well sir I believe THAT would be crossing the line into the realm of improbability Fafblog!

Oh, this can't be true!

Spying on you at the library, indefinite detainment, torture, preventive wars on the wrong country, oh sure I can see that. But nuking Iran? Well that'd just be crazy.

Legislating From the Bench   Balkinization

President Bush demonstrated his usual capacity for double-speak when he praised Judge John Roberts as a jurist who would "not legislate from the bench." As note on this blog and more extensively in Keck, THE MOST ACTIVIST SUPREME COURT IN HISTORY (mandatory reading during the confirmation hearings), the Rehnquist Court does nothing but "legislate from the bench" with Justices Thomas and Scalia being the most active judicial legislators. Consider the numerous areas in which they impose or would impose limits on state and federal officials.

1. They insist most campaign finance laws are unconstitutional.
2. They insist that most regulations of advertising are unconstitutional.
3. They insist that state legislatures can do little to protect abortion clinices from organized mayhem.
4. Thomas has suggested that elected officials have very limited capacity to regulate handguns.
5. They would use the fifth amendment to dramatically limit the capacity of local legislatures to pursue urban redevelopment.
6. They regard the fifth amendment as also limiting environmental regulations and limiting conditions that local legislatures can attach to private development.
7. They insist that affirmative action is unconstitutional, even though the persons responsible for the equal protection clause passed numerous laws providing special benefits to persons of color. nuking Iran? Well that'd just be crazy.

The Bush Oil Co., er, Administration great scat!

A former disgraced official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality who resigned days after the New York Times reported he had changed some government reports on global warming is joining oil giant ExxonMobil .

Philip Cooney, the former chief of staff of the council and a former energy industry lobbyist, will be working for Exxon beginning in the fall, company spokesman Russ Roberts said on Tuesday.

The New York Times first reported Cooney's job with Exxon on its Web site. The newspaper said another Exxon spokesman declined to describe the former White House official's new job.

Cooney resigned from his White House post on Friday, two days after the newspaper reported he edited some descriptions of climate research in a way that cast doubt on links between greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures.

Bush Administration official, oil executive . . . same diff.

Minority Rules LiberalOasis

Perhaps the most stunning part of the intel reform debacle is that the Speaker of the House admitted he had the votes to pass it.

Just not enough GOP votes to avoid making the Dems look good.

From the NY Times:

[Speaker Dennis] Hastert did not want to split his caucus and did not want the bill to pass with less than "a majority of the majority," said his spokesman, John Feehery.

"What good is it to pass something," Mr. Feehery said, "where most of our members don't like it?"

Well, there is a little thing called "the public good."

But that requires putting governing ahead of politics.

And that's not how the GOP got to where it is, so why start now?

Of course, saying the bill doesn't have support of the "majority of the majority" is a fancy, self-serving way to say a loud minority is opposed.

And that when a loud minority is opposed, it's important to wait -- as Senate Majority Leader Frist said -- until we "get it right".

Hmm. Does Frist apply the same logic to, say, judicial nominations?

Not exactly. As he said on CBS' Face The Nation this Sunday:

...let's take a nominee from the president, who has majority support in the Senate, and let's deny senators the opportunity to vote. It's wrong.

Any attempt to claim simple majority rule is a consistent principle of the GOP is now shot to hell.

So when the GOP tries to use it later, it should be quickly shoved down their throat.

We all know the Framers wanted the minority to have rights, to prevent a tyranny of the majority.

The question for the public to judge, both with today's intelligence reform and tomorrow's judges, is not if the minority has a right to object. Of course they do.

Instead the question is, what is the quality of the minority's objections?

Is the Pentagon's loss of turf, and lack of unrelated provisions on undocumented immigrant workers enough to warrant delay on the intelligence reform the 9/11 Commission says is "essential"?

And should the Senate roll over for activist right-wing judges who want to turn the clock back on equal rights, labor protections and environmental protections?

Democracy Now!:

As the media focuses on President-elect Obama and the transition of power here in Washington, the Bush administration is quietly trying to push through a wide array of federal regulations before President Bush leaves office in January.

Up to ninety proposed regulations could be finalized by the outgoing administration, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment. According to the Washington Post, the new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era. They include rules that could weaken workplace safety protections, allow local police to spy in the so-called “war on terror” and make it easier for federal agencies to ignore the Endangered Species Act.

While it’s nothing new for outgoing administrations to try and enact these so-called “midnight regulations,” the Bush administration has accelerated the process to ensure the changes it wants will be finalized by November 22nd. That’s sixty days before the next administration takes control. Most federal rules go into effect sixty days after they’ve been finalized, and it would be a major bureaucratic undertaking for the Obama administration to reverse federal rules already in effect.

I know that it will surprise no one that most, if not all, of these regulations come at the benefit of corporations and to the detriment of the American people and the environment, including making it easier to pollute near national parks, easing mining restrictions, and neutering the Endangered Species Act.

