I am getting pretty damn sick and tired of Fathead W and his crony politics, I don't mind telling you.

Witness today's installment, an effort to PREVENT improved emissions standards in automobiles:

"The Senate should ignore an incredibly mischievous last-minute veto threat from the White House and vote resoundingly in favor of an energy bill that could come before it as early as today. The bill represents a historic opportunity to ease America's dependence on foreign oil and to take steps in the battle against global warming, and its passage would send a message to the worlds' negotiators in Bali that Washington is at last getting serious about climate change.

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Go to The Board » The centerpiece of the bill is the first meaningful increase in fuel efficiency standards in three decades — from today's fleetwide average of 25 miles per gallon to 35 m.p.g. by 2020. To win necessary Republican votes, the Senate leadership agreed to drop one valuable provision contained in a measure passed earlier by the House: a requirement that all utilities provide 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Even so, the bill, as it now stands, contains not only the new fuel standards, which is a huge step forward, but also generous incentives for energy efficiency, for cleaner alternative fuels and for the new technologies that will be required to reduce the country's output of greenhouse gases. By almost any measure, it is the most important energy bill that Congress has entertained in many years.

It is thus astonishing that President Bush would even think of vetoing it, especially since he called for much the same improvements in automobile mileage as those contained in the bill. In a statement Tuesday, however, the White House demanded that the bill be amended to make the industry-friendly Transportation Department solely responsible for regulating fuel economy as well as carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

This would directly reverse the Supreme Court's historic decision in April declaring that greenhouses gases are air pollutants under the meaning of the Clean Air Act and giving the Environmental Protection Agency the power to regulate them. It would also have the effect of stripping California and other states of the power to impose their own automobile emissions standards."

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And again flying directly in the teeth of law. Wodda maroon.



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