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Republicans will take their first shot at derailing a top Democratic priority — climate change legislation — by offering as many as 200 amendments when the House Energy and Commerce Committee begins marking up its bill this afternoon. The markup, which could stretch over several days, probably provides House Republicans with their best opportunity for offering changes to a bill that will likely see limited amendments on the floor. “Our folks are united against cap-and-trade,” Energy and Commerce member Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said of the carbon control policy being pushed by Democrats. Last week, Democrats agreed among themselves on a...

The Obama administration itself estimates that cap and trade will involve increased costs from 2012 to 2019 alone of $645 billion, and admits in its own budget that the actual costs could be much higher than that, depending on permit prices over those years. Indeed, other estimates put the costs three times higher. So the increased burden on each Ameri can over this period alone would be $2,100 to $6,300. For a family with two children, that would be $8,400 to $25,200, with much more to come after 2019. These increased costs are effectively a new tax on the American...

In an interview with CNBC, Representative Barney Frank says he wants to push for prosecution of the people who caused the country's financial meltdown. The Massachusetts Democrat says he has no specific targets in mind, but says the most significant thing lawmakers can do is make past bad practices illegal.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama on Wednesday promised to save American taxpayers 40 billion dollars a year by slashing waste in government contracting, with a special eye on bloated spending on defense. "I reject the false choice between securing this nation and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars," Obama said on a day when he signed a presidential memorandum reforming the contracting system across the entire government. "In this time of great challenges, I recognize the real choice between investments that are designed to keep the American people safe and those that are designed to make a defense contractor rich,"...

6,796.99 Down -265.94 -3.77%

The hits just keep on coming on the jobs front... The Labor Department this morning reported that the nation lost another 598,000 payroll jobs in January. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, jumped to 7.6 percent from 7.2 percent in December. That's the highest unemployment rate since late 1992. The December job loss number was worse than consensus expectations. And revisions to previous months darkened the picture even more.

BREAKING NEWS: Georgian troops are preparing to defend the town of Gori against the advancing Russian army.

Obama calls for oil crackdown By: Mike Allen June 22, 2008 12:39 PM EST With the cost of gas a top issue in the presidential campaign, Barack Obama on Sunday will announce a plan to crack down on oil speculation by tightening regulations on energy traders. The announcement is further evidence that an Obama administration would take an activist, populist approach to regulating business. Obama wants to close a loophole in federal law that exempts some energy traders from regulations that govern other exchange-traded commodities. Democrats call this “the Enron loophole” because it benefited the Houston energy-speculation firm that collapsed...

A bill introduced in Congress this week would "compel" oil and natural gas companies to produce from federal lands they are leasing. If only it were that easy to find and produce oil. Imagine, an act of Congress that could do what geology could not. These lawmakers ask why oil and gas companies want more access to federal lands to drill if they aren't using all of the 68 million acres they already have? Anyone with even the most basic understanding of how oil and natural gas are produced – and this should include many members of Congress – knows...

Consider: The Brazilian government has a 58 percent controlling stake in Petrobras's voting shares and 32percent of its total shares, which means that some of the profits go straight to the government's bottom line, giving the politicians more money to spend on bribing their constituents. In the United States, American politicians do not benefit from a successful oil industry, since corporate profits go to shareholders, pensioners and employees; therefore Congress has a much greater incentive to respond to the concentrated power of the special interest group known as the "greens." There are plenty of other examples, says O'Grady: In Mexico,...

Scott Rasmussen’s first law of politics is that America’s politicians aren’t nearly as important as they think they are. That law was clearly demonstrated earlier today when the United States Senate finally surrendered to the American people on immigration. Politicians may make things messy for a while, but over the long haul it is the American people who determine the nation’s fundamental policies.

FINAL ROLL CALL: 46-53. RINOS: Graham (R-SC), Gregg (R-NH), Hagel (R-NE), Kyl (R-AZ), Lott (R-MS), Lugar (R-IN), Martinez (R-FL),McCain (R-AZ), Snowe (R-ME), and Specter (R-PA). Hats off to the Dems who voted agains this crap: Bayh (D-IN), Bingaman (D-NM), Brown (D-OH), Byrd (D-WV), Dorgan (D-ND), Harkin (D-IA), Landrieu (D-LA), McCaskill (D-MO), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), Rockefeller (D-WV), Sanders (I-VT), Stabenow (D-MI), Tester (D-MT) and Webb (D-VA). It should be noted that the following Republicans switched their vote for “Yea” to “Na” from the bill earlier in the week. They include: Bennett (R-UT), Bond (R-MO), Brownback (R-KS), Burr (R-NC), Coleman (R-MN),...

The Senate's revived legislation to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants faces a critical test Thursday after surviving potentially fatal challenges. Attempts from the right and left to alter key elements of the delicate bipartisan compromise failed Wednesday, including a Republican proposal to deny illegal immigrants a path to citizenship and Democratic bids to reunite legal immigrants with family members. The Senate killed, by a 56-41 vote, an amendment by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., to provide more green cards for parents of U.S. citizens. By a 55-40 margin, it tabled a proposal by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., to give family members...

WASHINGTON - The Senate voted Thursday to increase fuel economy standards to 35 miles per gallon for cars and SUVs, the first significant boost demanded of automakers in nearly 20 years.

You can watch today's "Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace on a podcast at the link. Krauthammer opines that only the House can stop the Immigration Bill, now. (Also, there's a really good interview with Petraeus.)

Key senators tentatively agreed on a plan to revive a stalled immigration bill on Thursday, aided by President Bush's support for a quick $4.4 billion aimed at "securing our borders and enforcing our laws at the work site." Officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Republican and Democratic supporters of the bill were presenting their proposal to the Senate's top two leaders, who in turn arranged an early evening meeting to discuss it. Precise details to be presented to Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were not disclosed. In general, according to officials familiar...

Port Of Spain - The four suspects in an alleged terror plot to bomb a New York airport were set up in an elaborate plan by the US Republican party to retain hold of the White House, the daughter of an arrested suspect claimed on Tuesday. Huda Ibrahiim, daughter of Amir Kareem Ibrahiim, one of four men accused of plotting acts of terrorism against the United States, said US justice officials had engaged in entrapment in breaking up the alleged plot. Huda, 20, speaking on behalf of the Trinidad and Tobago and the Guyanese Shi'ite Muslim community, read from a...

There has been a sharp decline in contributions from RNC phone solicitations, another fired staffer said, reporting that many former donors flatly refuse to give more money to the national party if Mr. Bush and the Senate Republicans insist on supporting what these angry contributors call "amnesty" for illegal aliens. "Everyone donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said the former employee.

U.S. forces rescued 41 Iraqi civilians Sunday from an al-Qaida hide-out northeast of Baghdad, including some who showed signs of torture and broken bones, a senior U.S. official said.

Strangling Oil By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Thursday, May 24, 2007 Energy: As Americans get ever-angrier about soaring gasoline prices, Congress wants to do something, anything. So this week, the House passed a bill seeking to end "price-gouging." Fair enough — now, what is that? In the Senate, New York's Charles Schumer wants to break up big oil companies on the notion that more small companies would foster competition and cut prices. Others, including New York's other senator, Hillary Clinton, want to tax oil companies' "windfall" profits. Such measures, and others like them, demonstrate a woeful ignorance of basic economics. But...