Congress
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House Republicans’ transportation bill contains zero good policy
House Republicans are going to unveil their transportation bill today, and it is expected to have a ton of backwards ideas in it. These include: Spending more money on highways than anything else Encouraging private companies to expand highways and charge for the use of those lanes Funding highway work through oil and gas drilling […]
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Republicans cockblock NOAA appointment because of an oil-drilling snit
You’d think that the main criterion for being named the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s chief scientist would be that you are a scientist. (Lesser criteria: being plausibly chiefly; studying some field related to oceanic and/or atmospheric science.) Turns out, though, that being a scientist can be a real liability for the chief scientist job, […]
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Congressional staffers will stop betting on wildfire destruction
We here at Grist mock a lot of people. But we don't always manage to mock some sense into them. Which is why we're pretty psyched about the response to Sarah Laskow's feature story revealing that congressional staffers were making deadly wildfires into a fun office pool:
McKie Campbell, the [Senate Energy and Natural Resources] committee’s Republican staff director, said the contest has been stopped.
“It will never happen again,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “It was in no way indicative of disrespect for any of the folks who put their lives on the line to battle the fires.”
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Koch fiends: AFP’s favorite members of Congress
Americans for Prosperity gave five senators and 39 representatives perfect scores for their votes to uphold the Koch agenda in Congress.
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Critical List: Huge wind farm to rise in Wyoming; doomsday clock ticks forward
The Obama administration is speeding towards approval for a huge wind project, 1,000 turbines strong, in Wyoming.
GOP Senate candidate Linda McMahon cribbed text for her op-ed on Keystone XL from the website of pipeline builder Transcanada.
There's a second tar-sands pipeline, Northern Gateway, and that one faces strong opposition, as well.
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Time to be angry, not cynical, about corporate money in politics
We're unfazed by things that should shake us to the core, like how Big Oil pays Congress to do its bidding. We need to get naïvely angry again.
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Death of ‘lightbulb ban’ greatly exaggerated
Congresscritters who love inefficiency, waste, and air pollution — or at least the money that comes from industries that do — attached a rider to the spending bill yesterday evening that will reverse an earlier law to phase out crappy old-style lightbulbs. The crazy thing is that the ban is still in effect, and the […]
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The return of the Keystone XL pipeline
Keystone XL is back from the dead. After President Obama announced a delay in a final decision on the tar-sands pipeline, House Republicans’ first gambit was to try to speed up that process. But now, they have a more sinister plan: They are trying to force through wholesale approval of the pipeline project. They're doing […]
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Critical List: Congress does everything it can to screw the environment; fabric cleaned by sunlight
Congress voted to put sanctions on Iran, which would make it harder for Iran to sell oil, but potentially make oil sales more profitable for the regime overall. After all the work that the anti-Keystone coalition did, Republicans are trying to tack a measure to approve the pipeline onto a bill that extends the payroll […]