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Betrayed by Congress with the Cap-and-Trade Bill South Orange, NJ Saturday, June 27, 2009 By Alan Caruba Mark it on your calendar, June 26, 2009 was the date that the House of Representatives betrayed every American in the name of saving the nation and the Earth from global warming. It was the day that 219 Representative voted for the obscenely misnamed "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" Only eight Republican members of the House voted for it and 44 Democrats voted against it. The bill, some 1,200 pages, was not read by those men and women voting on...

HR 2998 American Clean Energy and Security Act. The Congressional record minutes of yesterday can be accessed at Thomas.gov. The Corporations and Associations that are backing this legislation can be found on pages H7685 & H7686. Listing below:

Michael Jackson's spirit lives on inside a Filipino jail. Tourists flocked to the prison in Cebu, south of Manila, Saturday for an elaborate tribute performed by hundreds of inmates in orange prison garb who became an Internet sensation in 2007 for their jailhouse "Thriller" performance.

Full disclosure: I never watched a Michael Jackson video all the way through until today, after reading in The New York Times that “in the Philippines, a dance tribute was planned for a prison in Cebu, where Byron Garcia, a security consultant, had 1,500 inmates join in a synchronized dance to the ‘Thriller” video.” Jackson always seemed to me unspeakably silly when he wasn’t genuinely creepy, but the mass outpouring of grief at his death made me curiously enough to view the cited item on YouTube. All music in some way is sacramental and all public performance has some religious...

A couple weeks back, ACORN CEO, Bertha Lewis, held a conference call with the Conference of Mayors. The call discussed strategies for preventing the growing tide of foreclosures in America's cities. On the call was St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay. In fact, the city of St. Louis had already begun an alliance with ACORN in the area of foreclosure prevention.

The following republicans voted FOR the largest tax bill ever passed by a session of Congress. Any good work they have done has been for naught. Unless they change their votes by the deadline, Wed, July 2nd, they will for ever be a member of the Cap and Tr8tors. HR 2454 RECORDED VOTE 26-Jun-2009 7:17 PM BILL TITLE: American Clean Energy and Security Act Time left for the Cap and Tr8tors to change their vote. 04 Days, 07 Hours, 44 Minutes, 15 Seconds. 1) Click on their link. 2) Select the 'Contact' tab. Contact their local office as they are...

"CO2 is not a pollutant. In simple terms, CO2 is plant food. The green world we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2. These plants largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today. Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2. In and of itself, therefore, the increasing concentration of CO2 does not pose a toxic risk to the planet." - John R. Christy, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alabama "Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a...

It’s not just what’s in the bill. It’s the way they rammed it through the House. Just like the porkulus: Under-handed, transparency-defying, and stuffed with earmark payoffs and bribes concocted in middle-of-the night, backroom deals.

HR2454 Passes House: Kirk, 7 other Republicans, Vote for Greatest Tax Increase in U.S. History "Cap and Trade". The official name for the bill is the "American Clean Energy and Security Act". HR2454 passed in the U.S. House of Representatives late Friday evening, June 26th. The bill--which will be the greatest tax increase in American history--received 219 "aye" votes and 212 "nay" votes. 211 Democrats and eight Republicans voted "yes", 44 Democrats and 168 Republicans voted "no". Therefore, it can safely be said, the votes of eight Republicans...

Contrary to what we hear incessantly, marriage is not a right; it is an estate, a condition. There are conditions of life that have nothing to do with rights. One doesn’t have a right to go through puberty. One either does or doesn’t. What is the condition of being married, and what makes it possible to attain it? Franz Rosenzweig’s anthropology—in which religion is a response to man’s sentience of death, and the sentience of death is not only an individual but also an communal characteristic—may help answer that question. Humankind fights mortality in two ways. The first is to...

first wrote that all of Barack Obama’s promises come with expiration dates, and broken promises from politicians are nothing new, of course. However, one usually expects politicians — especially those running on hope and change — to either remain true to their professed core values and the issues that fueled the most passion on the campaign trail, or at least explain their change in the daylight. Obama did neither, nor did he apologize to the man he besmirched endlessly on the campaign trail while adopting the policy that Obama most demonized as a candidate.

