Priveleges of Being Commander Guy

Congress’s oversight authority derives from its implied powers in the Constitution. So when Congress wants to oversee anything related to the Bush Administration, the Bush Administration and anyone who worked for the Bush administration who is so inclined, repond thusly:

Plus ca Change

Every baby boomer has to remember this:

 

This Kid is Smarter than Your Kid

(h/t stillman and MsLibrarian)

— or mine. No offense intended. And you, me, and they have a ways to go to make a contribution like this:

March to Dictatorship Note of the Day

There’s this quaint little theory Dick Cheney nurtured in his grinch-sized heart ever since his benefactor and hero Richard Nixon gave a final wave from his the taxpayers’ helicopter: the theory of the unitary executive. Like a previous generation that sang “Save your confederate money, boys/The South shall rise again,”  young Dickie saved the shards of his Watergate-shattered theory until the pieces could be put together again.

A Nickel Here, A Nickel There

The bigger, better bottle bill makes a great deal of sense. In the first place, it’s silly that a piece of plastic with a soda label on it gets recycled, whereas the same piece of plastic with a water label on it likely goes to the landfill. In the second place, it’s sillier that unclaimed nickels — deposits collected by retailers but not claimed by customers — go to the bottlers and not, say, New York State.

Bush is No Hoover

By now you’ve seen clips of this:

And you’re probably thinking, while the economy burns, that the only thing that would have completed his performance was if he had been playing a fiddle.

The War Against Science Hearts Snow

Once upon a time a jerk drove home through a woodland every day. Every day, he’d flick a cigarette out his window as he passed. There was a drought, and everybody warned everybody else to be careful about flammable materials and woodlands. But our jerk said,

“I dunno what they’re talking about. I’ve never seen no woods catch fire on my account.”

A Smile to Fear — and His Teeth Ain’t Green, Either

Why is this man smiling?

I felt pure skepticism at the thought that George Bush had turned a green corner by signing the Independence and Security Act of 2007 the day before yesterday. After all, in his lifetime the closest he ever got to green was around the gills.

Will Lobby Sludge Stymie a Green Future?

It looks as if the new Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 bets the farm, so to speak, on biomass. This approach is controversial. As Joseph Romm points out in today’s Salon: 

Business Oinking at the Trough

It appears that business lobbyists are giving new depth to the image of “pigs at the trough:”

Business lobbyists, nervously anticipating Democratic gains in next year’s elections, are racing to secure final approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor and economic rules, in the belief that they can get better deals from the Bush administration than from its successor.