Tag Archives: BP

CURRENT HOUSE FLOOR PROCEEDINGS
LEGISLATIVE DAY OF AUGUST 10, 2010
111TH CONGRESS – SECOND SESSION

The procedural vote on HR1586 in the House of Representatives is taking place right now ..a Vote to help Teachers, Govt workers, Firefighters and 1st Responders..it extends the stimulus money to help states pay Medicaid and is a 26Billion dollar Bill. I have to say how distasteful it is to know that even 4 in the Democratic Party felt bold enough to vote against HR1586 the vote moves it forward and a vote to debate is now on the floor as well as a possibility that they may have to come back another day…following that if HR1586 passes the bill goes to President Obama asap.

HR1586 passes 247-161 vote with the ugly truth that 3 in the Democratic Party voting No and will go to the desk of the President. The House also passed the 600million for security on the border and now are adjourned until Sept 14th

3:26 P.M. –

The House adjourned pursuant to H. Con. Res. 308. The next meeting is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. on September 14, 2010.

On motion to adjourn Agreed to by voice vote.

Mr. Hastings (FL) moved that the House do now adjourn.

H.R. 1586:

to impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients

3:25 P.M. –

Motion to reconsider laid on the table Agreed to without objection.

On motion that the House agree to the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 247 – 161 (Roll no. 518).

3:01 P.M. –

The previous question was ordered pursuant to the rule.

1:49 P.M. –

DEBATE – Pursuant to H.Res. 1606, the House proceeded with one hour of debate, equally divided and controlled, on the motion to agree to the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to H.R. 1586.

1:48 P.M. –

Mr. Obey moved that the House agree to the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment.

H. Res. 1606:

providing for consideration of the Senate amendment to the House amendment to the Senate amendment to the bill ( H.R. 1586) to modernize the air traffic control system, improve the safety, reliability, and availability of transportation by air in the United States, provide for modernization of the air traffic control system, reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, and for other purposes

1:46 P.M. –

Motion to reconsider laid on the table Agreed to without objection.

On agreeing to the resolution Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 229 – 173 (Roll no. 517).

1:39 P.M. –

Considered as unfinished business.

1:38 P.M. –

MOMENT OF SILENCE – The House observed a moment of silence in memory of the brave men and women in uniform who have given their lives in the service of the United States in Iraq and in Afghanistan and their families, and all who serve in our Armed Forces and their families.

H. Res. 1606:

1:37 P.M. –

On ordering the previous question Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 244 – 164 (Roll no. 516).

1:18 P.M. –

Considered as unfinished business.

1:17 P.M. –

UNFINISHED BUSINESS – The Chair announced that the unfinished business was the question on ordering the previous question and adoption of H.Res. 1606, which had been debated earlier and on which further proceedings had been postponed.

12:39 P.M. –

POINT OF PERSONAL PRIVILEGE – Pursuant to clause 1 of rule IX, Mr. Rangel rose to a point of personal privilege and was recognized by the Chair to proceed for one hour.

On motion to table the appeal of the ruling of the Chair Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 236 – 163 (Roll no. 515).

12:13 P.M. –

Mr. Polis (CO) moved to table the appeal of the ruling of the Chair.

12:12 P.M. –

The Chair announced that the pending question is will the decision of the Chair stand as the judgement of the House?

Mr. Price (GA) moved to appeal the ruling of the Chair.

11:59 A.M. –

Pursuant to a previous special order, Mr. Price (GA) rose to a question of the privileges of the House and submitted a privileged resolution. The Chair directed the Clerk to report the resolution. The Clerk completed the reading of the submitted resolution and upon examination of the resolution, the Chair announced that the resolution did not constitute a question of the privileges of the House.

H. Res. 1606:

11:58 A.M. –

POSTPONED PROCEEDINGS – At the conclusion of debate on H.Res. 1606, the Chair put the question on ordering the previous question and by voice vote, announced that the ayes had prevailed. Mr. Dreier demanded the Yeas and Nays and the Chair postponed further proceedings on ordering the previous question on H.Res. 1606 until a time to be announced.

