I was listening on the radio to Bush's press conference this morning. Fortunately, my listening got interrupted by a phone call. But before that blessed phone call came and saved me from the ignoramus, I heard him respond to a question about global warming. The questioner asked why his EPA chief had ruled that California and other states could not adopt more stringent standards than the federal government for controlling greenhouse gasses.

Bush, who as a Republican, should be for "state's rights" (he is when it is politically convenient, like overturning Roe v. Wade, a typically republican trait), gave a rather unusual answer - he said that addressing global warming required a "national strategy." We can't a bunch of these renegade states running around and doing more than the federal government. That just wouldn't work! What a bunch of BS. Why can't he just say that he wants to protect all his big industry buddies from having to make meaningful changes in how they operate? We all know that is what he is really saying and doing.

But nooooo, he said he had a NATIONAL strategy for addressing global warming. He even said that he had told Al Gore in their recent meeting about their strategy. (Can you believe he actually had the nerve to say Gore's name?) Then he laid out the strategy. It had three basic parts.

Part one, Bush said, is the energy bill that Congress just passed and he signed. He said that the bill required cars to get "35 miles per hour." Um, I guess he meant miles per gallon. What he didn't say is that the requirement doesn't kick in for another 12 years. Sure, we got time to wait, right? And is a standard that goes from 25 miles per gallon to 35 any kind of real change? Hah! If we as a nation couldn't do at least 35 in a year or two, and 100 or 200 miles per gallon by 2020, then what kind of technological giant are we? Not much of one, I guess.

Part two, Bush said, is that we need to start building more nuke plants. Nuke energy is clean, he said - good for global warming. Shows he has no concept of how many greenhouse gasses are emitted during the mining, processing, and disposal of nuclear materials. He must not know how many billions of dollars U.S. taxpayers are paying for "cleaning up" (and pretty ineffectively for the most part) all of the contamination and illness caused by nuclear processing and energy. Of, if he does know, which he should as president, he is just lying, at which he seems to be pretty good. Nuclear energy is not an answer to global warming.

Part three, he said, was "clean" coal. What is that? The concept of clean coal is a oxymoron. It just isn't possible to have clean coal, especially when you are referring to CO2 releases. Coal is one of the most concentrated forms of stored carbon in the ground, and it it virtually impossible to dig it up, haul it and burn it without some if not a lot of that carbon ending up in the air.

What this comes down to is that Bush is telling the American people that we don't have to worry about changing the way we live at all, but that we will be fighting global warming. He doesn't want to tell people that they have to really make serious changes in lifestyle because that will hurt the big corporations that are getting rich off the consumerism that drives the global warming economy. But the fact is that we have big changes ahead as a society if we are going to sustain our nation and other nations. If we don't, then it isn't going to be pretty.

If the American people believe Bush after all of his mistakes then I guess overall, as a nation, we get what we have coming. But he is, once again, lying to the American people. He has NO strategy to combat global warming. He is a shrill for the status quo, and for big business, that doesn't want changes. But, if the people allow this kind of deception and out and out lying by our number one executive to go on repeatedly without any accountability, then we are fools. What is it that Bush said? " Fool me once????........."

A spokesperson for California was quoted on NPR this morning as saying that the state will sue and sue and sue the federal government until they get the right to set their own standards. With former presidential candidate Jerry Brown in the California Attorney General's office, I can believe that. Go Jerry go! Hopefully the judicial branch is independent enough to understand the importance of these issues. I still have some respect for the judicial branch, but the laws for suing the government are horrible and unfair. It just shows how bad the government is when they lose lawsuits.

I can't wait to hear what all the other big shot republicans have to say about state's rights after this one? Of course, the republicans have become the biggest hypocrites on the political mainstage. They preach "family values" and "morality," but they sleep around, funnel money to their cronies, lie, make war, and all kinds of "immoral" acts (according to their own definitions.) They decry "illegal" immigration, but they use "illegal" immigrants to do jobs they don't want to do. I just hope that the people can see through all of this and get rid of these kind of characters from our government. They are dragging our nation toward disaster on a number of fronts.

Oh why oh why was the first thing Pelosi did as speaker of the house to take impeachment of the president and vice president off the table? What was she thinking?