We all know that cutters are very, very sick individuals. There are corporate cutters too. They too respond inappropriately by cutting. In their case, this causes harm to their workers, the communities that rely on them, and our national interest. Among our biggest cutters these days are our newsrooms.

The blogosphere - and the MSM - decry the death of news reporting as we have traditionally known it. It is no news that major newspapers across the US are suffering financially. The mainstream way to attack this problem has been for papers to fire reporters, cut support for new gathering, and focus money and efforts on advertisers and circulation.

Wrong! wrong! wrong!

It's official. The poor get poorer as the rich . . .
A recent study shows conditions of wage and wealth disparity that have not existed since records have been kept . . . i.e. since 1929.

Last May I asked Did Cheney beget the warrantless NSA spying? It seemed a likely interpretation of news reports available at the time, but I had to admit that the theory was speculative. For the President had declared that CIA Director Michael Hayden dreamed up the program.

The publication of George Tenet's memoir next week would appear to put that question to rest. According to advance reviews of the book, Tenet pins the blame squarely on Cheney. That is an important political development, if true.

Ah, but can Tenet be believed? His account of his years at the CIA is highly self-serving and does little to restore his tattered credibility. What's more, reviewers agree that Tenet has it in for Cheney.

A new Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report - Chad Stone and Robert Greenstein, What the 2007 Trustees' Report Shows About Social Security (April 24, 2007) finds that the common view that there is an inevitable Social Security crisis is wrong.

It's hard to imagine a creepier government web page than that of the National Security Agency - do not skip intro. Although the NSA kid's page comes close.

This is sock you in the face creepy. But a far creepier federal agency webpage is that of Unicor. What? Never heard of Unicor?

April 28 - the anniversary of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration - is now an international day on which to mourn for and remember workers who have been killed or injured on the job.

This is a revisit to a troubling story from a year ago - worth a revisit in light of Izzy's post a few days ago. As reported last year:

Bureau of Prisons whistleblower Leroy A. Smith Jr. has been pushing the government to stop endangering the health of prison workers since 2004. He has charged that prisoners at the Atwater, CA prison facility have been exposed to highly toxic materials while recycling materials from outdated and broken computers, televisions, and other electronic devices for federal, state, and county agencies.

What did he get for his efforts?

American news corporations can be proud that they employ the best stenographers in the world.

It's only been two days since the beltway journalists flew into a snit over Bill Moyers' PBS documentary on the massive failures of journalists before the invasion of Iraq. It wasn't their fault, after all, that Americans believed the administration lies that they faithfully transcribed in 2002/2003. The White House press corps certainly wasn't "compliant" in spreading the administration's message.

And yet, here we have another instance of a ridiculously naive press serving up patent nonsense so uncritically that it boggles the mind.

The mainstream media needs your help. For only 35 cents per day, you can...

Well, not really. Though some ink-stained wretches may take you up on it as community-based news outlets experience yet another tumultuous period of corporate consolidations and desperate staff buyouts to stem cash flow problems. In March, the Rocky Mountain News announced a voluntary program directed at reporters and support staff aged 55 and older and with at least 10 years of service to the paper. The aim is to entice 20 long-time Rocky staff, presumably some of the highest paid based on longevity, to find greener pastures.

Last week, the Denver Post, which has a joint operating agreement with the Rocky Mountain News, held a mandatory staff meeting in which the senior management delivered a similar offer to its longstanding staff.

My friend Milo sent me an interesting article from Australia about a problem with poodles on that side of the globe. What he is doing there I still haven't sorted out. On the phone he was very annoyed that there are no busses running to Hungary. I think there was some mistake with his travel arrangements.

Anyhow, I wouldn't have believed this story from the Sydney paper if Milo didn't vouch for it.

Thousands of Japanese have been swindled in a scam in which they were sold Australian and British sheep and told they were poodles.

The repeated and vociferous attacks upon Senator Harry Reid during the last month demonstrate, if nothing else, that the White House fears him and worries that Reid will succeed in fashioning a solid consensus in the Senate for limitations upon or a reversal of George Bush's nutty and unpopular Iraq policy.