10:55 A.M. –

DEBATE – The House proceeded with one hour of debate on H. Res. 1606

Considered as privileged matter.

H.R. 6080:

making emergency supplemental appropriations for border security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for other purposes

10:54 A.M. –

Motion to reconsider laid on the table Agreed to without objection.

On motion to suspend the rules and pass the bill Agreed to by voice vote.

10:15 A.M. –

DEBATE – The House proceeded with forty minutes of debate on H.R. 6080.

Considered under suspension of the rules.

Mr. Price (NC) moved to suspend the rules and pass the bill.

10:14 A.M. –

The Speaker announced that votes on suspensions, if ordered, will be postponed until a time to be announced.

10:02 A.M. –

ONE MINUTE SPEECHES – The House proceeded with one minute speeches which by direction of the Chair, would be limited to 5 per side of the aisle.

PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE – The Chair designated Mr. Kagen to lead the Members in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.

The Speaker announced approval of the Journal. Pursuant to clause 1, rule I, the Journal stands approved.

10:00 A.M. –

Today’s prayer was offered by Reverend Charles Gallagher, St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Washington, DC.

The House convened, returning from a recess continuing the legislative day of August 10.

9:24 A.M. –

The Speaker announced that the House do now recess. The next meeting is scheduled for 10:00 a.m. today.

9:00 A.M. –

MORNING-HOUR DEBATE – The House proceeded with Morning-Hour Debate. At the conclusion of Morning-Hour, the House will recess until 10:00 a.m. for the start of legislative business.

The House convened, starting a new legislative day.

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NATIONAL SECURITY The Right’s Shameful Muslim-Bashing

08/10/2010 Nativegrl77

Six days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush delivered a speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC, making clear his belief that the Islamic radicals who attacked America did not represent all Muslims. “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Bush said. “That’s not what Islam is all about.” In recent months, however, Bush’s message of tolerance has been increasingly rejected by key conservative leaders, many of whom have begun to irresponsibly cultivate fear and hostility toward American Muslims. Journalist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “the hysteria over the Cordoba Initiative” — the Islamic cultural center to be built in lower Manhattan — “has marked a tipping point. Recently, conservatives, including conservative politicians, have indulged in the sort of full-throated, shameless anti-Muslim prejudice more typical of the European far right.” While it was tasked with protecting the country, the Bush administration seemed to recognize that alienating Muslims worldwide was a bad idea, even if its actual policies of war and occupation ended up doing just that. Now, however, unmoored from the responsibilities of governance, the American right is unabashedly embracing a platform of blatant fear-mongering and Islamophobia, and promoting a deeply divisive discourse of war between America and Islam.

NATIONAL OUTBREAK OF ANTI-ISLAMIC PROTEST: Driven by the rhetoric of leaders like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, controversy over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” has spilled over into conservative protests against Muslim places of worship elsewhere in the country. The Atlantic’s Max Fisher notes that “crowds of protesters, sometimes aligned with the conservative Tea Party movement, are now rallying against proposed mosques in such locations as Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Temecula, California.” The New York Times recently reported that “local skirmishes make clear that there is now widespread debate about whether the best way to uphold America’s democratic values is to allow Muslims the same religious freedom enjoyed by other Americans, or to pull away the welcome mat from a faith seen as a singular threat.” Examining recent conservative rhetoric against both Muslims and immigrants, the Center for American Progress’ Matthew Yglesias wrote in the Washington Post, “Politicians are making hay out of the mosque only because public opinion seems to oppose it. They are reflecting, as well as stoking, a groundswell of public hostility toward outsiders.”

