On January 18, 2007, the White House, via OMB, issued an executive order and “Final Bulletin for Agency Good Guidance Practices” that bear scrutiny.

If you're like me, you gasped at the President's audacity in claiming that the US occupation of Iraq was going swimmingly right up until the Samarra bombing of Feb. 22, 2006. His bizarro version of history in the State of the Union address has been echoed repeatedly by the Vice President and various administration toadies.

Passions have been running high over at the environmental blog Gristmill. It all started when David Roberts criticized an environmentalist tendency that had become particularly noticeable recently: people were complaining cool new developments – a house that gets LEED platinum certification, Priuses, a carbon-neutral Super Bowl – because they weren’t environmentally friendly enough. He caught a lot of grief, and was back a few days later with a less ranty response that contains what I think is an excellent analogy for the environmental movement:

A few weeks ago I wrote about an interview of Dick Cheney on Fox News Sunday. Trotted out to make the case for Bush's ill-starred escalation in Iraq, Cheney made an even greater hash of things than might have been predicted. It was hard to decide whether the VP was now more confrontational than delusional.

Since then, he's given further disastrous interviews, especially one at CNN's Situation Room. The news media at long last began to report upon Cheney's preposterous assertions. We might speculate about why journalists suddenly have begun studying his remarks in broadcast interviews, given that the VP has been making similarly bizarre pronouncements for years. Anyhow, the fact that these interviews were also available almost immediately on the cable news networks' websites made it much more likely that reporters and pundits would check up on Cheney's comments.

With that in mind, take note of this un-reported fact: In the last year, especially the last 6 months, the White House has been making it much harder to track down the broadcast interviews given by administration officials.

In achieving victory in the Valle Vidal, northern New Mexico highlighted its strengths. We are a land and people of deep history, diverse culture and exciting opportunities. Over the coming months, we all deserve to take the time to celebrate and acknowledge that, without the support of each and every one of us, we would not have been able to protect one of our most valuable landscapes.

And yet, this victory leaves us with more to do - and it leaves lessons for the rest of the country.

Squirrels!? Intelligent?! Fun maybe and certainly life, but not intelligent. OK, I admit it, they are not writing dissertations, though they have inspired scientific investigation, and there is more to squirrels than merely being fluffy, nut-gathering rat cousins.

GAO issued two new reports on poverty this past week. They are:

Poverty In America: Consequences for Individuals and the Economy GAO-07-343T (Jan. 24, 2007)

Poverty in America: Economic Research Shows Adverse Impacts on Health Status and Other Social Conditions as well as the Economic Growth Rate GAO-07-344 (Jan. 24, 2007)

GAO had a very productive week this week. Among its reports is: Tax Compliance: Multiple Approaches Are Needed to Reduce the Tax Gap, GAO-07-391T (Jan. 23, 2007)

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) may be a small group, but they produce reports that are important and hard hitting.

The Project On Government Oversight follows a rich tradition of assuring that the government continues to work for the people it represents. Our nation was founded on the very principle that representation and accountability are fundamental to maintaining a strong and functioning democracy. Today, these principles espoused by our founding fathers are under attack as our federal government is more vulnerable than ever to the influence of money in politics and powerful special interests.

Last Friday, the Department of Education issued a press release tooting its own horn: U.S. Department of Education Announces Student Lender Settlement Protecting Taxpayers

"Protecting Taxpayers"? Says who?

Although climate change (and predictions of Bush’s SOTU treatment of it) have been dominating environmental news lately, it’s also good to check out what’s going on at a more local level. Here are a few of the items that caught my eye over the past week:

Cross-posted from ColoradoConfidential.com

Terming it a "lack of foresight" on the part of the Democrats, a group of Colorado activists have snagged a half-dozen 2008 Democratic National Convention related Web domain names  — and secured another bundle of sites designed to help protesters organize long before descending en masse on the Mile High City.

