The Los Angeles Times has a nice piece out today showing that EPA Chief Johnson overruled virtually his entire staff in rejecting California’s bid to regulate Greenhouse emissions.

The ruling, the Times points out, came just days after Dick Cheney met with executives from the auto industry:

“California met every criteria on the merits” one top staffer told the Times. “The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers.”

Sign up here.

Word is Tom Tancredo is dropping out of the GOP race. He’s certainly done his job.

He and Obama declared their candidacies on the same day. And I wrote at the time that Tancredo might have a bigger impact on the 2008 race. I’m not sure I’m wrong. He’s dragged his party into a nativist stance that could turn the Southwest Blue, and catapult any Democrat into office.

From my original Tancredo post:

…Which brings us to Tancredo. The anti-immigrant zealot has done more than any Republican since California Governor Pete Wilson to undermine his party’s prospects with Latino Americans. His populist xenophobia has been so damaging to the GOP’s outreach to the fastest growing ethnic voting bloc in the country that Karl Rove once furiously warned Tancredo never again to “darken the door” of the White House.

Tancredo’s calls to wall off the Mexican border and deport all undocumented workers play well to a significant portion of the Republican base, and his presence in the campaign will make it difficult for other GOP contenders to stake out a more reasonable stance. John McCain has been already been backed into this declaration on the border: “I think the fence is least effective,” he told Vanity Fair, “But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.”

The longer Tancredo stays in the race and the further to the nativist right he pulls the other GOP hopefuls on immigration, the greater the boon to Democrats in vital swing states like Florida, New Mexico, and Nevada.

¡Viva Tancredo!

Lying does have consequences, apparently.

I gotta give the Huckster credit.

When’s the last time we saw a member of the religious right who was fluent enough in the touchstones of the 60’s left to pull off a one-liner like this:
“I will confess this: If you play the spot backwards it says, ‘Paul is dead. Paul is dead.’”

Seriously. Here he is with a vote-for-me-and-baby-Jesus ad — a spot that has even religious conservatives with their noses out of joint — and Huckabee defuses the tension he’s created with a joke about the White Album?

As if to say, how much of a Jesus freak can I be if I also know how to play “Jesus is Just Alright”?

On a purely political note, whatever you think of the man, his team is doing an all-time great job of generating earned media from its ads. Between this and that Chuck Norris spot, I can’t think of anybody else whose ads even come close to this level of meta analysis and free Internet life.

UPDATE: It didn’t even occur to me in my post midnight blogging that the Paul in question is probably Ron Paul — who yesterday suggested Huckabee was a fascist — not Paul McCartney. Forget double entendre, it’s like a triple-backflip innuendo. Damn… I mean, darn, he’s good.