The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has voted to require airlines to allow passengers to deplane if the flights are held on the tarmac for more than 3 hours.
The measure is attached to a $34.6 billion FAA authorization bill.
The airlines are complaining that they do not want to lose the flexibility, but these long stays are most often about not having to put up passengers in hotels or paying for meals.
F$#@ the airlines.
That name may not be entirely fair, since it the tax would also apply disproportionately to Republican lawmakers, particularly those living on the now infamous “C Street” Christo-Fascist funded residences.
I’m of mixed emotions here. A tax on unprotected sex is a really stupid idea, but the idea of making Bristol Palin, and the residents of “C Street” pay an “Ass Tax”, amuses me no end.
And here we thought paying for sex was a no-no, especially for scandal-wary Members of Congress. But Rep. Steve Buyer thinks people who engage in the act (specifically, the kind that takes place sans protection) should have to pony up.
The Indiana Republican floated his unlikely cash-for-sex proposal Thursday during the markup of the health care bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee. Under the plan Buyer posited, those who engage in risky behavior, like smoking, not exercising and (ding, ding!) having unprotected sex, should have to pay a premium for their health care. After all, the reasoning goes, those people are more likely to incur higher health care costs than cigarette-eschewing, condom-wearing gym bunnies.
The distinguished gentleman from Indiana had to have been a College Republican, he was born in 1958, so he’s of roughly the right age, and this is a classic sort of juvenile CR bullsh%$.
Are there any grown-up Republicans left in Congress?
Basically, the proposal becomes law, it will end subsidies to private student loan providers, saving money for students and taxpayers to the tune of $87 billion over 10 years.
The student loan providers are even less deserving than Goldman Sachs, so here is hoping that this becomes law, though getting it through the Senate may be difficult, as the 3rd largest student loan provider is Nelnet, based in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of Senator Ben Nelson, who will almost certainly support a filibuster against the measure.
Amendment approving it being stripped from the Defense Appropriations Bill passes passes 58-40.
I’m with SecDef Bob Gates on this. The push behind this is to have the USAF be able to achieve air supremacy against any potential future foe, and the costs end up killing men on the ground, and citizens in the streets, now.
We still maintain the ability to achieve air superiority against any potential future foe, and air supremacy against any probable opponent, and it saves money for better readiness in a counter-insurgency scenarios that are the most likely future conflicts for the next ¼ century.
Additionally, it frees up money to provide for things like vaccinating and educating our children.
The F-22 was about ensuring that in the worst possible conflict the USAF would be at virtually no risk of air to air casualties, at the expense of everyone else.
While that might be nice for the fighter jocks, the marginal utility of air supremacy vs air superiority means very little to the guy on the ground, or the tax-payer.
Most of the rest of the reforms remain intact, but the card check provision has been removed.
What remains is the right of unions to campaign on company property, a faster election cycle, which gives less time for employers to strong arm and illegally fire employees, making mandatory anti-union meetings illegal, and binding arbitration.
Truth be told, I expect it to be watered down further, because the Barack Obama administration has been studiously silent on this measure, throwing yet another key constituency, unions, under the bus as they have with labor.
This bill will not progress with meaningful reform without White House support, and none is forthcoming.
Well, it looks like Barack Obama is going to be getting some well deserved push-back on his proposal to keep the ban on needle exchange programs.
Obama put it in his budget, and the House Appropriations Committee pulled it from their budget, and it’s what comes out of the Congress at the end of the day that makes law here.
Here is the background on Barack Obama going out of his way to reverse a campaign promise, and I still think that this is a deliberate attempt to enrage the gay community in order to score points with right wingers.
That being said, Obama also opposing sane harm reduction policies with regard to drugs in the context of international diplomacy, so maybe he actually buys into this whole “War on Drugs” charade, so maybe he is just worried of being demagogued on the issue.
I’m not sure which state of mind is worse.
That was blisteringly fast.
Normally, you can’t go through a re org for an ice cream stand this quickly, but they will be back, courtesy of Congressmen who are bought and paid for by automobile dealers.
