Under the proposed 50/50 formula, utilities that are more coal dependent will need to purchase even more allowances than they would have if all allowances were allocated based on emissions.

Well, yeah. And under the current proposed 50/50 formula, the coal burners would also have to purchase more allowances than if Congress did nothing at all. But the whole point of the bill is to discourage the use of high-emission energies like coal by making them less affordable than cleaner alternatives. Sheppard explains further why the lawmakers’ argument makes little sense in the context of the global warming debate:

Of course, this would work against the entire logic of the proposed scheme, which is to offer utilities financial incentives to switch to lower-carbon fuel sources. [...]

Right now, the climate bill needs all the votes it can get from Democrats. So enviros worry that concessions to this bloc could ultimately result in a deal in which coal plants suffer no real penalties for the carbon they pump into the atmosphere. “Dirty coal polluters know their days are numbered and are lobbying for the largest piece of the pie they can get,” said Jason Kowalski, policy coordinator at 1Sky. “It goes against the spirit of this legislation to reward the polluters that caused this problem in the first place.”

Signing on to the letter were Democratic Sens. Carl Levin (Mich.), Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Russ Feingold (Wis.), Herb Kohl (Wis.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Al Franken (Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Roland Burris (Ill.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Mark Udall (Colo.) and Robert Byrd (W.Va.).

Former Republican Colorado congresswoman (and Federal Marriage Amendment sponsor) Marilyn Musgrave, pictured below, canvassed with the young activists and said that their out-of-district origins didn’t matter. “It makes people so happy to see them,” she said.

Video and photos below the fold.

The 7th District is considerably bluer than the rest of the state — it gave Barack Obama a 19-point win over John McCain, after handing John Kerry a 3-point win four years earlier. And Perlmutter has represented parts of the district since he was elected to the state Senate in 1994. Still, it’s less of a longshot than the Senate race, and Frazier has built up name recognition that he’ll use to raise funds nationally.

Flickr: Stallio

The payday lending industry, stung by losses in states that either refused to authorize their high-rate, short-term loans or moved to limit finance charges, isn’t giving up without a fight.

Payday lenders are out in full force in Wisconsin, where a legislative battle is underway over efforts to impose a 36 percent rate cap on payday loans, a move the industry claims will put it out of business. The next big battleground state will be Colorado, where payday lenders already are making financial contributions to minority groups to win favor, in anticipation of an upcoming legislative fight over payday reform. And in Washington, D.C., payday lenders have sharply increased their Capitol Hill spending and profile at a time when other types of political fundraising is on the decline, hoping to dissuade Congress from imposing any additional federal limits on the industry. Payday lenders also wary of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would have oversight of mortgages and other financial instruments, even though proposals don’t specifically single out payday lending.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“Obviously, the industry has gotten its hat handed to it at the state level, and it appears to be spending a lot of time and money trying to win friends and influence people on the Hill,” said Jean Ann Fox, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

Not a single state has authorized payday lending since Michigan did so in 2005, Fox said. The last payday lender shut down and left Arkansas in August, not long after a crackdown by the state Attorney General. Voters in Arizona and Ohio last year approved rate caps on payday loans, despite aggressive opposition from the industry. In 2007, the District of Columbia approved a 36 percent rate cap, after a heated fight. The decisions have shifted the momentum in the payday lending battle, given that prior to the financial crisis, the industry regularly won victories at the state level to authorize their lending with no limits.

But payday lenders are gearing up for an alternative strategy. The industry believes it has found new support in arguing that payday loans, with annual interest rates that can reach 400 percent, are a cheaper alternative to overdraft charges. The industry is citing a recent USA Today analysis based on data from Moebs Services, an economic research firm. According to the analysis, consumers pay an overdraft fee of $26.68 every time they overdraw their account. So if consumers overdraw by $100, they’d pay an annual percentage rate (APR) of 696%, if the credit is paid back in two weeks – compared with an APR of 450% on a $100 payday loan with an average fee of $17.25, according to USA Today.

“The focus on overdraft protection on the Hill has helped legislators to understand that payday lending can be looked at as a cheaper alternative to overdraft charges,” said Steven Schlein, a spokesman for the Community Financial Services Association, the trade group for payday lenders.

Consumer advocates say that’s not necessarily true – and that neither of those high-cost options is a good one. Regardless, the industry has the money to get its message and arguments out in Washington. It doubled its lobbying expenditures in the last two years years to more than $4 million, according to the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Top recipients of payday lending money in the 2008 campaign cycle include such influential lawmakers as Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who reversed his support for a payday lending ban and sponsored much weaker reforms after accepting substantial contributions from the industry, and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

“It’s not that many dollars, especially compared to other groups, but what’s striking is how much more the payday lending industry is spending than it used to,” said Naomi Seligman, a CREW spokesperson.

