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The Republican Party decided to bring out the author of the controversial Blunt Amendment, that thankfully was killed in the Senate last month, which would have allowed employers to deny coverage of health services to their employees on the basis of personal moral objections, to give their weekly address this Saturday.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt continued with the GOP's series of attacks on the Obama administration for the rising price of gas, of course conveniently omitting the fact that they soared to record heights after Republicans deregulated oil speculation back in 2008.

Blunt was also still flogging the Keystone pipeline project as some great "job creator" even though, as Media Matters' Political Correction noted, the numbers given by Republicans on the number of jobs created have been highly inflated and a lot of those jobs would be temporary or go to workers in other countries.

And like his buddy John Boehner over in the House, Blunt was calling the Buffett rule a "gimmick" because we all know that anything a Democrat proposes that might lower our deficit but doesn't fix the problem completely is a cheap trick, but when Republicans propose to go after the funding for Planned Parenthood, they're being completely serious about reducing the deficit and not just playing partisan politics.

Transcript of Blunt's remarks below the fold.

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During this week's Republican response to President Obama's Weekly Address, we got more of the same with their solutions on energy and gas prices, which is "drill baby drill", pretending that the Keystone XL pipeline is going to create tons of jobs, and pretending that they're for an "all of the above" energy policy when they've been completely dismissive of President Obama for pushing a move to new sources of energy like solar, wind and geothermal.

Hastings also completely ignored the fact that domestic oil production is up in the United States and it hasn't lowered gas prices, that it's a global market that President Obama doesn't have a lot of control over if they're unfairly going to try to blame him for the costs of gas rising and that oil speculation has a good deal to do with the price of gasoline going up which his party doesn't seem to be too interested in confronting since they don't want any regulation of Wall Street or anyone else for that matter. Let the 'free market" rule.

Hastings was also still pushing the GOP's old "jobs plan" which Jon Perr already took apart for us here at C&L, not to be confused with their "new" jobs plan which he also debunked for us as well.

Transcript of Hasting's remarks and their description of the video from their You Tube posting below the fold.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) says that the soaring gas prices are the fault of oil speculators on Wall Street.

"Ten years ago oil speculators controlled about 30 percent of the oil futures market," Sanders explained. "Today Wall Street speculators control over 80 percent of that market."

"Their sole function in life is to speculate to drive oil prices up and to make money," he added.

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From 60 Minutes. The entire segment can be seen here. More results from Dick Cheney's secret energy task force? Or just more proof that businesses will behave badly when left unregulated? I hope we have some adult supervision return with the swearing in of Obama. Time will tell.

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.

So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

[....]

It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges.

"Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger.

"You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got."

Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. "This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got."

Full transcript to follow.

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