Last week I happened upon what are, in a sense, the most outlandish attacks of all—because they are posted at the White House website. I wish more Americans knew about these. They put the back-and-forth between Reid and the White House in needed perspective. But even more, they suggest to me that the Bush administration has violated federal law in trying to demonize Harry Reid. That puts a much more serious cast on the face of the debate.

The bullet ricocheted off the metal skin of Laura's tidy double-wide trailer and ripped through her head. Blood, bone and brain tissue splurted out of the exit hole like a hellish fountain.

My 21-year-old cousin tried to muster one last Earth-bound word. And knowing her gentle soul, it was probably a gurgle-y apology for getting in the way of the bullet. She let out one last breath. Her now blood-soaked younger brother, who accidentally discharged the .22 caliber pistol she got for self-protection from a neighborhood prowler, curled up in a fetal position and catatonically rocked until the police arrived.

So despite the polls, hawks at the White House and the American Enterprise Institute are still talking about progress in Iraq and in the “war on terror.” If you’re like me and find the pro-Bush slant on Iraq and U.S. foreign policy irritating, below are some answers you might provide to those still lingering on the dark side.

Yesterday in Indiana, inmates took over part of the New Castle Correctional Facility, a privately run prison, in what was called a "full-scale riot" by the town's mayor and a "disturbance" by the Department of Corrections. Two employees of the prison and seven prisoners have been injured.

Whatever you called it, the news had lots of pictures and video of smoke pouring out of the prison, but there's more to the story. The riot was evidently precipitated by an influx of inmates involuntarily transferred from Arizona. Arizona says this was "necessary" due to overcrowding, yet was recently negotiating with California to take their overflow of inmates.

Is Arizona lying or is something else going on?

Yesterday I commented on the failure of the corporate news media to mention anything about Scott Bloch's notorious lack of integrity when reporting that his Office of Special Counsel has begun an investigation of Karl Rove. The news of this "investigation" provoked a small fire-storm on line, and several public interest groups (such as POGO and CREW) posted scathing commentaries. A few bloggers also reviewed Bloch's shabby career at OSC (I like to believe that the analysis here is the most thorough of them).

Well, the national news media responded to that pressure today by acknowledging that some groups have certain reservations about Bloch's record. And yet, disturbingly, even this clean-up operation was performed sloppily. The most important issues, once again, go ignored.

Quite a stir on line today about the report in the LA Times that the Office of Special Counsel has started an investigation of Karl Rove's politicization of his office, the firing of at least one US Attorney, the abuse of RNC email accounts, and the transformation of several Cabinet-level Agencies into branches of the RNC during 2006.

So, unmitigated good news for all those who care about government integrity, openess, and the rights of federal employees--except for one troubling little detail. The head of OSC, Scott Bloch, is a notoriously partisan hack who should have been fired years ago.

Odd that the Times' reporter, Tom Hamburger, couldn't find any space whatever in his story to convey information about Bloch's background and thus the likely nature of the "investigation" into Rove's activities. Instead, he approaches the matter with an astounding lack of critical insight.

In a brief roundup of what looks interesting from GAO's releases last week, we find tax cheating federal contractors, information insecurity from a high number of goverment agencies, Burma, and more.

My friend Milo sent me this story, which he'd noticed on a recent trip to Texas, but I was already onto it. He was looking to buy a cider press, but that's neither here nor there.

It turns out that a veteran who was decorated with three Purple Hearts in Vietnam decided to award one of them to the President for all the harsh assessments of his many signal failures that Bush has had to endure. Or possibly it was the heart-ache of having ruined the nation's standing in the world?

For years, judges have “interpreted” workplace laws in a way that destroys the rights in those laws. Part I of this series examines some of those laws. Part II identifies three things that have caused us to lose these rights: (1) judges’ decisions; (2) employer antagonism to worker rights; and (3) our own failure to defend our rights. Part III talked about the need to replace the values of greed and selfishness with values of community.

