Obama to Nominate New Head of Consumer Safety

[TheCoxwain]

Source: Nytimes

WASHINGTON — President Obama will nominate Inez Moore Tenenbaum, South Carolina’s former school superintendent, to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the White House announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Obama also is asking that the troubled agency, which has been criticized as being too close to corporate America, receive $107 million — a 71 percent increase since fiscal 2007, the statement said.

Mr. Obama pledged during the campaign that he would double the agency’s financing; the budget request, the White House said, would get him three quarters of the way there if Congress approves it.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/us/politics/06consumer.html?ref=politics

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Nice ... I think the post should be elevated to a cabinet level position and should have a major say.


That will be guaranteed to burn up republicans

[Ian David]

1. I was hoping he'd nominate either Superdave Osborne or these guys...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFfoYZmV5iI

[santamargarita]

2. Consumer Safety, that's something I haven't head in a while...

under Bush, we had antifreeze in our toothpaste!

[No Elephants]

3. And it paid off. In 8 years, we did not have a single case of frozen teeth.

[No Elephants]

4. A school superintendent from SC? Puzzling choice. What about the head of Consumer Reports or some

other consumer product organization?

Doesn't seem as though she did well as a school super, either. According to her wiki (which will probably get scrubbed any minute), Stossel featured her on a 20/20 feature called Stupid in America.

"interview by John Stossel for a 20/20 Special Edition about public schools in the United States and around the world, called "Stupid in America,"<3> which originally aired on the ABC News network on January 13, 2006, at which time she was South Carolina's Superintendent of Education. She was criticized by Stossel for South Carolina's low average in SAT scores among high-school students. South Carolina was tied for 50th place with Georgia among the US states at the time, with an average score of 993 out of a combined 1600 possible. Tenenbaum defended South Carolina's schools, noting that South Carolina was poised for vast improvements in the next few years. She was replaced as Superintendent of Education by Democrat Jim Rex on January 10, 2007."

Yet Obama supposedly considered her for Secretary of Education! Somehow, I think there may be more to this one than meets the eye.

She has a law degree as well and Obama hired Adler, an other lawyer for the 3 person commission. Adler's credentials seem better and more relevant. http://www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/Faculty/search/detail.cfm?person_id=129

Come on, people. I KNOW we can do better for America. This is a huge nation, with plenty of well educated, ambitious people, many of whom might love a gubbaminit job in this economy. Oh, for FDR's "Brain Trust" or Kennedy's "Harvard Mafia."

A separate issue: It seems as though our agencies are too splintered. This could be a division within the FTC. I hope the communication between and among people who are supposed to watch out for us, our parents and our babies are at least communicating with each other better than, say, the FBI and the CIA did before 911.