Former Virginia Sen. George Allen (R), who is seeking to reclaim the Senate seat he lost six years ago, has made pro-dirty energy policies a huge part of his campaign, and has railed at every opportunity about high gas prices. But he and his campaign have either not noticed or chosen to ignore the significant drop in the cost of gasoline in recent weeks.

Front and center on his campaign website is a graphic comparing gas prices from the artificially low $1.85-per-gallon average from January 2009 (driven down by the economic meltdown) with the $3.87-per-gallon average of several weeks ago.

Throughout his campaign, Allen has promised lower energy prices, which he says can be achieved by pushing for more offshore drilling and more deregulation. The League of Conservation Voters called described him as having “one of the worst environmental records ever.”

In February, March, and April, Allen blamed the President for energy costs, complaining that “The Obama administration may not think rising gasoline and energy prices are severely straining budgets – but the families and small business owners of Virginia tell a different story.” The effort to pin rising gas prices on the President was echoed by Republicans across the country — though history consistently has shown gas prices have virtually nothing to do with any U.S. policy decision.

But according to AAA’s “Daily Fuel Gage,” the national average for a gallon of gas has dropped from $3.849 a month ago to just $3.676 today. And in Virginia, the state Allen hopes to again represent, it’s at an even-lower $3.485.

Allen has updated neither this graphic nor his rhetoric. Just yesterday, the campaign posted a comment from Allen’s wife Susan that Virginia entrepreneurs want “real change in Washington to get rid of burdensome regulations and create a real energy policy to alleviate the pain at the pump.” And a week ago, George Allen tweeted, “High cost of gasoline touches virtually every aspect of our economy. We need to unleash our American energy resources.”

When prices were going up, Allen and others on the Right, were all too happy to blame it on President Obama. Now that prices are going down, rather than give any credit to the Obama administration, they seem content to just ignore it. Allen owns between $108,009 and $370,000 in coal, oil, and other energy companies’ stock, received at least $15,000 in consulting and speaking fees from the dirty energy sector in the previous year, and was paid $20,000 for his work as chairman of the American Energy Freedom Center, a pro-dirty energy group which engages in global warming denial.

Facebook’s initial public offering — which so dominated the financial press that Facebook has been on the cover of the Wall Street Journal for nine straight days — has started to raise some red flags for regulators, after it came to light the company and its Wall Street underwriters quietly hid a report about weak revenue. And that’s just one of several ways in which the Facebook IPO highlights how Wall Street and big companies can game the rules to gain an economic advantage. Here are five examples:

1. Facebook may have hid information about weak revenue growth: According to one lawsuit launched since the company went public, Facebook “concealed crucial information” regarding weak revenue growth, failing to disclose a revised revenue forecast, much like Wall Street banks failed to provide key information about mortgage securities they were peddling before the financial crisis.

2. Morgan Stanley alerted “preferred” investors to Facebook’s poor growth forecasts: Facebook’s Wall Street underwriters are facing scrutiny from regulators for only alerting certain “preferred” investors about Facebook’s declining revenue stream, leaving many potential shareholders in the dark.

3. Facebook stock dropped, Wall Street got rich: Facebook stock plummeted on its second day of trading and has continued its decline since, but Morgan Stanley and the other underwriters are still turning massive profits by “shorting” its stock. “In fact,” Fortune’s Steven Gandel wrote, “Morgan Stanley and the other banks who were selling Facebook shares to the public were positioned to make more money the lower Facebook’s shares went.” As of Tuesday, the group of Wall Street banks that underwrote the IPO could have topped more than $450 million in profits — on top of more than $170 million in underwriting fees.

4. Facebook will dodge billions in taxes after its IPO: Corporate tax law allows companies that issue stock options to make huge deductions to their tax liabilities, helping Facebook avoid $16 billion in taxes. CEO Mark Zuckerberg could possibly never pay taxes again, using a series of loopholes to avoid them after the initial hit he’ll take after selling shares.

5. Facebook is spending big on politics: Just like the Wall Street banks and other big companies that spend huge amounts of cash lobbying Washington, Facebook jumped into the fray, giving $119,000 in donations to lawmakers through March 31. The money went to leaders of both parties and those lawmakers who “serve on House and Senate committees that handle Internet and online privacy issues.”

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon simply put it, “Facebook was whispering in the ears of the lead managers of its investment banks, on the understanding that the results of those whispers would remain available only to select clients until after the IPO was over. That’s not cool.” But at the moment, it’s how big businesses and Wall Street banks operate.

POMPANO BEACH, Florida — Stay-at-home moms should be considered working moms, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) argued on Tuesday — just so long as they’re not poor.

ThinkProgress discussed the issue with the south Florida congressman on Tuesday following a town hall meeting. West argued that women who stay in the home to raise kids should be considered working mothers. But when asked whether mothers who are on welfare should be allowed to stay home and raise their children, West’s position was remarkably different. Instead of advocating for the work that poor mothers do at home raising kids, West decried the “growth of the entitlement or the nanny state.”

