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Lee Greenwood's main claim to fame is writing and singing the hit patriotic hymn "God Bless the U.S.A." Soon Greenwood's blessing will matter on the American arts scene -- at least the part interested in tapping into federal largess via grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate, the Nashville-based country singer is scheduled to be sworn in Nov. 17 as one of the 14 regular members of the National Council on the Arts. Council members advise the NEA chairman, and their portfolio includes reviewing and making recommendations on applications for grants from the $145-million-a-year federal agency. Greenwood will serve a six-year term.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The White House on Friday defended its bid to push through a series of new rules that could relax federal regulations on the economy and the environment in the final days of President George W. Bush's term.
According to government watchdog group OMB Watch, the Bush administration is currently working on dozens of regulations that would loosen rules on emissions of pollutants, mining exploration and commercial fishing, and could have a lasting impact for years to come.
"It is impressive in how many different issues this sort of campaign covers," OMB Watch's Matthew Madia told reporters.
"It's environmental regulations, it's workers' safety, it's reproductive health, it's traffic safety, but the common theme is in a lot a cases the Bush administration is trying to remove restrictions on business and allow them to operate without any kind of government oversight," said Madia, a regulatory expert.
If the Bush administration succeeds, the regulations could prove difficult for the next administration, which will enter the White House on January 20, to undo without lengthy hearings and regulatory proceedings.
"It's intended to make sure that the kind of ideology and priorities that the Bush administration believes in are affecting the country for many years," said Madia.
US media said that up to 90 new regulations may be in the works.
"At least nine of them are considered 'economically significant' because they impose costs or promote societal benefits that exceed 100 million dollars annually," the Washington Post said.
Some of the proposed regulations include new standards on how to prevent and manage oil spills as well as rules on family and medical leave for government employees.
White House spokesman Tony Fratto defended the move, pointing to the end of the Bill Clinton administration in 2001 when he said the Democrat had issued a more than 50 percent increase in regulations.
"We are not doing that in this administration," Fratto said.
"The number of regulations under review has remained fairly constant. There is no great increase in the number of regulations that we are reviewing right now. If you go back six months or 12 months or 18 months the numbers stayed pretty much steady."
Fratto also pointed out that not all the regulations would be viewed positively by business and industry.
"Some of the regulations that are coming through I think are not, maybe not, particularly welcome by members of the business community."
He said Bush's chief of staff Josh Bolten had earlier this year issued a memo to agency and department heads in how to deal with regulations and included a timetable.
"What the chief of staff wanted to avoid was this very charge that we would be trying to, in the dark of night, in the last days of the administration, be rushing regulations into place ahead of the incoming, next administration."
According to reports, one of the rules would remove requirements that some fisheries file environmental impact statements and give review responsibility to regional councils made up mainly of groups with fishing interests.
Another rule, "being pursued over some opposition within the Environmental Protection Agency, would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases," the Post reported.
"According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming."
Madia said some of the rules "have been in development for years in some cases but the reality is that they are going to rush to finalize a lot of them here, at the end."
"It is not unusual, every administration does it and there is obviously a natural tendency to finish what you have started," he added.
Yeah, they'll always do that. Just imagine what Obama's going to be doing as his parting gift in 2016. Gosh, he's just so liberal it'll be something like free pashminas and tax credits to all married lesbians with adopted children of two or more races living on organic hemp farms. Plz.
__________________ Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.
I escaped somehow. Let's go
actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter
yes, but bush was clever to do it early enough so that all of his last minute legislation can't be easily overturned. (the way he overturned clinton's).
The latest- to allow uranium mining on the Colorado River (the source of lots of water for the Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles areas). Right next to the Grand Canyon.
The changes seem minor: clarifications of regulations, revisions to rules, updated land-management proposals.
But some recent proposals from the Interior Department – many likely to be finalized in the waning months of the Bush administration and pushed through with a shortened comment period – are seen by critics as an assault on America’s environmental resources and an attempt to solidify industry-friendly policy.
