Under The Radar

I don't think a lot of people noticed this in the flurry of media mania over sideshows like the Foley reports, but the House yesterday passed a major bill that would allow expanded offshore oil drilling. The bill also preserves a number of popular tax breaks for various groups.

The House voted overwhelmingly to expand offshore oil drilling and preserve a variety of popular tax breaks for families and businesses, and the Senate was poised early this morning to approve the package after lawmakers angry about trade provisions and the bill's $50 billion cost agreed to let the measure move forward.

Eight senators from textile-manufacturing states had sent a letter to Senate leaders yesterday threatening to block the bill unless they removed a proposal to lift tariffs on clothing manufactured in Haiti. And Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H) delivered a blistering condemnation of the decision by Republican leaders to push the unwieldy collection of tax, trade, health and energy measures through Congress as a single package at the last minute, with few opportunities for debate or objection.

That's not to say everything in the bill was a good thing necessarily, just that the offshore drilling issue is finally moving forward. There were lots of people unhappy with parts of the bill but there were a number of things that would have been very unpleasant surprises come tax filing time if the bill had not passed:

Throughout the day yesterday, negotiations over the tax-and-trade package consumed lawmakers, particularly in the Senate. With the trade measures under assault, House leaders delayed a vote on that portion of the package and focused first on the more popular tax provisions. By 367 to 45, the House voted to extend for two years nearly two dozen tax breaks, most of which expired in December 2005. They include a credit for research and development critical to many businesses, a reward for employers that hire former welfare recipients and a deduction for state and local sales taxes paid by people in states without income taxes.

If Congress had left town without extending the breaks, more than 19 million taxpayers would have faced higher taxes when they filed in April, said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

The package also would repeal a $5,450 limit on contributions to health savings accounts, allowing taxpayers to shelter an unlimited amount of money as long as they choose certain insurance plans with high deductibles. It would stave off a scheduled 5.1 percent cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare payments, and it would open 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas exploration.

The House approved the trade portion of the package by 212 to 184. That measure would grant permanent normal trading status to Vietnam and extend trade relations with some African and Andean countries, as well as some other developing nations. The measure also would allow some types of clothing made in Haiti to be imported duty-free. Supporters call the proposal a form of aid to one of the world's poorest countries, while opponents say it would destroy U.S. textile jobs by opening a tax-free door to Haitian goods manufactured with yarn and fabric from China.

With an already announced protectionist element in the Democrat's incoming majority, it may well become tougher to get trade agreements in the future. I'm not crazy about the Vietnam part of the bill, and I know a number of other folks have been really angry about it as well. But given the enormous oil strike already made this past summer in the Gulf, opeing up more areas makes sense.

Meanwhile, On That Old Crisis That Nobody Is Paying Attention To

While all of the press coverage these days is about the "realists" and the pretty rose colored sky that they have in their world, other parts of the world haven't exactly improved. Washington politicians and inside the beltway insiders may be enthralled with the ISG report , Iran still perks along with its accelerating nuclear program. And Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad smells defeat - for the West.

Iran has begun installing 3,000 centrifuges in an expansion of its uranium enrichment program that brings the Islamic nation significantly closer to large-scale production of nuclear fuel, the president said Saturday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also claimed that the international community was caving in to Tehran's demands to continue its nuclear program.

"Resistance of the Iranian nation in the past year forced them to retreat tens of steps over the Iran's nuclear issue," the semi-official Fars agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. Fars is considered to be close to Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.

Iran has been locked in a standoff with the West over its nuclear program. The U.S. alleges that Tehran is secretly trying to develop atomic weapons, but Iran contends its program is for peaceful purposes including generating electricity.

The West is losing ground here, Mahmoud's quite correct. And since the Baker boys want us to just sit down with them and reward them for all the bad behavior they have been engaging in, the West's backward slide is speeding up. This is the real problem with rewarding terrorism - it leads to a whole new - and likely much worse - set of issues that will need to be dealt with at an even higher cost in the future. The "realist" are only good at one thing: pushing today's problems on to people in the future to deal with. That past practice by these same committee members is pretty much exactly why we are at the point we are right now.

That really was not a path to success the first time they tried it. Why would it work better this time?

ABC - Fair And Balanced

Spending so much time fighting Spam Wars (maybe John Williams could write a theme song for that?) I missed writing about a number of things. One was the long awaited political hit piece report about Mark Foley's emails. Not surprisingly, the headlines from almost all media outlets are screaming that the GOP didn't stop Foley. Or didn't do enough or should have done more. You get the picture. What is very surprising indeed is that ABC reports, right up front,  the other little fact from the report: The Democrats also knew and also did nothing at all.

The House Ethics Committee Report includes new information that top Democrats were also aware in 2005 of Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to congressional pages at about the same time as outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert's office was informed.

While the report is critical of Hastert and his staff for not taking sufficient action, nowhere is there any evidence that the Democrats followed up. 

According to the Committee's report, "the communications directors for both the House Democratic Caucus and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee" in the fall of 2005 also had copies of e-mails written by Mark Foley to a congressional page, which the high school student described as "sick, sick, sick, sick."

ABC is also a bit unhappy that the mention of the Democrat's knowledge is not followed up, all the beating time is spent on Dennis Hastert and other in the Republican party. It sounds like there was plenty of blame to go around, but the report focuses on a one sided attack.

But while the report is highly critical of the shortcomings of Hastert and the Republican leadership, there is no follow-up to the brief one sentence mention on page 76 that powerful Democratic committees also knew about the e-mails except to note that Matt Miller, the House Democratic Caucus staff member, sent the e-mails at some point to various news organizations.

The AP article mentions the one mention of the Democrat's knowledge with one mention of their own. It is not that nobody reported it, it is that there was no follow-up, either by the committee or by the media. To the best of my knowledge from reading the news reports, the committee also appears to have not addressed the issue of the timing of the release of the news. And the report says that no rules were broken and no punishments are warranted.