Last-Ditch Effort To Ram Through Omnibus Bill By Barry, Pelosi Et Al Fails

After wrestling with - and finally abandoning - a 1,900-page catch-all spending bill stuffed with more than $8 billion in home-state projects known as earmarks in Washington and pork in the rest of the country, Senate leaders need to come up with a measure to keep the federal government running into early next year.

Nearly $1.3 trillion in unfinished budget work was packed into the spending measure, including $158 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave up on the bill Thursday after several Republicans who had been thinking of voting for it pulled back their support.

Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky had thrown his weight against the bill in recent days, saying it was "unbelievable" that Democrats would try to muscle through in the days before Christmas legislation that usually takes months to debate.

"Just a few weeks after the voters told us they don't want us rushing major pieces of complicated, costly, far-reaching legislation through Congress, we get this," McConnell said. "This is no way to legislate."

The turn of events was a major victory for earmark opponents like Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who for years have been steamrolled by the old-school members of the powerful Appropriations Committee.

The spending barons saw their power ebb in the wake of midterm elections that delivered major gains for Republicans - with considerable help from anti-spending tea party activists.

"We just saw something extraordinary on the floor of the United States Senate," a grinning McCain said.

The $1.27 trillion catchall bill wrapped together 12 bills - blending $1.1 trillion for the operating budgets of every federal agency with an infusion of funding to carry the war in Afghanistan into its 10th year - into a single foot-tall piece of legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass with just a couple of days' worth of debate.

It was designed to bankroll the day-to-day operations of the government for the budget year that started Oct. 1, funding the almost one-third of the federal budget that Congress has to pass each year.

The House and Senate typically spend months on the 12 annual spending bills, but Democrats didn't bring even a single one to the Senate floor this year, an unprecedented collapse of an appropriations process. The House only passed two of the 12 bills and didn't make any of the other 10 public.

The sinking of the bill was a setback for President Barack Obama, who supported it despite provisions to block the Pentagon from transferring Guantanamo Bay prisoners to the United States and fund a program to develop a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which the administration says is a waste of money. Obama came under fire from Republicans for supporting the bill after promising after the election to take a harder line on earmarks.

Just Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a public push for the omnibus measure at an appearance at the White House, saying that operating under a stopgap measure frozen at current levels would be a major hardship for the Pentagon.

McConnell had earlier quietly backed the effort to produce the legislation, which had significant input from Republicans on the Appropriations panel.

But release of the bill on Tuesday sparked an outcry among the GOP's conservative political base. Senate Republicans held two combative closed-door meetings in which the rank-and-file turned up the heat on those few Republicans who were considering voting for the bill.

Republicans were also irate that the measure contained money to begin implementation of Obama's controversial health care law and a financial overhaul measure that all but a handful of Republicans opposed.

On the merits, most of the rest of the bill had bipartisan support. It stuck to a spending cap sought by Republicans while boosting spending for Head Start, veterans programs and Pell Grants for disadvantaged college students. But that message didn't get out amid the firestorm over earmarks and the measure's remarkable size.

McConnell proposed Thursday to keep the government running at current funding levels through Feb. 18. By then, Republicans will have taken over the House and bolstered their strength in the Senate, giving them greater leverage to force spending cuts.

The House last week passed a yearlong funding bill that's mostly frozen at current levels. (source)

What The ObamaNation Has Brought Us: Taking From The Rich

President Obama’s $8 Billion Earmark Rerun: Lesson Not Learned?

The Obama administration today told Congress to pass an omnibus spending bill containing $8 billion in earmark projects, even though just a few days ago the president said one of the lessons he learned from the 2010 midterm elections was to take more seriously the public’s disapproval of – and his pledge to oppose -- earmarks.

“We wish there were no earmarks and are troubled with their presence” in the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill, an administration source told ABC News. “But Secretary Gates has told the President that the alternative bill” – a continuing resolution that for one year funds the government, which is due to run out of cash at the end of the week – “doesn't have the funding critical for several national security priorities.”

