Outside of the procedural vote realm we also found a few notable tweets from some of our favorite Tweepers.

When Congress passed new consumer protections for credit card holders last May, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., successfully attached a not-at-all-related amendment allowing firearms in national parks, so long as gun carriers comply with laws of the state in which the park is located. That law is now scheduled to take effect on Feb. 22.

In preview, the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees has released examples of some of the activities soon to be permitted under the new statute.

In Wyoming’s Yellowstone Park, for example, backcountry hikers will be free to openly carry firearms. At Virginia’s Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, concertgoers — including those picnicking on the lawn —  will have the same opportunity. In Alaska’s Denali and Colorado’s Mesa Verde parks, handguns in holsters might soon be in fashion. Visitors to Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg National Park — a popular field-trip destination for the area’s public schools — will be able to carry rifles across those battlefields. The list goes on.

For it’s part, CNPSR opposes the changes, citing the heightened risk for rangers and the increased likelihood that wildlife — as well as natural and historical monuments — will become irresistible targets.

“A feeling of safety and security will be replaced by wariness and suspicion,” Bill Wade, chair of CNPSR’s executive council and former head of Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, said in a statement. “This diminishes some of the ’specialness and reverence’ our citizens have long accorded to their national parks.”

Too bad for Wade that his voice doesn’t carry quite so far on Capitol Hill as that of the National Rifle Association.

A great piece in The Washington Times Tuesday reveals a remarkable degree of hypocrisy from some GOP critics of last year’s $787 billion economic stimulus bill.

More than a dozen Republican lawmakers, while denouncing the stimulus to the media and their constituents, privately sent letters to just one of the federal government’s many agencies seeking stimulus money for home-state pork projects.

The letters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, expose the gulf between lawmakers’ public criticism of the overall stimulus package and their private lobbying for projects close to home.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., for example, sought more than $50 million for two projects in his state, the Times found. Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, also blasted the stimulus bill as wasteful, yet two days before voting against it, Bennett “privately forwarded to [USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack] a list of projects seeking stimulus money,” the Times notes.

“I believe the addition of federal funds to these projects would maximize the stimulative effect of these projects on the local economy,” he [Bennett] wrote.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, also drew the Times’ spotlight.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, was yet another lawmaker who voted against the stimulus and later backed applications for stimulus money in two letters to the Agriculture Department.

“If the funds are there, Sen. Grassleys going to help Iowa, rather than some other state, get its share,” spokeswoman Jill Kozeny said.

Still another vocal stimulus opponent, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., was also busy lobbying for pork, the Times discovered, even as he was accusing the Democrats of promoting the “same old, tired big spending agenda.” A Wilson spokeswoman defended the discrepancy, telling the Times that the lawmaker “opposed the stimulus as a ‘misguided spending bill,’ but once it passed, he wanted to make sure South Carolina residents ‘receive their share of the pie.’”

Some government watchdogs had a different take.

“It’s not illegal to talk out of both sides of your mouth, but it does seem to be a level of dishonesty troubling to the American public,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Creative Commons photo by jimmywayne via Flick

House Republicans attempted to invoke House Rule 60, a procedural move that allows a majority vote on the floor of the House to pull a bill out of a committee even if the committee has not approved it. The hope was that seven Democrats would join the 44 Republicans in the House and force a vote on House Joint Resolution 6, sponsored by state Reps. Dwayne Alons, R-Hull, and Delores Mertz, D-Ottosen. The bill would begin the process of amending the state’s constitution to declare marriage as only between one man and one woman.

Only Mertz joined with the GOP, causing the effort to fail. House Minority Leader Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, told reporters that the issue is likely dead this session.

“This is it,” he said. “Either there’s 51 people who want to do it or there’s not.”

Paulsen said afterward that the outcome did not come as a shock.

“I’m not surprised by the result of today’s vote,” he said. “Gov. Culver and the Democrat leaders have made it clear they do not want Iowans to have an opportunity to vote on defending traditional marriage. The likelihood of the vote count changing this session is highly unlikely,”

In the Iowa Senate, Minority Leader Paul McKinley, R-Chariton, attempted to bring a similar bill, Senate Joint Resolution 2001, to the floor by getting a majority of lawmakers to sign a petition pulling it out of committee. All 18 Republicans signed on but only one of the chamber’s 32 Democrats — Tom Hancock of Epworth — joined them, causing their effort to fail as well.

McKinley said the fate of marriage will now be left to voters in the fall legislative elections.

“Iowans are tired of senators saying back home that they support allowing Iowans a vote and then not keep their word when they get to Des Moines,” McKinley said. “While our bi-partisan effort fell short of gaining the 26 votes needed to proceed, the voters this November will have an opportunity to decide if they are content with the continued Democrat obstruction and inaction”

Hancock told The Des Moines Register that he voted with Republicans because he lives “in a highly Catholic area” and his constituents want to vote on the marriage issue.

