Last minute actions by an outgoing President are nothing new. Clinton banned building roads in forests and the incoming Bush administration began working to overturn it almost as soon as they were in office. (Of course the first thing on their list was covering up the crimes of the father and Reagan with an executive order sealing their records. Let's hope that one can and will be undone, quickly.)
The Clinton pardon of Mark Rich will likely be matched by the Bush pardon of Scooter Libby and anyone else potentially vulnerable for the treasonous outing of a CIA NOC. (Said outting being vigorously defended by the rabid supporters of the.worst.President.ever).
The last minute flurry of new regulations by the Bush administration, as well as the Obama team's preparation to overturn as many of them as possible, has been discussed here, (Here's an interesting development: Another Bush screw-up may put his last-minute regulations in peril.)
But there is something else that isn't being discussed much, right now. In spite of the chattering of the well-coifed heads that Bush is going to work with Obama to make the transition as smooth as possible, he's doing even more to ensure that his worst policies continue into the first few years of the Obama administration. There's even a word for it; his moles are "burrowing" into position to be most effective in denying the American people the change that they voted for.
To whit: "President Bush is getting high marks for the grace and openness with which he is greeting President-elect Obama ... but once again, we find that Bush is just a covering glad hand for the strong-arm administration behind it."
To make up for losing the recent referendum for change in the nation's governance, the losers have come up with a snappy comeback: a coup. Well, sort of a coup. The outgoing Bush administration is spiking the bureaucracy with political appointees who, through the miracle of executive fiat, have suddenly been transformed into civil servants. As political operatives in the government's sundry bureaus, agencies and whatnot, they could have been chucked unceremoniously, and no doubt would have been, by the Obama administration. With the shape-shifters covered by Civil Service job protections, removing them will be as tough, and just about as much fun, as digging out ingrown toenails.
This process is not unknown. It has been around long enough to earn its own nickname -- burrowing. But in the past it has been used mainly as a patronage hustle, a way to reward loyalists, not to thwart an incoming administration by confronting it with in-house opponents to the very policies on which the new president campaigned. Patronage appears to have little to do with the Bush burrowing. Its practice is concentrated in offices where the Bush crew has focused its busiest damage to the public good, where it has played out its ideological wish list and where it has paid off its industrial constituency. The Washington Post, which has been keeping track, has found high-level switches in the Labor and Interior departments, in the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, often involving personnel with records of overriding professional judgments with ideological purposes.
The shuffles have a definite Western lean, with authority over grazing rights, land use, drilling, mining and other, allied matters that have been a preoccupation of Vice President Dick Cheney, who has long ridden with the good-buddies posse of ranching, logging and mining interests. The burrowing is of a piece with the Bush administration's high-energy effort to use executive orders and other preemptive instruments to get in last minute policy licks, especially against environmental protection. Typical winner: mountaintop strip mining. Typical loser: endangered species. In the most recent twist, as a news story put it, "The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing air-quality rules that would make it easer to build coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and other major polluters near national parks and wilderness areas, even though half of the EPA's regional administrators formally dissented from the decision and four others criticized the move in writing."
Add this to the list of bankrupting the treasury, destroying the economy, starting (but not finishing) 2 3 wars, setting the tax cuts for the wealthy to "sunset" as soon as he leaves office (thus ensuring an early fight for the next government) ... I'm not even going to try to list them all, he's been so atrocious ... and you have an undeniable pattern of the current President doing everything he can to hamstring his (party's) replacements.
There's one more thing you can count on, though. On January 21st the same wing nuts who are already calling the failure of the Bush / GOP "economic policy" of unrestrained capitalism with absolutely no help or interference from the government (other than welfare for the biggest corporations) "the Obama recession" will begin to point and laugh at the failure of the government that we voted for to overturn and set right 8 years of mismanagement. They'll neglect to mention that it's their own ideology that's continuing to fail, and the well-coifed readers of what passes for the national media will dutifully report that "liberalism has failed us, again".
Don't give up. Know that it will take one to two years for the new government to be successful in ending the GOP's reign of terror and failure. There's nothing historically unusual about this.
Bad government, once in place, takes time to fix, and there's no worse government than surrounding oneself with "faith based yes men" who continue to play that "God is on our side" fiddle as Rome America burns.
Turn off what passes for "news" in a world where 5 huge corporations dominate the flow of information, and be patient.