Here I describe a strategy to put a stop to judge’s gutting worker rights.

For years, judges have “interpreted” workplace laws in a way that destroys the rights in those laws. Part I of this series examines some of those laws. Part II identifies three things that have caused us to lose these rights: (1) judges’ decisions; (2) employer antagonism to worker rights; and (3) our own failure to defend our rights.

It will be no easy thing to take back these rights:

This has to be a group effort. That group effort is necessary in order to identify the incremental parts of the target, to identify the steps that need to be taken to lead to the ultimate goal. Indeed that goal needs to be identified. Is it just to peel off the judges' decisions that have undermined the law. Is it to transform our society into one that values work and workers? Or is it somewhere in between?

One of the wildest places in New Mexico can be found in Taos County.

Pick up your map. Find New Mexico. Find Taos. I'm talking about the chunk of land to the north and west of Taos.

The area is massive, sprawling over more than 300,000 acres. How you name it depends on who you talk to. I label it by a group of individual names: Rio Grande Gorge, Ute Mountain, Sunshine Valley, Wild Rivers, Cerro de la Olla, Cerro Chiflo, Rio San Antonio, Cerro del Aire…other names are Windmill, the Punche Valley, el llano, Upper Gorge, Lower Gorge, Rio Grande Cooridor, the Ute Mountain Run…the challenge in naming it has all to do with its size and diversity – as does the challenge in describing it.

So, lets begin with the river.

Frank: What's my situation? I'm just sterile that's all.

In What if there was a law . . . but judges destroyed it? Part I Daily Kos crosspost here I gave examples of laws Congress enacted to give workers rights . . . laws that judges then gutted in their decisions.

How can we take back our rights?

An NPR Morning Edition story yesterday profiled the launch of BostonNOW that will feature blog posts and traditional news reports as side-by-side content for the new daily tabloid newspaper. Nine more free city-based newspapers are planned over the next three years.

Later in the day, Denver Business Journal reported that Dagsbrun, Iceland's largest media conglomerate and its US-based branch, 365 Media USA LLC, have also trademarked the name "DenverNOW."

That is not a hypothetical when it comes to workplace rights. It is hard to think of a workplace law that judges have not undermined.

That means that the millions and millions of us who depend on a job for our livelihood are not getting the protections that the laws on the books are meant to give us. Given how important work is, this is a serious problem that affects every person in this country. It is a problem that deserves to be on our radar screen . . and yet it isn't.

It is possible to take action to change this situation, and that is most of what I want to talk about. But first, we need to look at the problem.

Nothing wrong with supporting your own team. One way you can do that is through you shopping and patronage dollars. If you want to ensure they are not going to the other side, you might want to pay attention to websites that promote shopping to support conservatives.

In this year . . .

We all sort of know that the US provides food to countries around the world where people are going hungry. We sort of know that there has been famine or hunger as a result of war in some countries.

We also know that throughout this Administration's term there has been gross mismanagement across the government. That mismanagement has included huge overpayments, no oversight to assure that the work was done, cronyism, and a blind preference for private rather than public providers. So is it possible that when it comes to international food aid, things are going well?

I kid you not. And you've been wondering, lo these last six years, how Cheney ever became Vice President.

That and other depressing facts are revealed in the latest Pew Research Center poll, which compares public knowledge of current affairs in 2007 with the results of a similar poll taken in 1989.

Pew tries to spin the bad news: "a new nationwide survey finds that the [cable news] and digital revolutions and attendant changes in news audience behaviors have had little impact on how much Americans know about national and international affairs." The fact of the matter is that Americans know even less in 2007 than in 1989, which is really saying something.

Is this the origin of Freedom Fries? Reuters has a story today on a report from Le Monde that says the "French secret services produced nine reports between September 2000 and August 2001 looking at the al Qaeda threat to the United States, and knew it planned to hijack an aircraft." AP also carries the story.

Le Monde said the French report of January 2001 had been handed over to a CIA operative in Paris, but that no mention of it had ever been made in the official U.S. September 11 Commission, which produced its findings in July 2004.