The proposals include changes to the Endangered Species Act, new management plans for 11 million acres in Utah, an effort to revoke congressional committees’ emergency powers to protect public lands, and a rule change for mountaintop mining regulations.
The Interior Department says the changes are common-sense ones that balance the needs of conservation with those of national energy policy. Environmentalists counter that the actions represent the final efforts of an administration that has been hostile to the environment since Day 1.
“Overall, it certainly is consistent with the approach this administration has taken for the past eight years,” says Sharon Buccino, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s land program. “It’s one final push before they go out the door to really open up public resources for private and industry gain.”
Mr. Bush is not the first lame-duck president to change environmental rules. Bill Clinton, in the last few days of his presidency, pushed through regulations to protect vast areas of the West.
The proposals include the following:
• A change to the Endangered Species Act to disallow the ESA from being used to regulate global climate change even if a species, like the polar bear, is suffering as a result of it. The change also reduces the number of scientific reviews of projects performed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
• Six new resource management plans for 11 million acres of federal land in Utah that critics say would open more roads and trails, make nearly 9 million acres available for oil and gas development, and reduce the areas managed primarily for environmental value. Five of the plans were finished on Friday.
• A rule change eliminating one of the few regulations governing mountaintop mining, a common practice in Appalachia in which a mountain’s top is blown off to get access to the rich coal beds beneath. Currently, a largely ignored “buffer zone” rule bars mining companies from dumping debris within 100 feet of any stream. The new rule would require them to either avoid the buffer zone or show why that is not possible, and to minimize harming the streams “to the extent possible” if they must dump there.
• A proposal to remove an “emergency powers” provision that allows the Interior Department or two congressional committees to protect public lands. The rule gained prominence this summer when the House Natural Resources Committee declared 1 million acres next to the Grand Canyon off limits to uranium mining.
These proposals have been portrayed incorrectly, says Chris Paolino, a spokesman for the Interior Department.
The proposed changes to the ESA, Mr. Paolino says, would clarify the Interior secretary’s belief that the ESA is not the right mechanism for regulating climate change. “Science at this point cannot make the link between the specific greenhouse-gas emissions from, say, Kansas, and link it to the effect on a subset of polar bears or an individual polar bear in the Arctic region,” he says. As for the reduced number of federal scientific reviews of projects, he believes it will allow the Fish & Wildlife scientists to give more time to projects that are more likely to affect listed species.
Environmental groups counter that allowing different agencies to determine whether a project needs independent scientific review hasn’t worked in the past and could lead to a scattershot approach in which potential hazards to species are overlooked. “They won’t have good sense of the cumulative impacts if they’re not tracking projects across species and agencies,” says Noah Greenwald, science director for the Center for Biodiversity in Tucson, Ariz.
As for the ESA’s role in climate change, Mr. Greenwald argues that it provides a focus for assessing the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions. He notes that even in the past, when the ESA was used to regulate DDT because of its impact on the bald eagle, officials did not tie one use of DDT to the death of one particular eagle.
Some of the harshest criticism is reserved for the land-management proposals in Utah and the easing of restrictions on drilling and oil-shale exploration, in part because they would be difficult for a future administration to overturn.
“Defaulting to providing more and more routes for oil and gas and more land for oil and gas development effectively prohibits other uses of these lands,” says Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society. Encouraging oil-shale development and geothermal leasing, and creating new “energy corridors” in the West, could lead to an “industrialization of the landscape,” she adds.
The Bureau of Land Management, for its part, says most of the lands were already open to potential drilling and off-road vehicles. The new plans would get rid of some of the unrestricted vehicle use, they say, and put designated routes in play. “There seems to be a perception … that these plans would throw open vast new acreage to development and use,” says Don Ogaard, planning lead for Utah’s BLM. “The land is open to that use now.”
