Legizecutive Powers

In an article, quite telling about the functions of the US government, Robert Pear, a writer for the NY Times lays out the fascinating elasticity of the executive and legislative branches. The article (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/washington/28cnd-earmark.html?hp) is about President Bush promising to veto legislation heavy in Congressional parentheses and fine print called "earmarks". If you were to look earmark up on Wikipedia, you would find that they are stipulations put on bills by legislators to instruct how these laws are to be carried out. Typically these are put in spending bills to instruct where the money allocated is supposed to go.
Now this is where it gets complicated - there are "hard" and "soft" earmarks. Hard earmarks are written into the bill and are legally binding. The rest are kind of written in the margins in Congressional committee reports. These are not written into the bill that goes to the president to be signed and are not legally binding. They are, however, traditionally obeyed, so a lot of fishy whims of individual Representatives and Senators slips through the cracks and money flows into certain "pet projects".
According to the article, the president is brandishing his trusty veto stamp as a threat to future spending bills the House and Senate don't knock it off. This president has always been quite proficient in his legislative checks, but he also threatened to use his executive authority - he could go as far as ordering executive offices to ignore all soft earmarks as they carried out legislation. This kind of thing really makes you think about the play available in the system.