U.S. Congress - S.3507 Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2008
S.3507 - Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2008
A bill to provide for additional emergency unemployment compensation. view all titles (3)
All Bill Titles
- Official: A bill to provide for additional emergency unemployment compensation. as introduced.
- Popular: Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2008 as introduced.
- Short: Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2008 as introduced.
This Bill currently has no wiki content. If you would like to create a wiki entry for this bill, please Login, and then select the wiki tab to create it.
Vote on This Bill
-
Share This Bill
More Share via Email
Sort By
Comments Feed
Displaying 211-240 of 573 total comments.
OOT quit coming around anon starting shit! Find peace and think good thoughts.
How can Sarah Palin help run a country when she couldn’t even take notice when her daughter was spending alot of time in the back seat of bubba’s pickup.
What’s the deal with all of these SEPARATE bills for extending benefits? Our responses are DILUTED on the different bills. When they look for the number of comments, it looks like not many but when they add together the comments for all the UE extension bills introduced, they’d have to RESPOND to us!!!!
2544 is the one that:
- was introduced FIRST
- gives us a $50 increase
- should be pushed for by ALL of us
Make them honor KENNEDY and his empathy for US by passing that bill!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“I think it will be a draw on who’s the worse president of all time (Jimmie Carter) or (George Bush JR.)”
No draw! George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have brought this country to it’s knees.
Oh, and GWB purchased a 98,000 acre ranch in Paraguay last year, in case he is prosecuted for war crimes.
Moderated Comment
“Just heard on fox news,
Nobama says he wants another stimulus package passed,
but he hopes it will pass soon, WITHIN WEEKS? And he will vote on the Wall Street Bail Out reguardless.
SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I guess, us unemployed will be waiting again, again and again, as usual…ALL TALK & NO ACTION!"
NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR WHAT THE NEOCON PUNDITS ON FAUX NEWS HAVE TO SAY!!
You better put your money on Senator Obama, because John Sidney McSame could give a rats ass about you, EVEN IF HE REMEMBERS the country is in a huge financial crisis. Hell, he can’t even remember the name of the president of Spain, or what hemisphere Spain is in, OR that Spain is our ally. If you recall McSame has repeatedly NOT voted or voted against the extension of UI benefits. WHY ARE YOU BLAMING OBAMA? McCain is a Senator too? What the hell is he doing to help us…ZERO!
Johnny Mac will be fine, don’t you worry. He can retire to his 8 homes, 13 automobiles and his wife’s $500m fortune.
Your unemployment check is no concern of his or that of his imbecile moosehunter running mate.
OPEN YOUR MIND, it’s the 21st century, dude!
if there is no unemployment extension the democrats will get more votes, it is to the democrats advantage to not add the extension to the big bail out bill. People that are hurting are more likely to vote for democrats, if the democrats were to add the extension to the big bailout bill it would be guaranteed to pass, then democrats running for office would have nothing to blame on the republicans
The democrats do not want you to get an unemployment extension they are talking out of both sides of there mouths if they wanted it to happen it would be included in the bailout. They have the power to make this happen but refuse to do it.
If the extension is not added to the big bail out I will not vote for anyone currently in office, that includes the presidential candidates I will vote for a third party wackjob if needed, we can’t make them think that we approve of what they are not doing .
That’s nonsense. I can’t answer why they are not putting it in but there has been no word of that either actually. Read the articles today. This bailout might not even pass period and won’t in it’s current state for sure. There are many economists including Paul Kreudman who are openly against it. They will pass ue extensions. One party or the other will push for it.My guess is it will end up happening. They all know the ue numbers are low that are reported. The Republicans don’t control the argument anymore. And I knew when this did not pass Saturday and Paulson was making the case today that there were problems. The Democrats need to move if they end up getting nothing done they are not going on vacation and they will put ue extensions in the budget quickly and have bush against the wall on that too. Politically both parties have to it’s just fact at this point. Call the Republicans and Democrats especially your home district ones of either party. They won’t be coming home without it if their counties are high in ue.
Stop posting and getting people to despair OOT. Karma comes back and is visiting you right now.
Moderated Comment
You are wrong , we stood a real good chance before this bailout bullshit but not now. This useless congress does not give a shit about us . They will give the idiots there 700 billion and get ready for their vacations .The republicans truly suck and Harry Reid and Pelosi are spineless jellyfish . It`s a shame the old warrior Kennedy can`t whip their asses into shape.
Get real, it’s not about us anyway. This is about greed, power, and election year maneuvering.
It’s going to be in the budget calm down and quit crying about the “evil Democrats” There are rumors the Republicans are working on a Bill of their own for UE. And score some political points of their own and take that away from the Democrats. Read your history that’s what they did in 04 to keep the White House and Congress. And they will do it again. And when this is put in the budget they are not opposing it given the Wall St. bailout. The Democrats have them between a rock and a hard place on both and will use it.
