The House GOP, who as a group rarely ever shy away from verbal pomposity and disturbing flashes of fact aversion, have been shouting to anyone willing to listen this week about House Speaker Pelosi's resistance to legitimize their farcical calls for a vote on OCS--outer continental shelf drilling. Thanks to Think Progress, here's a good list of their strange comparisions of Pelosi to a dictator:

– Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI): "This is the people's House. This is not Pelosi's politiburo."

– Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): "She's gonna bring us back and not deal with it? The American people are gonna hang her."

– Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): "When the people of France were starving, they went to the queen and said, 'The people have no bread.' The queen's answer was, 'Let them eat cake.' That is not the kind of answer we expect from the leader of the people's house in the United States of America."

– Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ): "There's going to be a change in this policy, Nancy Pelosi notwithstanding. She can't repress us forever."

– Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-CO): "I can't answer why she's acting like a dictator."

– Rep. Denny Rehlberg (R-MT): "Nancy Pelosi should not hold the American people hostage."

– Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX): "In your mind, do you believe America is a democracy or a dictatorship?"

Got it? Since Pelosi won't yield to the House GOP's calls for a gimmick vote on drilling, she's an American-style represser, dictator, or out-of-touch aristocrat. I wonder what that makes the  Department of Energy, who says that driling won't have a substantial impact on record gas prices? You can email all of these folks making these grandiose (and flat out wrong) statements about Pelosi at www.projecthotset.org. Tell them they should spend less time trying to paint the Speaker as a facist and more time switching our economy to one that runs on clean and green technologies instead of dirty fuels.   

It's been said that Hollywood and the World Wide Web have long been the domain of progressives, but there's increasing chatter that the Right needs to find their own voice in these mediums. And maybe now they have. No doubt buoyed by The Dark Knight's recent box office success, the Drill Here, Drill Now crowd seems sufficiently encouraged enough to try out a new star--Newt Gingrich. Newt, last seen in Al Gore's We Campaign commercials relaxing with Hillary Clinton on a couch and calling for action on climate, has a new video up on his America Solutions site encouraging those swell Gen Xers to send in their own videos about destroying the planet, er, I mean, drilling to reduce pain at the pump. Watch the video here. The best submission, selected by Newt himself, wins free gas for a year. Hurrah!

If you're not properly inspired by Newt's first foray into the 21st century, you can take real action to solve our energy problems here.

Some really great news out of Indonesia:

AMSTERDAM – The Indonesian province of Riau has pledged to halt the destruction of its forests and peatlands; a move that will prevent billions of tonnes of carbon from entering the atmosphere.

At a ceremony in the provincial capital Pekanbaru, Riau Governor Wan Abu Bakar announced the temporary ban, which will remain in place until a law is agreed. The move follows Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s pledge at the G-8 Summit in July to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation by 50 percent by 2009.

Indonesia is the world’s 3rd largest global warming polluter, mostly due to deforestation. In many cases, the forests of Indonesia are being cut down illegally to make way for palm plantations. Forest fires in Indonesia have been called the single largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world.

Aside from the direct impact a ban on deforestation in Indonesia will have on the amount of pollution being dumped into our atmosphere, it’s just nice to see that some of the world’s leaders actually made meaningful commitments to combatting global warming at the G8 summit. Other commitments made at that summit were not close to being ambitious enough to really tackle the enormity of the climate crisis we’re facing. It’s just nice to see some progress.