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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (13289)	10/21/2003 7:51:22 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

Energy bill hits ethanol snag No vote on conference report this week By William L. Watts, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 7:27 PM ET Oct. 20, 2003 WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- House and Senate Republicans were unable Monday to iron out tax-related differences on a wide-ranging energy bill, delaying action on one of President Bush's top legislative priorities until at least next week. Tax provisions regarding ethanol, the politically sensitive, corn-derived fuel additive, remained a key sticking point. Congress' two top tax writers -- Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., met Monday but were unable to reach a final agreement. In addition to ethanol, provisions of the final energy bill deal with modernization of the nation's power grid, oil and gas exploration incentives, and development of alternative energy sources. "Even though they continue to make good progress, House and Senate tax writers need additional time to complete their portion of the energy conference report," said Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La., in a joint statement. The energy bill would require refiners to double the use of ethanol to 5 billion gallons a year within seven years. Grassley has insisted that the energy bill include incentives to use higher-grade ethanol while ensuring that money continues to flow into the highway trust fund. Backed by a bipartisan group of farm-state lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Grassley has also resisted House language that ethanol proponents fear would give states greater leeway to opt out of the ethanol requirement. The Senate bill would let states waive the ethanol requirements if the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, after consulting with the secretaries of energy and agriculture, finds that forcing compliance would severely harm the economy or environment at the national level. The tax writers, who are also working to resolve differences between House and Senate versions of a Medicare prescription drug bill, were set to meet again Tuesday. Meanwhile, Domenici and Tauzin said they would hold off on a conference vote on a final House-Senate bill until early next week when the House and Senate are both back in session. Daschle, in a letter to President Bush, said House leaders were insisting on language that would harm small, regional ethanol producers while benefiting big producers, including Illinois-based industry leader Archer Daniels Midland (ADM: news, chart, profile). Daschle said the language favored by House GOP leaders would spur winter demand for ethanol, when ADM, one of the world's largest food processors, is able to produce more of the fuel additive and less corn-based sweetener due to lower seasonal demand for fructose. The firm would also be able to buy and store ethanol from smaller competitors in the summer when demand for the additive is less. Democratic energy lawmakers, meanwhile, complained that they have been shut out of negotiations. Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the senior Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, said that while GOP negotiators work on tax issues, there are reportedly hundreds of pages of text dealing with resolved issues that could be distributed to all conferees. "It is important that we be able to review the text thoroughly before we are called into a final conference meeting for a vote on it. Our staff was standing by all weekend in hopes of getting to see the text. We were not able to do so," Bingaman said on the Senate floor. Domenici has pledged to give Democrats 24 hours to review a final draft of the conference report once House and Senate Republicans have completed negotiations. GOP lawmakers from both chambers have been meeting since August in an effort to resolve differences between the Senate bill, passed this summer, and the bill approved by the House earlier this year. House and Senate GOP leaders moved to jumpstart talks this week after Domenici warned through an aide that completion of a bill could slip until early next year if Republican lawmakers failed to resolve internal differences by the end of October, when the House plans to adjourn for the remainder of the year. William L. Watts is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com

To: LindyBill who wrote (13289)	10/21/2003 11:28:05 AM
From: KonKilo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793622

If you are to the left of Klein, maybe it's time you took a look around. Not left of Klein, just uneasy about pouring all those dollars into physical "reconstruction". As usual, Josh Marshall has the most insightful take: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Here's a good piece in Newsweek about the White House's new front in the war on terror -- the battle against the media. They note one question that I've wondered about a lot. We hear quite a bit about all the schools reopening. But how many of them ever closed? Certainly, there were schools before the war, right? Says Newsweek ... Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. My own view of the reconstruction question chalks up a lot to inertia, poor planning and drift. If you go back to last fall, or even the early months of this year, there was plenty of talk about reconstruction in Iraq. But if you look closely most of the talk was about social and political reconstruction: building a free press, purging the army of Baathists, creating the building blocks of a rule-of-law society, and so forth. There was precious little talk about rebuilding their stuff, i.e., the physical infrastructure of the country -- bridges, schools, telephones, electrical grids, all up to western standards. Certainly, there was a recognition that we'd need to rebuild stuff that we broke in the course of prosecuting the war. But the entire focus of reconstruction underwent a wholesale transformation in the months after the war. The reason for this, I think, is that we very quickly found out, on entering the country, that the social and political reconstruction task was vastly harder than the planners of the war had anticipated, and that they were woefully underprepared for it. That left them scrambling for a new raison d'etre for the war, a new justification for what we were doing there. What we came up with was rebuilding their stuff. Of course, fat cats of all varieties were ready on hand to enable this drift in policy. And needless to say, most already had the president's ear. Building bridges and schools can be terribly expensive. But it's something we know how to do and something that shows concrete results. Building civil society can be, to paraphrase Bolivar, like plowing the sea. I grant you that this is a very broad brush analysis. But I think it captures much of what has gone on in our Iraq policy over the last six months. -- Josh Marshall talkingpointsmemo.com