THE ISLAMOPHOBIA NETWORK GOES MAINSTREAM: For years, a network of well-funded right-wing organizations and individuals have been peddling a false vision of Islam as irretrievably hostile to the United States and modernity, and of American Muslims themselves as a potential fifth column. Since 9/11, pundits like Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney, and Andrew McCarthy have made a fine living trafficking in anti-Muslim invective, but have mostly remained on the margins of the debate. Now the adoption of this anti-Islamic discourse by an ostensibly “serious” conservative leader like Newt Gingrich represents a significant escalation. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on July 29, Gingrich used a series of discredited anecdotes to argue that Islamist radicals are infiltrating America’s legal system, and declared that Cordoba House represented “an act of triumphalism,” because “Cordoba is the city in Spain where a conquering Muslim army built a mosque on top of a church.” Echoing Gingrich, and expressing his willingness to join “a mass demonstration in front of [New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg’s office,” former CIA head and Saddam-Al Qaeda conspiracy theorist James Woolsey insisted, “There is absolutely no reason to put [an Islamic cultural center] there except triumphalism.” In a detailed post correcting Gingrich, scholar Carl Pyrdum noted that this argument “elides three hundred years of Christian and Muslim history.” Far from “symboliz[ing] their victory,” Pyrdum wrote, “the [Cordoba] Mosque was held up by Muslim historians a symbol of peaceful coexistence with the Christians” of Spain.

TIME FOR PROGRESSIVES TO STEP UP: Analyzing the upsurge in anti-Islamic rhetoric among conservatives, George Washington University’s Marc Lynch wrote that “the progressive side bears some of the blame” in having failed to offer a coherent counter-narrative to the right-wing’s “war of civilizations.” Slate’s Will Saletan wrote, “If the prospect of losing our Constitution to religious government frightens you, don’t worry about the tiny Muslim-American minority. Worry about the anti-mosque majority Gingrich is working to mobilize.” Defending Cordoba House, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that Imam Rauf, the leader of the Cordoba Initiative, “represents what [Osama] Bin Laden fears most: a Muslim who believes that it is possible to remain true to the values of Islam and, at the same time, to be a loyal citizen of a Western, non-Muslim country.” Goldberg continued, “Bin Laden wants a clash of civilizations; the opponents of the mosque project are giving him what he wants.” “America has real enemies in the world — forces that want to kill us and destroy our democratic values,” wrote the CAP’s Sally Steenland. “We would be smart to refute their claims by more forcefully declaring and acting on what we know to be true — that Islam and democracy are wholly compatible, that Muslims were part of America before we were a nation, that they have fought alongside their fellow Americans in every war we have endured, and today are helping to strengthen our national security and fulfill our country’s promise of equality, liberty, and justice for all.”

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Environment: Global Warming

08/10/2010 Nativegrl77

ENVIRONMENT — REP. MARKEY SAYS GREENLAND ICEBERG HAS MADE ROOM ‘FOR GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS TO START THEIR OWN COUNTRY’: Last week, NASA satellite data showed that a giant ice shelf four times the size of Manhattan broke off from a glacier in northwest Greenland. “The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles,” noted University of Delaware climate researcher Andreas Muenchow, “and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building.” Over the weekend, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), who has been leading the legislative effort to confront climate change, blasted his obstructionist colleagues in a statement about the news. “An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Markey said. “So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate.” He added that it was “unclear how many giant blocks of ice it will take to break the block of Republican climate deniers in the US Senate who continue hold this critical clean energy and climate legislation hostage.” His urgency is warranted: a paper published in Science magazine last year found evidence “that the most recent 10-year interval (1999–2008) was the warmest of the past 200 decades” for the Arctic. And a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report found that 2010 Arctic sea ice extent was the lowest on record for the month of June. The startling decline in Arctic sea ice has been shown by numerous climate studies based on expert analysis to be a direct result of human activity.