Gates issued a statement this evening saying that without the omnibus spending bill, the Pentagon would be left “without the resources and flexibility needed to meet vital military requirements” – specifically “the military pay raise, increases in military health care costs, higher fuel prices, and other ‘fact of life’ bills.” The shorter funding bill would “slow our efforts to meet unanticipated wartime needs,” he added, while the bigger funding bill would provide funding for “critical national security initiatives” including the new Cyber Command and increasing special operations forces.

The president’s acquiescence with a bill that contains $8 billion in earmarks stands in contrast with what he said was a lesson learned from the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” when he indicated that he regretted not taking more of a stand against a different $8 billion in earmarks in a 2009 omnibus spending bill.

At his press conference after the shellacking, the president said that upon taking office, “we were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn’t change how things got done. And I think that frustrated people.”

The president said he’s “a strong believer that the earmarking process in Congress isn’t what the American people really want to see when it comes to making tough decisions about how taxpayer dollars are spent. And I, in the rush to get things done, had to sign a bunch of bills that had earmarks in them, which was contrary to what I had talked about. And I think folks look at that and they said, ‘Gosh, this feels like the same partisan squabbling, this seems like the same ways of doing business as happened before.’ And so one of the things that I’ve got to take responsibility for is not having moved enough on those fronts.”

The president said the midterms provided him with “an opportunity to move forward on some of those issues,” and he specifically cited incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., as wanting “to see a moratorium on earmarks continuing. That’s something I think we can work on together.”

Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring said Wednesday evening that President Obama and Cantor have not spoken about earmarks since the president mentioned his name at that press conference.

“So right after his election rebuke, President Obama claimed that he to work together to reform earmarks and today he supports a bill that contains billions of dollars of wasteful pork,” Dayspring said. “If that’s the kind of reform the President had in mind, Eric Cantor isn’t interested. People are furious and rightly so with the runaway spending and the joke process that they are watching Democrats are engage in. Even after the election shellacking, the President and his party still don’t get it. If he is serious about working together, he needs to take it seriously and pledge to veto this pork laden spending bill.”

The president told 60 Minutes last month that while he had “campaigned saying we should stop doing earmarks….I had to make a decision, ‘Do I sign this omnibus bill to finish last year's business? And, you know, make sure that I can keep on working with Congress to get all these things done? Or do I veto that bill and have a big fight right away in the middle of an economic crisis?’ Well, I decided to sign the bill. Now, that's an example of where I was so concerned about getting things done that, you know, I lost track of part of the reason I got elected. Which was we were gonna change how business was done here.”

After a number of decisions like that, the president said, “I think what people started feeling was, "Gosh, this is sort of business-as-usual in Washington,’ And that's part of what I ran against. And so, I reflect a lot about over the next two years, making sure that I remind myself, my job is not legislator in chief. It's not just a matter of how many bills I'm passing, no matter how worthy they are. Part of it's also setting a tone in Washington and for the rest of the country that says, "We're responsible’…” (source)

Earmark Foes Pressure Obama

Arizona Republican Representative Jeff Flake

Newly emboldened earmark foes are calling on President Obama to back up his opposition to pork-barrel spending with action.

Mr. Obama, who stopped requesting earmarks during his final year in the Senate, has used his bully pulpit to call for reform of the process by which lawmakers direct federal funding to pet projects. He even made it the sole focus of a recent weekly address, identifying earmarks as a possible area of bipartisan cooperation with the GOP.

But the president has signed billions of the sometimes-controversial projects into law during his first two years in office - even though he has later expressed regret for doing so.

"If you want to know how you really change the practice, it's for a president to say, 'I'm simply going to veto bills that have these projects in them,' " said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican and a leading anti-pork crusader. "He has to know what a stain there is around the country for this kind of politics, for earmarks in general, and if he were to take a firm stand that would be huge for him."

Indeed, with a near-record federal deficit and an economy that's still struggling to recover, public pressure to control government spending is immense and congressional Republicans have latched onto an earmark moratorium as a part of the answer. But members of Congress are also intent on protecting what they see as their constitutional prerogative to appropriate federal dollars, and those competing tensions have set up one of the key showdowns on Capitol Hill.

