Another "Heckuva Job, Brownie" Moment

If you thought incompetence was being weeded out of the Bush administration--and there's no reason to think that--all you had to do was see yesterday's hearing of the Acting Consumer Products Safety Commissioner. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post has a funny column recounting the testimony which got wide play. Most of the reporters missed the more humorous aspects of the hearing. Those kinds of things never escape Milbank's eye. To wit:

"Lawmakers had just begun to question Nancy Nord, acting chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, about all that lead showing up in children's toys. Her fellow commissioner Thomas Moore rose from the witness table to depart -- for a dental appointment.

"Are you leaving?" a surprised Nord asked, pausing in her testimony. "Can I come with you?"

"You're facing your own dentist here," pointed out Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.).

"It's a sad day," Nord replied, "when you'd rather go to the dentist."

A few weeks back I noted that the Utah mine catastrophe and the subprime crisis had this in common: they point out a need for a new wave of regulation. The same with e colil. Look, no one argues about whether we need, say, a Centers for Disease Control or a Pentagon or an FBI (unless you're Ron Paul). The same is true with regulation. Instead of a stale debate about more or less regulation, let's have one about where we need more regs and where we can safley trim on those which really serve no purpose. And, by the way, appointees who have some idea what's going on in their agencies would help.