran-Contra felon who now runs the Office of Total Information Awareness. There's obvious evil contenders like John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney. Why there's even evil Bush administration honorary members like real Dr.-Senator-Majority Leader Bill Frist.

There's also John Graham, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. As Reece Rushing from OMBWatch details in this excellent Tompaine.com item, OIRA is an obscure entity within the Office of Management and Budget that essentially serves as a regulation czar for the White House. What John Graham has used the position for is to weaken, deter, defer and discount every regulation he meets. He has run roughshod over dozens of Clinton-era environmental, health and safety regulations in the past two years. Read:

Graham previously served as head of the mostly corporate-funded Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, where he was a consistent and reliable ally of almost any industry seeking to hold off regulation, once telling the Heritage Foundation, "Environmental regulation should be depicted as an incredible intervention in the operation of society." At the time of his contentious confirmation in the summer of 2001, consumer groups, public health advocates, and environmentalists warned that Graham would use his regulatory review authority (all major rules must receive OIRA approval) to thwart important new protections -- a forecast that turned out to be dead on.

As a matter of fact, Graham once stated in a scientific panel that Dioxin should be categorized as both causing and preventing cancer. Read the whole piece at Tompaine.com. They got him good. Perhaps he is Dr. Evil.