"The president really is the lynchpin in all of this," said Steve Ellis, vice president of government watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. "He can talk to the Senate Democrats and say, 'Hey, it's not like I'm telling you to do something I didn't do when I was in the Senate.' So he has a bit of the moral high ground there."

Mr. Ellis noted that Mr. Obama has already had some luck "saber rattling" with Congress over a defense authorization bill last summer that included $1.8 billion for new F-22 fighter jets. The Senate eventually voted to cut funding for the program after Mr. Obama made the first veto threat of his presidency.

The president has been less interested in standing up to lawmakers when it comes to pork barrel spending projects - despite vowing to crack down on them during his 2008 campaign. Soon after taking office in March 2009, he criticized, but signed, a $410 billion omnibus spending bill loaded with $7.7 billion in earmarks, including $200,000 for a California tattoo removal program.

Mr. Obama justified his signature by pointing out that the legislation was left over from the previous year, declaring however that it "must mark an end to the old way of doing business." Nine months later, he signed a second omnibus bill totaling $447 billion, with nearly $4 billion in earmarks.

Both House Republicans, who will take control of the chamber in January, and their Senate counterparts have agreed to voluntarily ban earmarks, which account for less than 1 percent of federal spending but have become symbols of government waste and even corruption. In particular, the Senate GOP moratorium was a major coup for earmark hawks, who welcomed a change of heart by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a longtime defender of directing federal dollars to projects back home.

With their new majority, House Republicans could effectively block requests by House Democrats. But Democrats still control the Senate and, along with a few Republican outliers who are bucking their caucus on the pork moratorium, such as Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have vigorously resisted the anti-earmark wave.

That leaves a bipartisan band of agitators, led by Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, looking to force fellow lawmakers into line with a binding moratorium that, as a change to Senate rules, would require 67 votes and is unlikely to pass. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, an avowed earmarker, has agreed to allow a vote on the proposal even as he warned it would lead to a power grab by the executive branch.

"I think I have an obligation to the people of Nevada to do what's important to Nevada and not what's important to some bureaucrat with green eyeshades," Mr. Reid, of Nevada, told reporters last week in a routine defense of the practice.

But Mr. Obama seems to have recommitted himself to a tough public stance on pork since his party's "shellacking" at the polls earlier this month.

In a postelection press conference, he appeared to regret having signed bills piled high with earmarks, saying the process "isn't what the American people really want to see when it comes to making tough decisions about how taxpayer dollars are spent" and that he hopes to work with Republicans on reform.

He told Americans in a weekly address that "we can't afford" earmarks amid staggering deficits, and even put out a statement in response to Mr. McConnell's reversal in a bid to stay out front on the issue.

The real test, however, will come if and when Congress sends Mr. Obama another pork-laden bill. That may not happen until next year, as Mr. McConnell has vowed to block consideration of an omnibus spending bill during the so-called "lame duck" session of Congress.

Asked last week by a reporter whether the president would use his veto pen to enforce his views on earmarks, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs ducked the question, saying the administration would have to "evaluate a piece of legislation for what is and is not" in the bill.

Mr. Flake, who thought Mr. Obama "would take a firmer stand initially," said it would be a mistake for the president to sign another omnibus riddled with pet projects.

"I think people would say that's just more of the same," said Mr. Flake, who described the fight over pork as "a new ball game" come January, when the new Congress is sworn in. (source)

Barry As President: More Lies Catching Up With Him (The 2010 Omnibus Bill And The Earmarks Involved)

The Net Neutrality Coup (How's That Hope And Change Thing Working For Ya' Now?)

The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations.

The Federal Communications Commission's new "net neutrality" rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski's press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC's chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," he told his audience. He noted that "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless." A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform"—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that "more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government." The poll went on to say that since "currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly" to prevent a "centrally controlled Internet."

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center's FCC- commissioned report, "Next Generation Connectivity," wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup. (source)

No Congress Since '60s Makes as Much Law Affecting Most Americans as 111th

However history judges the 535 men and women in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate the past two years, one thing is certain: The 111th Congress made more law affecting more Americans since the “Great Society” legislation of the 1960s.

