Word: bliley
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...Kessler's agency is most often criticized not for its actions but for its inaction--for letting the approval process for new medical advances drag out for years and even decades. Virginia Republican Thomas Bliley, the pro-business chairman of the House Commerce Committee, ridicules the FDA's drug-approval procedures as "paralysis by analysis." The Washington Legal Foundation, a vociferously antiregulatory group funded by conservative organizations and companies, has relentlessly attacked the FDA through lawsuits, press releases (sometimes printed on lurid pink and purple paper) and a series of vitriolic print ads. "If a murderer kills...
...They're terrified of Nader and the left wing," says Senator Hatch, who parted ways with Kessler after a fight over regulating the vitamin industry, which is well established in Utah. "They want zero risk, and there's no way for there to be zero risk in anything." Representative Bliley, a tobacco-industry ally, goes further. The FDA's true mission, he has said, should be "to bring safe drugs and devices to the American people as quickly as possible...
Despite these problems, only those uninitated to Republican antics in the House are amazed at this point that the bill in question managed to pass. As the Republican revolution gets routinized as politics as usual, the story is all too familiar by now. House Commerce Chair Bliley was in the pocket of long-distance carriers like AT&T, and he looked to aid them by permitting only the Baby Bells to enter long-distance markets after long-distance carriers got a chance to establish themselves locally...
When Democrats ran the house, the health and environment subcommittee office was a no-smoking preserve ruled by anti- tobacco crusader Representative Henry Waxman. Today the subcommittee is part of the domain of Republican Thomas Bliley Jr., a pipe lover who hails from the tobacco state of Virginia. Smoking is now accepted in the old subcommittee room, and congressional aides gleefully flick their ashes into a glass ashtray placed atop Waxman's picture...
That left the hapless Bliley to convene a meeting of long-distance lobbyists in the Commerce Committee hearing room on July 13 to convey the grim news. Stunned, the lobbyists began a desperate effort to find someone to whom they could plead their case. "Nobody wants to talk to us," complained a lobbyist for the long-distance coalition early in the week. "Nobody wants to negotiate. Something is fishy here...