Obama Tally: Day 5 - State's Rights?

President Obama grabbed the nytimes.com headline today by revealing that tomorrow he will direct regulators to allow states to set their own automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards. Technically, this means he's restricting the power of the federal government on this issue. Good news for small government conservatives, right?

Wrong. This is a big win for the environmentalists. The effect is that California will be able to set high standards, forcing auto manufacturers to meet those standards if they want to do business in California (which they do).This effectively gives California control over the nations emissions and efficiency standards. A definite win for Obama's promise to make the environment a major issue of his administration

Also today, Obama's VP, Joe Biden, went on Face the Nation to talk tough on Afghanistan and predict increased U.S. casualties. I'll call this a win, as it ups the Obama's war-on-terror-toughness credibility, and makes good on his promise to take Afghanistan seriously. Biden, being Biden, had to point out the bad side of war (death), but I think people kinda could have figured that out on their own.

In other news, lobbyists can still be slimey, even in the Obama era.

And yes, I know there were lots of stories about Obama's economic stimulus plan, but I don't think any of them count as news. When something actually happens, I'll add it to the list.

Check out the running tally here.

UPDATE 1/26/09: Commenter JLD (in the most polite way I've ever seen on an AOL site) accuses me of being ideologically biased when I decide what gets a positive check and what gets a negative. I'm probably going to have to explain this a lot as long as I maintain this list, so I might as well get used to it. The + and - rankings are not based upon my own ideology, but rather whether I believe a news story represents a step forward or backward for the Obama Administration's policies. I'm not advocating or detracting these policies in this list. You can see a full explanation of the purpose of this list here. Polling readers, as JLD suggests, is certainly a good idea, and many sites, including ours, do that. However, this list is about something different.

Day	Event	+	-	=
5	Obama Announces Plan for States to Set own Automobile Standards	x
5	Lobbyests Can Skirt Obama's No Earmark Policy		x
5	Biden talks tough on Afghanistan	x