Laws and rules are for the little people. Especially the ones without guns.

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

What do shooting sprees and massive oil rig blowouts have in common?

At FDL News, David Dayen covers an article on Elizabeth Warren in which she argues, correctly, that if the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been up and running years ago, much of the banking/mortgage fraud could/would have been prevented.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s something missing from the polite Ms. Warren’s telling.

Jasmine Farrier’s Congressional Ambivalence tackles a subject that is both classic and timely: delegation of policy choices to the President and the executive branch. Farrier analyzes delegation to the executive on military base closures, trade policy (“fast track”), and the “War on Terror”—the PATRIOT ACT, Iraq policy, Guantanamo, and surveillance wiretaps. She finds a recurring theme of ambivalence: expressions of reluctance before Congress cedes power, expressions of regret after the fact. But Farrier suggests that Congress nonetheless rarely reclaims power once it has been ceded to the executive, a point illustrated perfectly by the PATRIOT act.

I got a call yesterday from a telecommunications lobbyist who had an interesting and very plausible theory regarding the handling of the decision on net neutrality: What if Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, is simply running out the clock?

The New York Times turns over valuable op-ed space to a former Bush OMB official who uses it to obscure it was his and OMB’s job to oversee how effective Interior and Minerals Management Service (MMS) were in promoting and regulating offshore oil drilling.

During the era of deregulation that has so damaged this country environmentally and financially, as well as in all manner of legal precedents, has brought on disaster in the gulf. The disaster would be worse than we can imagine if nuclear contamination were so unleashed as oil has been. The precedent of unsafe operation that was certified and guaranteed by oil companies to be harmless should provide a huge incentive to insure the safety of our world by intensifying the effort to contain vastly more deadly nuclear waste.

I’ve seen people variously describe the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe as “Obama’s Katrina” or “Obama’s 9/11,” but neither of those entirely works for me as a parallel. True, the government was woefully unprepared and ineffectual in 2001 and 2005 too, but that was because Bush was the worst president ever, not because industry lobbyists crusaded to cripple FEMA and airport security. Bush’s incompetence left the door to tragedy wide open, and Katrina and al Qaeda breezed right through it.

The Obama administration continues the Republican practice of negotiating with corrupt business executives instead of locking them up. Negotiation encourages. Prosecution deters. If you want to be able to trust your hamburger, get a government that will lock up the people who make tainted meat.