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OK, pop some popcorn and pull up a chair. Glenn Beck is calling out the dogs … on Republicans.

He ran a special segment last night urging his audience descend en masse upon the “Cap and Traitors” – Republican House members who actually voted for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill last Friday – all eight of them. With him to seal the deal was the Washington Examiner's Kevin Mooney, who besides being in need of a new suit was also in need of a logic text:

Beck: Now, there are eight Republicans who voted for cap and trade. ... Look at this map that we put up. It looks like all of the votes -- there it is -- it looks like all of these votes -- and we're going to have some showers -- uh -- all of the votes really came, half of the votes, more than half -- from those areas. The West Coast and from the liberal Northeast.

Mooney: Well, Glenn, you're put your finger on it. Uh, the votes, whether they're Democrat or Republican, in favor of this bill, out of the coastal areas, the elite areas of this country, they're areas of the country where the energy prices are already high. Democrats and Republicans voted against this bill in other parts of the country where they already are using other fossil fuels and have lower energy prices.

Beck: Isn't it interesting that those are the areas that are collapsing the fastest?

Mooney and Beck, not to put too fine a point on it, are full of crap. Just by way of example, look at my own home state of Washington, whose delegation voted strongly for the bill, and is included on their list of "coastal states" whose energy prices are supposedly too high. In reality -- somewhere far distant from these guys' residence on Planet Wingnuttia -- Washington's energy prices are among some of the lowest in the nation (for instance, our electricity costs are far below the national average, since we get so much of it from hydroelectric sources. Likewise for Oregon, another "elite coastal" state. Meanwhile, some of the nation's highest electricity costs can also be found in Florida and Texas -- some of the "non-elite" states on Beck's graphic.

And Glenn? Our economy here in Washington is far from collapsing. The housing bubble didn't overinflate as much here as elsewhere -- including, say Florida and Texas. And we have Microsoft and Boeing. So we're hurting, yes -- but we'll be fine. No thanks to the right-wing ideologues like yourself who wrecked the national economy.

Phony methodology aside, it is in any event always fun to see the right savage its own -- because nearly all of the eight Republicans who voted for the bill came from vulnerable districts. Dave Reichert, from Washington's 8th District, just barely survived two tough challenges from Darcy Burner, and did so in part by selling himself as friendly to environmentalists. And indeed, he comes from a district that has never elected a Democrat, but whose growing technology-worker base is a rapidly changing demographic politically -- and particularly big on environmental issues.

So we're happy to see them get hell from the Glenn Beck wing of their party. It just reminds the large mass of swing voters in the 8th District and others like it, once again, why it's stupid to vote even for a "moderate" Republican -- because they will always be overwhelmed by the pseudo-populist Wingnuttians who dominate the GOP at all levels. Especially the pundit one.

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The America's Future Now gathering in D.C. just wrapped up today. I haven't been able to post a lot about the panels and talks that went on over the past three days, but probably the most interesting speech I heard came from Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, talking about the energy bill working its way through Congress.

Adam Siegel at GetEnergySmartNow has a good post up about with excerpts:

If I’d been here a year ago, I would have talked to you about three things: The need to transform energy economy, create jobs, and tackle global warming. ... About the third, during the campaign, I spoke it about every single night. People asked me why, as it was 21st on people’s concerns. I responded: it should be first on everyone’s agenda and the only way it will be is if we talk about it.

... If I am going to simplify the issue, we have to quit taking geologic carbon and turning it into atmospheric carbon.

... In the past, people have described the Senate as the place where a good House bill goes to die. ... We need to change that. We need to reestablish the Senate as a place where an okay bill goes to get vastly improved.

... There is the possibility that we will end up with a framework that is ineffective, that has offsets, that doesn’t have a firm cap. ... Or, we could end up with something that could really transform our use of energy. Obviously, we’re going to have to work real hard to get from the former to the latter.

The whole session was fascinating -- including the speech by Sierra Club president Carl Pope, who talked at length about how the federal government's fickle ways on energy have been killing our ability to create green jobs. (You can watch it all here.) The classic case of this involves the reality that even though wind turbine transformers require elements mined from American soil, China is the world's leading manufacturer of them.

And if you don't believe that "green energy" is going to be the key to restoring America's position as the world's leading economy, check out this report about the fact that investment in that sector is rising at a sharp rate:

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Interestingly enough, the public relations industry does indeed have a code of ethics. It would be nice to see environmental groups push to have those who took part in this campaign ejected from any professional associations.

As to the officials of those companies? Decent people should shun them - but only because I'm a pacifist and would never advise you to storm their houses with pitchforks:

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

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