For the first time since President Theodore Roosevelt began the quest for a national health-care system more than 100 years ago, the Democrat-led House and Senate took the biggest step toward achieving that goal by giving 32 million Americans access to insurance. Congress rewrote the rules for Wall Street in the most comprehensive way since the Great Depression. It spent more than $1.67 trillion to revive an economy on the verge of a depression, including tax cuts for most Americans, jobs for more than 3 million, construction of roads and bridges and investment in alternative energy; ended an almost two-decade ban against openly gay men and women serving in the military, and today ratified a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.

For all of its ambitious achievement, the 111th Congress, which may adjourn this week, also witnessed a voter-backlash driven by a 9.6 percent unemployment rate that cost Democrats control of the House and diminished their Senate majority.

“This is probably the most productive session of Congress since at least the ‘60s,” said Alan Brinkley, a historian at New York’s Columbia University. “It’s all the more impressive given how polarized the Congress has been.”

Revenue Gains

As lawmakers wrap up the session, Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are positioned to complete their best two years in revenue, General Motors Co. has emerged from bankruptcy with more than $23 billion repaid to the U.S. Treasury, and American International Group Inc. was able to sell $2 billion of bonds in its first offering since the company’s 2008 bailout.

The S&P 500 Index has gained 38.9 percent since Congress convened in January 2009, the biggest increase for a two-year congressional session since 1997-1998, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The S&P 500 Index reached 1254.60 yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average 11533.16.

Stimulus money created and saved jobs across the country, helping strapped state governments retain their workforces, according to government analyses. President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers said that in Ohio, for instance, the legislation created 122,000 jobs for teachers, police officers and construction workers.

“These policies carried the economy along during a period when the private sector was not engaged,’ said Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research in New York at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research.

Election Results

The careers of many lawmakers didn’t fare so well. Fiscally conservative Tea Party activists channeled their frustration with government spending and debt into political campaigns, most often to the benefit of Republicans challenging Democratic incumbents. In the Nov. 2 elections, Democrats lost 63 House seats, costing their party control of the chamber in next year’s Congress. In the Senate, the Democratic majority was shaved by six seats; the party will have 53 votes in next year’s session, Republicans 47.

“What we did was work, and our reward was, ‘Get out of here,’” said Representative Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat and outgoing chairwoman of the House Rules Committee. While Slaughter won re-election, five of her New York colleagues were among Democrats defeated.

Partisan Divide

Party-line votes on most of the major measures engendered ill will among Republicans and helped stall in the Senate initiatives requiring significant bipartisan support. Blocked legislation included limits on greenhouse-gas emissions that scientists blame for global warming, a bill the House passed in June 2009, a measure offering undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and the administration’s attempts to curb growing income inequality with tax increases for higher earners.

Those are unlikely to be tackled next year, when the House’s Republican majority will turn its attention to dismantling the health-care law and cutting domestic government spending by $100 billion.

Congress this year was also unable to approve a single one of the 12 annual appropriations bills that fund the government.

“I think it was a disaster,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican, of the congressional session.

Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, the chamber’s No. 2 Democratic leader, saw it differently: “This whole two-year session has been dramatic in terms of its achievement and the changes that it’s brought about.”

End of Era

The policies embraced by the 111th Congress suggested the end of an era in Washington, as Democrats pushed to reverse three decades of deregulation that began under President Ronald Reagan, say economists.

“We’ve been in a trend toward an attempt to deregulate the economy,” said Harris. “You’re turning back the clock to an earlier period.”

The scope of regulations approved since Obama took office has made business hesitant to expand and hire new workers, he said. “Business is overwhelmed,” said Harris.

Congress scored its first big accomplishment weeks after Obama’s inauguration with passage in late February 2009 of a $814 billion stimulus bill. It has created or saved 3.3 million jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while also steering more funds to road construction, broadband technologies and renewable energy ventures.

New Customers

The health-care legislation approved last March provided insurers including WellPoint Inc. of Indianapolis and drug- makers such as Pfizer Inc. of New York millions of new customers by requiring that all Americans have health insurance. These industries, as well as medical device-makers, will also face billions of dollars in new fees, and hospitals face a host of new standards designed to help curb soaring costs.

