Executive order madness

We've been hearing a lot about Executive Orders of late, most notably the rather inexplicable order Bush signed regards the Office of Vice President (discussed more here). It might help if the Veep himself could shine some light of truth on this little matter.

But speaking of EOs, today we hear about an almost equally puzzling order, this time from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome. Seems the maverick mayor has banned SF city government agencies from buying bottled water--even the big bottles for their office water coolers:

In a press release announcing the decision, the mayor cited the environmental impact of making, transporting and disposing of the bottles. More than a billion of them end up in the state's landfills each year, the release said.

Not sure about San Fran's water, but when my family lived in Southern California years ago we got bottled water because the tap water was terrible. Even if it's decent there's a lot of hysteria about tap water these days (talk to John Stossel) so it's likely city employees will simply bring their own bottled water to work. Or buy more Co-colas, Pepsis or green teas in plastic bottles and subsequently throw them in the trash.

But, as with all things political the Mayor's office needed to frame the move to appeal to the constituency, which meant painting it as an attack on global warming (which is really liberal code talk for an attack on Connocophillipsmonsantoburton). A real no-brainer, from several different perspectives.

The only positive seems to be a savings to the taxpayers by not buying water. Was it really a stealthy conservative move?! That might be the only way to do it out there, but let's not get ahead of ourselves here--after all this is a bureaucracy we're talking about. The order might eventually require an entire new city department to pot the potable tap water and bring it to the employees who won't drink it, forcing the expansion of another department to remove it.