In a recent video for his Current TV network, former Vice President Al Gore offers “a forceful endorsement” of same-sex marriage, saying that “gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women — to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage.” “Shouldn’t we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to ones partner regardless of sexual orientation?” added Gore. Watch it:

UPDATE: Evan Wolfson, founder of Freedom to Marry, praises Gore for getting “it right” and showing “what leadership really means.”

In December, EPA administration Stephen Johnson rejected “California’s long-standing request for a waiver from federal law to be able to implement its own landmark regulations to slash greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.”

According to new documents released today by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Johnson, a political appointee, overruled his own staff, who in October recommended that California receive the waiver. According to the case laid out in briefing slides, EPA staff believed that legally, the agency could not deny California’s waiver:

SLIDE – “If We Grant . . .”

· “Likely suit by manufacturers”
· “EPA is almost certain to win such a suit”
· “Grant will likely allow CA standards to go into effect . . . ”
· “Grant would be generally consistent with federal GHG rule”

SLIDE – “If We Deny . . .”

· “Almost certain lawsuit by California”
· “EPA likely to lose suit”

Substantively, the staff also argued in this October presentation that California needed the waiver in order to mitigate the effects of climate change:

California continues to have compelling and extraordinary conditions in general (geography, climatic, human and motor vehicle populations – many such conditions are vulnerable to climate change conditions) as confirmed by several recent EPA decisions.

Earlier this month, California and 15 other states sued the EPA over its refusal to allow them to set their own tougher vehicle-emissions standards. Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, California has regularly been allowed to set its own standards and has emerged as a “national leader in developing air quality protections.”

Johnson’s decision to overrule his staff follows a trend by President Bush’s political appointees to put politics over science. In 2003, for example, FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford decided to block over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill, despite recommendations by the agency’s scientists. Career professionals at the Justice Department who advised rejecting Georgia’s discriminatory voter ID law were also overruled by the department’s political appointees.

(HT: The Crypt)

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House Democrats once again postpone a vote on holding Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers in contempt of congress for refusing to testify in the US Attorneys matter. There’s some kind of nominal rationale for this, but an anonymous “top Democratic insider” says:

When we have the votes, we’ll go ahead with this. Right now, the votes are just not there.

Basically, we seem to have some fraidy-cat Dems out there who for some reason don’t think picking a fight with the White House over their gross distortions of the rule of law would be a smart idea and then we have a weak leadership that for some reason doesn’t want to bring them into line.

The Army is currently considering a “proposal to cut soldiers’ battlefield tours from 15 months to 12 months beginning in August, an effort to reduce the stress on a force battered by more than six years at war. … Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered the move to 15-month deployments about a year ago, as the Pentagon struggled to fight wars on two fronts.”

I missed Holly Yeager’s January 11 column on the thin “bench” of potential female presidential candidates behind Hillary Clinton, but it’s still all true two weeks later and worth reading. I found it, meanwhile, while reading this excellent post by Mark Schmitt (aka Holly Yeager’s husband) taking note of the incredible run of bad luck that struck down a whole string of promising 1970s-vintage New York political women.