2008-11-10T06:55:54Z opencongress.org tag:opencongress.org,2007:/bill/comments/52528 2008-11-10T06:55:54Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-11-10:/comment/58268 Anonymous buying presents*** 2008-09-19T06:27:58Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-19:/comment/39990 Anonymous Sorry about the long posts everyone but I want to keep this information together for future postings. Here is the comparison between sponsorship of this bill and state unemployment numbers that we need to tackle this morning: Rank State Rate 1 SOUTH DAKOTA 3.3 2 NEBRASKA 3.5 3 NORTH DAKOTA 3.6 4 UTAH 3.7 5 WYOMING 3.9 6 OKLAHOMA 4.0 7 WEST VIRGINIA 4.1 8 HAWAII 4.2 8 NEW HAMPSHIRE 4.2 10 MONTANA 4.4 11 MARYLAND 4.5 12 IDAHO 4.6 12 IOWA 4.6 12 NEW MEXICO 4.6 12 VIRGINIA 4.6 16 KANSAS 4.7 16 LOUISIANA 4.7 18 ARKANSAS 4.8 19 ALABAMA 4.9 19 DELAWARE 4.9 19 VERMONT 4.9 22 TEXAS 5.0 23 WISCONSIN 5.1 24 MASSACHUSETTS 5.3 25 COLORADO 5.4 26 MAINE 5.5 27 ARIZONA 5.6 28 NEW YORK 5.8 28 PENNSYLVANIA 5.8 30 NEW JERSEY 5.9 31 WASHINGTON 6.0 32 MINNESOTA 6.2 33 GEORGIA 6.3 34 INDIANA 6.4 35 CONNECTICUT 6.5 35 FLORIDA 6.5 35 OREGON 6.5 38 MISSOURI 6.6 38 TENNESSEE 6.6 40 KENTUCKY 6.8 41 ALASKA 6.9 41 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 6.9 41 NORTH CAROLINA 6.9 44 NEVADA 7.1 45 ILLINOIS 7.3 46 OHIO 7.4 47 SOUTH CAROLINA 7.6 48 CALIFORNIA 7.7 48 MISSISSIPPI 7.7 50 RHODE ISLAND 8.5 51 MICHIGAN 8.9 List of Sponsors & Co-Sponsors for Bill S.3507 for the 21 states that are above 6% (5 Stars means they are on the list of sponsors and co-sponsors) Sen. John Reed [D, RI] ***** and 17 Co-Sponsors Sen. Max Baucus [D, MT] Sen. Joseph Biden [D, DE] Sen. Barbara Boxer [D, CA] ***** Sen. Sherrod Brown [D, OH] ***** Sen. Christopher Dodd [D, CT] ***** Sen. Richard Durbin [D, IL] ***** Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D, CA] ***** Sen. Thomas Harkin [D, IA] Sen. Edward Kennedy [D, MA] Sen. John Kerry [D, MA] Sen. Frank Lautenberg [D, NJ] Sen. Carl Levin [D, MI] ***** Sen. Barack Obama [D, IL] ***** Sen. John Rockefeller [D, WV] Sen. Charles Schumer [D, NY] Sen. Debbie Ann Stabenow [D, MI] ***** Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D, RI] ***** These are the Senators that NEED to be on the LIST (ones with 5 stars are already co-sponsors): Let's get calling!!! Member Name DC Phone DC FAX Senator Patty Murray (D- WA) 202-224-2621 202-224-0238 Senator Maria Cantwell (D- WA) 202-224-3441 202-228-0514 Senator Norm Coleman (R- MN) 202-224-5641 202-224-1152 Senator Amy Klobuchar (D- MN) 202-224-3244 202-228-2186 Senator Saxby Chambliss (R- GA) 202-224-3521 202-224-0103 Senator Johnny Isakson (R- GA) 202-224-3643 202-228-0724 Senator Richard G. Lugar (R- IN) 202-224-4814 202-228-0360 Senator Evan Bayh (D- IN) 202-224-5623 202-228-1377 Senator Christopher J. Dodd (D- CT) 202-224-2823 202-224-1083 Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (ID- CT) 202-224-4041 202-224-9750 Senator Bill Nelson (D- FL) 202-224-5274 202-228-2183 Senator Mel Martinez (R- FL) 202-224-3041 202-228-5171 Senator Ron Wyden (D- OR) 202-224-5244 202-228-2717 Senator Gordon Smith (R- OR) 202-224-3753 202-228-3997 Senator Kit Bond (R- MO) 202-224-5721 202-224-8149 Senator Claire McCaskill (D- MO) 202-224-6154 202-228-6326 Senator Lamar Alexander (R- TN) 202-224-4944 202-228-3398 Senator Bob Corker (R- TN) 202-224-3344 202-228-0566 Senator Mitch McConnell (R- KY) 202-224-2541 202-224-2499 Senator Jim Bunning (R- KY) 202-224-4343 202-228-1373 Senator Ted Stevens (R- AK) 202-224-3004 202-224-2354 Senator Lisa Murkowski (R- AK) 202-224-6665 202-224-5301 Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D - At Large) 202-225-8050 202-225-3002 Senator Elizabeth Dole (R- NC) 202-224-6342 202-224-1100 Senator Richard Burr (R- NC) 202-224-3154 202-228-2981 Senator Harry Reid (D- NV) 202-224-3542 202-224-7327 Senator John Ensign (R- NV) 202-224-6244 202-228-2193 Senator Richard J. Durbin (D- IL) ***** 202-224-2152 202-228-0400 Senator Barack Obama (D- IL) ***** 202-224-2854 202-228-4260 Senator George Voinovich (R- OH) 202-224-3353 202-228-1382 Senator Sherrod Brown (D- OH) ***** 202-224-2315 202-228-6321 Senator Lindsey Graham (R- SC) 202-224-5972 202-224-3808 Senator James DeMint (R- SC) 202-224-6121 202-228-5143 Senator Dianne Feinstein (D- CA) ***** 202-224-3841 202-228-3954 Senator Barbara Boxer (D- CA) ***** 202-224-3553 202-224-0454 Senator Thad Cochran (R- MS) 202-224-5054 202-224-9450 Senator Roger F. Wicker (R- MS) 202-224-6253 202-228-0378 Senator Jack Reed (D- RI) ***** 202-224-4642 202-224-4680 Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D- RI) ***** 202-224-2921 202-228-6362 Senator Carl Levin (D- MI) ***** 202-224-6221 202-224-1388 Senator Debbie A. Stabenow (D- MI) ***** 202-224-4822 202-228-0325 2008-09-19T05:18:03Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-19:/comment/39949 Anonymous where does the s.3507 stand as of now ? 