Reporting from Washington — Congress appeared poised Thursday to continue compensating state and local governments for incarcerating illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, ignoring President Obama's call to eliminate such payments. That would spare strapped California from another hit on its budget. The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to provide $228 million nationwide next year, acting a week after the House voted to allocate $400 million, the same as this year. Once the full Senate acts, negotiators from both chambers will meet to reconcile their differences. California, which receives about 40% of the money, still could end up with less than it...

Krauthammer on Press/Obama: 'The Hot Sex is Over, They're In the Cigarette Stage' By Brent Baker Created 2009-06-27 15:53 NPR's Nina Totenberg scolded the more adversarial approach some in the White House press corps took to President Obama during Tuesday's press conference, but on Inside Washington this weekend columnist Charles Krauthammer rejected the notion the media's honeymoon is “over,” as he cracked: The hot sex is over, they're in the cigarette stage right now. You get a question or two that's slightly obstreperous, but the adulatory coverage is still all wall-to-wall. That's a comedic improvement over what he offered Tuesday...

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) goes on the Glenn Beck Comedy Hour, and repeats her contention that the government might use census data to round people up and put them in internment camps.

LOS ANGELES – The Rev. Jesse Jackson says Michael Jackson's family wants an independent autopsy following the pop star's sudden death at age 50. Jesse Jackson said after a Chicago press conference Saturday that there are unanswered questions surrounding the King of Pop's death, including about the role of the personal cardiologist who was with him.

Betsy McCaughey reads massive healthcare bills so you don’t have to. New York’s former lieutenant governor, now chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, fired the torpedo that ultimately sank HillaryCare. While the sheer girth of that 1,431-page legislative juggernaut intimidated nearly everyone, McCaughey devoured it. Her resulting January 1994 New Republic article, “No Exit,” unmasked HillaryCare’s previously overlooked warts and sores. The horror that McCaughey revealed eventually spelled that initiative’s doom. McCaughey has done it again. In a June 19 Wall Street Journal op-ed, she dissected the 615-page draft of Ted Kennedy’s Affordable Health Choices Act. The Massachusetts...

TIME takes advantage of of MJ's death to make money and keep the company afloat for a while. Time magazine will publish a $5.99 special commemorative issue on Michael Jackson to hit newsstands on Monday, June 29. Time last published a special edition in the days following 9/11 (it sold 3.25+ million copies stateside). For the special commemorative issue, Time spoke with Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Nancy Reagan, Lenny Kravitz, Jesse Jackson, Tommy Mottola, Berry Gordy, Spike Lee, Sheryl Crow, Anjelica Huston, Clive Davis, Al Sharpton, Deepak Chopra, Kobe Bryant, Lance Bass, Oscar De La Hoya, Savion Glover,...

Two of the biggest names in the City of London had previously undisclosed links to slavery in the British colonies, documents seen by the Financial Times have revealed. Nathan Mayer Rothschild, the banking familyÂ’s 19th-century patriarch, and James William Freshfield, founder of Freshfields, the top City law firm, benefited financially from slavery, records from the National Archives show, even though both have often been portrayed as opponents of slavery. Internet Explorer 6 or 7 or Firefox 1.5/2.0 on Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, or Safari 2.0 or Firefox 1.5/2.0 on Mac OS X v10.4 or Mac OS X v10.5...

Saturday appears to be the slowest day of the week for news, so this list will pale in comparison to yesterday's. Even so, here's some great content for you to read and digg. http://diggsandburies.blogspot.com/

One shot from losing in the first round of qualifying, Melanie Oudin will now be playing in the second week at her first Wimbledon. It has been a surprising, thrilling run for Oudin, a determined 17-year-old from Marietta, Ga., who still has many more friends and acquaintances in the junior ranks than in the main draw of the main event. But Oudin’s junior days are behind her now, as she proved beyond a reasonable doubt on Saturday by thinking and hustling her way to a 6-7 (8), 7-5, 6-2 victory over sixth-seeded Jelena Jankovic of Serbia, who was ranked No....