Word: browner
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...could blame the save-the-earth brigade for feeling a bit confused last week. There was Carol Browner, eco-hero Al Gore's personally approved choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, coming to the defense of 35 pesticides that potentially cause cancer. Arguing that they actually pose little threat to human health since they are consumed in extremely minute amounts, she seemed poised to ask Congress to relax one of America's oldest and most stringent food-safety laws so that farmers could keep applying the chemicals to crops...
...maybe not. After environmental activists raised a ruckus, Browner released a Clintonesque statement: "Right now the law says we cannot have these chemicals concentrated in processed food. We have to accept what the law is. But at the same time, we have gotten to a point where we have to say we know a lot more about these chemicals than we did 35 years ago when the law was passed." Welcome to the EPA two-step...
...Browner is not the first government bureaucrat to dance around the issue of pesticides. But the former Florida secretary of environmental regulation was expected to be a stalwart anti-Quayle when it came to ecological correctness. Instead, rather sensibly, she plans to gather everyone from activists to farmers to chemical manufacturers around the negotiating table. "We have to get out of an adversarial posture and into a dialogue," she says...
...discretion in interpreting the Delaney Clause. Now the Supreme Court must consider whether or not to hear the case. But no matter how the legal question is resolved, the larger issue remains. "There are scientific anachronisms that get created anytime you have a 30-plus-year-old environmental regulation," Browner says. "It's time to revisit Delaney with the knowledge we have now." In a period when many people see all sorts of foods as health hazards, a more realistic assessment of pesticide risks could go a long way toward easing public paranoia...
...Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The first question at Clinton's Thursday press conference was not about his economic team but whether General Colin Powell was in contention, as rumored, for Secretary of State. Sure, there have been a few wrong calls -- Carol Browner, and not former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, was named to head the Environmental Protection Agency. There were also surprises -- almost no one predicted that Robert Reich would end up as Secretary of Labor, and few slated Donna Shalala for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Democratic national chairman Ronald Brown...