2008-10-02T10:13:29Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-10-02:/comment/44446 Anonymous How come a "high unemployment" rate was 6.0 back a few months ago, but now all of a suddent went up to 6.5? 2008-09-25T17:07:25Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-25:/comment/41301 Anonymous The passed the 25 billion for the big three auto makers, Don't they make enough profit working minors in Mexico for 1.50 a day and a meal ticket, they are all greedy b^stards, really 2008-09-21T16:43:29Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-21:/comment/40391 Anonymous 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! 2008-09-21T20:29:24Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-21:/comment/40415 Anonymous McCain and the POW Cover-up by Sydney H. Schanberg 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 2008-09-21T06:41:22Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-21:/comment/40312 Anonymous Is there any doubt at all , that this assclown will go down as the worst president of all time ? 2008-09-21T09:50:55Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-21:/comment/40336 Anonymous OOT quit coming around anon starting shit! Find peace and think good thoughts. 2008-09-22T17:58:42Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-22:/comment/40643 Anonymous What up with the flags 2008-09-24T04:03:21Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-24:/comment/40894 Anonymous http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/finish-line-is-slipping-away-for-congress-2008-09-23.html Finish line is slipping away for Congress By J. Taylor Rushing Posted: 09/23/08 07:55 PM [ET] House and Senate members are convinced that the 110th Congress is likely to extend into next week, next month or possibly November, as the chambers’ already crowded agenda now includes rescuing Wall Street. Lawmakers are also wrestling with still-simmering debates on energy, taxes, economic stimulus proposals, defense policy and a must-pass, stopgap spending resolution to keep the federal government running. In the Senate, that’s enough of a workload to convince many members — from leadership to rank and file — that a Friday adjournment for the rest of the year is not likely to happen. “No way,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “We’re going to be here for a while.” The good news is that there is bipartisan agreement on the likelihood of an extension of the current session or a lame-duck session. “For all of these things to get accomplished before the end of the week is going to require a level of bipartisanship that perhaps isn’t evident here on most days,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the GOP’s chief deputy whip. Even Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reminded reporters that no presidential-election-year Congress in the past 20 years has adjourned in September.“We’ve had them go as late as Oct. 28,” Reid said. “My caucus has a lot of things they’ve planned and want to do, there’s campaigns going on, and they would like to go home. But we’re going to finish this at the right time, not some arbitrary date.” The size and scope of the remaining agenda are even throwing doubt on Congress’s usual last-minute knack for wrapping up agreements and fleeing town on Thursday nights before a weekend. “I don’t know how much magic dust we have left,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.). “I think it’s in short supply. But stay tuned.” Among the few mileposts that can point the way forward is the end of the fiscal year next Tuesday, Sept. 30 — a drop-dead deadline for a spending resolution to keep the government operating. This year, however, that normally benign date has been infused with the fiery political debate over energy, with leaders prepared to let the 27-year-old congressional ban on offshore drilling expire on the same date. The congressional ban has been included in annual spending bills, or continuing resolutions passed in lieu of those measures. Several Democrats say that could leave a dangerous vacuum with no clear guidelines on offshore oil drilling. “There’s no