221 of said legislators have cosponsored a bill reversing GM and Chrysler’s cutting tyheir dealer rolls.
It’s not surprising. Auto dealers are always big political donors, having their thumbs on the scales is part of the business model, so now they are showing their clout.
Not only does he endorse the concept, he plansd to introduce a bill in his committee.
The Senate will be tougher. Hopefully, some discipline can be enforced on filibusters.
It appears that Majority Leader Harry Reid just told finance chair Max Baucus to stop moving the bill to the right in an attempt to get Republican votes:
According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.
This actually makes sense. Any healthcare reform that works will cripple the Republican Party for at least a generation, so accommodating the Republicans means that you are making sure that the plan will fail.
Meanwhile, on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is doing his best to kill a public option:
It is more important that health-care legislation inject stiff competition among insurance plans than it is for Congress to create a pure government-run option, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said.
“The goal is to have a means and a mechanism to keep the private insurers honest,” he said in an interview. “The goal is non-negotiable; the path is” negotiable.
President Barack Obama has campaigned vigorously for a full public option. But he’s also said that he won’t draw a “line in the sand” over this point. On Tuesday, the White House issued a statement reiterating his support for a public plan.
I think that Emanuel believes that a big war chest is the only determinant to winning elections, and he does not want to offend the deep pockets of the insurance industry.
His actions as the head of the DCCC, when he decided to ran the hapless Tammy Duckworth at the expense of Christine Cegelis in the Illinois Congressional 6th district, where he dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the primary, and over a million in the general, keeping a Republican in the seat, are a good example of why his “campaign funds trump everything,” philosophy is a complete lose.
Case in point, freshman Representative Tom Perriello, who was aggressively lobbied to vote for the cap and trad bill, he thought that it was a sellout, and originally intended to vote against it, and is now being targeted by the GOP on this vote.
On the other hand, blue dogs, like Gene Taylor, were allowed to vote their campaign dollars “conscience”, and were not aggressively lobbied.
Perriello’s margin in his campaign, just 727 votes, while Gene Taylor, “He won 74.6% of the vote in 2008, and 79.8% in 2006.”
This is about campaign money. Rahm Emanuel and His Evil Minions™ think that the blue dogs are critical in getting big money campaign donations, and that if you have to sacrifice a few progressive Dems to secure that, they don’t raise the big bucks, so screw them.
Representatives Travis Childers (D-Criminally Stupid)and Gary Miller (R-Stupid Criminal) have proposed an 18 month suspension of the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC), which is intended to reduce fraud in appraisals.
Unsurprisingly, in the world before politics, Childers and Miller were a realtor and a home builder respectively, and fraud=profits for that lot.
We know this bill sucks because of who supports it:
The National Association of Realtors’ Lawrence Yun says “stories of appraisal problems have been snowballing from across the country with many contracts falling through at the last moment.” The National Association of Mortgage Brokers proclaims, “Tens of thousands of consumers have already been robbed of their opportunity to enjoy historically low rates by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s rule.” The appraisal management companies, critics say, don’t seem to care if the appraisers they pick know anything about the neighborhoods in question.
This is a bad, bad bill.
Cap and trade barely passes the house, and Barack Obama is wringing his hands about how the tariff against nations with weaker measures, “At a time when the economy world-wide is still deep in recession, and we’ve seen a significant drop in global trade, I think we have to be very careful about sending any protectionist signals out there.”
Barack Obama is a smart guy. He knows that there are similar tariffs in countries that have a VAT, so that you cannot evade the tax by outsourcing production, and he knows that the economic consensus is that the absence of such measures distort free trade by subsidizing foreign manufacture of goods.
He also has to know that the WTO just signed off on these tariffs as legal, so long as they are not, “a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade”.”
He expresses these “concerns” because he believes that any restriction on the flow of goods and services,* is dangerous and bad.
