The Larochelles were seeking to separate the flag from the Constitution, and to make it a symbol of religious belief – and officially recognized by Congress as such. Congressman Mike Turner was more than happy to help them do this – and to try to use the boy scout as a tool to push religion as a wedge issue – when he introduced H.R. 3779.

If an oil company isn’t even using the leases of public lands they already have, why should they take on yet more leases… unless what those oil companies really want to do is just squat on their leases of public lands with oil under them only in order to prevent the oil from being drilled, thus decreasing supply and artificially driving up the cost of petroleum products so that they can make a bigger profit without doing any more work.

To vote for this bill was to insult the Constitution of the United States of America, and in doing so, to insult the USA itself. A vote in favor of this bill is a betrayal of the Oath of Office every member of Congress has taken. It is unpatriotic, and a grave breach of trust.

According to the sponsors of H.R. 6211, the American people are supposed to regard it as an “opportunity” to have big oil corporations come onto our public lands at a bargain basement rate, take whatever wealth they can find, sell it at a huge profit that won’t be shared with the rest of us, and then leave what they found as a scarred, poison wreck of its former self. Sorry, but I don’t see the “opportunity” in that.

Only someone determined not to see what’s happening around them could deny that America is going through profound economic suffering. Gasoline prices are up, and that means that there’s inflation for practically everything else we buy too. At the same time, work is increasingly hard to come by. New jobs aren’t being [...]

The Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, as its name implies, would begin a transition from reliance on out-of-date fossil fuels for transportation toward more efficient transportation by train. It’s exactly what we need to deal with America’s current economic and environmental problems. For some bizarre reason, almost all of the Republicans in the House of Representatives oppose it.

This legislation does exactly what Republicans say they want to do. It makes public schools more efficient. In fact, the bill makes such plain sense that 27 Republican members of the House of Representatives crossed the aisle yesterday to vote in favor of it. Thanks to them, the bill passed, and will become law if passed by the Senate.

There can be no rational objection to the Crane Conservation Act on the grounds of fiscal responsibility. The legislation has been examined and been certified to contain no earmarks for pork barrel spending. The Crane Conservation Act also contains no extra provisions to deal with any matters other than crane conservation. It does not secretly modify any existing U.S. law or provide financial kickbacks to anybody.

Do these politicians expect us to believe their excuses, that their failure to protect endangered great cats and canids is due to conservative principles? That explanation is absurd on the face of it. True conservatives support conservation.

This collection of backwards-thinking members of Congress, numbering 25 including Michelle Bachmann herself, have all signed on as sponsors of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act. I hereby name them the Dim Bulb Caucus, both on account of their stubborn dedication to wasteful technology and for their dazzling dim-wittedness in ignoring the economic and environmental threats that arise from their efforts to thwart energy efficiency.