Matt Gunterman March 11th, 2007

The Rocky Mountain News lede says it all.

Federal officials secretly schemed to limit payouts for sick and dying nuclear weapons workers, including thousands from the Rocky Flats plant outside Denver, newly released documents show.

Those “federal officials” just happen to be from Elaine Chao’s Department of Labor, and Secretary Chao is the woman in the dynamic duo that President George W. Bush called the “ultimate power couple” on March 2 at his $2.1 million fundraiser for McConnell. Imagine the pillow talk.

Read the article. It’ll boil your blood and make you wonder if we shouldn’t add a new category to the whole motif of DINO (Democrat in Name Only) and RINO (Republican in Name Only): AIMO, or American in Name Only.

What a spectacular cost-saving measure: draw the process out so long that the former employees simply die before they get treatment and care. The lengths these people will go to to save a buck for a tax cut, huh? Here’s what Assistant Secretary of Labor Victoria Lipnic had to say about the expanding costs of treating sick workers, “There is not a fiscal conservative left anywhere.” You are so right, Vicky. It’s such a waste of money. Everybody’s gotta die sometime, right? And billionaires only live once.

Many in Congress aren’t terribly happy about this. How much did Secretary Chao know? Whatever the answer, I don’t think it reflects kindly on her. She might be SOL in more ways than one.

• Elaine Chao , Rocky Flats Scandal , Secretary of Labor
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