Weekly Watchdog

August 23, 2012

Super PAC cash favors the GOP

Conservative super PACs dominated their Democratic rivals in the latest round of fundraising, according to reports from the Federal Election Commission filed Monday.

Restore Our Future, a super PAC supporting presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, brought in $7.5 million in July, finishing with an imposing $20.5 million in the bank. Top contributors include Texas homebuilder and super donor Bob Perry, who gave another $2 million.

Conservative super PAC American Crossroads brought in $7.1 million finishing the month with $29.5 million in the bank. Texas mega-donor and billionaire Robert Rowling's TRT Holdings, a private holding company that includes Omni Hotels and Gold's Gym, gave $1 million. TRT also gave $1 million to American Crossroads in February. Rowling personally gave $1 million to the super PAC in May and another $1 million in July.

Meanwhile, the Democratic super PACs didn't fare quite as well.

Kentucky death case: Another black eye for state workplace safety enforcement

Around midnight on June 1, 2007, Tina Hall was finishing her shift in a place she loathed: the mixing room at the Toyo Automotive Parts factory in Franklin, Ky., where flammable chemicals were kept in open containers.

A spark ignited vapors given off by toluene, a solvent Hall was transferring from a 55-gallon drum to a hard plastic bin. A flash fire engulfed the 39-year-old team leader, causing third-degree burns over 90 percent of her body. She died 11 days later.

After investigating the accident, the Kentucky Labor Cabinet's Department of Workplace Standards cited Toyo for 16 "serious" violations and proposed a $105,500 fine in November 2007.

The violations didn't stick.

Fishing deaths mount, but government slow to cast safety net for deadliest industry

Commercial fishing is the deadliest vocation in the United States. Four years running, from 2007 to 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked commercial fishing as the most dangerous occupation in the United States. From 2000 to 2010, the industry's death rate was 31 times greater than the national workplace average.

And no place, a recent National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report reveals, is more deadly for commercial fishermen than the East Coast.

Recognition

The honors keep rolling in for our investigative series Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities produced last fall in collaboration with NPR. We just learned that the series won this year's Science in Society Award for Science Reporting from the National Association of Science Writers and that The Newspaper Guild-CWA has selected Poisoned Places for a Broun Award of Distinction.

Despite legislation passed two decades ago, our multimedia investigation revealed that in hundreds of communities across the country, Americans are still exposed to dangerous chemicals in the air they breathe. A secret "watch list" underscores what the government has known about the threat - and how little it has done to address it. Over nine months our reporting and data team, along with NPR, worked to produce more than a dozen stories and videos. We created an interactive database enabling users to look up sources of toxic air near where they live. Then, as often happens during in-depth investigations - an unexpected discovery: Reporters learned that the EPA maintains a "watch list" that includes serious or chronic Clean Air Act violators that have not been subject to timely enforcement. Days after our stories broke, the EPA made that secret "watch list" public. That kind of impact is why we work so hard to uncover these stories.

Until next week,