April 2, 2009 The Pump Handle 3Comment

The Dept of Labor’s Inspector General issued not one, but two reports yesterday criticizing OSHA’s management practices, and fueling calls for the prompt appointment of competent, worker-safety committed leaders to get the agency back on track.  The first IG report concerns the “consulting services” provided by Mr. Randy Kimlin, an advisor to (and South Carolina buddy of) former OSHA chief Ed […]

April 2, 2009 The Pump Handle 2Comment

By Nalini Padmanabhan, cross-posted from Target Population Anyone who’s ever taken a psychology class would be able to tell the story of Kitty Genovese and the societal observation it gave birth to, known as the Genovese effect or the bystander effect. Her story is not easily forgotten. According to Michael Dorman of NewsDay, her 1964 […]

April 1, 2009 The Pump Handle 4Comment

“The Cruelest Cuts,” the Charlotte Observer’s excellent series about “the human cost of bringing poultry to your table,” has won five journalism awards for the Observer. Reporters Ames Alexander, Kerry Hall, Franco Ordoñez, Ted Mellnik, and Peter St. Onge undertook a 22-month investigation to get the story. They filed FOIA requests for hundreds of poultry-plant […]

April 1, 2009 The Pump Handle

We spend a lot of time writing about all of the things that are going wrong, so it’s nice to highlight some promising news periodically. In particular, it seems like there have been a lot of positive news stories about hospitals lately. The Washington Post’s Ceci Connolly profiles Pennsylvania’s Geisinger Health system, which is demonstrating that it’s […]