Gay-rights advocates applauded the defeat of the procedural moves, saying Republicans are out of touch with mainstream Iowans. A recent Des Moines Register Iowa Poll found that 62 percent of Iowans believe lawmakers should focus on other things besides gay marriage.

“Republicans once again pursued an agenda that is out of touch and irresponsible,” said Brad Clark, campaign director for One Iowa, the state’s largest gay-rights organization. “We applaud House Democrats who demonstrated their commitment to a responsible agenda to balance the budget and their commitment to freedom for all Iowans.”

Before the 2010 legislative session was underway, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, made his opinion clear on the issue.

“I will not write discrimination into the constitution of the State of Iowa,” Gronstal told The Iowa Independent. “I’m going to block that at every opportunity. There will be no vote on the constitutional amendment.”

With Gronstal’s adamant support of same-sex marriage, along with House Speaker Pat Murphy, D-Dubuque, social conservative leaders conceded that the likelihood that a ban could ever be passed in 2010 was very remote. The best they could hope for was to attempt to get Democrats on the record in support of same-sex marriage and use the issue during the 2010 legislative elections.

Supporters of marriage equity are taking nothing for granted, though. During the 2009 session House Republicans also failed to force a vote on marriage using House Rule 60. But a constitutional amendment was tacked on to several other bills. State Rep. Chris Rants, R-Sioux City, first attempted to attach a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage to the state’s Health and Human Services budget, but the move was ruled out of order.

He then attempted to insert language in a Democratic tax proposal that would have defined a married couple as “a man and a woman” for the purposes of the state’s tax code. That effort also failed.

In the Senate, less effort was put into getting a ban passed, causing Christian radio host Steve Deace to criticize McKinley during his drive-time program on Iowa’s largest radio station for “feeding constituents a line of bull” about doing everything possible to stop same-sex marriage.

Anti-McKinley fliers were reportedly being distributed in Pella, paid for by a Virginia-based conservative group called Public Advocate of the United States, that called McKinley a “chicken” for not pushing harder to force a vote.

McKinley made one attempt at forcing a vote on a constitutional amendment in 2009, requesting that Gronstal join him in crafting legislation to begin the process. Gronstal refused and the matter was dead.

Tougher water regulations get final approval.

House committee passes prevailing wage bill.

Former aide to U.S. Rep. Steve King running for state attorney general.

Legislature considering requiring employers to offer sick leave.

The so-called Democratic health care bill already contains six very Republican provisions.

Forty-four Republicans were joined by Democratic state Rep. Delores Mertz of Ottosen in attempting to invoke House Rule 60, a procedural move that allows a majority vote on the floor of the House to pull a bill out of a committee even if the committee has not approved it. If the effort was successful House Joint Resolution 6, sponsored by state Reps. Dwayne Alons, R-Hull, and Delores Mertz, D-Ottosen, would have gone to the full House for debate and an up or down vote.

A similar effort failed in the Senate earlier in the day.

Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley, R-Chariton, spoke on the Senate floor Tuesday urging lawmakers to sign a petition that would allow Senate Joint Resolution 2001, which would begin the process of amending the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to be brought to the Senate floor for a vote despite not being approved by a committee.

A similar move is expected to take place Tuesday morning in the Iowa House.

All 18 Republicans signed on to the petition, but 26 signatures were needed to force a vote. McKinley said one of the chamber’s 32 Democrats also signed the petition — state Sen. Tom Hancock of Epworth.

“While our bi-partisan effort fell short of gaining the 26 votes needed to proceed, the voters this November will have an opportunity to decide if they are content with the continued Democrat obstruction and inaction,” McKinley said in a statement shortly after the effort failed.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, has repeatedly said he will never allow a vote on same-sex marriage.

Below is video of Senate Republicans discussing their petition Tuesday morning.

House Joint Resolution 6, sponsored by state Reps. Dwayne Alons, R-Hull, and Delores Mertz, D-Ottosen, would begin the process of amending the state’s constitution to declare marriage as only between one man and one woman.

Normally, the legislation would have to be approved by a committee in order to be considered on the House floor. But lawmakers will attempt to invoke House Rule 60, a procedural move that allows a majority vote on the floor of the House to pull a bill out of a committee even if the committee has not approved it.

Republicans have 44 seats in the House, meaning seven Democrats would have to join them in order to force a vote. Brad Clark, campaign director for One Iowa, told The Iowa Independent last week that Democrats could avoid the situation by simply not voting, thus denying Republicans their majority without taking a stand on the issue.

