As I was updating the WashingtonWatch.com Twitter feed just now, I felt obligated to point out a non-typo: H.R. 2454, The American Clean Energy and Security Act would cost about $12,000 per U.S. family.
It’s being debated on the House floor right now.
(That doesn’t mean you should necessarily be for it or against. Just aware of [...]
Dan Neil of the L.A. Times writes about his alternative proposal for spending on federal energy programs:
[T]he U.S. Department of Energy budgetary request for fiscal 2010 is $65 billion, including nearly $40 billion from the National Economic Recovery Act. The 2010 Toyota Prius will probably come in around $23,000 when prices are announced later this [...]
More than 350 bills were introduced in Congress on its first day yesterday. At that rate, we’ll easily rocket past 10,000 bills, and past the last Congress’ record of over 11,000 bills. (And of course that rate won’t actually continue.)
We’ll be adding the new bills to the database throughout the day, but what [...]
President-Elect Obama began to sketch his economic recovery plan in his weekly address yesterday. It’s long on spending but short on price tag.
The items he features in the talk include energy, roads and bridges, schools, broadband, and electronic medical records.
Of the items on the list, the energy idea seems to hold the most promise. [...]
Improbably, here on the night when election returns are coming in, I’ve decided to write about gas prices. But there’s no time like the present to get back to real policy issues. I’ve had quite enough of all this politics, thank you.
The Omaha World-Herald reported today that gas prices in the Omaha-Council Bluffs area [...]
Dozens of press releases come out every day on some public policy issue or another. I picked one pretty much at random to write about a couple of months ago. It was an American Trucking Associations release touting the support of a professional truck driver for a piece of legislation. I thought [...]
On Tuesday this week, the House passed an energy bill that had been introduced late the night before.
It’s bad practice to introduce a bill and take it to the floor without giving members of Congress and the public a chance to read it, but House Republicans were really howling because they had staged a protest [...]
A little over a month ago, I wrote here about the debate on oil speculation.
One of the commenters on S. 3268, The Stop Excessive Energy Speculation Act of 2008 had pointed to a Web site called Stop Oil Speculation Now. I speculated (ahem) that this commenter might be a spinmeister for that campaign.
Whatever the [...]
One of the most visited bills on WashingtonWatch.com this week is H.R. 2774, The Solar Energy Research and Advancement Act of 2007. It has been reported from committee, which means that it is ready for the full House of Representatives to debate. The bill would establish a group of programs and subsidies to [...]
A staple of modern lobbying is the self-identified consumer group. Claiming to represent the interests of consumers, these groups send letters to Congress and issue press releases to create the appearance that a large cross-section of people actually feel strongly about an issue. They often front for different interests than actual consumers, such [...]