D. Lynn DeVault, board chair of the Community Financial Services Association, recently told Checklist, a trade publication for check cashing stores and payday lenders, that the industry is pouring its resources into Capitol Hill, increasing its federal lobbying budget by four times this year alone to fight off more than 14 bills in the House and Senate that affect payday lending. The group strongly opposes a measure that would cap rates on all consumer loans at 36 percent, co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. It even still dislikes the weaker bill sponsored by Gutierrez, who said in July that he would no longer accept industry contributions. Schlein said payday lenders will oppose in principle any payday reforms coming from Washington, contending that states should handle the issue.

DeVault said the group’s increased lobbying spending represents some 60 percent of its total budget, forcing it to cut back on consumer education and community outreach programs.

“We’re cutting back everywhere so we can put our resources behind this federal effort,” she told Checklist.

For that reason, Fox, of the Consumer Federation of America, doesn’t consider the payday lending fight anywhere near over, despite recent successes, including the 36 percent rate cap on payday loans to military personnel imposed by Congress in 2006.

“It’s always a concern,” she said. “Families burned by payday lenders don’t have the same Gucci Gulch ability to take on Congress.”

The industry’s efforts to fend off pending regulation in Washington are a twist on the tactics of financial services firms during the subprime boom. After lobbying from the lending industry, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2004 exempted banks and mortgage companies from tough state anti-predatory lending laws.

In states still facing payday reform fights, intense battles are underway.

In  Wisconsin, payday lenders have recruited 29 lobbyists for various payday reform proposals – the most lobbyists hired for a single issue in recent memory, said Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, sponsor of the bill to impose a rate cap. Payday lenders also were the No. 1 campaign contributor during the first reporting period of this year, he said. Along with Hintz’s bill, other measures are being proposed in Wisconsin that would benefit payday lenders with lesser reforms, and have the industry’s support. Wisconsin is one of the last states without an interest rate limit on payday loans.

“It’s a gold mine here right now,” Hintz said, noting that even campaign consultants who helped get him elected have been lured to the opposition’s side. “I had no idea I’d be getting into something like this.”

As a result, it’s the “Mother Teresa coalition” of groups like the Catholic Conference and other nonprofits that support payday limits, up against the money and clout of payday lenders, Hintz said. “There is no interest group for people who were taken advantage of by payday lenders,” he said.

Hintz also said it was his understanding that payday lenders were tired of losing in other states, and as a result planned a major campaign in Wisconsin. Lawmakers are expected to consider payday lending reform proposals before the end of the year, he said.

In Colorado, the payday lending industry has been busy raising its profile and contributing to minority groups and events, said Matt Sundeen, senior policy analyst and general counsel with The Bell Policy Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group.

Last month, former Denver Bronco Willie Green, director of corporate development and community outreach for the payday lender Advance America, presented the Urban League of Metropolitan Denver with a $10,000 contribution on behalf of his employer. Payday lender Moneytree for the first time sponsored the annual El Grito 5k run/walk, a major event for the Hispanic community.

Despite the industry’s financial clout, Sundeen said consumer advocates in Colorado are encouraged by the defeat of payday lenders in other states, where the industry far outspent opponents.”Clearly, they are very active in our state as well,” Sundeen said. “But we hope in 2010 we’ll be able to take care of payday legislation.”

It may not be that simple. In Ohio, where voters approved a 28 percent rate cap on payday loans last year, payday lenders are working to circumvent the law by continuing to make payday loans under two older consumer loan laws still on the books, said David Rothstein, a researcher with nonpartisan Policy Matters Ohio. “Those laws were never meant for payday loans,” he said. “The payday lenders are certainly doing everything they can” to continue making loans, he said.

Schlein, the industry spokesman, said payday lenders are keeping up the fight in Ohio, and will keep spending money in states where payday reforms are being considered. They also will work in Washington to prevent lawmakers from trying to put any limits on payday loans. “We always are going to fight hard,” he said.

Which means the battle over high-rate, short-term loans to people in financial distress won’t be over anytime soon.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams at the 2008 GOP Texas State Convention (williamsfortexas.com)

“Let’s talk about race,” wrote Michael Williams.

