How This White House Operates

One major difference: "[T]his kind of all-in-the-family mess would send Tony moping to his long-suffering shrink, whereas Cheney shows no inclination to deal with uncomfortable issues or face harsh realities."

Joe Sudbay writes on Americablog: "Ari Fleischer and Cathie Martin have re-confirmed that practically the entire Washington press corps had been leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative for partisan political reasons. This was back in 2003. Yet, that entire Washington press corps dutifully reported the repeated denials from the White House -- including those from Bush -- about the leak."

Bush's New Directive

Meanwhile, a two-week-old executive order makes it to the front page of the New York Times.

Robert Pear writes in the New York Times: "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. . . .

"Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said: 'The executive order allows the political staff at the White House to dictate decisions on health and safety issues, even if the government's own impartial experts disagree. This is a terrible way to govern, but great news for special interests.'"

And Cindy Skrzycki writes in her Washington Post column today: "On Jan. 18, when the headlines in the United States focused on the war in Iraq, the new Democratic Congress and actress Lindsay Lohan's alcohol problem, the Bush administration rewrote the book on federal regulation."

Here's that Jan. 18 executive order.

That same day, the budget watchdog group OMBWatch reported it as "a further threat to public protections from an administration committed to elevating special interests over public interests. It codifies regulatory delay, further removes agency discretion over legislative implementation, and centralizes control over the regulatory process into a small executive office. It substitutes free market criteria for the public values of health, safety, and environmental protections, and substitutes executive authority for legislative authority.

"We can only speculate as to why the President has issued these amendments at this time in his presidency. With Congress now in control of Democrats, it is unlikely that further anti-regulatory efforts will be supported or ignored by a compliant Congress. It is a surprising action to take in light of the Dudley nomination now pending before the Senate. It may be an admission by the administration that the nomination is not likely to succeed, and that the President has decided to advance the Dudley philosophy through the back door."

Why wasn't the White House press corps a little quicker on this story? I don't know.