Salon.com > Patty Murray

U.S. Chemical Safety Board in decline?

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:12:00 +0000

On April 2, 2010, an explosion at the Tesoro Corp. oil refinery in Anacortes, Wash., killed five workers instantly and severely burned two others, who succumbed to their wounds.

Eighteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing a massive oil spill.

In both cases, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board — an independent agency modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board — launched investigations. Like the NTSB, the Chemical Safety Board is supposed to follow such probes with recommendations aimed at preventing similar tragedies.

Yet three years after Tesoro and Deepwater Horizon, both inquiries remain open — exemplars of a chemical board under attack for what critics call its sluggish investigative pace and short attention span. A former board member calls the agency “grossly mismanaged.”

John McCain realizes GOP can’t win war on women

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:45:00 +0000

John McCain sounded awfully chastened yesterday. Gone was the bluster of doing "everything in my power to block" Susan Rice from a position she has yet to be nominated for. He didn't question her competence. The rage gave way to this Sunday morning walkback: "I think she deserves the ability and the opportunity to explain herself and her position, just as she said. But, she's not the problem. The problem is the president of the United States."

I doubt McCain is done being an angry, bitter man who still hasn't forgiven Rice for her attack on him during the 2008 presidential campaign. But someone must have told him that trashing an accomplished, relatively young woman of color who wasn't even remotely responsible for what happened in Benghazi is just not a good look these days. Maybe McCain underestimated how many people had Rice's back, from the Congressional Black Caucus to the president himself -- just as his fellow party members had underestimated the power of the voting bloc they commanded on Nov. 6.

The Pentagon ties you aren’t hearing about

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:00:00 +0000

When Senator John Kyl, a Republican member of the "supercommittee" charged with reducing the federal deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade, threatened to walk out on the panel if cuts to the defense budget were open for discussion, it was big news. Far less attention, almost none, in fact, has been paid to Democratic Senator Patty Murray, a co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. But a recent award that the senator from Washington received may say more about the likelihood of cuts to the defense budget than the Arizona Republican's tough talk. So, perhaps, does Murray's refusal to discuss it.

Last month, Patty Murray was awarded a bronze statuette featuring a little boy with a big smile on his face, running while holding a toy airplane aloft. Presented by the Aerospace Industries Association, a coalition of more than 300 defense and aerospace firms, the "Wings of Liberty Award" was given to Murray "in recognition of her longtime support of the aerospace and defense industry," reads the organization's press release. According to Jim Albaugh, the executive vice president of America's second largest defense contractor, Boeing, and the chairman of AIA's Board of Governors, "Senator Murray knows the value of the aerospace and defense industry."