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Update: Tell Google: Don’t be evil

08/10/2010 Nativegrl77

The FCC can’t wait any longer to protect consumers

Clicking here will add your name to this petition to the FCC:

“Chairman Genachowski: The FCC, not big corporations, should make important decisions about the future of the Internet. Stop delaying and use your powers to enact strong net neutrality provisions immediately.

Click here to add your name

Google and Verizon just jointly announced a proposed policy framework for net neutrality, and it’s worse than we expected.

The Google-Verizon plan would end the Internet as we know it. Right now there is only one Internet that treats everybody and all content equally. But the proposal would change all of that. And insidiously, it would effectively dismantle net neutrality while claiming to protect it.

Still, the fact of the matter is that it’s not Google’s place to write regulations — that’s the job of the FCC, which has failed to act quickly to protect American consumers.

Click here to automatically sign our petition telling the FCC to stop delaying and enact strong net neutrality provisions ASAP.

Our friends at MoveOn described the Google-Verizon proposal well when they said it would “create two separate, unequal sections of the Internet — one for big business that would be high-speed and exclusive, and then the inferior, slow ‘public Internet’ that would be available to you and me.”

While it was unexpected that Google, formerly an advocate of net neutrality, would associate itself with such a bad policy, it’s not surprising that the proposal shortchanges the interests of consumers and the public at large. This proposal is just the latest example of giant corporations trying to write the very regulations that govern their behavior.

Frankly, it’s just another indication that the FCC has waited too long to put appropriate protections in place for Internet consumers.

Click here to automatically sign our petition telling the FCC to stop delaying and enact strong net neutrality provisions ASAP.

Earlier this year, the FCC looked like it was on track to ensure we could all enjoy strong net neutrality provisions. But a federal lawsuit forced the FCC to change its plans.

The FCC can still enforce net neutrality, but it first must revisit a Bush-era decision to deregulate broadband. By revisiting this decision and reclassifying broadband, the FCC can do everything it needs to do to protect American consumers. And in fact, the Chair of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, announced his intentions to do this.

But he has backed away from this plan under intense pressure from telecommunications industry.

Our federal regulators need to stop caving to big business and take a stand for us. The FCC has all the tools it needs to protect our interests and ensure the Internet remains a vital engine of information exchange and innovation, but it seems to lack the political will to live up to its mandate.

Tell the FCC to stop delaying and start acting to protect American consumers and ensure we all can rely on strong net neutrality protections. Click here to automatically add your name to our petition.

CREDO is working with our allies at MoveOn, PCCC, Free Press and ColorOfChange.org to put pressure on Google, the White House and the FCC. This is a crucial moment for our campaign. And your actions will be part of a broader effort to stop the FCC, Congress and the White House from standing by idly while we let corporations destroy the Internet.

We should not let BP decide the legislative framework for offshore drilling. We cannot let Goldman Sachs decide who chairs the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. And we must not let Google or Verizon decide how we can use the Internet.

Speak up and sign our petition to the FCC today. Just click here to automatically add your name. Thank you for working for a better world.

Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Today’s Best of the Web …livecheap.com

08/10/2010 Nativegrl77

How to Tame College Costs
Social Security in the Red
Dealing With Deflation
7 Great Coupon Resources

Social Security Now in the Red

It was just a matter of time. Social Security

will pay out more this year than it takes in. As we mentioned before, the consequence of this, is that Social Security, the #1 investor in U.S. treasuries is now a net seller.

How to Tame College Costs

While tuition is getting out of hand at many colleges, the non-tuition costs can pile up too. This article looks at 5 non-tuition expenses and how to reduce them. Let us shortcut this one for you, get a lot of roomates in a 4 bedroom place that won’t impress the parents and make sure one of them knows how to cook. It has worked for decades.

Dealing with Deflation

What to do with your money in a deflationary environment> The dreaded “D” word is making its rounds and here are what investors are doing.

7 Great Coupon Resources

A good list from GenXFinance. There are many other sources, but a some new good ones on this list.

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