Equating today’s rising credit card rates to usury, several House Democrats today announced plans to introduce legislation capping credit card rates at 16 percent.

“Things were a lot better for the average person in this country when we had usury caps,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), head of the House Rules Committee, said in a statement announcing her bill. “Watching how credit card companies have exploited people by increasing rates up to 30 percent and more is criminal and this bill will allow us to put an end to this practice.”

Massachusetts Democratic Reps. John Tierney  and Michael Capuano will co-sponsor the bill.

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The Minnesota Independent reports that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is scheduled to join previously announced headliner Sarah Palin at the National Tea Party Convention to be held Feb. 4-6  at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tenn.

From The Minnesota Independent:

[O]rganizers of the National Tea Party Convention tweeted that Bachmann would be a speaker at the Feb. 4–6 event in Nashville. Palin keynotes the convention, which is “aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from around the nation for the purpose of networking and supporting the movements’ multiple organizations principle goals.”

The Nashville Post reports that Palin’s keynote address will be closed to the press.

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Public option supporters who have looked at TWI’s Senate Public Option Scoreboard in the past few hours are probably dismayed to see that the math simply doesn’t add up for passage of health reform legislation with a government-run health insurance plan. That’s the result of comments today by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who basically nixed the already-slim chance that he’d support cloture for a bill with a public plan.

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As national climate legislation slowly simmers on the back burner of the Senate and expectations are lowered for the international climate conference in Copenhagen, environmentalists can take solace in the efforts of California, which this afternoon issued the country’s first broad-based cap-and-trade blueprint to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

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The new Washington Post-ABC News poll has only 72 percent of Americans saying that global warming is occurring right now. It’s an eight-point drop from last year, and it’s mostly driven by Republicans. The percentage of Republicans who believe in global warming has plunged from 76 to 54 percent. Fewer independents and Democrats say that climate change is happening, but the drop-off has not been so steep.

The office of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, just issued a press release announcing the launch of an investigation into “Climategate,” the quasi-scandal involving the release of more than a thousand hacked emails that reveal agenda-driven behavior on the part of climate scientists. To no one’s surprise, Inhofe takes the issue to its hyperbolic extreme, writing, “[I]t appears that the basis of federal programs, pending EPA rulemakings, and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated.”

The full text of the release is after the jump.

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I’ve been following the small but growing number of lawsuits brought on behalf of torture victims against U.S. government officials for more than a year now, but the opening statement in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday on behalf of four British former Guantanamo prisoners may be the most eloquent statement on the issue I’ve seen yet.

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Continuing with the question of how Congress will meet the costs of escalation in Afghanistan, Matthew Yglesias flags this Politico piece reporting an initiative by House Democrats to place a one-percent surtax on “middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000,” in addition to higher taxes on wealthier households. It has support not only from Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, but also from ethically challenged defense subcommittee chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) and the financial services committee’s Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Here’s how Politico reports it’ll work:

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McClatchy reports that, after weeks of deliberation, President Obama has settled on the number of additional troops he plans to send to Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he’s called “a war of necessity” in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.

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Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in NY-23, has conceded a final defeat to Rep. Bill Owens (D-N.Y.) in a statement that calls for more monitoring of the state’s election system.

“Since the morning of November 4th, many of my supporters have asked me to challenge the outcome of this race,” said Hoffman. “Their concerns centered on the veracity of the new voting machines used, for the first time, in the majority of the eleven counties that make up the Congressional District. Over the past three weeks, we nearly cut Bill Owens’ lead in half. Sadly, that is not enough. The shift in support since election night highlights one fact; the Boards of Elections, both state and county, need to work closely to ensure the seamless use of these machines in the 2010 statewide and midterm elections.”

The whole statement after the jump:

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