framework established for revenue-sharing, there’s no clear framework for coastal zones,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). “Some could argue a vacuum may be as detrimental as the moratorium.” One challenge to meeting Wednesday’s deadline for funding the government is that the Jewish New Year begins at sundown on Monday and ends at sundown on Wednesday. Lawmakers have traditionally honored the holiday, leaving the weekend as the most viable alternative for finishing work on the continuing resolution. Leadership aides say there is no clear decision yet on how to cope with that possibility. Lobbyists are watching closely but know little more. One said the White House sent Congress a list of demands on Monday for accepting a longer-term funding resolution beyond a few weeks. The list reportedly included approval of the Colombia free trade deal, as well as an India-U.S. nuclear agreement. A White House spokeswoman said President Bush did not send a letter to Congress on Monday outlining demands for an acceptable continuing resolution, but said that the Office of Management and Budget informally communicated to the Hill a few weeks ago. “As far as demands, we haven’t seen a CR yet so I don’t have any comment to offer yet,” said spokeswoman Corrine Hirsch. In the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said it’s possible that neither the financial bill nor a continuing resolution to fund the government will be finished by Friday. “We are willing to work through the weekend if that’s what’s required,” Hoyer said. “The Congress is not going to be in a position to not be able to respond.” Jared Allen and Jim Snyder contributed to this article. 2008-09-24T07:02:18Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-24:/comment/40925 stubsnews TheHill.com ‘Main Street’ advocates looking for their bailout By Jim Snyder Posted: 09/23/08 05:23 PM [ET] At a rally before a day of door-knocking, a band of local officials in green shirts and from distressed communities out West expressed their frustration at how fast Washington reacted to help Wall Street. The Treasury had found billions of dollars to prop up mortgage giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the insurance powerhouse American International Group. But the request from the National Forest Counties & Schools Coalition for $500 million a year in federal aid — a small sum of money in the federal budget dedicated to replacing lost revenues due to a prohibition on development on nearby federal forests — had stalled yet again. “Never in my 34 years in Washington have I felt such visceral anger from grassroots clients who were in town to lobby on an issue that didn’t relate to war or peace,” said Gerald Warburg, an appropriations lobbyist for Cassidy & Associates who briefed coalition members before the lobby day. “One guy stood up and said that [the bailout] makes me want to punch somebody.” With Congress now considering a massive $700 billion bailout to banks and other financial services institutions dragged down by “illiquid assets,” “Main Street” is lobbying to get its share. The massive amounts Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke say is necessary to avert an economic meltdown may eventually force Congress to rein in spending in other areas, as the federal deficit balloons. Barack Obama acknowledged Tuesday that he may have to “phase in” some of his spending priorities rather than rushing ahead. But for now, lobbyists representing Main Street, a community that apparently includes everyone not directly tied to the financial services industry, are using the unease on Capitol Hill over the massive taxpayer-funded bailout to pressure lawmakers to support other, much less expensive priorities. Warburg said the bailouts represent IOUs to Middle America that provided a “specific opportunity” to make the case on behalf of his clients. The communities that abut off-limits national federal forest lands have already had to lay off teachers, law enforcement officials, firefighters and city workers due to budget shortfalls. The lack of economic development dollars used to be made up by commercial user fees, but those receipts have declined in recent years, resulting in the need for further help from the federal government. The appropriation sought by the forest communities and schools coalition is in a tax extender package the Senate was set to take up on Tuesday. Debate on that measure was postponed, however, as lawmakers continued to debate the administration’s bailout