Dodgy Deals R US

A few hair-raising bills in the US House of Reps and Senate, which are now really scraping the bottom of the morality barrel.

First of all, the House yesterday passed Bush's latest Energy Bill. It's window-dressed as a green-friendly, alternative-fuel-source kinda intitiative, but the guts of the whole thing is a whopping bonus for the big energy companies which Dick Cheney loves so dearly: $US14.5 billion in tax breaks and incentives over 10 years.

It's not as if these guys actually need this money. For example, this just in from Reuters:

Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company, posted a 32 percent rise in quarterly profit on Thursday, pushed up by a relentless surge in crude oil prices and strong refining margins.

Secondly, and even more scandalously, the House yesterday voted to join the controversial Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The bill only just passed, by 217 votes to 215.

But Charles Taylor (R-NC) says his NO vote was not counted by the voting machines! Coming on the heels of the Diebold voting scandals, this raises the question of whether the US House and Senate have dodgy voting sytems that are being manipulated in favour of the GOP pro-business agenda.

Josh Marshall and the TPM Cafe are on the case...

Meanwhile, in the US Senate, increasing opposition to the War In Iraq prompted a batch of Senators (including Republicans) to try to impose a series of amendments on the latest defense bill, which called for another whopping $450 billion in funds (how many people does that kill?). Refusing to accept the amendments, and having already threatened a PResidential veto, the GOP simply pulled the bill off the table and replaced it with a bill to grant gun manufacturers wide-ranging immunity from any lawsuits arising from criminal acts in which their weapons are used. Worse yet, they argued that the new gun bill had to be passed "to support our troops", lest the poor gun manufacturers go broke.

We couldn't have that, could we?