Senate Passed Ethics Reform Bill, Cheney Rejected Help From Iran and some Generals Testify

From Yahoo News

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer
    WASHINGTON - The Senate, responding to voter frustration with corruption and special interest influence in Washington, on Thursday overwhelmingly approved far-reaching ethics and lobbying reform legislation.                   Under the bill, passed 96-2, senators will give up gifts and free travel from lobbyists, pay more for travel on corporate jets and make themselves more accountable for the pet projects they insert into bills.         Entire Article

   The oversight committee part of the bill did not make it through this time. The committee would have been an independent group to investigate the breaches of ethics from members.

    From Yahoo News

Thu Jan 18,2007

LONDON - An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize
Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President
Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp. ADVERTISEMENT

The U.S. State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the American invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State
Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Wilkerson said, Cheney vetoed the deal.

"We thought it was a very propitious moment" to strike a deal, Wilkerson said. "But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the vice president's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil' ... reasserted itself."

    Entire Article

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    Of course this was rejected by Cheney, Bush and the rest of the Crime Family! The group would have lost to much money and I'd bet that Cheney's old company had already paid him to much for all of those no-bid contracts that they received from this administration.

    Someone from the State Department has denied that the department ever got the letter from Iran. It probably went into the paper shredder that was parked in front of Cheney's house!

    Meanwhile, some retired generals  told a U.S. Senate committee on Thursday that sending the additional 21,500 troops to Iraq will not help.

"Too little and too late," is the way Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former chief of the Central Command, described the effort to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.... "The solution is political, not military," he said.

"A fool’s errand," was the judgment of Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who commanded troops in the first Gulf War. He said other countries had concluded that the effort in Iraq was not succeeding, noting that "our allies are leaving us and will be gone by summer."

  TPMCafe  has a list of bills that are up for proposal in Congress that have to do with the Bush 'escalation'. Check it out when you have the time.

 

Technorati tags: Senate, Ethics, Generals, Bush, Cheney

 

   

 

 

Democrats Cut Back Oil Company Subsidies

    The House, in its continuing effort to get some good bills/legislation passed in its first one hundred hours on the job, cut back on some of the oil industry subsidies on Thursday! This amounts to billions of dollars that the federal government may be able to add to the treasury.

   Critics  of the bill claim that it will diminish oil production in the U.S. and increase reliance on imports.

   Of course, the Democrats only hold a slight majority in the senate so it remains to be seen if this bill will get put into action.

    From Yahoo News

The legislation would impose a "conservation fee" on oil and gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; scrap nearly $6 billion worth of oil industry tax breaks enacted by Congress in recent years; and seek to recoup royalties lost to the government because of an Interior Department error in leases issued in the late 1990s.

Democrats said the legislation could produce as much as $15 billion in revenue. Most of that money would pay to promote renewable fuels such as solar and wind power, alternative fuels including ethanol and biodiesel and incentives for conservation.

"The oil industry doesn't need the taxpayers' help. ... There is not an American that goes to a gas pump that doesn't know that," said Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (news, bio, voting record), D-Md. Pump prices topped $3 per gallon last year as the oil industry earned record profits.

The bill, Hoyer said, "starts to move our nation in a new direction" on energy policy.

   To read the GOP's reasoning for opposing this legislation, go here.

 

Technorati tags: Democrats, Oil, Oil Companies, Subsidies