Soon Greenwood's blessing will matter on the American arts scene -- at least the part interested in tapping into federal largess via grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
OK, at the risk of being a big dickend here, isn't that part of the arts largely elitist bullshit that people like the idea of but wouldn't go to see unless you paid them and kicked the TV in the face?
Yeah, they'll always do that. Just imagine what Obama's going to be doing as his parting gift in 2016. Gosh, he's just so liberal it'll be something like free pashminas and tax credits to all married lesbians with adopted children of two or more races living on organic hemp farms. Plz.
You're just jealous because you don't live in The Land Of The Free.
Seriously though, is it actually a big deal? I know the rest of us immediately go into "meh" mode the second we know when we're going to be leaving our job, and if at all possible stock up a load of paid holiday so we can leave everyone in the lurch a couple of weeks early, but you'd kind of hope that the President of the United States would take his job a little more seriously than the average schmomo.
Seriously though, is it actually a big deal? I know the rest of us immediately go into "meh" mode the second we know when we're going to be leaving our job, and if at all possible stock up a load of paid holiday so we can leave everyone in the lurch a couple of weeks early, but you'd kind of hope that the President of the United States would take his job a little more seriously than the average schmomo.
Well, yeah, that's the problem. They want continued influence and they want a legacy - in the absence of a sudden complete change of heart, they want these things to be in the spirit of the way they governed.
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Well, yeah, that's the problem. They want continued influence and they want a legacy - in the absence of a sudden complete change of heart, they want these things to be in the spirit of the way they governed.
Unless you have some reason to think that Bush wouldn't ever have done this unless he was about to be 86'd from the White House, I don't see it as that at all. Seems like business as usual. Unless the country can do without having a president for a few months, why would Bush just stop working til Obama gets in?
Unless you have some reason to think that Bush wouldn't ever have done this unless he was about to be 86'd from the White House, I don't see it as that at all. Seems like business as usual. Unless the country can do without having a president for a few months, why would Bush just stop working til Obama gets in?
Traditionally these last minute things include stuff that they never could have gotten away with if they weren't on the way out. But, to be fair, most everything he's done for the last eight years bothers me.
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Do you think that the internets will get changed back to the internet once Bush is no longer president?
I have a feeling that will be his true legacy.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DoloresHaze
he was real you fucker, his name is fernando I fucked him once and gave me crabs. There.
Unless you have some reason to think that Bush wouldn't ever have done this unless he was about to be 86'd from the White House, I don't see it as that at all. Seems like business as usual. Unless the country can do without having a president for a few months, why would Bush just stop working til Obama gets in?
I would be all for having the president-elect take over within 2 weeks of the election (or as soon as he's picked his staff) if the current president's approval rating was below 35%.
I would be all for having the president-elect take over within 2 weeks of the election (or as soon as he's picked his staff) if the current president's approval rating was below 35%.
Ah well, that's tradition for you. Believe me, you guys have it relatively easy in that respect.
But no, I see what you're saying. I don't think I could bear to wait that long for all that awesome change that's going to happen.
lol @ myself for even thinking this for a minute.
they did their math wrong:
Quote:
Originally Posted by thisbytes
I would be all for having the president-elect take over within 2 weeks of the election (or as soon as he's picked his staff) if the current president's approval rating was below 35%.
seriously. it's the lowest they've ever seen in the history of doing these polls.
... The all-time low on the public's mood may have something to do with the poll's finding that President Bush is the most unpopular president since approval ratings were first sought more than six decades ago. Seventy-six percent of those questioned in the poll disapprove of how he is handling his job.
That's an all-time high in CNN polling and in Gallup polling dating back to World War II.
"No other president's disapproval rating has gone higher than 70 percent. Bush has managed to do that three times so far this year," Holland said. "That means that Bush is now more unpopular than Richard Nixon was when he resigned from office during Watergate with a 66 percent disapproval rating."
I'm waiting for the inevitable hostage situation when Bush refuses to let Obama into the White House. And when I say "inevitable" I mean "would be really funny".
Bush's parting gifts 
