Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy. In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities. This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/30/w...&en=9f1468dd91984d81&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Has any Prez signed more Directives that King George? or are his just a bit more over reaching? Rocket River
Thats just wonderful, because what we really need is to make the government even more beuracractic and bloated. Nice traditional GOP values, George.
Well that's not the direction I was looking at it, but yeah, good point! I guess it's true, Bush really is a RINO.
via TPMuckraker -- Hitler did this. He installed an officer in every agency to monitor party loyalty. It was called the Gestapo. Posted by: Jim http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002433.php
Basically he did it to keep track on the big bad EPA and OSHA who make life so difficult for poor business and special interests groups who only want to make money and not deal with pesky agencies that don't allow them to pollute the environment or force them to provide basic safe workplaces for workers in chemical plants. Great job. wow I'm really pissed about this actually. Is there anything Congress can do to take this power away from him? I can't imagine anyone wanting the President to have that much control. I certainly wouldn't want some liberal cinammon tea sipping President to have that much control. Checks and balances, Georgie. Checks and balances.
impeach? Seriously though, I'm surprised jr hasn't thought this through. You want executive oversight of corporations? Just wait until a democratic president is in office.
This is another in a long line of policy decisions that effectively move some of the market risk from corporations to average Americans and taxpayers. I'm actually surprised it took this long for something like this to get established. I really thought after Dan Quayle's "Competitiveness Council" that something would already be in place. Here's the whole article... You've got to love that quote by Rosen... placing political appointees in a position to rule on regulations after checking with the WH is "classic good government."
impeach the s.o.b. for starters. the whole administration is totally criminal, but i know it will never happen. if bush hasnt been impeached for what he has already done than really there isnt anything he could do that would make it happen. whats with the liberals and the cinammon tea? i thought they liked chamomile? id rather have a liberal president who drinks cinammon tea than a fake conservative president who ****s all over the constitution.
and the fuhrer grabs more power... "we dont need no stinkin' 4th amendment!" http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6154457.html FBI turns to broad new wiretap method By Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: January 30, 2007, 4:00 AM PT FBI turns to broad new wiretap method The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed. Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords. Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible. Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.) That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch. The technique came to light at the Search & Seizure in the Digital Age symposium held at Stanford University's law school on Friday. Ohm, who is now a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Downing, a CCIPS assistant deputy chief, discussed it during the symposium. In a telephone conversation afterward, Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents' default method for Internet surveillance. "You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment," he said. "If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don't throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact." "You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you're trying to monitor," he added. On Monday, a Justice Department representative would not immediately answer questions about this kind of surveillance technique. "What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets." When the FBI announced two years ago it had abandoned Carnivore, news reports said that the bureau would increasingly rely on Internet providers to conduct the surveillance and reimburse them for costs. While Carnivore was the subject of congressional scrutiny and outside audits, the FBI's current Internet eavesdropping techniques have received little attention. Carnivore apparently did not perform full-pipe recording. A technical report (PDF: "Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System") from December 2000 prepared for the Justice Department said that Carnivore "accumulates no data other than that which passes its filters" and that it saves packets "for later analysis only after they are positively linked by the filter settings to a target."
