Will Someone Please Tell Me What Party Our President Is In?

I mean really. I understand the whole hatred of lawyers. You couldn't get into law school, only made it through undergrad because his father was who he was. Managed to avoid not being cashiered from the Air National Guard... because of who his father is. I get all that.

But can someone please explain this to me.

Now, I have a left lean when it comes to some things, so perhaps I am missing something. But as I understand it, Republicans are supposed to champion small government. That way, the freedom of the people are maximized. To that end, governmental bureaucracy is most bad and should only exist when it cannot be avoided.

Let me know when I am wrong about the basics. I really want to understand this.

So how does that philosophy, which I am told is at the heart of the Republican party, produce President Bush's latest policy: ending the protections found in the Endangered Species Act. Agree with the act, disagree with the act, thats not the issue. The issue is the way in which the Bush Administration seeks to achieve their end: by strengthening the bureaucracy. Apparently the plan is to use a loophole in the act to have the various agencies pass regulations.

The regulations will prevent agencies from considering whether projects are contributing to greenhouse gases and the effect of global warming on species. Sounds a little on the innocuous side right? Global warming is still being debated and maybe it is and maybe it is not junk science. However, under the current regulations, the various departments go run their assessments by Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Call me crazy, but based on their names ("Fish and Wildlife Service" and "National Marine Fisheries Service"), they seem to be two agencies which would seem to know something about the environment.

Under the new regulations, the various departments will no longer need to do this. because they Instead, apparently the various departments and agencies have developed a certain amount of expertise in evaluating the environmental impact of projects on the environment. While I trust the Department of Transportation to tell me if a planned project will be safe transport wise, how many of the people there spend their time actually investigating the effect of their projects on the environment? Or say the Department of Energy?

Then again, I guess its easier to get projects approved when science is taken out of the assessment all together.

But getting back to my point. The Bush Administration is not doing this through a law. Instead, they are doing this through a regulation. A regulation made by a faceless bureaucrat. A bureaucrat who will not face the voters. A bureaucrat who, in many cases, received his position because he is a party loyalist, not because he is qualified for the position.

If the Democrats had anyone in congress worth their salt, this would not be such a problem. It would mean a vote to change the law and then override the president's veto and science would be kept in the equation when making decisions regarding the environment. However, since Democrats in congress are all talk and no hat, I doubt that they will do anything of the sort.

As I was asking earlier, is this the action of a man committed to having government closer to the people, or closer to the Oval Office?

Apparently, these are how my views line up with the candidates

85% Bill Richardson
84% Chris Dodd
83% Barack Obama
82% Hillary Clinton
80% John Edwards
76% Joe Biden
61% Rudy Giuliani
61% John McCain
57% Dennis Kucinich
56% Mike Gravel
47% Mitt Romney
44% Mike Huckabee
32% Fred Thompson
26% Tom Tancredo
13% Ron Paul

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Correct Me If I Am Wrong..

But I thought that one of the hallmarks of Republican ideology was to have less government regulation at the national level so that the states had more autonomy to legislate for themselves within the national system. What usually gets referred to as the state laboratories or experiments or something along those lines. Its actually not a bad idea some of the time.

Apparently, when it comes to serving their corporate backers, ideology and values are not so important to the Republic Party of the current administration. Today, at about 6:30 p.m. EST, the EPA, headed by Stephen L. Johnson, decided to not grant a waiver to California.

Had the waiver been granted, California, and possibly other states, would have been able to set higher standards to decrease the amount of emissions. In all, the proposed California law would have mandated a 30 percent cut in tailpipe emissions by 2016.

Now, first it might be helpful to explain what this "waiver" is all about. The waiver California was seeking has to do with the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act, first signed into law in 1970 and amended as recently as 1990, sets standards to combat air pollution in the United States. While states may not legislate levels below the standards set in the Clean Air Act, they may create laws which exceed the standards of the law. In order to do so, they must first obtain a waiver from the EPA.

Since the Clean Air Act became law, nearly four decades ago, there have been 40 applications for waivers. Until today, none of had been rejected.

It should also be noted that California was not the only state that was seeking a waiver, it was simply the first in line. Also stating that they would seek waivers from the EPA were Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Four more states, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Utah, were preparing to adopt the same of similar standards as those in the California proposal. Furthermore, Iowa is considering adopting them as well.

In all, those states represent apparently 70 percent of new car sales. Going by the figures for the population of the U.S., if all the states were to adopt these standards (which seems likely given that only Iowa is still at the consideration phase), then it would represent 157.5 million people, or 52.6% of the population. All of these legislatures are responsible to their constituents, in some ways more so than the EPA is through Congressional oversight and Presidential administration control.

So what was the rationale for the EPA's decision? As the AP noted, "In explaining his decision, Johnson cited energy legislation approved by Congress and signed into law Wednesday by President Bush. The law requires automakers to achieve an industrywide average fuel efficiency for cars, SUVs and small trucks of 35 miles per gallon by 2020."

Anyone else notice what they were doing there? Instead of admitting that they were breaking with precedent, the EPA was changing the subject. The laws being adopted by the states had to do with emissions. The new federal law deals with fuel efficiency. The two are not the same.

Whats the real reason? In my opinion, I think you need to look at who stands to gain from all this. Perhaps... the auto industry. GMC has gone on record stating that they are opposed to the California style regulations and that refusing the waiver would "[remove] the disproportionate burden of complying with a patchwork of state-specific regulations that would divert our resources, automakers can concentrate on developing and implementing the advanced technologies in ways that will meet America's driving needs."

Of course, GMC has been fighting California's stringent air quality standards in the courts. And recently, their attempts failed when the U.S. District Court last week.

Again in my opinion, if you look at what auto industry is saying, is that they do not want to change. They want to be to continue do business the same way. Yes, I have read the arguments that imposing change in industries is a bad thing. However, this time, I do not believe that the argument works. The law, at least the California version, did not mandate how the reduction in emissions were to occur. It was just that the emissions had to go down. The automakers would have a clear deadline to come up with whatever way would work for them... just as long as they met the deadlines.

Now, its not all the auto industries fault. They are doing what corporations are supposed: trying to maximize their profits for their investors. However, the actions of the EPA in this case seem to be at odd with what the current administration has been instructing them to do: namely find a ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

And here I thought that the goal was to find a way to protect the environment (and by extension our health) without submitting to Kyoto. And by letting the states do this, we see what works and what does not. And its something that every other administration has permitted applicant states to obtain for more than thirty years.

Oh well, I must have been wrong.

This Is Something Important To Think About

And my initial reaction is that this is an extremely ill-conceived notion.

What is this of which I speak? It is a bill which was introduced recently and called "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act of 2006".

So am I for the exploitation of children? Of course not. What I am against is are some of the provisions of the proposed bill. As Think Progress noted, the bill would do some of the following:

– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
— Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.

A bill like this would certainly abridge First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and turn hosting sites and ISPs into monitors of what is and is not legal. And we all know how much corporations like to err on the side of protecting themselves.

Now, I know that its very rare that I get comments here, but think about other sites where you do leave comments and what that does add to the discussion of... anything.

If you would like to speak out on this to McCain directly, you can do so here. If there is some other way to protest this bill that someone else is aware of, please let me know.

Aww darn

Tom DeLay has resigned from the House of Representatives and will be pulling out of the current campaign.

Could not have happened to a nicer person.

Unfortunately, he is getting off the ballot in Texas the easy way. He is moving to Virginia. (The other two ways are to be dead or have plead guilty to a crime. I was kind of hoping for the third).