So much for that lame duck quackitude, Bush is going to place his anti-Midas touch on as many areas as he can before he's kicked out the door.

The Left Coaster: You can go to a soldier's funeral now, Mr. President

Politics in the Zeros: The unexpected return of class war

Where's the Outrage?: A doctor examines a sick patient.

MediaBloodhound: Leaked memo of McCain camp's future Hail Marys

The E&P Pub: John McCain vs the Des Moines Register

The Story of Stuff: A fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns, exposing the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues. (h/t swimgirl)

Angry Bear: Chris Dodd, having played along with the "this is urgent" call has now presented the "if this is so urgent, show us what it's really worth to you" card.

OurFuture: Behind the financial debacle: Conservative Misrule. Vote No Bailout!

Legal Schnauzer: Proof that Siegelman was wrongly convicted

The Gist: Hypocrisy Bombshell! Antigay John McCain has a gay chief of staff

Booman Tribune: Rush Limbaugh is still a lying sack of sh*t

Grist: John McCain's environmental record is as bad as climate change denier James Inhofe
So he just lies about it.

T. Boone Pickens is a billionaire oil man and a career corporate raider who loves George Bush so much he donated $250,000 to his 2004 inaugural ball. He was, and still is, fully behind the invasion and occupation of Iraq and makes no bones about it. So why is he now pushing for the use of alternative energy sources like wind and solar in his Pickens Plan?

It might be because he sees the soaring price of gas and how it is crushing the average American and decided to invest billions of dollars of his own money on a bet that it will pay off. His holdings in natural gas would make his a very healthy profit, should we convert to using it more. Don't get me wrong, I support anyone who wants to lower our dependence on oil and clean up our environment, but if you watch the above video and go to the PP website you'll see that the environment doesn't get much play. In fact, considering his push for OCS drilling, I'd say the environment isn't the overriding issue, just ridding us of our dependence on foreign oil.

Carl Pope, Executive Director of The Sierra Club has praised his plan, going so far as to say Pickens is "out to save America" -- and I have no problem with that -- but do financial motivations vs. environmental motivations matter? Should we just be thankful that someone has stepped up to the plate, even if it means that the ultra-wealthy will once again control our energy resources, or do we strive for more ownership in the future of our own energy policy and demand more emphasis and accountability on our environment? In the end, will Pickens' plan even work?

David Sirota at Open Left:

A few weeks back, I wrote a New York Times magazine article about the populist uprising against unbridled oil and gas drilling in the Mountain West. The article highlighted a major theme in my new book, THE UPRISING. In the article, I discussed how the Bush Bureau of Land Management has thrown the principle of environmental caution overboard by opening up a huge amount of federal land to drilling. So it is with more than a little bit absurd to read this New York Times story today:

"Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years. The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states."

Do you love it? We're facing gas prices that necessitate drilling in environmentally sensitive and heretofore protected land right now, despite absolutely no evidence that it would ease current prices. Yet the Bush administration sees no dichotomy in insisting that we need to take a slow, measured approach to building solar plants, lest we don't take into account the long term environmental impact.

Think Progress: Study concludes US media embed program a “communications victory” for the Bush administration. Just don’t tell Brian Williams that.

Huffington Post: BREAKING NEWS: McCain Resigns From His Campaign.

Democracy Now!: The Bush administration is holding 27,000 prisoners, with no legal recourse, in secret overseas jails. Where’s the media?

skippy the bush kangaroo: Cookie Jill with the latest environmental news, which includes “zones of death” spreading in our oceans and how America’s wasteful eating habits not only take food from the mouths of the hungry but increase greenhouse gases. Plus, are global warming “alarmists” losing the rhetorical war?

TPM Muckracker: The Bush administration in yet another episode of Working Tirelessly to Control the Flow of Information. Today’s story: “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI). Or as we call it: CYA.

Guest roundup by Brad Jacobson of MediaBloodhound. See you tomorrow, reality-basers! Until then, email those submissions and tips to mediabloodhound at yahoo dot com.

The U.S. Attorney Purge scandal may be over, but the Bush administration hasn’t changed its habit of ridding itself of those guilty of independent thinking.

The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region [of Michigan] had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up.

On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade’s interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Midwest office, based in Chicago.

We’ve learned quite a bit in recent days about the White House interfering with EPA regulations on dioxin contamination, but it’s especially bold, even for the Bush gang, to fire the one career official who was looking out for the public’s interests.

For the past year, Gade has been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil and sediment that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. […]

Though regional EPA administrators typically have wide latitude to enforce environmental laws, Gade drew fire from officials in Washington last month after she sent contractors to test soil in a Saginaw neighborhood where Dow had found high dioxin levels.

Michigan Environmental Council President Lana Pollack called Gade a “woman of unquestioned credentials and integrity who was doing her job enforcing our environmental laws.”

In this administration, that’s not a compliment.