What? No Diary on NY Times Front Pg Obama Story?
Sat Feb 02, 2008 at 10:03:23 PM PDT
There is now. Hard to believe no one here saw this and thought it worthy of discussion.
Apparently, according to a front page story in Sunday's New York Times, Mr. Change, Mr. "I'll fight the special interests", on one of the few pieces of legislation he's introduced, buckled to industry pressure despite his constituents going crazy because radioactive runoff was turning up in groundwater.
"Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft," said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. "The teeth were just taken out of it."
Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.
Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.
In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the leak controversy or other nuclear issues.
In interviews over the past two weeks, Obama aides insisted that the revisions did not substantively alter the bill. In fact, it was left drastically different.
In place of the straightforward reporting requirements was new language giving the nuclear commission two years to come up with its own regulations.
The rewritten bill also contained the new wording sought by Exelon making it clear that state and local authorities would have no regulatory oversight of nuclear power plants.
In interviews last week, representatives of Exelon and the nuclear commission said they were satisfied with the revised bill.
Did you Obamatrons think no one was going to notice this?
