Word: midnighters
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President Barack Obama has promised change for America, but when it comes to environmental regulations, he's still in the grip of yesterday. In his last few months in office, former President George W. Bush's Administration pushed through over 150 "midnight regulations," many of them weakening existing environmental protections. Although Obama is now in charge, most of Bush's new rules are on the books, and changing them will take time and effort from an already burdened White House. "The Obama Administration will be saddled with reversing harmful Bush rules at the same time that Obama wants to enact...
...outgoing Administration. But it also had a tactical purpose: new regulations require 30 to 60 days from their official publication in the Federal Register to take effect. (Regulations that have an "insignificant" economic effect - less than $100 million - need 30 days; bigger rules need 60.) By finalizing midnight regulations at the beginning of November, the Bush Administration ensured that most of the rules would be in effect before Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20 - in some cases, just before. (See the top 10 green ideas...
Despite the Bush Administration's deserved reputation for punctuality, not every new midnight regulation was finalized in time, and the Obama White House acted quickly to slow what it could. In the Administration's first full day in office, White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel sent out a memo ordering a halt to all federal regulations not yet finalized until the new team could review them. For the environment, that meant Obama was able to save the gray wolf from being removed from the Endangered Species Act and block a pair of new air-quality rules, including one that...
...overturn them. The Administration could also seek to withhold funding from certain regulations. Last, as part of the Congressional Review Act, which went into force in 1996, the White House can ask Congress to vote down any rule finalized after a certain date, which would include all the midnight regulations. But that law has been used successfully only once since it was enacted, and exercising it would take valuable energy away from Obama's legislative agenda...
...provide more detail of plot and dialogue, but the visual palette was way too dark for me to take legible notes, and frankly, though I saw it at a midnight screening hours ago, the movie just wasn't that memorable. Suffice to say that there's much bounding about by furry, blurry CGI werewolves, quite a few decapitations and a poignant but nifty crisping of one of the vampires when exposed to sunlight. Being set in an earlier day (night), Lycans renounces the whizzing Matrix-like bullets of the first two movies for swords and a heavy-metal...