The health-care law is facing legal challenges, with the insurance provision a key dispute.

An overhaul of the rules governing the financial services industry, approved in July, aims to prevent a repeat of an economic collapse that led to the failures of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Washington Mutual Inc. It included $4 billion in aid to help thousands of unemployed property owners avoid foreclosure, while the program has fallen short of its goals.

Congress also passed laws to help ensure pay equity by enabling women to pursue lawsuits claiming they were underpaid, and to empower the federal Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry, which includes restrictions on cigarette marketing.

New Justices

Additionally, lawmakers expanded state programs for health insurance for children, and they confirmed two Supreme Court justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor became the first Latino to serve on the court, and the pair increased to three the number of women among the nine justices.

Following the November elections in which voters handed Democrats what Obama termed a “shellacking,” Congress in a lame-duck session made significant additions to its accomplishment list. Lawmakers approved an $858 billion measure that continues for two years Bush-era tax cuts for all income levels, extends aid for 13 months to the long-term unemployed, provides estate tax relief and cuts by two percentage points worker payroll taxes during 2011.

Congress in its last days also voted to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on military service by openly gay men and women. Yesterday it cleared the biggest food-safety overhaul in more than 70 years, giving the FDA more enforcement power. And the Senate ratification today, 71-26, of the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty gives Obama a key foreign-policy victory.

‘Broad Basis’

“What we’ve been able to do in the lame duck has been not just bipartisan by a fingernail, but bipartisan on a broad basis,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat.

From a market perspective, Congress’s biggest accomplishment was probably the tax cuts, with the estate tax breaks the “whipped cream, fudge and cherry on top,” said Ethan Siegal, president of the Washington Exchange.

Investors responded to the health-care and financial- services measures largely negatively, with health care viewed as “big government gone nuts,” he said.

Democrats say it will take years before the public recognizes their achievements. Many of the measures that passed were designed to forestall a bleaker recession, an argument that’s little comfort to many Americans as the nation’s unemployment rate has remained at 9.5 percent or higher for more than a year.

“It was hard to tell people that we accomplished anything important when their lives are so difficult,” said Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat and outgoing chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee.

Changing Direction

The Tea Party movement, which worked to elect lawmakers advocating a new era of fiscal authority, has already begun to shift the direction of Congress.

Shortly after the election, Senate and House Republicans announced a voluntary ban on earmarks, the funding for pet projects added to bills by lawmakers. The incoming House Republican leadership has promised to turn the focus of the Appropriations Committee from funding government to identifying spending cuts.

Many of those efforts will likely fail in the Democrat- controlled Senate. And the party split between the two chambers is likely to bring the record of congressional productivity to an abrupt end in January.

“There’s just nothing that’s going to be accomplished,” said Brinkley. “What really is disturbing is that this is a period in which there is a lot to be done.” (source)

Dems Go Where Republicans Fear To Tread: Net Neutrality

Consumers for the first time got federally approved rules guaranteeing their right to view what they want on the Internet. The new framework could also result in tiered charges for web access and alter how companies profit from the network.

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday voted 3-2 to back Chairman Julius Genachowski's plan for what is commonly known as "net neutrality," or rules prohibiting Internet providers from interfering with legal web traffic. President Barack Obama said the FCC's action will "help preserve the free and open nature of the Internet."

The move was prompted by worries that large phone and cable firms were getting too powerful as Internet gatekeepers.

Most consumers haven't had a problem viewing whatever they want online; few instances have arisen of an Internet provider blocking or slowing services.

Rather, the FCC rules are designed to prevent potential future harms and they could shape how Americans access and use the Internet years from now. In the future, the Internet industry will be increasingly centered around the fastest-growing categories of Internet traffic—online video, gaming and mobile services, analysts say. Cisco Systems Inc., the broadband network provider, has forecast those services could quadruple by 2014.

Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Inc. and a staunch proponent of keeping the Internet unregulated, after an FCC hearing on Tuesday.

