Word: watchdogging
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...personal motto was Semper idem (always the same) and he lived up to it with matchless rigor. Prior to the liberalizing Second Vatican Council, Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani was one of the most feared and powerful princes of the Roman Catholic world. His authority as a ranking doctrinal watchdog came from his influence within the Holy Office. Ottaviani was half blind but, the Vatican saying went, "sees more with one eye than most see with two." Armed with a steely mind and consummate dedication, he became in his own word, a "carabiniere" (policeman) of orthodoxy. Even after the windows...
Ever since the near disaster at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been debating whether to order the shutdown of other nukes designed and built by the same company, Babcock & Wilcox. Some of the watchdog agency's critics have had no doubts about what the NRC should do: they want a shutdown of all nuclear plants in the U.S. Cooler heads, however, pointed out that most of the plants have relatively good safety records. Besides, any major loss of generating capacity at the onset of the summer months-when electrical consumption...
...saving for everyone. It issued a shutdown agreement, but only after the utilities "voluntarily" offered to suspend operations at the nine B & W plants, including Three Mile Island's disabled reactor. One objective was political: the beleaguered NRC wants to convince critics that it is indeed a vigilant watchdog...
...legislature did not, of course, rush willingly into creating its own watchdog; it only acted when Common Cause collected 95,506 signatures in support of a new ethics statute. The legislature did, however, squeeze through a watered-down bill in order to avoid seeing the tougher Common Cause proposal on the November ballot. As local attorney Robert Moncreiff explains, "while a lot of people woke up this January and felt the law had dropped out of the sky, it was clear that it would have been on the November referendum list if the legislature didn't act quickly--and nobody...
With a weakened ethics commission, the state's only true watchdog remains a nongovernmental one, the press. Extensive press coverage by the media has thus far led to the resignation of three King appointees, Elder Affairs Sec. Stephen G. Guptill, Insurance commissioner Stephen F. Clifford and, most recently, MDC Associate Commissioner Thomas Da Silva. A fourth King appointee, MDC Commissioner Thomas Haggerty, took a paid "leave of absence...