In the closing days of the 2009 legislative session, Republicans in both the House and Senate made numerous attempts to force a vote on a constitutional ban on gay marriage, including attaching it to a tax proposal and the state’s Health and Human Services budget. Democrats successfully blocked the efforts.

This would mark the first formal attempt to overturn the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling of the 2010 legislative session. Last April, the Court legalized same-sex marriage.

Demcoratic legislative leaders have vowed that same-sex marriage would not be debated this year.

William Lietzau (Defense Department photo)

William Lietzau, a Marine colonel who currently serves as deputy legal counsel to the National Security Council, is poised to become the Pentagon’s new deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs in the next several weeks. Lietzau, an international law expert described even by his critics as a brilliant and energetic attorney, previously served as a special adviser to Jim Haynes, the top Pentagon lawyer during Donald H. Rumsfeld’s tenure, when Rumsfeld and Haynes codified torture and indefinite detention as hallmarks of Bush-era terrorism policy. The position, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, came open late last year, after Phil Carter, the previous deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs and a favorite of civil libertarians, abruptly resigned.

As the next deputy assistant secretary, Lietzau will be at the center of the Obama administration’s decisions about trying the remaining Guantanamo detainees in reformed military commissions or in federal courts. He will also be central to the construction of a post-Guantanamo terrorism-detention policy in an administration that claims to be more committed to the rule of law than its predecessor. Lietzau is said to have gained the confidence of senior administration officials over the past year, particularly as he helped revise the military commissions to include greater process protections for defendants — even though civil libertarian groups still consider those rules to be unfair.

Two senior military lawyers who fought with Haynes over military commissions and interrogations in the Bush administration said they were surprised to hear of Lietzau’s impending appointment to the Obama Pentagon. Retired Rear Adm. Don Guter, who served as the Navy’s Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002, described Lietzau as a close Haynes confidante but not an outspokenly opinionated figure. “If he disagreed with Jim Haynes you’d never know about it,” Guter said. “Because of his close association with Haynes I’d be more comfortable if I saw something public [indicating] he’d made a break with those policies.”

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig also described Lietzau as closely tied to Haynes, whose role in instituting extreme interrogations at Guantanamo Bay against the wishes of military lawyers cost him Senate confirmation for a federal judgeship. Romig, the Army’s Judge Advocate General during Bush’s first term, said that although he did not know specifically what positions Lietzau took on detainee interrogations or if Haynes even consulted him on the issue, “at that time, he was certainly in the bosom of the administration that was running interrogation programs that at the very least were quite troubling, and in many minds were a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions.” Lietzau’s expertise in international law — he was part of the Clinton administration’s delegation to the 1998 Rome conference that wrote the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court — should have allowed him to know “what was right and wrong with [Bush's] interrogation policies,” Romig said.

While Lietzau was close to Haynes, he also became close to retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, now Obama’s national security adviser. The two officers met in Europe a few years after Lietzau had left the commissions, when Jones commanded U.S. military forces on the continent and Lietzau was his staff judge advocate. Lietzau joined the National Security Council last spring at Jones’ request.

Lietzau has many advocates in the legal and policy communities. John Bellinger, the former National Security Council and State Department legal adviser during the Bush administration, sparred frequently over detainee treatment with Haynes and David Addington, Dick Cheney’s attorney, who took far more extreme positions. But Bellinger, now a partner with the law firm of Arnold & Porter, considered Lietzau a first-rate appointee. “I think Lietzau is an excellent choice who knows the issues and is pragmatic and non-ideological,” he said. “I have never seen him to approach terrorism issues or international justice issues in an ideological way.

Similarly, Eugene Fidell, a Yale Law professor and president of the National Institute of Military Justice, called Lietzau’s appointment “creative,” despite any substantive policy disagreements they had. “The last thing I want is someone to come into the job without the respect of the military bench and bar, which he would have,” Fidell said, “and having to start from scratch in understanding the legal environment.”

Rosa Brooks, a Pentagon policy official who criticized the military commissions during the Bush years, added that while she couldn’t confirm Lietzau’s appointment, “I am a fan of Bill Lietzau’s. He’s smart, an honest broker, and has both intellectual and moral integrity.”

Lietzau was the first prosecutor for the military commissions established in 2001 — an official Pentagon release called him “instrumental” to the military commissions’ “preparations” — and served in that role until 2003. Yet during that time, the commissions did not bring charges against a single detainee, a fact that raised eyebrows among his colleagues. “I have to believe in his position Lietzau was being used by Jim Haynes as a sounding board or adviser on all international law issues,” Romig said, “because he was not doing much as chief prosecutor.

