With a winter storm too. So sorry to hear this.

This isn't good.

It's crazy

You have to feel for them

much oil they lost - not how much environmental and other damage they inflicted on these towns.

Turn on MSNBC right fugging now, malaise!!!

Saw the 4.00am repeat :chuckle;

said WV was a very rich state. In terms of natural resources it was.

DOT regulation proposals, delayed has finally arrived in the White House. Now the proposals are in the hands of the Office of Management & Regulatory Affairs.

What happened to the silica rule is no isolated example. A series of executive orders over the past three decades have given OIRA significant authority to reassess rules on every imaginable subject, from health care to the environment to transportation. The office shares early drafts of rules with the president's top advisers as well as other Cabinet-level agencies that might object.

Although some on OIRA's team have degrees in science and engineering, former officials say its leadership and staff are largely drawn from the realms of economics, law and public policy. Regardless, the office does not hesitate to rework agency rules that were years in the making and backed by peer-reviewed science. Often, OIRA officials make a proposed rule appear too costly by revising the calculation of benefits downward. As it did with the silica limits, the office can also prolong the process, holding regulations in limbo for months and sometimes years.

In an influential 2001 Harvard Law Review article, Elena Kagan, now a Supreme Court Justice, argued OIRA provides a crucial check on the actions of government bureaucrats. "From the beginning of the twentieth century onward," she wrote, "many statutes authorizing agency action included open-ended grants of power, leaving to the relevant agency's discretion major questions of public policy." Since agency heads are appointed, this could lead to administrative inefficiencies and, potentially, abuses of power. OIRA's review requires agencies to answer to the president — an elected official who, unlike agency administrators, is accountable to the people.

But in practice, OIRA operates largely in secret, exempt from most requests under the Freedom of Information Act. It routinely declines to release the changes it has proposed, the evidence it has relied upon to make them, or the identities and affiliations of White House advisers and other agencies' staff it has consulted. OIRA doesn't even disclose the names and credentials of its employees other than its two most senior officials. (Repeated requests to the office for the backgrounds of its employees drew no response.)

According to a study by the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit research and educational organization critical of the office, 84 percent of the EPA's proposed rules from 2001 to 2011 featured changes suggested by OIRA as did 65 percent of other agencies' regulations. Officially, OIRA's "edits" are suggestions but they carry the weight of the White House and are typically accepted by the agency proposing the rule.

http://www.propublica.org/article/lobbyists-bidding-block-government-regs-sights-set-secretive-white-house

The office was created in the first year of the Reagan administration.

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for profit