A reminder that Still President Bush can still cause damage, even when he's busy groping volleyball players at the Olympics:
Bush to Relax Protected Species Rule
MSNBC staff and news service reports
updated 5:53 p.m. ET, Mon., Aug. 11, 2008
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Monday said it plans to let federal agencies decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants.
The proposal, which does not require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews that government scientists have been performing for 35 years. Developers welcomed the plan, while environmentalists derided it.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said late Monday the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival.
Let me translate that last paragraph from "conservativese": "These rules which protect endangered species must not be allowed to actually protect any endangered species."
We thought it was a sort of victory that the Government acknowledged polar bears are being jeopardized by climate change, but instead, that fact becomes the impetus to merely change the rules rather than try and protect the bears.
Kudos for MSNBC for writing a pretty good article that is accurate in showing the gaping mendacity of the conservative position here. Also, they ran a very smart photo to bring it home:
Andrew Vaughan / AP
Honestly, I'm only surprised this rule has survived this long, but I guess the dog-days of his last summer are the best time for Bush to do this. McCain can criticize it to distance himself from Bush on an issue the conservative movement doesn't care much about (hell, some of the Christian right actually approve of protecting the environment), meanwhile a whole big backlog of calamitous developments can be approved by the newly ensconced Bush loyalist career civil service plants, and even if Obama wins and reinstates this rule, the projects will have broken ground and Obama will be "risking jobs" to stop them.
File this under Bush land mines for Obama to step on. But given the bald eagle angle, the ads do write themselves.
