Last month I helped you decipher what progress does and doesn’t mean for executive branch nominations being considered in the Senate. I can now add that President Obama’s executive branch nominations are generally lagging behind President Bush’s when it comes to the Executive Calendar (list of all treaties and nominations that are ready to be taken up on the Senate floor).

I was canvassing in Louisiana in favor of the restoration of the Gulf Coast.  While doing so, I encountered certain ordinances or other restrictive regulations that restrict access to housing in certain areas, like closed subdivisions or limit access at certain times.  I believe that having an executive government in place at the federal level that tries so hard to keep information from its citizens, allowing these type of restrictions that negatively impact canvassers's ability to disseminate information to the public is very bad.  Since it seems to be local government bodies and public officials that have either put these restrictions into place directly or else have allowed them to be adopted, we need to take a closer look to see if these actions run afoul of the First Amendment.

It seems that the Bush Administration has decided that executive branch agencies have to behave like the three monkeys: Speak no evil, see no evil, and hear no evil. According to articles in today’s Washington Post and the New York Times newspapers, last October, 2007, members of Vice-President’s Dick Cheney staff edited out six pages of proposed Congressional testimony of Julie L.Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”)where the CDC was going to point out that global warming caused by greenhouse gases emitted from fossil fuels are a serious threat to public health.