It is Wednesday.  Here is a list of links.

• Arnold has hired his chiropractor, his dentist and now his nanny to various state boards.  Good thing this guy is nothing like George Bush or we would expect these people to be unqualified!

• The Supreme Court has now stepped into the battle between the Navy and environmentalists, ruling that the Navy can engage in sonar exercises off the California coast that may endanger dolphins, whales and sea lions.  Why courts are arbitrating this case instead of the science is one of the neat little quirks of our system.  But sure, why should the Navy be inconvenienced by moving a few miles off the coast?  Not in the public interest, you see.

• Mountain House, California, particularly Prosperity Street in Mountain House, offers a cautionary tale about how screwed the housing market is:

This town, 59 feet above sea level, is the most underwater community in America.

This week, a real estate office in Tracy, Calif., near Mountain House, was advertising foreclosure sales.

Because of plunging home values, almost 90 percent of homeowners here owe more on their mortgages than their houses are worth, according to figures released Monday. That is the highest percentage in the country. The average homeowner in Mountain House is “underwater,” as it is known, by $122,000.

That is really worse than anyone’s projections.  This is going to be a brutal downturn, and the recently upgraded homeowner relief looks to be insufficient.

• DiFi, who may be made chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is striking hard at the most important, festering problem at the soul of our society today – scalped tickets for the inauguration.  But I’m sure that if we were committing torture or illegally wiretapping on Americans or indefinitely detaining prisoners without charges, she’d be all over that, too.

• Gary Miller has been caught with some pretty shady campaign practices again. Well, I take that back, this goes beyond shady:

apparently Congressman Miller paid his “bigger development construction company” a series of 5 payments which equaled $47,360. All this came from his re-election campaign, and when this is taken into perspective, it  amounts to his largest campaign expenditure, 22% of the $218,368 that he raised.(LiberalOC)

• Dan Weintraub, hero of High Broderism.  I love this line: “Will (redistricting) change the world? No.”  The better question is “Will it change anything?”  I love how these guys never look at the actual registration statistics, with all these seats that have changed between 6-8% in party affiliation, when they intone that legislators pick their voters.  Do they pick who changes their registration, who dies and who moves, too?

• Finally, CREDO Mobile is trying to whip legislators to remove John Dingell from the chair of the House Energy Committee and replace him with Henry Waxman.  Which is great, and they personalize the message so that each person receiving their email gets the name of their Congressman on it.  Only, my Congressman is Henry Waxman.  And so my message said “Will you tell Henry Waxman to vote for Henry Waxman for Energy Committee chair?”

I think he can be trusted to do the right thing.

• According to Dan Walters, all his serious economist friends are telling him there’s no recession yet, theoreticaly speaking.  He might want to read his own paper, about how the Employment Development Department can’t keep up with the demand for unemployment benefits and everyone calling in is getting a busy signal.  Tip to those who apparently aren’t feeling a recession: use the EDD website.

• In a reversal to the Bush Administration, a judge has ruled that George Bush cannot exempt the Navy from environmental laws regarding the use of sonar within 12 miles of the California coast.  Not that Bush followed the ruling of the judiciary the first time, but…

• There are still high hopes for an end to the WGA strike, and meetings in Los Angeles and New York have been scheduled for the weekend (ostensibly to present the contract), but caution lies ahead, as more foreign imports and reality television are likely to wind up on schedules, and less pilots are likely to be shot.  Of course, this was my point all along, and why I underscored the need to grow the union for the benefit of everyone involved and give everything on television the opportunity to unionize.  But jurisdiction for reality and animation was dropped in the most recent round of talks, and there will be consequences to that.

• Our friends at the SEIU are going to start a $75 million dollar, year-long, national campaign in support of universal health care.  I have to think that this is a positive by-product of the coalition built in California around the ultimately unsuccessful effort on health care reform.  If so, then there was nothing unsuccessful about it.  It’s very exciting to see a full media and ground effort to draw the policy distinctions on health care between the parties, and to advocate for a system that makes sense for working families.

Use this as a repository for everything but the election.

(Regarding the summoning of the devil below, I’ll get there at some point.  But I’d prefer to talk about something important over an obscure argument about which Americans deserve to decide things over which other Americans.)

The battle between environmental groups and the US Navy over the use of sonar off the California coast appeared to come to an end last week, when a federal judge forbade sonar use within 12 miles of the shoreline.  But for this ruling to hold, you would have to have a President who believes in an independent judiciary and the rule of law.  Alas, we have a king.

The Navy announced today that two important steps have been taken under existing law and regulations to allow it to conduct effective, integrated training with sonar off the coast of southern California after a federal court earlier this month imposed untenable restrictions on such training.

In accordance with the provisions of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), and at the recommendation of the Secretary of Commerce, the President concluded that continuing these vital exercises without the restrictions imposed by the district court is in the paramount interests of the United States. He signed an exemption from the requirements of the CZMA for the Navy’s continued use of mid-frequency active (MFA) sonar in a series of exercises scheduled to take place off the coast of California through January 2009. The Navy already applies twenty-nine mitigation measures approved by federal environmental regulators when using active sonar, and these will remain in place.

In other words, the President thinks killing whales is a small price to pay for not having to tell the Navy move their boats a bit.  Anyway, if the whales aren’t willing to die for the cause of liberty, then they simply want the terrorists to win.

The Navy takes steps to limit damage to whales, granted.  But that is pretty much besides the point.  Between denying the waiver for California to regulate its own tailpipe emissions and this latest action, it’s clear that this Administration doesn’t find the normal structures of the law to apply to them.  This next election is in large part about bringing this back into balance, about finding an executive who doesn’t treat the Constitution like something on which you wipe your shoes.