Dubja and Humpty Dumpty

From the New York Times:

"March 18, 2006

Judges Overturn Bush Bid to Ease Pollution Rules

By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, March 17

A federal appeals court on Friday overturned a clean-air regulation issued by the Bush administration that would have let many power plants, refineries and factories avoid installing costly new pollution controls to help offset any increased emissions caused by repairs and replacements of equipment.

Ruling in favor of a coalition of states and environmental advocacy groups, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the "plain language" of the law required a stricter approach. The court has primary jurisdiction in challenges to federal regulations.

The ruling by a three-judge panel was the court's second decision in less than a year in a pair of closely related cases involving the administration's interpretations of a complex section of the Clean Air Act. Unlike its ruling last summer, when the court largely upheld the E.P.A.'s approach against challenges from industry, state governments and environmental groups, the new ruling was a defeat for the agency and for industry, and a victory for the states and their environmentalist allies.

In the earlier case, a panel including two of the three judges who ruled on Friday decided that the agency had acted reasonably in 2002, when it issued a rule changing how pollution would be measured, effectively loosening the strictures on companies making changes to their equipment and operations.

But on Friday, the court said the agency went too far in 2003 when it issued a separate new rule that opponents said would exempt most equipment changes from environmental reviews and even changes that would result in higher emissions.

With a wry footnote to Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," the court said that "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world" could the law be read otherwise.

"We decline such a world view," said their unanimous decision, written by Judge Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Judges David Tatel, another Clinton appointee, and Janice Rogers Brown, a recent Bush appointee, joined her.

"This is an enormous victory over the concerted efforts by the Bush administration to dismantle the Clean Air Act," Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, whose office led the opposition from the states, said in an interview."

So the Judges finally saw what so many of us already knew: the current White House can barely read childrens rhymes or fairly tales and their lawyers are not much better.

Thank you reason and rational thinking. Finally we have some people that are not beholden to the money of big industry and oil and that consider the future of our environment as well. This is a step forward for a change, not backwards like we have seen for the past 6 years.

Speaking of going backwards, maybe more people will start to see the light and truth and put even more pressure on their representatives in Congress and Senate to vote against drilling in Arctic now. The Senate just approved such drilling in a bill this week. That must be stopped. We cannot let the oil companies into this precious bio zone and destroy it as well just to make even more money than they already do. We do not need this oil. Spend the money on alternative replinishable fuels and more fuel efficient engines instead.

About face, turnaround, go the other way.....

From:

"The New York Times

March 13, 2006

News Analysis

A Bush Alarm: Urging U.S. to Shun Isolationism

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, March 12 — The president who made pre-emption and going it alone the watchwords of his first term is quietly turning in a new direction, warning at every opportunity of the dangers of turning the nation inward and isolationist, and making the case for international engagement on issues from national security to global economics.

President Bush's cautions on the dangers of pulling back behind American borders — in trade and investment, in immigration and in his effort to make the spread of democracy the signature of his second term — first cropped up in his State of the Union address six weeks ago."

Desperate times are calling for desperate measures in Dubjaland. At first he was the ultimate isolationist, go-it-alone advocate walking on this earth. Anybody who disagreed was the enemy. Charging headlong into Iraq essentially on our own, despising all but a few that we had bought over onto our side.

Now he is advocating against isolationism at every opportunity. What happened? Did they finally work out that going it alone actually does not work and that you need strong partners both politically and financially to really get significant things done in this world.

Going into Iraq essentially on our own has cost thousands of lives all round and now created a civil war like we have not seen in along time. We do not see freedom or democracy at work, just death and destruction. Please do not tell me that freedom is expensive and must be fought for. We created this mess of death and failure because we did not want to head the advice of our then allies and friends. In our headlong rush to war we forgot that friends are their to help and advise and sometimes it pays to listen to them.

Now that we are in this mess we have few friends to turn to, we spurned them all and wining their trust and friendship back will take many long hard years.

Are the people finally coming to there senses?

In a CBS poll reported today the White House and Dubja are being rated at an all time low for just about everything that is important to Americans today. See www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/27/opinion/polls/main1350874.shtml for the details. But despite the fact that people are now finally seeing that we have a President that simply does not care about them, they still need to see that he does not care about their county in the same way that they do. For example the administration keeps pushing oil exploration in the few protected and fragile eco havens in America, despite the State of the Union cry to decrease our dependency on oil.

A case in point is the Red Desert in Wyoming (Cheney country, surprise surprise!) The following is a quote from the NRDC website on the threats to Yellowstone in general, and the Red Desert in particular:

"When the American buffalo rebounded from near-extinction and gray wolves returned to the wild, they found their refuge in the tawny grasslands and pine-covered ridges of Yellowstone National Park. When grizzly bears lost most of their habitat to logging and development, the northern Rockies provided them with the thousands of square miles of wild forests and meadows they needed to survive. Without the vast stretches of Rockies wilderness, where will the next species go to be replenished?

Despite these questions, the Bush administration is set on sacrificing more of the country's most cherished wild places to satisfy energy corporations. Wyoming's Red Desert, for instance, is slated for a massive oil and gas project even though it is an oasis of prime wildlife habitat for elk, mule deer, hawks and eagles. With its single-minded focus on leasing more public land for development, the administration also has announced plans to remove Yellowstone's grizzly bears from the Endangered Species List. NRDC will oppose this premature effort in court.

The Bush administration is now considering a proposal to expand the Smoky Canyon Mine, a phosphate mining operation, into the pristine Sage Creek and Meade Peak roadless areas of Idaho's Caribou-Targhee National Forest. Phosphate mining has already released dangerous amounts of toxic selenium into the streams, groundwater and soils of this region, threatening local drinking water supplies and jeopardizing the survival of imperiled Yellowstone cutthroat trout, as well as elk, mule deer and other wildlife. Expanding the mine would increase these pollution risks and set a dangerous precedent for other harmful development in the unspoiled wild forests of Greater Yellowstone."

Now more than ever we need to speak up, rally support and redirect our country to a path of preservation and protection, instead of the head long rush to destruction just to make Exxon and other oil companies even richer than they already are at our expense.