He is a free market mousketeer™ who believes that free trade will, inexorably spread democracy throughout the world, raise everyone’s standard of living, keep ants away from your picnic, and keep your daughter from dating the guy with the tattoos and piercings.
Do not expect meaningful labor or environmental measures as a part of his free trade deals. They won’t happen.
*Except for IP, where excessive US copyright and patent restrictions must be adopted world wide.
Connecticut has changed its US Senate succession law.
New Senators will now be appointed by a special election, not by the (currently Republican) Governor of Connecticut.
I am not suggesting that anyone do any harm to the honorable Joseph Lieberman, but should he be caught in a Senate closet with a male page and a goat, I would no longer be concerned about his successor.
The Federal Trade Commission is coming out in support of legislation outlawing pay for delay deals between brand-name and generic drug manufacturers.
Pay for delay is where the drug maker that created a drug pays generic drug manufacturers not to make a generic equivalent once the patent has expired.
Eliminating this practice should save consumers about $35 billion over the next 10 years.
I think that it’s important, and it’s something of direct interest to me, I get my insurance, and pay a lot for it, through MHIP, but I simply do not believe that a meaningful plan is on the way, and so I find it to depressing to write about.
Between the belief that the plan needs some Republican votes, even though meaningful healthcare reform will cut their own throats politically, and the power of the insurance, the AMA, and medical lobbies, I just don’t see anything meaningful happening.
So, I read, and I get depressed, and how often can I call someone like Bayh, or Baucus, or Conrad pig felching rat bastards?
It adds very little to the understanding of the situation.
And there is a lot of skepticism, particularly about expanding the Federal Reserve’s regulatory role, because, as Alan “Bubbles” demonstrated, you could end up with an incompetent lunatic running the most opaque organization in Washington, see here, here, here
They should be concerned. While insulation from oversight and public input might be a good thing when one manages the monetary system and has to create a recession to reign in inflation, it is not when you are talking about regulating agencies.
I think that this is something that Lawrence Summers wanted, because he believes that Obama will appoint him to succeed “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke, and he wants more authority at what he sees as his future position.
One thing that does concern me is that one of the biggest failures in this of failures, the corruption in the way ratings agencies like S&P and Moody’s operate, is largely untouched.
I’m unimpressed, but I agree with Paul Krugman when he says, “One thing I was concerned about was whether this consumer financial protection agency would be toothless , but the opposition of [a bank lobby group] makes me believe that it’s not such a bad idea after all,” when he talks about moving the regulation of consumer loans out of the Federal Reserve and move it to a dedicated consumer credit protection agency.
It’s too little, too timid, and too friendly to the forces that created this in the first place.
The House Ways and Means Committee is considering generating additional $37 billion in additional revenue by removing the deductiblity of direct to consumer advertising for prescription drugs.
The Chairman, Charles Rengel is talking about it favorably, and I think it does good on a number of levels:
I don’t expect it to stick, but a top staffer for Max Baucus (D-MT) just had a meeting with a group of lobbyists, and he told them that if their clients were to attend a meeting on healthcare hosted by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), it would be “viewed as a hostile act”, because the see the meeting as a part of an attempt “stop healthcare reform.”
I expect there to be a right-wing media sh%$storm over this, and for Baucus, or his aide to abjectly apologize, with tail tucked between their legs, because that’s how Democrats wimp out, but for right now, this is a good thing.
95 Dems voted with the Republicans to instruct the conference Representatives on the conference committee to keep the amendment to hide torture photos in the Iraq/Afghanistan supplemental, in a stunning display of cowardice.
Thankfully, it’s non-binding, and will probably be ignored by the conferees, but jeebus this is hypocritical, particularly for the Dems in safe districts who voted for it.
It will be ignored by the conferees because the ‘Phants will all vote against the supplemental, because they are opposed to the IMF money, so the Progressive Caucus can actually kill this bill.
Lieberman and Graham are at again, promising to filibuster the Senate on everything because their Bush era torture photo cover-up amendment was pulled from the Iraq/Afghanistan authorization.