Comcast Corp. and other Internet providers have experimented with ways to handle the growing problem of network congestion. Recently, Mr. Genachowski suggested that instead of selectively slowing certain traffic to cope with congestion, providers could consider charging consumers for how much data they consume. That would be a departure from the flat monthly fees consumers pay now for Web access. It's something providers privately say is one of the only ways to make a profit and fund network infrastructure.

Such a system could pose a challenge to companies like Netflix Inc., which streams movies over broadband networks to televisions and computers. Netflix Tuesday said the FCC decision did not go far enough toward protecting content providers.


The new rules will also allow phone and cable companies to sell to Internet companies like Amazon.com Inc. faster data delivery for extra money, particularly on wireless networks. That would let a company that offers streaming video, like Google Inc.'s YouTube, pay a wireless company like Verizon Communications Inc. a bonus for guaranteed delivery of its videos to consumers' smart phones.

But FCC officials said any such priority service must be disclosed, and they said they would likely probe and reject such efforts. That could prompt some of the many expected legal challenges to the new rules, since it is not clear if the FCC has authority to enforce them.

Consumer groups and other organizations, including the American Library Association, oppose such high-speed toll lanes, arguing all Americans should have the same quality of Internet access.

The FCC's decision is a mixed bag for consumers. The new rules—which haven't been released in full—say that land-line broadband providers can't block legal content from websites, or "unreasonably discriminate" against companies like Skype or Netflix that want to use broadband networks to provide video or voice services. They also require providers to give consumers more information about their Internet service, like actual download speeds or usage limits.


But the rules come with some wiggle room for the industry. Service providers will be allowed to engage in "reasonable network management" to cope with congestion on their systems.

Wireless companies are less restricted by the new rules—a win for the industry because consumers are increasingly accessing the web using hand-held devices such as iPhones or Blackberries. Mr. Genachowski said mobile carriers faced more congestion issues than other companies and need more leeway to manage their networks.

Wireless companies would be prohibited from blocking Internet voice services but they could block access to many other applications, citing congestion issues.

Reaction the FCC's rules was mixed. AT&T Inc. said the rules were "not ideal" but would bring some "market certainty so that investment and job creation can go forward." Verizon said it was "deeply concerned" because it didn't think the rules were needed. A coalition of Internet companies including Google said the rules were a good first step but stronger regulations on wireless networks were needed to ensure the same rules apply to both wired and wireless Internet.


Some venture capital firms that invest in innovative applications and wireless technology expressed concern about how the rules will impact the wireless business. "The problem is that there's so much ambiguity in the rules," said Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures, which has invested in startups including Foursquare and Twitter Inc. (source)

Barry As President: Turning The Military Into A Social Experiment (Obama signs 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' Repeal)

President Barack Obama signed a landmark law Wednesday repealing the ban on gay men and women serving openly in the military, fulfilling one of his major campaign pledges and casting the issue as a matter of civil rights long denied.

"No longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie, or look over their shoulder in order to serve the country that they love," Obama said.

[ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ]


A beaming Obama signed the bill at the Interior Department, a location chosen to accommodate a larger than normal audience that cheered, chanted and applauded throughout the ceremony.

"This is a good day," Obama told the crowd. "This is a very good day."

The new law ends the 17-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy that forced gays to hide their sexual orientation or face dismissal. More than 13,500 people were discharged under the policy. Its repeal comes as the American public has become more tolerant on such issues as gay marriage and gay rights in general.

"I say to all Americans, gay or straight, who want nothing more than to defend this country in uniform, your country needs you, your country wants you, and we will be honored to welcome you into the ranks of the finest military the world has ever known," Obama said.

Pentagon officials must first complete implementation plans before lifting the old policy — and the president, defense secretary and chairman of the joint chiefs must certify to lawmakers that it won't damage combat readiness, as critics charge. But Obama said: "We are not going to be dragging our feet to get this done."

The signing ceremony was a breakthrough moment for the nation's gay community, the military and for Obama himself. The president vowed during his 2008 campaign to repeal the law and faced pressure from liberals who complained he was not acting swiftly enough.

