(Note: It was announced shortly after 7 pm ET that Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, had died.)

by Andrew Zajac

Cleveland-area Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones is in critical condition after suffering an aneurysm last night.

The Plain Dealer and other news outlets this afteroon briefly reported that Tubbs-Jones, 58, the first black woman to represent Ohio in Congress, had died.

But officials subsequently said Tubbs Jones is alive but has limited brain function.

Tubbs Jones gained a measure of notoriety earlier this year with her staunch support of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary, despite representing a heavily black district which tilted to Barack Obama.

Here's a recent update on Tubbs Jones from AP, plus more on her controversial support for Clinton:

by Frank James

For the past few months as oil-futures prices were breaking records with a barrel of oil topping out around $150, Many congressional Democrats raised concerns about speculators in the "dark" market driving up those crude-oil prices. Sometimes it sounded as though congressional Democrats were looking for bogeymen to pin the price spikes on in an effort to demonstrate to voters that they were doing something.

These claims came against the counter narrative by economists, oil-industry experts and many Republicans that it was less speculation than world demand that was forcing prices higher. No less than Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said he didn't believe speculators were the likely culprit because of a lack of evidence, including signs of energy supplies being hoarded.

The speculation question yields no easy answers and is indeed one of the murkier areas when it comes to what is happening exactly with energy prices.

It's worth noting however that speculation is evidently playing a larger role in oil markets than was earlier hought.

This from The Wall Street Journal:

Data emerging on players in the commodities markets show that speculators are a larger piece of the oil market than previously known, a development enlivening an already tense election-year debate about traders' influence.

by Amanda Erickson

It's a partial win.

That's what House Republicans called the announcement that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) may allow a vote on offshore oil drilling...if it is packaged with funding for renewable energy projects, tapping strategic petroleum, and repealing tax breaks to oil companies.

Pelosi told Larry King on CNN that she would consider permitting the vote, which has been at the center of a three week partisan brawl.

On August 4, Pelosi refused to allow lawmakers to cast their vote before the August recess, which inspired an impromptu floor revolt. The Republican lawmakers have been making their way back to Washington to speak on the darkened floor about the importance of comprehensive energy legislation.

But on Tuesday, they responded to Pelosi's offer by saying that she was trying to put up a bill that was designed to fail. They said if the Speaker is serious, she should call back Congress for a vote now.

by James Oliphant

The Justice Department Monday filed a brief opposing indicted Sen. Ted Stevens' bid to move his corruption trial to the friendly spaces of Alaska.

DOJ lawyers claimed that such a move would force the mass decampment of witnesses, evidence and lawyers. It wants the trial to stay in Washington, where Stevens keeps a residence and holds down a job.

More interesting, they argued that the move would give Stevens even more opportunity to use his indictment as a campaign issue. (The senator is up for re-election.) That, they say, would potentially taint an Alaska jury.

Read more, including the government's brief, at Writ Large, the Tribune's new legal affairs blog.

by Amanda Erickson

Welcome to Swamp Clearing, an occasional feature in which we will dissect one or two of the most-discussed, outrageous, or otherwise fascinating talking points of a particular news cycle, analyzing the claim to figure out how accurate it is.

As we go along, if you have questions, problems, things you want us to look into, send us an email.

As week two of the Republican protest on offshore drilling kicks off, we're jumping on the energy bandwagon by exploring the offshore oil drilling debate. First, a quick summary: Republicans had been pushing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to allow a vote on offshore drilling energy legislation. Pelosi refused, and on Friday Aug. 1 adjourned the House for the summer.

Since then, Republicans have returned to the floor to deliver speeches without microphones, lights, or BlackBerries. The reason for this protest? Besides garnering some publicity, the lawmakers want Pelosi to call the House back so its members can vote on the energy legislation.

This has ignited an all-out flame war between the two parties, Below are a few choice comments, and the facts behind them.

by Matthew Hay Brown, updated with Boehner aide response

House Minority Leader John Boehner used some vivid language last week to describe the political consequences House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would face for refusing to hold a vote on expanding offshore drilling.

Now Pelosi's top deputy is urging him to take it back.

Boehner, who has joined the Republican protest demanding that Pelosi call the House back from the August recess to vote on a GOP energy bill, was asked Friday about the possibility of a special session in which Democrats focused on other issues, such as children's health insurance, without tackling drilling.

"She's gonna bring us back and not deal with it?" asked the Ohio Republican, as quoted by Politico. "The American people are gonna hang her."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who has enjoyed a cordial relationship with Boehner, said he was "disappointed" by the "inappropriate comments."

"Republicans are clearly frustrated that the American public is not buying their Johnny-one-note energy policies of the past, but such comments are harmful to a useful debate over our nation's future," the Maryland Democrat said. "I hope the Minority Leader will apologize for his remarks, and work with Democrats in a bipartisan, constructive manner to increase our domestic oil supply, invest in renewable energy and end our dependence on foreign oil."

A spokesman for Boehner said today that the minority leader had "used a figure of speech to reflect the frustration Americans feel every time they fill up at the pump."

by Frank James

It seems everything has a Washington connection, even Isaac Hayes who died yesterday at age 65.