_{From left, activists Mark and Barbara Cohen, Glenn and Barbara Spagnuolo, at this year's annual Columbus Day protest in Denver. Reprinted with permission.}

This past Sunday Science Fun presented information on recent studies on primate intelligence. Not all that data is gathered from unobtrusive observations of primates in their native habitats. Some of it is carried out in laboratories in which primates can be caged, poked, and worse. And as close relatives, they may be used in research to benefit humans but which means harsh treatment for the primates. And as the years pass and they age and become less useful, what is a lab to do?

NOTE: This diary was origionally posted on August 6, 2005. I am reposting it after several requests to do so. Also, with the Valle Vidal victory locked up, I will be back posting as normal on Mondays with the occasional post during the week.

On Thursday, July 28th, 2005, the Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2005 was introduced in the House of Representatives. The Roadless Area Conservation Act of 2005 would protect 58.5 million acres of National Forest lands from commercial logging and road building. This Act would reinstate one of the most popular rules put in place by President Clinton…a provision the Bush Administration has been obsessively attempting to overturn

President Clinton’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule was one of the most popular land management decisions in the history of the United States. The Roadless Rule was approved following 70 years of scientific study and more than 600 public meetings across the country. During its consideration, 2.5 million Americans wrote the Federal government in support of the rule, making it the most popular in American history. Since then, another 1.8 million comments were received by the Bush administration opposing their plan and urging reinstatement of the original protection policy. Since the Bush gang usurped power 4 years ago, they have been trying to gut President Clinton's most far-reaching and visionary achievement. Several court decisions have upheld the Roadless Rule despite the Administration's failure to implement it and support it in court.

Never one to let public opinion stand in the way of a stupid move, (2.3 million Americans - nearly 95% of all comments received - supported Clinton's rule and then voiced opposition to its repeal in 2002) the Bush Administration seems posed to finally have the Roadless Rule revoked.

But....why should we care about this?

There are members of Congress who don't support our troops, and I want to tell them all point blank: You're very bad men!

George Bush made this point on Thursday in an interview with a Dallas station, WFAA. He'd been asked by the interviewer about the proposed non-binding resolution on Iraq that has been introduced in Congress, and Tony Snow's statement that members of Congress need to be careful about the message they're sending by supporting it. President Bush upped the ante against Congress, so to speak:

"Now one thing it's fine to have a debate, but I don't want our kids [actually, he means 'our troops fighting in Iraq'] to be dispirited or discouraged. Because I support them and most members of Congress support 'em too, don't get me wrong."

The administration and Pentagon have been assuring us, falsely, for five years that all the detainees held under appalling conditions at Guantanamo are "terrorists" and "the worst of the worst", and that they all were picked up on the battlefield. For the latest in outright lies, listen (if you can stand it) to the opening statement by State Dept. official John Bellinger on the Diane Rehm Show of Jan. 18.

Yet notoriously, Bush has failed to put any of these men on trial. Under pressure from the Supreme Court's ruling in the Hamdan case, last October Congress passed the almost certainly unconstitutional Military Commissions Act in order to "facilitate bringing to justice terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants through full and fair trials by military commissions". On Jan. 18, the Pentagon released its manual of rules to implement military commissions.

So, will these trials—if they ever occur—be fair? A pretty important question, which until now has received fairly cursory treatment for the most part.

When we're talking primates and intelligence, we start getting back into familiar territory. These are our closest living relatives, after all.

Where do issues of water pollution, adequacy of water, the impact of rising petroleum prices, and hunger meet?

on the Bush administration's under the radar strategy. Things have been just a little too quiet - or so we thought. link here.

From Wired News' blog:

The Department of Homeland Security has been ordered to pay the Stanford Law School Cyberlaw Clinic $66,861.39 in attorneys' fees for its failure to comply with the Freedom of Information Act while stonewalling my request for records on the Zotob virus' infiltration of its computers.

Alert readers will recall my year-long battle to learn the details of an August 2005 failure of the $400 million US-VISIT system. Highlights include the DHS's Bureau of Customs and Border Protection asking me to drop the matter, then losing the paperwork, and finally denying the request in its entirety, all to avoid revealing that it made mistakes in leaving the border screening system open to attack.