plan. The Main Street rallying cry is in fact probably the loudest in that ongoing debate over the rescue plan. Consumer advocates, for example, continued to press Congress on Tuesday to include protections for homeowners who face foreclosure in any Wall Street rescue package. Banks have stepped up their lobbying efforts to block what they call the “cram down” provision that gives bankruptcy judges the ability to reduce mortgage payments for distressed homeowners. Financial service lobbyists have argued that the provision would raise mortgage rates on other homebuyers. But consumer advocates say the provision would decrease the number of foreclosures, and that would stem falling home values that are a bigger threat to the larger community. “Any Wall Street bailout must include help for Main Street,” said Nancy Zirkin, executive vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights . In a letter sent to Capitol Hill on Monday night, AARP CEO William Novelli called the bankruptcy provision a “matter of basic fairness.” “It would benefit all homeowners, not just those at risk of foreclosure, as it would decrease the number of foreclosures, stabilize home values, protect communities and help put the economy back on the path to recovery,” the letter states. The “help for everyday Americans” advocacy efforts also extended beyond the immediate debate over the bailout. Labor groups, for example, stressed the need to Congress to adopt a second stimulus package, in addition to the Wall Street rescue package. “Any taxpayer bailout of Wall Street must be balanced with economic relief for ordinary Americans dealing with the economic consequences of Wall Street’s outrageous conduct and the government’s own inaction,” the labor group wrote Congress over the weekend. The stimulus package should include money to extend unemployment benefits, a “major investment” in roads and bridges and other parts of the nation’s infrastructure and financial help to states and communities. The bailout even brought back the debate over offshore drilling, which had dominated congressional debate for much of the summer. The Institute for Energy Resources , a pro-drilling think tank, criticized an effort by House Democrats to attach a limited expansion of offshore drilling to the continuing resolution that would keep the government running. IER wants the bans on drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska completely lifted. “This move makes it clear that Congress would continue to stick it to Main Street as they bail out Wall Street,” IER said in a news release critical of a spending measure reportedly crafted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Also on Tuesday, the Save our States Coalition, a group affiliated with labor, held two news conferences with reporters to stress the need for additional economic aid to states. Bridgett Frey, a coalition spokeswoman, said 29 states have budget shortfalls and need additional federal financial aid. “We are trying to call attention to the fact that Main Street needs economic recovery in addition to Wall Street,” Frey said. 2008-09-25T10:00:53Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-25:/comment/41165 Anonymous thank you so very much 2008-09-25T10:04:37Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-25:/comment/41170 Anonymous That's it. 2008-09-25T15:13:34Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-25:/comment/41272 Anonymous Illinois CS They have been posting articles here in parts and it works out ok. 2008-09-26T09:47:48Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-26:/comment/41621 Anonymous Do you live in Nevada? 2008-10-27T07:51:14Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-10-27:/comment/54483 Anonymous Try being an unemployed single mom ,MR. Bush! Every politician should have to live my life for a month before running for office. Might give them a different perspective! 2008-09-28T04:50:01Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-28:/comment/42499 Anonymous Where do we stand on u/e? 2008-09-28T11:07:30Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-28:/comment/42697 Anonymous I have not read that they will be bringing an unemployment extension up on its own, do you have a source you can share? 2008-09-29T13:23:16Z tag:opencongress.org,2008-09-29:/comment/43215 Anonymous We would be walking around naked, we dont make anything anymnore.....really, Butm I think wallstreet made their own problem . ---------- tart putting US made products back on the shelves.