For Obama, it was the second high-profile bill signing ceremony within a week. On Friday, he signed into a law a tax package he negotiated with Republicans that extended Bush-era tax rates for two more years, cut payroll taxes and ensured jobless benefits to the unemployed for another year.

The two events, however, could not have been more different in tone.

The tax deal divided Democrats and forced Obama to accept extensions of tax cuts for the wealthiest, a step he had promised to not take. With Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell at his side during that bill signing, Obama seemed dutiful and subdued.

By contrast, the emotion of Wednesday's ceremony defined it; even the president himself said he was "overwhelmed" by the moment. The gay activists and supporters packed in the room hooted, applauded and shouted in joy at the president, shedding any sense of a contained, formal event.

As Obama signed the bill into law, someone in the back of the room yelled: "We're here, Mr. President. Enlist us now!"

"I couldn't be prouder," Obama said.

Obama hailed the "courage and vision" of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and praised Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, who advocated changing the law.

Among those in attendance at the ceremony was the son of a World War II veteran who was saved by a gay comrade during the Battle of the Bulge. Also present was Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Alva, the first American wounded in the war in Iraq who has spoken out against the Pentagon policy.

The Pentagon now must address the practical consequences of the law. Guidelines must be completed that cover a host of questions, from how to educate troops to how sexual orientation should be handled in making barracks assignments.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama thinks actual implementation of the new law will be "a matter of months."

Military officials and gay rights groups have been warning gay troops not to come out yet, as the law will not go into effect until certification — and after that, a 60-day waiting period.

The new law is the second of three expected victories in what's turned out to be a surprisingly productive lame-duck Congress for Obama . Weeks after his self-described "shellacking" in the midterm vote, he's won lopsided approval of a tax cut compromise, and the Senate is poised to deliver his top foreign policy goal: ratification of a new nuclear arms treaty with Russia.

Born 17 years ago as a compromise between President Bill Clinton and a resistant Pentagon, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy became for gay rights campaigners a notorious roadblock on the way to full acceptance.

Yet he has also faced rising discontent among gay activists who believed he hadn't moved forcefully enough. He's been heckled at campaign appearances over AIDS funding and the failure to end the military service ban.

Obama countered that as commander in chief, he had to ensure the ban's end is carefully prepared for.

That's just what the bill from Congress mandates.

"The implementation and certification process will not happen immediately; it will take time," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz warned in an e-mail that went out right after Saturday's Senate vote. "Meanwhile, the current law remains in effect. All Air Force members should conduct themselves accordingly."

Military and administration officials are wrestling with numerous legal questions raised by the end of the ban — knowing that courts are waiting in the wings. They include what to do about pending expulsion proceedings, and when those ousted under the old policy might apply to rejoin the armed forces. (source)

Sarah Palin And The Haters Of American Normal

We are just south of Christmas, and the nation's insiders -- self-proclaimed blue-bloods by birth and/or worldview -- have declared open season on Sarah Palin. Crazed left and sclerotic right have united in common purpose -- "hellbent," as Politico put it -- to rid this nation of the possibility of a presidency that would most assuredly end in "apocalyptic disaster" after which "the survivors will envy the dead" (or so says that fading leftist icon, The New Republic). Stop her now -- or we may end up with a normal American at the helm.


Sarah Palin is just too dumb to understand how lousy it is to be in this materialist and fascist society, this hateful America, the Atlantic tells us. Scorn laces the left as New York Times opinion writers let us know that behind the deceptive Palin smile "lies anger" and an unwillingness to accept the decline that those who know better have visited upon us out of wisdom and necessity. Shut up and bowl (or hunt or fish or tailgate, or any one of the thousands of pursuits those with little culture and no brains participate in), they say, and leave the decisions to us.


Meanwhile on the right, MSNBC's house conservative, Joe Scarborough, says it's time for Republican insiders to "man up and confront Sarah Palin." She's poison for responsible (read: insider) government. Bush consigliere and FOXNews analyst Karl Rove is leading the charge to stop this outsider, whom he regards as "unsuitable" for the presidency, which is a job best left to those who brought us porous borders, intrusive regulation, and exploding government spending. (In some respects, the Obama reign is simply the Bush presidency on steroids.) From left and right, insiders all, the anger is palpable at what James Lewis of American Thinker terms "American exceptionalism in the flesh -- and downright attractive flesh at that."