Score one for the good guys.

Think Progress today posted an interactive chart to track members of Congress and their support of or opposition to escalation of the Iraq War as outlined in a speech by President Bush this week.

The current Congressional tally thus far:

Where does your delegation stand?

This is a breadth post for you work wonks. Below are links to new reports, news, and other developments in the area of health and safety.

Round up of workplace health and safety news and developments

During this Martin Luther King holiday weekend, the Washington Post published one article about the sad state of historical knowledge among US schoolchildren, and another article that showed just how important it is for young people to learn history.

May be found here at least for now. You can also find it via this page.

This interview is well worth a listen. The interviewer gives her a pretty hard time.

Tollroads and selling off or leasing highways is big in the news these days as the magical solution to state budget problems. No need to raise taxes, and the money for state projects just rolls in. That's according to the headlines. But does it?

Dick Cheney gave an interview this morning on Fox in what clearly was an effort to stem to the onslaught against the administration's Middle East plans. The White House must be feeling the heat from Congress, to risk sending a deeply unpopular Vice President out on such a mission. You get the impression that they're now worried about holding onto their base.

Cheney botched the job even worse than might have been predicted. Unprepared perhaps for a surprisingly aggressive line of questioning from Chris Wallace, Cheney came across as surly, evasive, and delusional.

What's worse, while barely trying to conciliate the administration's critics in Congress, again and again Cheney essentially dismissed their relevance and insinuated that they were incapable of challenging Bush's policies. He couldn't even resist claiming that they were undermining the troops in Iraq.

Cheney's intervention is such a colossal failure at so many levels that it may provoke Congress to take a tougher stance than it might otherwise have done.

Well, SSF is back from winter vacation, tan, rested, getting over a cold from all that glad-handing and air travel, and ready for some lifely talk about intelligent life.

And at long last about octopuses. To get started, here is a link to a video of an octopus escaping from a plexiglas box. Video copyright James B. Wood 2006 Notice how the octopus elongates its head into a 1 inch cylinder that stretches back far from the hole - it seems to have measured the hole's diameter and anticipated exactly how small its head must get to go through. It doesn't just squish its head through.

House Committee on Education and Labor reclaims its name after the Republicans edited out labor in 1995. link

You might think that once you have electronic tolling, it is easy to slap up a tolling system on an existing highway. But that is just not the case. Pennsylvania is now thinking of converting I-80 to a tollroad and/or privatizing it and letting the money roll in it. link and link

But they are much more likely to see the state bleed money and destroy an important part of the state's infrastructure.

Two years ago, unbossed ran a series of investigative reports on private toll roads that changed politics in Colorado. Now, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states say they are playing the toll road game.

During that time, we exposed the existence of secret deals at the public's expense, federal policies that are intended to funnel money to private investors at the public's expense, and more.

Much of what we said then applies now and needs to be made part of today's public debate.

The Office of Management and Budget is one of the less-well-known tools the Bush administration has been using to advance its agenda of freeing corporations from pesky health and safety regulations. Last January, OMB’s Office of Internal and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) released a proposed risk assessment bulletin that would have made it much more difficult for EPA, OSHA, and other agencies to carry out their function of protecting our health and safety. Today, this boon to corporate interests received a smackdown from none other than the National Academies.

Public Citizen’s Robert Shull, one of the leaders in the fight against this proposal, posted the good news earlier today at the public health blog The Pump Handle. For those who aren’t as familiar with the proposal and the criticisms against it, here’s a bit more background.

Last November, unbossed reported on NSSE - the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)'s most recent report. And in December on Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE). Lessee what's next? How about LSSSE?

His Petulance cannot hope to escalate farther down into the abyss without sending more members of the state militias, also known as the National Guard, to Iraq. Congress can stop the escalation by refusing to permit those troops to be called up to active duty. But a courageous governor could also block Bush, and change the entire dynamic of the national debate on Iraq, by refusing to permit the federal government to take control of the forces under the governor's command.