All the battleground states are high in UE% MI,OH etc. The Republicans want their guy in the White House. They won’t ignore this or they will lose the election for sure…and they know it.Think free trade talk and nothing for citizens will work this time? It won’t…and they know it.
CR passed today ie the budget, no EU
SAME SHIT DIFFERENT MONTH.
The gov’t sure hasn’t changed their thoughts about us.
Look, we went through this last time. Some of you were calling the Dems spineless, etc. then, but ultimately it was the Dems that pushed thru the legislation that got us extended benefits.
Why the defeatist attitudes, we have no idea how this will shake out next week? We still have three weeks of bene’s left. Have an attitude of gratitude and STOP WHINING, as the Repugs would say!
“Until just recently, few have discussed the actuarial implications of McCain’s ripe old age and his selection for President-in-Waiting. I hope this little video essay makes you laugh and cry:”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjzDcPXJQoc
Are we back to OOT garbage?
Who Farted?
Moderated Comment
John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a
Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from
the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who,
unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has
quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that
keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified
documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a
determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became
instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the
books.
Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied
from reporting the POW story and McCain’s role in it, even as McCain has
made his military service and POW history the focus of his presidential
campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War have also turned
their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn’t talk about
the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.
The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There
exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness
depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained
to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual
code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a Special Forces unit
that was aborted twice by Washington and even sworn testimony by two
defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of
evidence suggests that a large number—probably hundreds—of the US
prisoners held in Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was
signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy
combat pilot John S. McCain.
The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW
families for years. What’s more, the Pentagon’s POW/MIA operation had
been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for
holding back documents as part of a policy of “debunking” POW
intelligence even when the information was obviously credible. The
pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally produced the
creation, in late 1991, of a Senate “Select Committee on POW/MIA
Affairs.” The chair was John Kerry, but McCain, as a POW, was its most
pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking
machine.
Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies
suppressed or tried to discredit is a transcript of a senior North
Vietnamese general’s briefing of the Hanoi Politburo, discovered in
Soviet archives by an American scholar in the 1990s. The briefing took
place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran
Van Quang, told the Politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205
American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage
to ensure getting reparations from Washington.
Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the
prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. Finally, in a
February 1, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi’s premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon
pledged $3.25 billion in “postwar reconstruction” aid. The North
Vietnamese, though, remained skeptical about the reparations promise
being honored (it never was). Hanoi thus held back prisoners—just as it
had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and
withdrew their forces from Vietnam. France later paid ransoms for
prisoners and brought them home.
Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to
the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not
returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, secretaries of defense
under Nixon, said in a public session and under oath that they based
their conclusions on strong intelligence data—letters, eyewitness
reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger
chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the
issue: “I think that as of now that I can come to no other
conclusion…some were left behind.”
Furthermore, over the years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
received more than 1,600 firsthand reports of sightings of live American
prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand accounts. Many witnesses
interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed
“credible” in the agents’ reports. Some of the witnesses were given
lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these
witness reports. Yet the DIA, after reviewing them all, concluded that
they “do not constitute evidence” that men were still alive.
There is also evidence that in the first months of Reagan’s presidency,
the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being
held by Hanoi. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an
official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in
the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush,
CIA director William Casey and National Security Adviser Richard Allen.
Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee
on June 23, 1992.
Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors, and no information was
released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert
Caldwell, obtained the portion of the testimony relating to the ransom
offer and wrote about it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen
testified. He said he told Reagan that “it would be worth the president
going along and let’s have the negotiation.” When his testimony appeared
in the Union-Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel,
this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story, saying his memory
had played tricks on him.
But the story didn’t end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty
in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard
part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981. The
Senate POW committee voted not to subpoena him to testify.
On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, sister of missing airman Capt.
Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an
organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate
committee’s public hearings. She asked for information about data the
government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified
program known as PAVE SPIKE.
The devices were primarily motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to
pick up enemy troop movements. But they also had rescue capabilities.
Someone on the ground—a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor
gang—could manually enter data into the sensor, which were regularly
collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated,
without any challenge from the committee, that in 1974, a year after the
supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a
person or people had manually entered into the sensors—as US pilots had
been trained to do—“no less than 20 authenticator numbers that
corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US
POW/MIAs who were lost in Laos.” Alfond added, says the transcript:
“This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not
discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE.”
McCain, whose POW status made him the committee’s most powerful member,
attended that hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her
criticism of the panel’s work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a
while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of “denigrating” his
“patriotism.” The bullying had its effect—she began to cry.
After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching
tirade, but McCain simply turned and stormed out of the room. The PAVE
SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don’t know anything
about those 20 POWs.
