Thirty years from now, what will be the Bush administration’s most enduring legacy? The Iraq War? Post 9/11 detainee interrogation methods? My guess is that it will be the failure to issue one single, measly rule policing greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and R. Jeffrey Smith give a must-read synopsis of what is now known about the administration’s global warming stalling. Their narrative begins 15 months ago when the Supreme Court ruled, in Massachusetts v. EPA, that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate greenhouse gases if they are found to cause public endangerment.

The EPA in December found that — surprise, surprise — greenhouse gases are economically disastrous, will significantly alter the natural world and are already causing changes in weather patterns. But the White House simply ignored this report. Consequently, the EPA will likely announce today that they will re-open the comment period as to whether there’s a public endangerment that merits regulation.

It appears from the Post’s account that the focus isn’t on a certain administration official — say, Dick Cheney or Susan Dudley, regulatory affairs director for the Office of Management and Budget — who brought us to this stage. Instead, numerous officials and career employees have either distorted the global warming facts or not done enough to challenge the distorters.

Hopefully one day we’ll know the full story and won’t be in Siberia when we’re reading it.-MB

Did the Justice Dept. systematically turn its back on the sex trafficking of women and girls and the abuse of prostitutes by their pimps? That’s what John R. Miller, a former State Dept. official, alleges in a scathing New York Times op-ed.

Miller claims that the State Dept. and President Bush himself strongly supported a comprehensive anti-human trafficking law to crack down on the transportation and exploitation of what he calls sex slaves. But the Justice Dept. decided that its federal resources could be better spent and rejected the legislation.

Besides unloading on his former bureaucratic rivals, Miller makes a compelling case that many prostitutes are, in fact, practically slaves. These are not adults doing their profession of choice, but kids:  the average prostitute starts work at age 14.-MB

The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach reports that the United States Dept. of Agriculture is considering whether to plow 1.2 million acres of land previously set aside for conservation. Currently farmers are getting paid not to harvest this land in the name of nature and wildlife. But with food prices skyrocketing and ethanol all the rage, the demand for land to grow corn has rarely been higher.

It puts Agricultural Secretary Ed Schafer in quite a spot. Often political appointees can run out the clock with only a few months left to go in an administration. But Schafer must make a decision that will affect the food supply chain, the nation’s soil and animal life, and hundreds of farmers.-MB