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This is sickening. Rep. John Shadegg uses baby Maddie, a 7-month-old daughter of his Chief of Staff to the floor as a prop during the health-care debate in the House earlier today.

The Political Carnival writes:

I wanted to "spit up", and wished Maddy had.

Yes, John Shadegg actually used an innocent infant as a prop, spoke baby talk, and provided us with nothing more than what was most likely in Maddy's diaper at the time. And for this, he got applause.

The collective (im)maturity of the Rushpublic side of the aisle doesn't come close to measuring up to Maddy's level of sophistication. How utterly humiliating.

Henry Waxman made a joke and said: “That was a remarkable child,” “and a great ventriloquist.”

How could a father let his child be used as a prop like that? What would have happened if he hurt her in any way? The entire Republican Party is made up of fools, and I mean the staffers as well. And then there are the people who applauded this stunt ...

By the way, John Shadegg does have a somewhat checkered past, if you remember...

Paul Krugman says that the main Republican strategy to fight climate change legislation will be to attack it as hurting the economy:

By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real G.D.P. will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that G.D.P. per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.

So where do the apocalyptic warnings about the cost of climate-change policy come from?

Are the opponents of cap-and-trade relying on different studies that reach fundamentally different conclusions? No, not really. It’s true that last spring the Heritage Foundation put out a report claiming that Waxman-Markey would lead to huge job losses, but the study seems to have been so obviously absurd that I’ve hardly seen anyone cite it.

Instead, the campaign against saving the planet rests mainly on lies.

Thus, last week Glenn Beck — who seems to be challenging Rush Limbaugh for the role of de facto leader of the G.O.P. — informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Beck. Similar — and similarly false — claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts.

A year ago I would have been shocked by this behavior. But as we’ve already seen in the health care debate, the polarization of our political discourse has forced self-proclaimed “centrists” to choose sides — and many of them have apparently decided that partisan opposition to President Obama trumps any concerns about intellectual honesty.

So here’s the bottom line: The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green.

So Verizon Wireless is one of sponsors of the Friends of America Rally this Labor Day weekend, an anti-environment, pro-coal event. Most of the other sponsors are in the coal industry and there is even a link to the National Mining Association’s anti-Waxman-Markey petition on the home page.

Credo Action wanted to know why Verizon would sponsor such a reactionary event with such polarizing figures--especially ones that have gone out of their way to foment violence. From their email:

Before we launched our campaign, CREDO Action reached out to Verizon Wireless to confirm its sponsorship of the pro-coal "Friends of America" rally. Becky Bond, our Political Director, then sent a cordial follow-up to give Verizon Wireless a heads-up that our campaign had launched. Verizon replied as follows:

"This is how our response is going over with the activists. Becky once lived in a tree for a while. At least now I know where the emails are coming from."

— James Gerace, VP of Corporate Communications at Verizon Wireless

You got that?

If you don't think that Verizon Wireless should support global warming deniers and practitioners of mountaintop removal mining, then Verizon Wireless thinks it's okay to dismiss your concerns because you must have "lived in a tree for a while."

If they're going to try to mock us for opposing right wing demagoguery, then we'll just have to make more noise.

So please take a minute to ask your friends and family to join this campaign, especially if they are Verizon Wireless customers.

Let's remember how this campaign started. Verizon Wireless apparently sees nothing wrong with co-sponsoring a rally put on by Massey Energy, the biggest violator of the Clean Water Act in history; sees nothing wrong with giving a platform to people who deny global warming; sees nothing wrong with giving the emcee microphone to Ted Nugent who famously said:

Obama, he's a piece of sh — . I told him to suck on my machine gun...Hey Hillary [Clinton] you might want to ride one of these [machine guns] into the sunset, you worthless b — ch.

Apparently these are the values and sentiments Verizon Wireless feels comfortable associating itself with. You can violate the law, pillage the Earth and publicly insult Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the most vulgar way. Verizon Wireless is fine with that. But when we express common sense concerns about environmental stewardship, Verizon Wireless thinks we're tree-hugging nuts.

You know you want to give Verizon a piece of your mind. Remember, be polite. Show more class than they have.

Shakesville: Facts Schmacts...but Waxman-Markey passes the House anyway

Scott Horton: Did a Bush Justice Department official obstruct the Renzi investigation?

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Many thanks to Batocchio for filling in so ably for the past ten days

[Ed. note: Please welcome to C&L our old friend and erstwhile congressional candidate from Washington's 8th District, Darcy Burner. Darcy's now heading up Progressive Congress, and we hope to have her contribute posts as often as she's willing and able. -- DN]

We talk a lot about wanting representatives who will display courage and conviction. But the real test of that isn’t what they do when it’s easy – it’s what they do when it’s hard.

**

When I was running for Congress, my son Henry would take every opportunity he could to talk about climate change. He talked to me, he talked to Democrats at legislative district meetings, he grabbed the microphone if he saw TV cameras. He used my webcam two years ago to cut this video:

Today the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on the Waxman-Markey energy bill, the most significant climate change legislation in history. It establishes a cap-and-trade regulatory system designed to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere over the next several years.

I want to help principled progressives who vote their conscience when it's politically costly understand that we have their backs.

Continue reading »

Add this to the pile of monumental screw-ups committed by the Bush administration.

Raw Story:

A lengthy investigation published Thursday reveals that the Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old, substandard munitions being delivered to US and Afghan troops fighting on the front lines of the war on terror.

So to recap: During the free-cash-giveaway that is defense contracting, the Pentagon awards $300 million to the company of a clueless 22 year old, resulting in our soldiers having to use substandard weaponry.

The bright side? According to his MySpace page, he's a "super nice guy." That's nice to know, at least.

Thank God Waxman is on the case. We'll definitely be following this one.

  We've covered the misconduct hearings of GSA Administrator, Lurita Doan, but left out this portion of the hearing from earlier this week and thought it was worth posting. Henry Waxman runs through the laundry list of Doan's unethical and illegal actions, then tells her point blank that she should resign.(h/t Sestakastan)

DownWithTyranny:

GSA head Lurita Doan was a suspicious appointee to begin with. Her qualifications to head the nation's main federal contracting agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), seemed to have been primarily that she and her husband had given hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions to Bush and other right wing politicians. Yesterday Bush's Office of Special Counsel recommended she be fired for engaging in "the most pernicious of political activity" banned by the 1939 Hatch Act and for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. ""Doan solicited the political activity of over 30 of her subordinate employees when she asked 'How can we help our [Republican] candidates?'" The recommendation points out that "Doan has shown no remorse and lacks an appreciation for the seriousness of her violation." Read more...

For those of you who missed the testimony of the "totally paranoid" Lurita Doan, you can see portions of it here. She has another date with Henry Waxman tomorrow...

You go Henry:

The lawmaker poised to cause the Bush administration's biggest headaches when Democrats take control of Congress may just be a grocer's son from Watts who's hardly a household name off Capitol Hill. Rep. Henry Waxman has spent the last six years waging a guerrilla campaign against the White House and its corporate allies, launching searing investigations into everything from military contracts to Medicare prices from his perch on the Government Reform Committee....read on