The committee’s final report, issued in January 1993, began with a
forty-three-page executive summary—the only section that drew the
mainstream press’s attention. It said that only “a small number” of POWs
could have been left behind in 1973. But the document’s remaining 1,180
pages were quite different. Sprinkled throughout are findings that
contradict and disprove the conclusions of the whitewashed summary. This
insertion of critical evidence that committee leaders had downplayed and
dismissed was the work of a committee staff that had opposed and finally
rebelled against the cover-up.
Pages 207-209 of the report, for example, contain major revelations of
what were either massive intelligence failures or bad intentions. These
pages say that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no
branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of
satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the
distress signals US forces were trained to use in Vietnam—nor had they
ever been tasked to look for such signals from possible prisoners on the
ground.
In a personal briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me
privately that as it became more and more difficult for either
government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged
prisoners, those prisoners became not only useless as bargaining chips
but also a risk to Hanoi’s desire to be accepted into the international
community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly
that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard
labor or torture—were eventually executed. My own research has
convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few—if any—are
alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing was conducted “off the
record,” but because the evidence from my reporting since then has
brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point
in not writing about the meeting.)
For many reasons, including the absence of a constituency for the
missing men other than their families and some veterans’ groups, very
few Americans are aware of McCain’s role not only in keeping the subject
out of public view but in denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That
is because McCain has hardly been alone in this hide-the-scandal
campaign. The Arizona senator has actually been following the lead of
every White House since Richard Nixon’s and thus of every CIA director,
Pentagon chief and National Security Adviser, among many others
(including Dick Cheney, who was George H.W. Bush’s defense secretary).
An early and critical attempt by McCain to conceal evidence involved
1990 legislation called the Truth bill, which started in the House. A
brief and simple document, the bill would have compelled complete
transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence said
that the “head of each department or agency which holds or receives any
records and information, including reports, which have been correlated
or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of
war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the
Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records
held or received by that department or agency.”
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus by McCain), the bill went
nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a
few months later a new measure, the McCain bill, suddenly appeared. It
created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents
could emerge—only the records that revealed no POW secrets. The McCain
bill became law in 1991 and remains so today.
McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel
Act, which was strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal
penalties against “any government official who knowingly and willfully
withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to
the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person.” A year
later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military
bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling
amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the
criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the
field to speedily search for missing men and report the incidents to the
Pentagon.
McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it
impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA
matters. That’s an odd argument to make. Were staffers only “willing to
work” if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the
law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of
debunking the existence of live POWs.
McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence has been woven
together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and
unpatriotic myth. He calls it the work of the “bizarre rantings of the
MIA hobbyists.” He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry
out classified documents as “hoaxers,” “charlatans,” “conspiracy
theorists” and “dime-store Rambos.” Family members who have personally
pressed McCain to end the secrecy have been treated to his legendary
temper. In 1996 he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members
who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a
mother in a wheelchair.
The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on
legislation that seals POW information is that he believes the release
of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of
those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW
families I’ve met over the years, only a few have said they want the
books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest
say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.
It’s not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors
to avoid further torture has played a role in his postwar behavior. That
confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at
Hoa Lo—to try to break down other prisoners—and was broadcast over
Hanoi’s state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal
who had bombed a school and other civilian targets. The Pentagon has
copies of the confessions but will not release them. Also, no outsider I
know of has ever seen a nonredacted copy of McCain’s debriefing when he
returned from captivity, which is classified but can be made public by
McCain.
In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers,
McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was
being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his
propaganda value (his high-ranking father, Rear Adm. John S. McCain II,
was then the commander of US forces in the Pacific). Also in this
memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given
the confession. “I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair,” he
writes, revealing that he made two “feeble” attempts at suicide.
Tellingly, he says he lived in “dread” that his father would find out
about the confession. “I still wince,” he writes, “when I recall
wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.”
McCain still didn’t know the answer when his father died in 1981. He got
his answer eighteen years later. In his 1999 memoir, the senator writes,
“I only recently learned that the tape…had been broadcast outside the
prison and had come to the attention of my father.”
Does this hint at explanations for McCain’s efforts to bury information
about prisoners or other disturbing pieces of the Vietnam War? Does he
suppress POW information because its surfacing rekindles his feelings of
shame? On this subject, all I have are questions. But even without
answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of someone’s mind, one
thing about the POW story is clear: if American prisoners were
dishonored by being written off and left to die, that’s something the
American public ought to know about.
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/schanberg
Sarah’s “Witness Protection” Program Expands
By John Nail – September 21, 2008
John McCain exhibited his executive judgment in picking Sarah Palin and telling America she is qualified to be VP and step in as President if need be and far more experienced than Obama or Biden due to her “executive experience”. How did he do?
Well, for a woman who introduced herself to us so feistily all as a “pitbull with lipstick” the cone of silence is like a federal witness protection program and special rules she needs to be the first Republican female VP are getting silly, but are nonetheless quite disturbing.
