About a half dozen people were injured today in an explosion at a chemical plant in Morganton, NC.

Was this explosion caused by relaxed and ignored regulations by OSHA, the EPA and the Dept. of Labor that has been routine in the Bush administration?

Dave Lauriski, Bush's first head of the National Mine Health and Safety Academy, canceled every new regulation that had been proposed by the Clinton administration.  These regulations were in various stages of approval. None have since been enacted. Other regulations were relaxed and the number of mine inspectors decimated, leading to the recent mining disasters.

While accidents can happen anytime, whenever an industrial accident happens during this administration, the poor performance of the regulatory agencies must be examined in every incident. Was cronyism and incompetence again responsible for today's accident? While there's no indication of it, the shoddy Bush record demands that it is investigated.