On border policy:

"The evidence of this neurosis is visible at the border with Mexico, where the Department of Homeland Security has been rushing to reinforce an ineffective system of fencing and sensors, trucks and boots on the ground. The mission, imposed upon it by Congress after a wearying stalemate on immigration reform, is a mandate to do the impossible, at record speed and at record expense.

This commitment to enforcement alone, without fixing legal immigration, was always Plan B. Even President Bush, the master of the botched federal initiative, predicted it would fail. He is looking unusually prescient.

In Arizona, a 28-mile pilot project to build a "virtual fence" of sensors and cameras has fallen short of expectations. The problem, according to the Government Accountability Office, was too much haste and too little consultation with the Border Patrol. The main contractor, Boeing, rushed into the project with the wrong software. Its cameras couldn't focus on targets, and systems were confounded by innocuous things like rain. The Bush administration has confused things further by saying the system is working as planned — but won't be expanded.

That is not necessarily good news along remote border areas in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where there is a lot of desert and mountains and where the alternative — pouring billions into building a real fence — is viewed as simply insane. No amount of fencing would seriously deter illegal crossers, border-town officials insist, and the effort actually makes things worse: You have to build roads to build the fence, and the new roads connect with old ones and vastly increase their usefulness to smugglers in cars and trucks. Mayor Ray Borane of Douglas, Ariz., said that people on the Mexican side have cut through his section of the fence with torches, welding on doors with their own locks, going in and out at will. "They cut holes in the thing like you wouldn't believe," he said."

On climate change:

The Bush administration has now provided the rationale for its lamentable decision to deny California permission to develop its own stricter rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. The explanation was full of holes, but it was not a total setback for those who want urgent action on global warming.
The essence of the administration's reasoning was that California had failed to demonstrate "extraordinary and compelling" circumstances justifying stricter rules. To make that case, Stephen Johnson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was forced to argue that climate change gravely endangered not only California but the entire country. As hard as it is to believe, this was the first time that any senior administration official had explicitly conceded that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.

Even more startling for an administration that has spent seven years in denial, Mr. Johnson acknowledged that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," that man-made emissions are largely responsible and that the consequences could be devastating — more wildfires, more droughts, rising sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more outbreaks of insect-borne diseases.

Given all that, one would assume that Mr. Johnson is at last ready to champion a national program of controls on greenhouse gas emissions, something the administration has long resisted. At the very least, he would now seem obliged to begin regulating greenhouse gases, at least from vehicles. The Supreme Court in effect ordered the E.P.A. to do just that last April, when it declared carbon dioxide a pollutant subject to regulatory control. Nearly a year has gone by, and Mr. Johnson has not announced any new regulations

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IF they can't deal with people, and they can't deal with the environment, what the hell good are they?



A