For instance Hayes, an American original of a singer, songwriter and self-styled Black Moses, gave an important endorsement to Rep. Steve Cohen, the white lawmaker who represents Memphis and handily beat a black attorney in last week's Democratic primary.

Cohen, who received 79 percent of the vote in his mostly black district, obviously didn't need Hayes's hot-buttered soul of an endorsement to win, but it certainly didn't hurt. A local Memphis news station did a segment on Hayes's endorsement.

Meanwhile, earlier this year the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama was fond of using the 1960s classic r&b song "Hold On, I'm Coming" which became was a hit for the singing duo, Sam and Dave. Hayes co-wrote that song with its unique origin.

During a recording session, Hayes was getting impatient waiting for his songwriting partner, David Porter, to return from the restroom and began yelling for him to hurry up. "Hold on, I'm coming" Porter shouted back. A hit was born.

Anyway, the Obama liked that song a lot. Obama's supporters enjoyed changing the lyrics to "Hold On, Obama's Coming."

But Sam Moore, half of Sam and Dave and the song's owner, didn't like the Obama's campaign use of it, so he asked them to cease and desist from using it which they did.

Maybe Hayes's "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" is still available?

In any event, rest in peace Black Moses. Your funky, lush music provided a partial soundtrack for the lives of millions.

Cohen, left, celebrates with his co-campaign manager Randy Wade. (AP Photo/The Commercial Appeal, Mark Weber)

by Frank James

In Memphis, Rep. Steve Cohen, a white Democrat, won a decisive primary victory over Nikki Tinker, a black lawyer, in a congressional district that is 60 percent African-American.

Call it a victory for incumbency or a demonstration that African-Americans don't always vote for the candidate who have the most melanin in his or her skin, Cohen picked up 79 percent of the vote versus 19 percent for Tinker. Talk about your thumpings.

Here's a snippet from today's Memphis Commercial Appeal with a Cohen quote:

Cohen won 79 percent of the vote, greatly expanding his base of support from the 2006 Democratic Primary he had won with 31 percent of the vote on a very crowded ballot. Nikki Tinker polled only 19 percent (she got 25 percent in 2006).

Cohen, 59, is virtually assured of re-election, though his campaign does move to the November general election, with independent candidates Jake Ford, Dewey Clark and Mary Taylor Shelby Wright on the ballot. In 2006, Cohen easily defeated Ford, the brother of former 9th District representative Harold Ford Jr. and son of former representative Harold Ford Sr., drawing 60 percent of the vote to Ford's 18 percent.

This race was marked by fairly blatant racial appeals from both Cohen and Tinker. Cohen introduced legislation which passed the House that would have the U.S. officially apologize for slavery.

For her part, Tinker ran an ad in which showed video of marching Klansmen and a picture of Cohen who she accused of once voting against a bill that would have changed the name of a Memphis park so it no longer honored on of the Ku Klux Klan's founders.

by Matthew Hay Brown

The recent exchange of letters between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader John Boehner occasioned by the debate over drilling has been typical for the two leaders when they have been divided over an issue.

Less so is the gambit by Boehner today.

The Ohio Republican and his colleagues in the GOP House leadership are bypassing their Democratic counterparts with a letter sent directly to the majority party's rank-and-file. They're asking Democrats to join the Republicans who have been staging a floor protest this week in calling on Pelosi to reconvene Congress for a vote on "increasing American-made energy."

"Since Last Friday, House Republicans have stood with the American people in an unprecedented nationwide protest against Speaker Pelosi's decision to adjourn the House for the rest of the summer without a vote on the energy solutions Americans are demanding," Boehner said. He said he would return to Washington tomorrow to join the protest.

"Republicans will not rest until the American people have been heard and Speaker Pelosi has allowed an up-or-down vote on the energy reforms our nation needs," he said.

Republicans, who have been giving speeches in the dimmed House chamber since last week, want to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf to oil and gas exploration.

Democrats, who have dismissed the revolt as a stunt, say oil companies should focus first on developing the tens of millions of acres on which they already have permission to drill. They also want President Bush to release supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Both sides acknowledge that there is little they can do to reduce prices at the pump in the short term. The text of the Republican letter follows.

by Amanda Erickson

After almost a week of ignoring Republican protests, Democratic leaders stepped into the offshore oil drilling fray.

Top Democrats attacked the Republicans' floor protest as mere antics and criticized the GOP for holding up "real" legislation that would create "long-term" change.

Pelosi (D-Calif): "According to the Bush Administration's own Energy Department, if we repealed the offshore drilling ban today, oil and gas production would not begin there until 2017, and the impact on prices before 2030 would be "insignificant." Why do House Republicans keep calling for an action that they know won't solve today's energy problems?"

Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) put out his own statement, calling drilling a "temporary band-aid," and arguing for "visionary" proposals that allow for nuclear and other sustainable energies.

Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) weighed in. On a conference call today, he said that Senate Democrats also helped bring down oil prices by introducing a bill to eliminate some speculation in the oil futures market.

by Frank James

For months, members of Congress, especially but not only Democrats, have questioned why the Iraqi government doesn't spend more of its own billions in oil dollars (it has the world's third largest known oil reserves) on its reconstruction, instead relying on billions of U.S. tax dollars.

Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John Warner (R-Va) asked The General Accountability Office to examine the Iraq oil revenue issue and the GAO has come back with an answer.

The thumbnail: from 2005 to 2007, the Iraqis had $96 billion in revenues with $90.2 billion coming from oil revenues. And 2008 was expected to be a good year because of high oil prices, with revenues this year coming in between $73.5 billion and $86.2 billion, again with 90 percent coming from oil.

During the same period the Iraqi government spent $67 billion on its operating expenses, such as government workers' salaries and pensions as well as goods and services. Only one percent went to "maintaining Iraq- and U.S.-funded investments, which includes the maintenance of roads, bridges, vehicles, buildings, water and electricity installations, and weapons."

The Iraqis had a $29.4 billion surplus at the end of December which they kept in Iraqi and U.S. financial institutions. The GAO estimated that It's 2008 surplus would range between $38.2 billion to $50.3 billion.

It's those surpluses that are really driving some U.S. lawmakers crazy. They want the Iraqis to start spending that money so that U.S. taxpayers could stop picking up so much of the reconstruction tab. The GAO says the U.S. has appropriated $48 billion for Iraqi reconstruction and stabilization since 2003, with about 70 percent of those funds having been spent.

Part of the problem is that the Iraqis don't have the capacity to spend their money effectively. As the report says:

U.S. government, coalition, and international officials have identified a number of factors that have affected the Iraqi government's ability to spend more of its revenues on capital investments intended to rebuild its infrastructure. These factors include Iraq's shortage of trained staff, weak procurement and budgeting systems, and violence and sectarian strife. As we have previously reported, the United States has funded, since 2005, activities to help build the capacity of key civilian and security ministries and thereby improve the Iraqi government's ability to execute its budget for capital projects.

by Amanda Erickson

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) took a major swipe at Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) when she compared the House Speaker to infamous French queen, Marie Antoinette.

Like Antoinette, who said starving French peasants should eat cake if they had no bread, Foxx said Pelosi is thumbing her nose at the needs of American who can't afford the cost of gas.

"That's not the kind of answer we expect," she told reporters at a press conference this morning.

This was only the latest in a series of increasingly forceful (and at times, long-winded) attacks on Pelosi for adjourning the House without allowing a vote on energy. In the hours after Pelosi ordered the lights, cameras and microphones off of the House floor Friday, several Republicans delivered speeches calling for a vote on off-shore drilling. They have continued for the past three days.

Today, they even brought in the big guns, in the form of Republican Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker from Georgia. He told reporters that American-generated energy is good for national security and the environment.

by Amanda Erickson

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) was sitting in his family room Sunday afternoon when his BlackBerry went off. Urgent, it read. Come back in Washington.

Roskam packed up his four children and drove through the night to speak on the darkened House floor Monday morning.

He joined a group of Republicans who, without cameras, microphones and BlackBerries, have returned to DC during the August recess to insist that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) allow a vote on energy legislation that includes offshore oil drilling.

On Friday, Pelosi shut down debate by adjourning the House for the summer.

The protest (or stunt, depending on who you ask), has lasted three days. Leaders pledged to keep going "as long as it takes," or at least until the end of the week.

On Tuesday, 15 Republican lawmakers took to the floor. They told stories about struggling constituents, made fun of France, and offered history lessons in the name of suffering Americans, who they say deserve to "have their voices heard."

Tour groups drifted in and out. But a cadre of committed staffers stayed, offering more than one standing ovation and chants of "vote, vote, vote."

Pelosi has so far stood her ground, pushing the president to release stockpiled oil from the nation's reserve.

by Chris Jones

If Barack Obama wins the presidency, Second City might well find itself the quasi-official White House comedy troupe.

The Obama campaign, and the Obamas themselves, have been enamored of the Chicago-based theater ever since the 2007 mainstage revue "Between Barack and a Hard Place" cast Hillary Clinton as an unloved, hard-nosed pol unable to compete with a charming, chameleonic rival whom even Abraham Lincoln loved to call B.O.

That show, a huge hit, was also notable for the love ballad "Where Was This Al Gore Before?," replete with the memorable rhyming of "Tipper" and "zipper."

Most of the senior staffers of the Obama campaign, including chief strategist David Axelrod, came to the show.

So did Michelle Obama and Maya Soetoro-Ng, Sen. Obama's half-sister. The pair laughed uproariously all night long...

(For the rest, go to the Theater Loop blog by Chris Jones.)

by James Oliphant

From Texas Politics, a blog of the Houston Chronicle:

Rick Noriega brought down by a bad tooth

Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Rick Noriega was temporarily felled Monday by an abcessed tooth, said campaign spokesman Martine Apodaca.

Apodaca said Noriega had to have a small piece of his right back jaw removed to deal with the abcess. He said Noriega does not feel well and may need a day or two to be speaking normally again.

"It's not so much that he's incapacitated as it is he's incomprehensible," Apodaca said.