Bush v. Science

"Dr. BRANSBY: Well, our Senator Sessions from Alabama.

Block later explained: "Jeff Sessions's press secretary told us the Alabama Senator had indeed sung the praises of switch grass last Friday in a meeting with Al Hubbard, an economic advisor to the president."

Here's more information , including pictures, about switch grass.

Jonathan Guthrie writes in the Financial Times: "Switchgrass is the botanical marvel Mr Bush has dragged from obscurity to propose as a source of bioethanol powering a US free from extortion by oil sheikhs and threats from mullahs. Has the Kyoto protocol refusenik and doubter of global warming suddenly gone a funny shade of green? Perhaps, but in a distinctively Republican way.

"If switchgrass was a person not a plant, it would drive a truck with an National Rifle Association bumper sticker and whitetail buck strapped across the hood. Panicum virgatum is a tall-growing, clumping grass, whose flower-heads once undulated like an inland sea across vast expanses of prairie. It grows where honest, God-fearing folks live, far from coastal Democratic enclaves."

Energy Policy Watch

Ronald Brownstein writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Let's say the energy bills in your house are too high. One response might be to start saving for a new, more efficient house you could afford in 10 or 20 years.

"Or you could replace the windows and improve the insulation today.

"President Bush, in the energy plan he announced in his State of the Union speech last week, chose the first strategy. Bush promised more federal energy research, primarily into technologies that might reduce America's fossil fuel dependence years from now. But he rejected the common-sense measures that could bring immediate improvements and maximize the long-term benefits of the new research."

Domestic Spying Watch

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales opened up his day of Senate testimony on domestic spying with a broadside against the very idea of talking about it.

From his prepared statement : "Our enemy is listening. And I cannot help but wonder if they aren't shaking their heads in amazement at the thought that anyone would imperil such a sensitive program by leaking its existence in the first place -- and smiling at the prospect that we might now disclose even more or perhaps even unilaterally disarm ourselves of a key tool in the war on terror."

Barton Gellman, Dafna Linzer and Carol D. Leonnig wrote in Sunday's Washington Post: "Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use. . . .

"The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged 'reasonable' if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained."