Struggling Congressional Candidate, John Carney, announced yesterday that he’d like a “working group” to study any link between groundwater contaminants and Delaware’s cancer rates. It was just 2+ short years ago that the Minner-Carney Administration was calling for “Blue Ribbon Panels” right-left-&-center to investigate any number of problems facing Delaware that Minner-Carney had refused to deal with. The great thing about “panels” or “working groups” is that you can grab the headline without actually doing anything — an apt description of 8 years of Minner-Carney.
For example, former Governor Minner created the Delaware Cancer Consortium after the news media, primarily the News Journal, published a series of articles on Delaware’s high cancer rates and the concern about cancer “clusters”. Former Lt. Gov. Carney got to chair the “Disparities Committee”.
Why did Minner-Carney need this “Blue Ribbon Panel”?
Recall that at the time, the Minner-Carney administration came under fire from all sides for withholding cancer demographic information. Then gubernatorial candidate Markell went so far as to criticize Minner-Carney saying, “That’s why the Minner-Carney administration should have released this information months ago. It made no sense to withhold this information from the public for so long.” Even the Sierra Club weighed in stating that Lt. Gov. Carney’s eventual requests for more “study” didn’t go far enough.
Of course, then Lt. Gov. Carney was in a pickle – defending Minner-Carney while trying to look tough on pollution after delaying the release of the information. No such conflict, now, and he won’t have to serve on the “working group”.
In the end, we know how Minner-Carney worked out for him. Remembering that a rose by any other name is still a rose, one would think that after losing an election because the “Blue Ribbon Panel” tactic didn’t work, that you’d change tactics not change names.
Like all liberals John wants to spend money to accomplish nothing while making us feel good.
More specifically he wants to spend 5 MILLION dollars to do a study.
Gov. Begatto will never give up any state employee money so one can only guess where John will get 5 MILLION dollars from.
Why don’t we go over to Penny Hall at the U of D and get the Geology grad student’s working on this? Be cheaper, faster and accurate.
C’mon John you wanna spend 5 MILLION dollar’s??? For far less then that I’ll be your policy guy. What a deal!
‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ is synonymous with patronage.