Two Republican governors this morning accused the Environmental Protection Agency and the Bush administration of preventing states from tightening up tailpipe emissions standards in an attempt to combat global warming. Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Jodi Rell of Connecticut lit into the EPA on the op-ed pages of today's Washington Post, saying the agency has ignored the threat of global warming, disregarded a Supreme Court ruling that said the EPA can regulate greenhouse gas emissions and blocked states from enacting tougher measures to slow emissions.
The governors' op-ed piece comes in advance of EPA hearings this week on whether to grant California a waiver that would allow the state to deviate from federal standards. The governors say the EPA has refused to grant the waiver for 16 months and continuing to do so may provoke legal action.
And, since we're reading the op-eds this morning, we'll direct you to another piece by national intelligence director Mike McConnell who argues again for an "updated" (read: more expansive) Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to let the feds better collect info on terror suspects.
McConnell provides few specifics, aside from stating that computer memory has expanded rapidly since FISA went into effect in 1978.
"Today...you would be hard-pressed to find a computer with memory less than 512 megabytes," he writes. "The law simply has not kept pace with technology."
By McConnell's logic, because computer memory has expanded while cellular phones have shrunk to "the size of credit cards," we need to eliminate warrants for spying on terror suspects altogether. It feels like the national intelligence director left out a few connecting paragraphs in his argument. He does, however, talk about "credibility,"
"legitimacy," "oversight," and "civil and privacy rights." Don't you feel so much safer?