It was September 22, six days after former President Jimmy Carter suggested that race was one reason for the special political animosity toward President Barack Obama. Williams, the four-term Texas railroad commissioner–a job, he tells everyone, that has everything to do with energy policy and nothing to do with railroads–had already dinged Carter for the remarks. But in a long blog post at his campaign website, Williams went further.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“As an African-American son of the South,” wrote Williams, “I grew up in a time and place where you didn’t have to divine intent or deconstruct code words to find racism.” The crisis in America, he explained, was the proliferation of people calling one another “racists” for their position on Obama’s policies. “We have rid our institutions of government of the practice of discrimination; if only we could rid our political discourse of the ugliness that ensues when we ascribe discriminatory motive to statements with no obvious discriminatory aspect.”

There was a nuts-and-bolts political point to this. Williams is one of the nation’s very few African-American Republicans who hold statewide office. He’s running for the U.S. Senate seat expected to be vacated by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), a candidate for governor that year. If elected, he would be the only African-American member of the Senate, as the appointed and scandal-plagued Democrat Roland Burris is retiring next year. That means Williams is threatening to jump out of obscurity and into the position of a credible, high-profile critic of Obama.

“I don’t know if some of the criticisms President Obama has received have been about veiled prejudices,” Frazier told TWI while on the road to an event in Durango, Col., a small city with a black population of less than one percent. “But when it comes to me, Democrats are not going to be able to use some of those same tactics and rhetoric–which have actually tended to work for them–accusing me of disagreeing with the president because of his race. I’m not one of those Republicans sitting around, questioning the president’s citizenship.”

While Republican strategists have spun some outbreaks of racial dialogue to their advantage–virtually all of them feel that Jimmy Carter’s comments reflected poorly on the former president, not on Republicans–there is a stark awareness that the party’s lack of African-American faces is a problem when opposing the first African-American president. Despite the elevation of RNC Chairman Michael Steele, not many Republicans spoke highly of his attempts to turn racial controversies against the Democrats, such as his suggestion that the White House may have pressured Gov. David Paterson (D-N.Y.) to leave the 2010 campaign because he’s black. As the party has pointed to anti-tax Tea Parties for proof of political momentum, the lack of more African-American spokespeople has been notable.

“It’s hard for a white liberal to call black a Republican a racist,” said Richard Ivory, the editor of HipHopRepublican.com.

Since former Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) retired in 2002, the party has had no African-American representation in Congress, and that’s led to some missed opportunities. In 2005, when then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean joked that Republicans couldn’t match the diversity of a Democratic meeting unless they invited “the hotel staff,” the semi-official Republican response to Dean came from a decidedly low-profile group of eight black Republicans in Mississippi.

In 2006, when the party ran credible African-American candidates in Ohio, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, GOP strategists gleefully turned the race card over on Democrats. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), for example, was pilloried by Republicans for saying then-Senate candidate, now RNC Chairman Michael Steele had followed his party “slavishly.” But in a bad year for the party, its top-tier African-American candidates were wiped out.

Black Republicans have no problem portraying Democrats as especially interested in bringing them down. Herman Cain, a 2004 U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia–who lost the primary to now-Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.)–has claimed that Democrats want him and fellow black Republicans to “stay on the plantation.” The National Black Republican Association called the January 2009 election of Steele “the Democrats’ worst nightmare,” an accurate reflection of the reason some Republican National Committee members gave Steele a shot at the job. In an interview with TWI, Ken Blackwell–who has remained a sought-after conservative speaker since losing a 2006 race for governor of Ohio–argued that Democrats targeted him early to prevent the rise of a powerful black Republican voice.

“When I was re-elected as secretary of state, I got 42 percent of the African-American vote,” Blackwell reminisced. “That just worried the Democrat strategists and leaders. So I got targeted. If I had been running for another term as secretary of state, they wouldn’t have wasted the time on me. But a conservative, African-American governor? That’s problematic.”

Some of the party’s 2010 hopefuls have hurdles to overcome within the party. Neither Williams nor Frazier is the favorite in his respective Senate race. Despite polls showing that either of them would be likely to win their general elections, Williams trails either Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R-Tex.) and Attorney General Greg Abbott (R-Tex.), and Frazier trails former Lt. Jane Norton (R-Co.), who entered the race only last month. “Michael Williams is a black candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “How much of a chance would I give him of surviving a runoff with Dewhurst or Abbott? None.”

