[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must welcome the heat she's getting for wobbling on the farm and energy bills. Having caved in to Detroit on fuel economy standards and compromised with Midwest agro-plutocrats on crop subsidies for millionaires, she's shown that she's more a pragmatic Baltimore pol like her father than a knee-jerk San Francisco liberal. That'll serve her well.

Both the farm and the energy bills won approval in the House in the past couple of weeks. Both are monuments to waste, stupidity and policy distortions going back generations -- longer in the case of the ag subsidies.

Pelosi says she hopes the Senate energy bill, which contains a sharp increase in fuel economy requirements -- from roughly 25 miles per gallon to 35 -- for cars and trucks, will prevail over the House version when the two are reconciled. She said it almost the same day that we learned that for the first time ever foreign models were outselling Detroit.

More significant, maybe, is the fact that the farm law -- and agricultural policy generally -- is morphing into an energy program. The bill, HR 2419, which calls itself the "Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2007," has oodles of incentives for the development and transportation of renewable fuels.

by jsw [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

Lots of posts in the California blogs in the last 24 hours, almost all of them on Bush commuting Scooter Libby's sentence (it's good to be the king -- or his friend). Actual California stuff I found below the fold. As always, if I missed something, post it in comments.

Incidentally, I noticed that for some reason the links sometimes appear as plain text in the RSS feed. They do seem to show up as hyperlinks in the emailed roundup. I'll see what I can do about that. Until then, just click through for hyperlinking.

by Julia Rosen [courtesy of Working Californians blogs]

It is official, Rep. Dingell and Rep. Boucher have dropped their effort to overrule California's tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions law, at least for now. Their proposal ran into the strong opposition from Speaker Pelosi, environmentalist and California elected officials. They had continued pushing the issue until yesterday, when they pulled it out of the energy bill currently under consideration in the House. SFChron:

The pair sent a memo on Monday to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, saying they would soon release a final version of the Democratic energy bill that would not contain the proposal to pre-empt California and other states from their plan to cut greenhouse gases. Other contentious provisions also would be dropped, the lawmakers said.

"You will note that a number of the more controversial issues we raised, such as coal-to-liquid fuels, fuel economy standards, a low-carbon fuel standard, various mandates, and the role of federal and state programs, are not included," Dingell, the committee chairman, and Boucher wrote in the memo.

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