You can find the story in Le Monde online here.

4-17-07 UPDATE: The follow up Le Monde story is here.

Today my friend Milo entered the debate about the level of compensation being offered by the U.S. to the civilians killed accidentally in Iraq and Afghanistan by American troops. People have been much too harsh in the past regarding Milo's credibility. As I think even his critics will agree after reading this, he's come up with quite a good news story from a Florida paper.

Milo preferred not to divulge what he was doing in Florida this weekend (I think it had something to do with buying an orange plantation). Anyway, in the Orlando paper he noticed a story showing that the government paid out millions of dollars in compensation to a group of passengers riding in a single vehicle blown up in 2003.

That doesn't seem to fit at all with the other news stories we've been seeing this past week, based on documents released by the ACLU. These state that compensation payments are capped at a few thousand dollars. So which is it? Thousands, or millions, of dollars?

Anyone who pays attention to laws enacted to protect worker rights will notice that they all have the same lifecycle. Law is enacted. Rights in the law are attacked. Judges hand down cases that weaken the law. Two recent laws where you can see this dynamic are the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

But now one Republican has now taken up the fight to restore worker rights under Americans with Disabilities Act.

I rarely write 'covers' for other authors' commentaries, but today is the exception. I urge you to head over to Harper's and read Scott Horton's splendid essay on the nature of state secrecy and torture: Torture, Secrecy and the Bush Administration. In this speech, which he gave the other day at the NYU School of Law, Horton places the Bush administration's bizarre record of lawlessness, secrecy, and torture in much needed historical context. He describes the struggle in 17th century Britain to do away with the Star Chamber (secret courts) and to enshrine elements of legal due process and openness that the founders of our Republic embraced and defended.

"If Imports Cost You Your Job . . . Apply for Trade Adjustment Assistance"

Workers whose employment is adversely affected by increased imports may apply for TAA. TAA offers a variety of benefits and reemployment services to assist unemployed workers prepare for and obtain suitable employment. Workers may be eligible for training, job search and relocation allowances, income support and other reemployment services.

But if you expect to actually get the services you are entitled to by law, well, think again. This is, after all, the compassionate conservative Bush Department of Labor (DOL) that will be handling your case. That's what some former BP -IBM workers are learning.

All Things Considered (NPR) moments ago aired a blockbuster of a story by Ari Shapiro, who said that he had sources with access to the White House who blew the Bush administration's cover story on the firing of the US Attorneys. The plan originated with Karl Rove, and his idea was to fire all the US Attorneys in order to conceal the fact that the mass firing was meant specifically to get rid of just a few of them.

In the last two years the rate at which recent graduates of West Point are leaving the military has shot way up. The cause appears to be disaffection over the disastrous occupation in Iraq, particularly the impression that Army officers have that there's no end in sight.

Yesterday I wrote about the lack of integrity of the Republican lawyers who pretend to be fighting the scourge of "voter fraud" nationally. Their actual but unspoken goal is to suppress the vote among likely Democratic voters. The national GOP treats election integrity as if it were a game. For the most part, Republican allegations of "voter fraud" are meant to distract from their own systematic efforts to suppress the votes of people who aren't voting Republican.

Today, the New York Times has a disturbing report about the consequences of this shabby Republican crusade upon the people living around us. It turns out that in trying to whip up hysteria about "voter fraud", Republican federal attorneys (the ones whom the White House did not fire) have hounded some poor unfortunates most shockingly.

How bad is the politicization of the Justice Department, when every single day brings new revelations of wrong-doing? Today, McClatchy exposes how Republicans working in DoJ have been advertising their corruption...literally.

My name is John Thayer and I am the supervisor of the Capitol Power Plant Tunnel Crew that works for the Architect of the Capitol. There are 10 of us in the crew. We maintain the five miles of underground utility tunnels that supply heat and cooling to all of Congress and some 20 other federal office buildings on Capitol Hill. Some of us have worked in the tunnels for over 20 years – I've worked for the AOC for 22 years. If you all are comfortable sitting in this room, because our team of pipe-fitters and welders and electricians is doing its job.
. . .
Just over a year ago, we found out that the AOC had been misleading us for years about the extent of our workplace exposure to asbestos. . . .