In a valedictory May 2003 press briefing, Lietzau described his role as “really the process portion of setting up military commissions.” That process, established by Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Haynes, departed significantly from the military’s courts-martial system, restricting a defendant’s right to a public trial and allowing for hearsay to be admissible, although Lietzau pushed for defendants to retain the presumption of innocence. At the briefing, a reporter asked Lietzau if the commissions provided a defendant with a defense comparable to the normal military justice system, and he replied that the commission’s rules “were drafted to accommodate that kind of flexibility that would be needed.” But five years after their creation, a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the commissions were unconstitutional, improperly established by the administration and providing defendants with insufficient due process rights. In 2006, Congress passed a law authorizing a new version of the commissions although the Supreme Court in 2008 found problems with the process rights of the new commissions as well.

One senator who voted against the 2006 Military Commissions Act was Barack Obama. Last May at the National Archives, in one of Obama’s most important national security speeches as president, Obama criticized “the flawed commissions of the last seven years” and said his embrace of a reformed version of the commissions would bring them “in line with the rule of law.” Some in the administration believe Lietzau is, however ironically, the man for the job. A senior administration official who would not speak on the record because Lietzau’s appointment has not been announced said that the colonel “believes the rule of law is a fundamental part of our effort in the fight against al-Qaeda” and that Lietzau’s long experience with both the military commissions and international law provides the administration with “value added as we work with Congress” on a “durable” legal infrastructure for terrorism detainees.

At times Lietzau has expressed surprise about the Bush administration’s terrorism decisions. During a talk he gave at Harvard shortly after 9/11, he said he doubted that the administration would seek to try anyone in a military commission; months later he was helping design them. And in an article for a book on terrorism and international law published in 2002, Lietzau averred that President Bush’s assurance that the military treat detainees in the “spirit” of Geneva Conventions ensured that detainees “will continue to be treated humanely.” Over the next several years, dozens and perhaps hundreds of people detained by the U.S. in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere were tortured — activities President Obama expressly forbid during his first week in office by issuing an executive order restricting interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army’s field manual.

Lietzau was a deputy to Haynes during the winter of 2002 and spring of 2003, when Haynes presided over an internal Pentagon debate resulting in the modified adoption for Guantanamo of “enhanced interrogation” techniques authorized for the CIA to use on senior-level al-Qaeda detainees. A Senate Armed Services Committee investigation from 2008 determined that Haynes was a powerful bureaucratic force pressing for harsher detainee treatment. A former colleague in Haynes’ office, Richard Shiffrin, told the committee that Lietzau was present at a key 2002 meeting in which participants expressed “some frustration with the quantity and quality of information being obtained” at Guantanamo, although Shiffrin did not attribute any substantive position to Lietzau. And no source for this piece had knowledge of Lietzau having anything to do with torture.

It is unclear what exactly Lietzau’s appointment signifies in terms of concrete policy decisions or shifts. An email to Defense Secretary Gates’ spokesman, Geoff Morrell, went unreturned. But Bellinger predicted Lietzau would “adopt a balanced approach between the security needs of the country and military and the need to address worldwide concerns that we do not have an appropriate legal framework or legal policies.” The senior administration official said Lietzau was “bound and determined to make sure, whether it’s in three years or seven, when he walks away from this job, there is a durable legal infrastructure” to handle terrorism detainees justly.

Both Guter and Romig, the former senior military JAGs who clashed with Lietzau’s old boss, Haynes, independently described Lietzau as intellectually “flexible” and willing to faithfully implement the policies of his bosses. “The guy is smart, so he can figure out what the Supreme Court has said” about the due process rights to which detainees are entitled, but “it troubles me the guy can go from one end of spectrum to the other, arguably,” Romig said. “It’s very curious they would take somebody to run [policy on] detainees who was in the position he was in seven or eight years ago.”

Allegations of misconduct surrounding the state’s film tax credit emerged last September. The allegations, which involve misuse of the credits and lack of oversight by the state, led to resignations from the top two officials at the Iowa Department of Economic Development and the firing of Tom Wheeler, who was running the tax credit program almost single-handedly. Gov. Chet Culver also suspended the tax credits while an investigation was conducted.

Wheeler is now facing serious misdemeanor allegations that could mean up to one year in jail. He’s accused of failing to verify eligibility of applicants for tax credits. His attorney released a statement Monday calling the decision by the attorney general to file criminal charges “disappointing.”

“The state has decided to pursue a novel theory of criminal liability and it is our position that their decision is a mistake that is not supported by the facts or the law,” attorney Gordan Fischer said. “However, because they have chosen this path, Tom’s focus must now necessarily shift from trying to help the state develop a functional, and economically beneficial, tax incentive program to defending against the criminal charges.”

Also charged is Wendy Weiner Runge, who was executive producer of a 2008 film, “The Scientist,” and Matthias Alexander Saunders, a photography director involved with “The Scientist.”