To West, the problem isn’t welfare-to-work, which requires mothers on welfare to work outside the home; it’s “people depending on the federal government”:

KEYES: Is there any question about whether or not stay-at-home moms who are raising kids, whether or not they should be considered working moms?

WEST: [...] Go to any military installation and go on that installation to a stay-at-home mom that is taking care of that family and that household why, or even a husband, a spouse, the primary person that’s deployed, and tell them that they’re not really working. I don’t think you’ll be walking off that military installation the same way that you walked onto it.

KEYES: What about mothers who are on welfare though? Do you think they should be allowed to stay at home and raise their children?

WEST: I think that what we need to do is how do we reduce the growth of the entitlement or the nanny state. Coming from the inner city, a good thing of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson, I think now you’re talking about second and third and getting towards fourth generation of welfare. And as I showed up there, I don’t want more people depending on the federal government. I want more people to be out there and enjoying the American dream.

Staying at home and raising kids is absolutely work, as any parent will attest. The problem is that conservatives like West will only defend the work of stay-at-home moms when they live in financially secure homes, while backing welfare reforms that prevent lower income mothers from doing the same.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) issued a statement Wednesday calling for a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, demanding House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) schedule a vote on the plan as soon as possible. But her proposal differs from others offered by Democrats, including President Obama, that call for an extension of the rates for incomes below $250,000. Instead, Pelosi wants a permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts for incomes up to $1 million, the statement said.

“Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit,” Pelosi said. Her plan, however, would cost the government billions in revenue compared to Obama’s plan, and though she has billed it as a tax cut for the middle class, half of its benefits would go to millionaires, according to analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice:

CTJ’s preliminary estimates show that Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $250,000 or $200,000 of income a taxpayer makes would save between $60 billion and $70 billion in 2013 compared to the GOP proposal to extend all the tax cuts, depending on economic conditions. Leader Pelosi’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $1 million of income would save 43 percent less revenue than Obama’s proposal.

The additional tax cut that would result from Pelosi’s plan compared to Obama’s plan (the additional tax cut resulting from extending the Bush tax provisions for taxpayers’ first $1 million of income instead of “just” their first $250,000 or $200,000 of income) would not be targeted towards the “middle class.” In fact, 50 percent of this additional tax cut would go to taxpayers with adjusted gross income (AGI) in excess of $1 million.

Millionaires would continue to benefit under Pelosi’s plan because the tax cut applies to the first $1 million of their incomes, meaning their tax cut would still be substantially larger than it would be for actual middle class workers. And as a result, a large portion of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which blew up the national debt and failed to deliver on promises of job creation and economic growth, would exist in perpetuity.

Senate Democrats, led by five female Senators, began a renewed push this week to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that protects women who sue over being paid less than their male counterparts.

But, as with much of the recent pro-woman legislation, the measure will spark a partisan fight. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) began efforts to prevent the vote from being filibustered. “Republicans deny they’re waging a war on women,” Reid said on the floor Thursday morning, “yet they’ve launched a series of attacks on women’s access to health care and contraception this year. Now they have an opportunity to back up their excuses with action.”

Here are five things you need to know about the Paycheck Fairness Act:

1. The Paycheck Fairness Act is not new: Democrats, however, have struggled to get it passed. Last time it came up for a vote, the House passed it with very little bipartisan support. Then Senate Republicans unanimously voted against the bill. Even if they had passed it, though, then-President George W. Bush vowed to veto it.

2. Pay equity is a real problem: Nearly half of all workers in the United States are women. But women tend to hold lower-paying jobs overall, and even when they have the exact same title as men, they make significantly less. Overall, women make 77 cents to a man’s dollar, and in some professions, specifically high-paying careers, that disparity is much higher. The Paycheck Fairness Act would help close the gap more quickly by providing incentives for employers not to discriminate.

3. Lost earnings have serious consequences: The amount of money an average woman loses to the pay gap could feed a family of four. And while the wage gap is slowly shrinking, at its current rate it won’t actually disappear for 45 years. Still, more women are becoming the primary breadwinners or dual-earners in their family, with nearly 40 percent of women out-earning their husbands and a larger number of women with high degrees entering the job market.

4. Existing law doesn’t go far enough: The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act ensured that a woman has the proper window of time to sue for pay discrimination. The Paycheck Fairness Act takes significant steps to close loopholes in the original pay discrimination law, the Equal Pay Act, and to ensure that women can investigate whether they are being discriminated against. It also makes stronger penalties so that employers don’t violate pay discrimination laws. Included in the bill, too, is a grant for a salary-negotiation training program for women, who tend to be reluctant to negotiate.

5. Mitt Romney has not taken a position on the bill: After a very awkward moment over the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a spokesperson for his campaign said that Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.” But it’s unclear whether this means Romney would support a new piece of legislation that protects women who don’t have full pay equity.