For a long time Iraqis have been all too aware that the Bush administration sponsors a powerful group of Sunni terrorists in their midst, the MEK (or MOK), who are on the US State Department's list of terrorist organizations. Before the US invasion, these Marxist Iranian exiles had been sponsored by Saddam Hussein. But because the MEK enjoys American support, the Iraqi government has been unable to drive them out of the country.

Most Americans, however, remain unaware that their government is in bed with Sunni terrorists. You won't find many US news outlets exposing the Bush administration's hypocritical support for the MEK. Recently there have been two reports on the subject, but neither has made a ripple in the MSM.

Last month, the Investigative Reporters and Editors awarded a medal to Ken Ward, Jr. of the Charleston Gazette for his investigative series on coal mine safety, “Beyond Sago.” Ward had been covering mine safety on and off for the Gazette for a while and had recently received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship to cover coal mining topics when the Sago and Aracoma mine disasters happened in early 2006.

Ward decided to focus on the issue of coal mining safety. Via a FOIA request, he obtained mine inspection records from the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). The fellowship allowed him to travel around Appalachia and talk to coal miners and the families who’d lost coal miners. The award-winning stories he wrote include “One by One” and “This is What it’s Like to Die.” The IRE judges had this to say about Ward’s stories:

The NTEU has got to be one of the best unions at making its case to the public. Take its IRS Watch site. See how it makes its case - in a clear, dramatic, and authorative way - that demonstrates that the Administration is up to no good. For example, the site shows that most of us are paying higher taxes to make up for not collecting taxes from the very rich.

This barrage has apparently gotten the IRS' goat. Scroll to the end to see how [pathetically] the Administration is responding.

U.S. college doors might as well have "Keep Out - Dogs and Poor Kids Need Not Apply" signs posted on them. Even without signs like this on the doors of our colleges' Admissions Departments, that is what is happening. Whether it is rising college costs, the increasing unavailibility of grants, poor preparation in primary and secondary schools, lack of information, lack of family support, the effect is the same.

The traditional White House Easter-egg roll was all but ruined this year because of the hard-line stance taken by the Bush administration in its eternal "Global war-on-terror". Several parents, alarmed by the unexpected bellicosity of the guards, hurried their children back out beyond the security perimeter and onto Pennsylvania Avenue before the event began. "I don't know what they were thinking," said one mother who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

Forget those stereotypes of professors. If your professor seems absent-minded, maybe it's because she is trying to keep straight which of the four or more courses she is teaching at which campus it is today . . . while figuring out how to keep the wolf from the door with the woeful wages she gets paid . . . while trying to damp down her rage at the way she is treated . . . because she is a freeway flyer. In fact, it is far more likely these days that your professor is an adjunct, non-tenure track, contract, disposable, ill-treated teacher than not.

Milo came for tea this afternoon. I thought he might be able to help me in the orchard with some really pressing problems that, for one reason and another, have gone uncorrected during the last few years. But instead he spent the first 100 minutes complaining about Monica Gonzales. It was all pretty unproductive, and I can't say I fully understood what the issue was.

This is a follow up to the overview I gave of the ILO decision that found North Carolina was in violation of international law. The International Labor Organisation found that N. Carolina law violated international law because it forbids collective bargaining by N.C. public employees.

That decision is not enforceable, so, you may well say, why does it matter?

This past week saw the second UAW victory in its campaign to organize dealers in Atlantic City casinos. This victory came despite desperate attempts by the so-called Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation to stop workers from voting. More below.

Last October, unbossed carried the story that a complaint had been filed with the International Labor Organisation against North Carolina for violating international law. The ILO has now issued its report.

The bottom line is a stunning victory for the unions and a huge rebuke to the US government's position, one that finds it speaking out of both sides of its mouth. Something that did not escape the notice of the ILO.

