With the help of Tom Tomorrow, George W. Bush, and an old scorecard we found lying around, we try to sort out the Village players

[Don't forget to click to enlarge]

by Ken

(1) ONE WAY TO TELL BUSH AND OBAMA APART:
ONE ONLY TRIED TO CARVE UP SOCIAL SECURITY

Of course we're jumping ahead a bit on the assumption that the current president gets what it seems pretty clear he's wanted all along. Why else would he have appointed a "deficit reduction" commission that could have been blessed by deficit hawks' deficit hawk Pete Peterson? After all, from what's been leaked so far (by, or on behalf of, the co-chairs, yet!), despite the claims of having searched everywhere for possible ways to reduce the deficit, all the solutions seem to come from the playbook of the Deficit-Hawk Right, while all sorts of other possible savings seem rather grandly to have been ignored.

From our friend Ian Welsh's blog:

Bush would have endorsed Obama if asked

From the FT:

The venue was the Oval Office. A group of British dignitaries, including Gordon Brown, were paying a visit. It was at the height of the 2008 presidential election campaign, not long after Bush publicly endorsed John McCain as his successor . . . Trying to be even-handed and polite, the Brits said something diplomatic about McCain’s campaign, expecting Bush to express some warm words of support for the Republican candidate . . . "I probably won’t even vote for the guy," Bush told the group, according to two people present. "I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me.”

And why not, it’s not hyperbole at all to say that Obama is Bush’s third term. He has embraced Bush’s wars, Bush’s approach to executive power, Bush’s civil liberties doctrines and Bush’s economic doctrines. The differences exist, but they are not significant. In almost every way that matters, Obama took Bush’s constitutional order and institutionalized it, giving it a bipartisan imprimatur.

(2) JUST TO SHOW HOW TOUGH IT CAN BE TO TELL
THE VILLAGE PLAYERS WITHOUT A SCORECARD . . .

From Al Kamen's Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

Peer review

Sometimes things can change at warp speed in this town.

Barely six weeks ago, on Sept. 29, the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility's news release headline was "Interior Makes Big Stride on Scientific Integrity."

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's new order banning political appointees from monkeying with scientific analyses -- something said to have occurred with some frequency in the previous administration -- "could be transformative," PEER noted.

PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch cautioned that, while the order was a "welcome development," it would be prudent to wait for rules to be written and enforced.

Good advice. An e-mail last week from the Alaska regional office of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE, the new name for the infamous Minerals Management Service of gulf-oil-spill fame) told employees that Director Michael Bromwhich had a new policy: "All outside/public presentations, be they speeches, PowerPoints, technical or other, etc., must be forwarded to [the headquarters] Office of Public Affairs for approval."

The change, the e-mail explained, was that "in the past...regional directors could approve technical papers; papers related to policy, sensitive topics, or national in scope had to be forwarded" to headquarters. "Now all papers must go to HQ." And don't forget to use Form 1982 -- "Request for Approval of Official Expression by Oral Presentation." (Bureaucrats and the English language are mortal enemies.)

Ruch fired off a protest letter to Salazar blasting the "chilling effect" he said the scrubbing policy would have on agency scientists.

In addition, he noted that another Interior agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service, has "completely eliminated" such prior reviews of scientific work. Having public affairs flacks review scientific work smacked of political control.

A BOEMRE spokesman said that Ruch was being "reckless, irresponsible and misguided," Greenwire reported, and that the policy is not really new and is only intended to make announcements more coordinated and coherent, not to censor.

Well, as Ronald Reagan always said, "trust but verify."

#