The prospects are better for Huddleston and West. Privately, Republican strategists suggested that they will not face serious primary challenges, and are strong contenders for support from the National Republican Campaign Committee if they post strong fundraising numbers of their own. West raised more than $550,000 in 2008 for his first race, with what he characterized as “nothing” from the state or national parties, and pulled 45 percent of the vote in a district that gave 48 percent to George W. Bush in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. West relished the idea of arriving in Washington and demanding membership in the Congressional Black Caucus.

“They don’t want that to be out there,” West told TWI. “They don’t want to see empowerment. They want to have entitlement. You undercut the people like the Jesse Jacksons, the James Clyburns, the Maxine Waterses. You know–the John Conyerses, the Diane Watsons. I am their worst nightmare and I understand that. I welcome them to come and engage me on that level.”

Huddleston, who ran and lost a campaign for the North Carolina legislature last year, may be running in a more favorable district. While Rep. Larry Kissell (D-N.C.) easily won the seat in 2008, he was aided by a massive turnout of African-American voters who make up 28 percent of the district. Huddleston said he’d had eyeball-to-eyeball conversations with black voters who split their ballots for Obama, Kissell and him. He also hinted at a possible endorsement from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom Huddleston called a “mentor” in his military career.

“He and I have communicated,” said Huddleston. “Let’s leave it at that.”

Alone among the Republican candidates that TWI spoke to, Huddleston balked at the idea of becoming a high-profile, go-to spokesman on racial flare-ups if he got to Congress. Democrats keep their base “stoked” when they “play the race card,” he said. “I will not be a token for anybody. If I’m on your team, you let me on because I can play the position. And if you’re a reporter and you ask me to comment on what Jimmy Carter said about race, I will give you my time. I’ll have the expectation that you come back to me to talk about national security, or about trade, or about one of the issues I actually am running on.”

According to Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist whose book “Wrong on Race” argued that Republicans should be able to capitalize on Democrats’ weak record on racial progress, Huddleston might have the clearest view of how a black Republican could take advantage of the political scene.

“Not to be crude,” said Bartlett but I think [J.C.] Watts and [former Rep. Gary] Franks (R-Conn.) were always viewed as tokens in the black community. Their election led neither to an increase in voting for Republicans by blacks nor any increased effort by Republicans to attract black votes.”

Last Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 258-163 to refuse to allow detainees now held at the Guantanamo Bay prison to enter the United States. Even a supermax prison facility isn’t safe enough to contain them, they decided, in a nonbinding resolution.

But Peter Finn at the Washington Post noted on Sunday that conditions at the United States’ most secure federal prisons are actually far more draconian than they are at Guantanamo Bay.

“For up to four hours a day, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, can sit outside in the Caribbean sun and chat through a chain-link fence with the detainee in the neighboring exercise yard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” writes Finn. By contrast, terror suspects in U.S. prisons are usually kept in complete isolation, allowed only one hour a day outside, and never get to speak to anyone.

The federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado is home to such notorious convicted terrorists as 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef; Teodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber; and Terry Nichols, convicted of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The conditions at Florence are supposedly so bad that terror suspects in Britain appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to prevent their extradition to the United States, arguing that the prison conditions constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In fact, studies have found that such extreme isolation can cause or exacerbate mental illness.

At Gitmo, meanwhile, KSM gets to work out on the gym’s elliptical machines and stationery bikes, choose his own movies to watch in the media room, read newspapers and books, and play handheld electronic games, reports Finn.

The Obama administration hasn’t yet revealed how it intends to close the Guantanamo prison, and what it plans to do with the 220 or so detainees that remain there.

That information is hidden behind a proxy:

h/t Stacy McCain

Update: The Colorado Independent had an item on this last week.

“This cannot pass. What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

She’s talking about health care reform.

Update: Luning passes on some more background.

Bachmann was speaking at a fundraiser, described as a “personal legislative briefing,” for the Colorado-based Independence Institute, which describes itself as a “free-market think tank.” In a fiery speech that had the audience cheering, Bachmann railed against the dangers of health care reform and other Democratic initiatives, saying the proposals “have the strength to destroy this country forever.”

2nd Update: The Colorado Independent has more on Bachmann’s appearance here.

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You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

My attitude toward this is let’s get something. Let’s get the ball rolling. Let’s not have an argument between two poles. Let’s pick a middle course. Of course, the right wing and the insurance companies are already attacking the middle course. If there’s no public option we shouldn’t do anything. The last thing you want to do is pour a trillion dollars into something we already know doesn’t work right.

Also of note, Dean, a physician and a longtime advocate of a single-payer system, appears to have abandoned that approach due to political realities — much to the dismay of the left-leaning Colorado audience.

You can read Wendy’s write-up here.