First we got the “Human Kid Shield” after she throws her daughter under the bus for her pregnancy at the convention and then procedes to trot the kids, including her Downs Syndrome baby around St.Paul. If she and McCain had simply been honest about this in the first place no one would have cared.
Second she couldn’t give interviews or answer either media or voter questions except now we have:
We got Charlie Gibson’s interview where she can see Russia and embarassed herself or spouted catchwords and catchphrases.
Then Hannity’s absurd palavering and drooling all over her and more lies coming out and the same 6 or 8 words repeated dozens of times with no information coming out just platitudes and lies like the Bridge etc
Third she goes home to get her life ready to go on the road and send her son off to Iraq and she is all by herself on home turf and what happens?
In her speech sending him off she invokes the old Cheney belief that we are fighting the people in Iraq who attacked the US on 9/11 and that the war is “God’s will” for the US. The Pentagon had warned her in advance to not politicize the event.
Fourth McCain discovers from 2 & 3 that she can’t really be out on her own AND without her no one come to see him alone and what happens?
Finally on the stump with McCain as training wheels she answered, or tried to, a couple of voter questions in controlled situations with McCain and we got “Stump the candidate” avoidance line and an answer on energy and “fungible” resources (from the foremost expert in the US on energy) that was unintelligible.
Fifth after not fully vetting Palin and making a rash last minute call on her McCain’s team quickly realized that they had a number of serious issues to deal with, the biggest of which is Troopergate. What do they do?
Parachute in a legal SWAT team headed by a “Rambo” – the former counter terror chief from the US Attorney’s office in NY. The team now runs all aspects of this probe that was created in July by the Republican AK legislature.
All the witensses who were called have refused to testify including her husband and McCain’s team have essentially usurped Palin’s responsibilities as Governor to try and hide the apparently damning facts about Palin’s abuse of power and her husband’s shadow role in the state until after the election.
All inquiries related to Palin on AK issues run thru the McCain SWAT team. The McCain campaign is essentially running a large part of the business of AK. Is this America??
Sixth we now see that the McCain campaign is concerned that Palin is not ready to debate and negotiates a set of rules to protect her. Hmmm, I wonder how world leaders would feel meeting her with “rules” in their talks with her? is this reverse sex discrimination that Caribou Barbie isn’t ready to go toe to toe in public with her Democratic counterpart.
“McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.”
In fact in her 2006 gubernatorial debates she tried to have a stand in appear for her
Everyone is trying to be polite to this national newcomer but enough of this bullsh*t!
Special rules for a “woman”?? The big bad world she wants to “reform” doesn’t work that way.
The problem is that McCain has no clue as to women, women’s issues or respect for them. He just hastily chose this poorly vetted and clueless, incompetent small town mayor and poorly educated Governor to try and win an election.
Now in order to try and shatter the glass ceiling he has to put her first on training wheels, then in a bubble and then add special rules to protect her to try and limp to the election.
This entire selection and nonsense is an insult to every person in America, Alaska and particularly to qualified women like Hillary whose supporters McCain was trying to peel off. Even Peggy Noonan called it – “It’s Over”.
Let’s call this what it is – lipstick on pitbullsh*t!
COME ON FOLKS PUNCH IN YOUR STATE AND CONGRESSMAN AND EMAIL INSTEAD OF COPY & PASTE , GET SOME COMMON SENSE.
hey caps lock:
agree, please call, fax, e-mail !!! This is how “WE” can work together instead of annoying each other with the stupid off topic stuff ! PUHLEEESSSSE
Congress looks at unemployment relief
Although there is disagreement in Congress about increasing government spending on infrastructure, there appears to be bi-partisan support to do something for the unemployed. Danielle Karson has more.
Stacey Vanek-Smith: Economic Stimulus is the topic du jour on Capital Hill as well. Democrats in Congress are working on a plan to bolster government spending on infrastructure. Danielle Karson reports.
-——————————————————————————————————————-Danielle Karson: The Democrats want more spending on bridges and transportation. The GOP isn’t ruling out a second stimulus package, so long as it doesn’t tack on a huge public works program. But both parties do agree on one subject.
Maurice Emsellem: There’s actually pretty good bi-partisan support for extending unemployment benefits. People understand the economy is in really rough shape, and could become much more serious in the next couple of months.
Maurice Emsellem is with the National Employment Law Project. He says the House proposal would extend unemployment benefits from 13 to 20 weeks. Workers in states with unemployment above 6-percent would get 26 weeks.
Emsellem: We’re expecting that number to go up, perhaps as high as 15 states with unemployment above 6 percent, or close to 6.5 percent.
If Congress does nothing, more than 800-thousand workers will run out of unemployment benefits in less than two weeks.
In Washington, I’m Danielle Karson for Marketplace.
danielle karson are they gonna vote on this before the break ?
Moderated Comment
Moderated Comment