Note: this is a long, long post in which I try to summarize a long and detailed report and give the essence of the party positions and the ILO findings. I have tried to sign post key parts. I realize this may try the patience of most readers, but it is worth at least scrolling to the bottom and perhaps scanning the rest.

Don't let this happen in your state!

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell has hired the investment firm Morgan Stanley to advise him about whether the Pennsylvania Turnpike should be privatized.

Will Morgan Stanley's advice be objective and accurate? Or will their advice be biased and worthless because Morgan Stanley makes money when roads are privatized?

April 4th, 1968. The day Martin Luther King was killed while fighting for economic justice.

This past Wednesday was the 39th anniversary. And I am sorry to say I let it pass, lost in the midst of other pressing work. So let me make amends now. Interfaith Worker Justice focuses on MLK Day in January - not April 4.

The Interfaith Worker Justice website has many resources to help us remember him and to bring to mind what a tragedy it is for this country to have lost his voice, to have been in the wilderness 39 years without his insights and moral guidance. And just as the Israelites entered the promised land after 40 years in the wilderness, may next year we all see that promised land of justice for all.

So stop by IWJ's site and take a few minutes to honor him and to rededicate yourself to this important work.

Part of our annual ritual of filling out our tax returns is seeing in black and white how we did last year. We tend to focus on the question of whether we owe money or will get money back - and how much. But there's also that space for how much money we earned. We tend to see the money we make as the measure of who we are and what we accomplished . . . of failed to accomplish.

But one group gets to see a big figure in the income box that bears no relationship to the bad jobs they did. These are the guys with the golden parachutes. So who's floating pretty this year after jumping ship?

From tomorrow's Guardian, we learn that the Bush administration wanted to escalate tensions with Iran after the 15 British sailors were seized two weeks ago. How predictable; for Bush and Cheney, any resort to diplomacy is a token of weakness. Bush offered to use American naval forces provocatively in order to threaten Iran.

Instead, Blair told them to stay out of it. He also asked Bush & Co. to tone down the rhetoric while Britain tried to free the hostages without provoking a war.

Hence Bush's closest ally in his Middle East fiasco has concluded that he cannot be trusted with any sensitive issues. No wonder that the success of the British negotiations has sent Bush's apologists into orbit. It's an insult to everything their guy stands for, not to give war a chance.

Thanks to Desert Beacon, I can reassure you that the upcoming Commencement Day speech probably won't be as dreadful as it could have been. The reason is that it's very unlikely George W. Bush will make an appearance on your campus.

Normally a President is very much in demand around graduation time, but the Miami Herald is reporting that this year, the schedule is light. Very, very light.

Could you want a better yardstick for how far Bush's popularity has fallen?

Did your college loan officer promise to "make you an offer you couldn't refuse"? Does the head of the Office of Student Aid appear in public surrounded by heavy set men packing a surprising amount of heat? Did your student loan package include an entry, under the penalties for late-payment, labeled "knee-capping"?

These might be clues that your college or university belongs to a national criminal conspiracy to bilk financially vulnerable students for all they're worth. Investigations by the New York Attorney General are revealing that dozens and perhaps hundreds of institutions are implicated in these schemes. Typically they involve exorbitant interest rates from "preferred lenders" selected by the college, which receive kickbacks in exchange for helping to deceive students about the nature of the loans and the lenders. Some individual loan officers seem to be getting a cut of the money.

Speaking as one who depended on student loans back in the day, and who's devoted his career to higher education, this is ugly folks. I thought I'd seen every kind of sleazy academic wheeze by now, but...chiz.

The GAO has issued a troubling and scathing report on IRS Commissioner Mark Everson's performance in keeping taxpayer information secure. Below I will lay out some of the findings, but only some. There are so many fundamentally troubling failures it is hard not to just cut and paste the whole report or just include the link.

As you read on, bear in mind that the response from Commissioner of Internal Revenue Mark Everson was: "The IRS takes its security and privacy responsibilities very seriously. " [p.26-27] If this is serious, I hate to see comic . . . or lax.