Why has a revolt of the governors not occured yet? Surely because they feel stymied by a deeply flawed ruling of the Supreme Court. In 1990 SCOTUS upheld the language of an Act of 1987, which stated that governors may not block the federal government's deployment of their own National Guard troops on the grounds of "location, purpose, type, or schedule of such duty".

But SCOTUS evaded the fundamental fact that the Constitution allows state militias to be federalized only for a few domestic purposes. Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq do not by any stretch of the imagination fit into the circumstances identified by the Constitution, it seems to me that a governor would be justified in challenging any further National Guard deployments.

The answer is we do not know. There have been no studies comparing the outcomes and processes of matched organizing campaigns. There have been no head-to-head studies at all. The lack of studies is seen in a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) on the number of workers fired in organizing campaigns. They are pushed to speculate and assume and to engage in complex manipulations of data because there is just no reliable information about what happens during card check campaigns.

Just out today, the National Taxpayer Advocate 2006 Annual Report to Congress condemns the use of private debt collectors to collect overdue tax payments. Among their findings:

1. The IRS is now using 75 contract employees from collection agencies PCAs to collect taxes. And it is using 65 IRS employees to "monitor" the 75 employees. This "suggests" that it is not cost-effective to contract out the work.

2. And the bottom line statement for the NTA is:

The impact to tax compliance is uncertain. However, the National Taxpayer Advocate believes the IRS has risked much for a small return, if any, on its investment.

Most of what we hear in the liberal blogosphere is that the NLRB is a do-nothing agency, except when what it does hurts workers who want to organize. That is anything but an accurate view.

For one thing, during the past year, the NLRB was able to win over $100 million for workers who were illegally fired. And that's not all.

The Village Voice has dropped This Modern World from its print edition.

Sign the petition to save Sparky, Blinky and the gang.

On Tuesday, the Urban Institute held a forum entitled “Increasing the Minimum Wage: Implications and Effects” in anticipation of one of the Congressional Democrats’ first legislative activities. Presenter Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute had a simple message: Keep the minimum wage bill clean.

Sen. Harry Reid, newly elected as the Senate Majority Leader, introduced the following 10 bills on the first session of the 110th Congress:

1. Ethics reform, to clean up Congress so the government can get back to serving the American people.

2. Raising the minimum wage, to give millions of American families an opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

3. Medicare Prescription Drug program reform, to save seniors, the disabled, and American taxpayers money.

4. Acting on the 9/11 Commission commendations, to fully secure our ports and borders and ensure that our first responders have the resources they need to keep America safe.

5. Funding stem cell research, to open the promise of life-saving cures and treatments.

6. Energy reform, to address global warming and put America on a path to energy independence.

7. Easing the financial burden of college tuition, to increase accessibility for hardworking students and their families.

8. Strengthening and rebuilding America's military, to ensure the American people get the real security they deserve.

9. Comprehensive immigration reform, to fix America's broken immigration system.

10. Pay-as-you-go legislation, so that Congress has to cover its costs just like American families do.

Agree? Disagree? What would you have offered instead?

The quality of education is critical to the well-being of individuals, to businesses, to individual states, and to our nation. Some states seem to have declared war on education. They attack teachers and teachers' unions. They claim that to be business friendly, the number one priority is cutting taxes. They then use all these positions as an excuse to underfund schools - essentially playing chicken with the state's welfare.

In some states, workers at the very bottom will be seeing a bump up in their earnings thanks to increases in the minimum wage. One issue that affects whether or not we think the minimum wage is adequate is how we measure poverty. Believe it or not, the standard used is so outdated and inaccurate it tells us almost nothing we need to know about the numbers of Americans living in poverty.

Friends, what a pleasing prospect to look forward to this coming year. Huge changes as a result of last November's election. Things look promising there and a reward for years of hard work by many, including the blogosphere, to make it happen.

And we now have lots of evidence that can demonstrate to even the most faithful Republicans that this Admnistration has taken us down a path of failed policies, corruption, and potential national decline.

Or do we?