Why do they hate her? Lewis hits the nail on the head. Sarah Palin is quintessentially American. She is a throwback to the days of the founders, when citizens became politicians because the common good demanded service -- not because political office offered wealth, power, and a pool of Beltway interns ripe for sexual exploitation -- and followed their tenure with a return to private life. But we now live in the age of professional politicians, the self-proclaimed best and brightest who make decisions for an electorate too simple to understand "the facts or the truth." Or so says Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts politician who is to "haughty" what Paris Hilton is to "self-involved."


And so anger and angst bubble over, spilling out as the grandees realize Sarah Palin is just so darned...normal! Lewis describes her as a "beautiful, strong, intelligent, articulate, healthy-looking, truth-telling...gun-totin', sports-lovin', all-American woman." And that "sunny disposition" sets them off, for Sarah Palin is a fiery red poker plunged into the pasty white of the collective metrosexual gut. Elizabeth Wurtzel, the best-selling author who blogs for the Atlantic, howls with pain at the realization that Palin is actually "the most visible working mother and female politician in America, that she is the best exemplar of a woman with an equal marriage, that she has put up with less crap from fewer men than those of us who" are the official feminists within the media and political elites.


That's not fair, Wurtzel screams, admitting that the truth "drives me absolutely bonkers." This mainstay of the New York literati oozes the anger and jealousy so typical of what New York Times columnist David Brooks proudly calls the "educated class." And so they scream and whine and put out milk and cookies in hopes that God and the Santa they've chased from the public space would please, please, please...stop Sarah Palin!


What gives her the right to be happy, asks Wurtzel? Palin, who is "not very thoughtful, not very bright," is so darned ordinary that she doesn't understand the horrors of American life. But Wurtzel does, having first attracted attention with her New York Times bestseller chronicling the depravities visited upon her by the fruits of American exceptionalism. You see, Wurtzel survived the horror of being raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the shame of enduring the nation's best private schools, the depravity of having parents who paid for summer camps and Harvard -- small wonder she plunged into "catatonic despair, masochism, and hysterical crying." Doesn't Palin know, Wurtzel cries, that...America sucks? Karl Rove knows, Keith Olbermann and Kathleen Parker and Elliot Spitzer and Barack Obama know -- that's why they're smart.


But Sarah Palin is not Elizabeth Wurtzel smart. Nor is she Karl Rove savvy, Keith Olbermann articulate, or Barack Obama cool. No, Sarah Palin is just plain normal. And not just any normal -- she is American normal, the kind of normal that wrenched a nation away from a calcified European aristocracy and established what Abraham Lincoln described as "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." It is no coincidence that the United States is the single nation that, for the entirety of its existence, has had immigrants fighting to be included in a community structured upon individual "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," as our Declaration of Independence puts it. And now that normal is being challenged by those who want to control every aspect of American life.


Enter Sarah Palin and American normal. Their reaction, James Lewis notes, is "Oh, Gawwwdd! Is this 'Father Knows Best' or what?" And the only answer is...yes, and "Leave It to Beaver" and "Happy Days," too. It's a basic respect for American values and Judeo-Christian tradition and the belief that each one of us matters. And now throw in a bit of "South Park" and you have a cutting-edge conservative savvy that recognizes that this country, as rude and crude and flawed as it gets, should be admired and preserved.


Sarah Palin for president? The screams of the elites are in a crescendo, and it's not even 2011. The roar is deafening: She's not a Karl Rove or Nancy Pelosi, they cry, a John McCain or a Barack Obama, a Hillary Clinton or a Lindsey Graham. She's not Washington or New York or Manhattan or San Francisco. She's Sarah Palin, and she's Alaska, for Obama's sake!


And your point is...?


Stuart Schwartz, formerly a media and retail executive, is on the faculty of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. (source)