Friday, February 02, 2007

One of many reasons it sucks we have had two terms of the Bubble Boy administration, instead of at least one term of Gore. We could have started to address this problem.

Climate Panel Issues Urgent Warning
The world is already committed to centuries of warming, shifting weather patterns and rising seas from the atmospheric buildup of gases that trap heat, but the warming can be substantially blunted by prompt action, an international network of climate experts said today.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Made me laugh:
The truth is, what [click the link to find out who!] did during his eloquent and passionate critique of the war last Wednesday was what our Founding Fathers hoped U.S. senators would use the chamber for: to speak in depth about the difficult issues facing the day. What the press was doing, I have no idea.
One of many reasons to be pleased that there is a Democratic-majority Congress.
Under its new Democratic chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took on the Bush administration’s handling of climate change science yesterday, and even the Republicans on the panel had little good to say about the administration’s actions.

The subject of the hearing was accusations of administration interference with the work of government climate scientists. Almost to a person, Republicans on the panel introduced themselves by proclaiming their agreement that the earth’s climate was warming and that the principal culprit was greenhouse gases generated by people and their machinery.

[...]

But the other witnesses spoke about how the administration had delayed, altered or watered down the findings of government scientists, the kind of thing they said they had not experienced in the Clinton administration.

Link: Scientists Criticize White House Stance on Climate Change Findings

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts.

How very Soviet of him. Party loyalty, don't you know.

When you elect someone who hates "the government," the result is bad governance. I would have thought this was an easy concept, but here we are in the second term of the Bubble Boy presidency.