It's WAY past time for a member of the United States House of Representatives to file ethics charges against Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM).

I’m calling you to action, my friends. It looks like we are going to have to FORCE someone to file the ethics complaint against Wilson. That someone, me thinks, is Rep. Rahm Emanuel.

In 2005 I wrote a piece about Meghan L. O'Sullivan, but never posted the thing because it was speculative. There was something very strange about this former model's elevation, for no very obvious reason, to Special Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite aside from MLO's minimal qualifications, her published views about foreign policy should have been anathema to Bush. In fact, some neocons loathed her.

Even more oddly, after joining the Bush administration O'Sullivan transformed herself into a true-believer. I'd begun investigating her in the first place when I stumbled across some of her gushing comments about Bush's Iraq policies.

How had a Brookings neolib infiltrated this White House, and why had she become an abject Bush-bot? I had my suspicions, but I chose not to indulge them in 2005.

Now, just as the WH needs every bit of Iraq-hype it can muster for a "fight is as noble as any our nation has undertaken", we learn that MLO is leaving the administration without any job lined up. It's time to ask some probing questions about her rise and fall.

In its Massachusetts vs. EPA ruling issued yesterday, the Supreme Court found that the Clean Air Act does, in fact authorize EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. (For background on the case, see Justin Pidot’s post on Gristmill.) The ruling states:

While the Congresses that drafted §202(a)(1) might not have appreciated the possibility that burning fossil fuels could lead to global warming, they did understand that without regulatory flexibility, changing circumstances and scientific developments would soon render the Clean Air Act obsolete. The broad language of §202(a)(1) reflects an intentional effort to confer forestall such obsolescence.

The majority opinion (PDF), authored by Justice Stevens, conveyed that the five justices were unimpressed by the administration’s excuses for why EPA shouldn’t be regulating these emissions (or why the court shouldn’t be deciding whether it could). Many of those, it happens, are the same excuses the administration keeps trotting out to defend its inaction on climate change as a whole (emphasis added in all):

The National Taxpayer Advocate's Office has been in the news lately with reports that she is doing the People's work. Just a few months Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen released her 2006 Annual Report to Congress, and it was full of important revelations. Good for her.

But she can't do it alone. The National Taxpayer Office is assisted by the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (TAP). They are now taking applications for new panel members.

The NTEU has a nice site up with information about the costs of our government by contractors. You can find it here.

IAP Worldwide Continues its Record of Failure - With Your Tax Returns

Got your attention? Well, it's all true. Throughout March, in story after story unbossed writers revealed the role private contractor IAP played in the horrible conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. [Those stories can be found using the unbossed site search box or scrolling through the unbossed March archive.]

One story revealed that IAP had also been failing to meet the requirements of its contracts to handle taxpayer data. Yes, your private information in the hands of the guys who messed up Walter Reed. You'd never know that IAP has been falling down on this new contract to read IAP's press releases though. Obviously their media guys are really good.

My friend Milo sent me this story from New Hampshire, which was published in today's Keene Sentinel. Of all places to allow Fox News to interfere in a presidential candidates' debate, NH is possibly the worst. Just when you thought Democrats had finally wised up to the game-playing by all these extremists, you discover that there are new depths of stupidity to be plumbed.

State Democratic leaders agreed on Saturday to allow Fox News to host their Sept. 12 presidential candidates' debate at Norway Hill School in Hancock, said the school's director David Carney. Negotiations broke off in February after party activists protested the draft agreement, which would have given Fox exclusive rights to broadcast the debate. Fox later made several key concessions demanded by party leaders. The cable news company agreed to include at least one reporter from National Public Radio among the questioners. A Fox spokesman said Saturday that Cokie Roberts had agreed to participate.

The National Right to Work Committee is best known for its hard hitting, pull-out-all-the-stops anti-union work. In fact, in its half-century of existence, it has never once supported any legislation that would actually help any worker find work, keep work, or get decent work.

That is a record almost unparalleled in our nation's history. Now that is about to change. You heard it here first.