red states rule
09-04-2011, 05:11 AM
The libs over at the Daily Beast seem to be losing their love of the Bamster
More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/02/obama-halts-epa-regulation-smog-standards_n_946557.html) on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report (http://www.debatepolicy.com/cheats/2011/09/02/august-jobs-report.html) from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech (http://www.debatepolicy.com/articles/2011/08/31/barack-obama-still-acting-like-a-wimp-refusing-to-fight-for-jobs.html) by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term.
The smog decision (http://www.debatepolicy.com/cheats/2011/09/02/obama-halts-clean-air-rules.html) is a real low. The story behind this includes the fact that, as Brad Plumer reports (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/did-the-white-house-double-cross-enviros-on-the-smog-rule/2011/09/02/gIQAWnZ7wJ_blog.html) environmental groups were going to file a lawsuit in 2009 about Bush-era ozone rules, and the Obama administration told them, in effect, “Wait, don’t hassle us with a lawsuit, we’re going to propose stricter rules soon.” So the stricter rules were proposed, and the White House has now said, “Sorry, changed our mind.”
We can’t calculate yet how this will reverberate through the environmental world, but we can imagine. This is the kind of thing that sticks with people. A promise was made and broken. And you know how partisans say sometimes in anger that we’d have been better off with the other guy? They say it for effect and don’t actually mean it. But in this case, it’s literally true. Bush-proposed standards in 2008 were tougher than the 1997 standards under which companies will now operate. I doubt environmentalists will forget this one.
And not just environmentalists. Even the Center for American Progress—the leading Democratic think-tank, an organization that is very, very close to the administration—issued a statement criticizing this decision (apologies—it was emailed to me, but without a link). That may be a first for CAP, which called the decision “deeply disappointing” and said it “grants an item on Big Oil’s wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm.” And the timing of it could not be worse, coming at the end of a week that included a stupid unforced error (the speech fracas) and leaks indicating a set of small-bore proposals to be offered next week.
On the jobs front, as Matt Yglesias points out (http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/02/310721/the-conservative-recovery-teeters-into-recession/), things are going exactly according to Republican plan, insofar as massive public-sector layoffs every single month are helping to depress overall jobs numbers. These layoffs are of course the direct result of budget cuts—reductions in federal aid to states in various programs that have come under the knife since the spring. The deals Obama has made with the Republicans have therefore contributed to the jobs crisis. The Republicans of course know this and surely have a chuckle about it in private. Obama makes videos bragging about the single biggest budget cut in history.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/02/barack-obama-a-president-adrift-after-jobs-report-and-epa-decision.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+(The +Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles)
More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/02/obama-halts-epa-regulation-smog-standards_n_946557.html) on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report (http://www.debatepolicy.com/cheats/2011/09/02/august-jobs-report.html) from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech (http://www.debatepolicy.com/articles/2011/08/31/barack-obama-still-acting-like-a-wimp-refusing-to-fight-for-jobs.html) by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term.
The smog decision (http://www.debatepolicy.com/cheats/2011/09/02/obama-halts-clean-air-rules.html) is a real low. The story behind this includes the fact that, as Brad Plumer reports (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/did-the-white-house-double-cross-enviros-on-the-smog-rule/2011/09/02/gIQAWnZ7wJ_blog.html) environmental groups were going to file a lawsuit in 2009 about Bush-era ozone rules, and the Obama administration told them, in effect, “Wait, don’t hassle us with a lawsuit, we’re going to propose stricter rules soon.” So the stricter rules were proposed, and the White House has now said, “Sorry, changed our mind.”
We can’t calculate yet how this will reverberate through the environmental world, but we can imagine. This is the kind of thing that sticks with people. A promise was made and broken. And you know how partisans say sometimes in anger that we’d have been better off with the other guy? They say it for effect and don’t actually mean it. But in this case, it’s literally true. Bush-proposed standards in 2008 were tougher than the 1997 standards under which companies will now operate. I doubt environmentalists will forget this one.
And not just environmentalists. Even the Center for American Progress—the leading Democratic think-tank, an organization that is very, very close to the administration—issued a statement criticizing this decision (apologies—it was emailed to me, but without a link). That may be a first for CAP, which called the decision “deeply disappointing” and said it “grants an item on Big Oil’s wish list at the expense of the health of children, seniors and the infirm.” And the timing of it could not be worse, coming at the end of a week that included a stupid unforced error (the speech fracas) and leaks indicating a set of small-bore proposals to be offered next week.
On the jobs front, as Matt Yglesias points out (http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/02/310721/the-conservative-recovery-teeters-into-recession/), things are going exactly according to Republican plan, insofar as massive public-sector layoffs every single month are helping to depress overall jobs numbers. These layoffs are of course the direct result of budget cuts—reductions in federal aid to states in various programs that have come under the knife since the spring. The deals Obama has made with the Republicans have therefore contributed to the jobs crisis. The Republicans of course know this and surely have a chuckle about it in private. Obama makes videos bragging about the single biggest budget cut in history.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/02/barack-obama-a-president-adrift-after-jobs-report-and-epa-decision.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+(The +Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles)