Bad Deeds for 5-9-2011

 

Hostage Situation: John Boehner Threatens to Severely Harm America Unless We Go on an Unhealthy Extended Starvation Diet – In a speech speech Monday night to the New York Economic Club, House Speaker John Boehner said that any legislation to raise the so-called debt limit beyond its current $14.3 trillion cap should be accompanied by spending cuts larger than the amount of the permitted increase in the debt.

Boehner’s comments come as investors and business groups have been seeking assurances that the GOP-controlled House will join with President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Senate to enact the must-pass debt limit measure, which is needed to prevent a market-roiling, first-ever U.S. default on its obligations.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says a failure to increase the federal government’s ability to borrow would have disastrous effects on the economy.

Boehner’s remarks are notable since it’s virtually impossible to produce spending cuts of that size without addressing major benefit programs like Medicare, food stamps and Medicaid.

“Tax hikes should be off the table,” Boehner said to the wild applause of billionaires.

 

Texas Senate Passes Bad Budget Bill – A partisan majority of the Texas Senate took advantage of a seldom-used procedural device to pass the Senate’s budget plan today. The 19-member Republican majority, opposed by a solid bloc of all 12 Senate Democrats, first dumped a part of the bill that would have tapped the Rainy Day Fund for $3 billion to reduce budget cuts. Then the majority rammed through the budget and sent it on to the Texas House, which has already passed an even worse budget for 2012-2013. The two versions now must be reconciled.

The budget bill did not pass without first coming under fire from a number of senators who eloquently described the damage this budget proposal would do by “putting the next election ahead of the next generation,” as Sen. Eddie Lucio, Democrat of Brownsville, put it.

Texas AFT President Linda Bridges also had something to say about the proceedings in the Senate today. Here’s her statement:

“Today a majority of our Texas senators joined their House counterparts in helping make history–of the worst kind–while sowing the seeds for a bleaker future for our state. This is the first budget bill in more than 60 years that has not funded new enrollment for Texas public schools. That’s 80,000 to 90,000 more students each year streaming into underfunded schools and facing the damage done by the $5 billion plus in public education cuts in this budget.

“The Senate budget means our students will have fewer teachers, larger classes, and fewer support services for those most in need. And with this awful budget proposal as its starting point, the Senate majority moves the budget debate toward the even more extreme level of cuts in the horrendous House budget plan–all while leaving $6 billion dollars in the Rainy Day Fund. The consequences of this failure of leadership will be felt for decades unless lawmakers from both houses have the courage to do better.”

 

Republican Leaders Want Routine Bills To Have Social Issues Attached – Should every piece of legislation in the House and Senate be subject to a rider to pass restrictive conservative social agenda items like restricting abortion and blocking equal rights? Some members of the Republican Party say yes, and they want to start with the debt ceiling vote.

“What we use the debt limit to leverage is really up to the leaders, [but] I would think this would be one of the bills that we could be asking for,” said Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), an ardent anti-abortion supporter.

Although conservative organizations have not yet begun pushing for this as part of the debt limit debate, activists said they would support the effort and argued that Republicans should make it a matter of routine that deals include requirements that the Senate vote on social issues. “Republicans making such demands shouldn’t be out of the ordinary,” Family Research Council’s Tom McClusky said.

So there you go. The Republican party would like to hold legislation passing through congress hostage to pushing through their conservative social agenda. So much for wanting to grow the economy, or promises that bills shouldn’t have riders.

 

Monsanto’s Genetically-Modified Soybeans and Other Crops Pose a Dire Emergency to Agriculture – On January 17, 2011, Dr. Don Huber, an internationally-recognized plant pathologist and Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, sent a private letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warning him of a serious problem facing U.S. agriculture. This letter, marked “CONFIDENTIAL and URGENT”, warned Secretary Vilsack of a previously unknown pathogen, “new to science” that “should be treated as an emergency”. 1

Huber’s letter discussed the new pathogen in the most dire terms, saying that the findings of this team of top scientists had already discovered a link between the new pathogen and the steady rise of plant diseases in Roundup Ready corn and soybean crops and in association with high rates of infertility and spontaneous abortion rates of 45% of cattle and dairy herds consuming feed that had been treated with the number one selling weed killer Roundup.2

Huber warned Secretary Vilsack that the discovery of the new pathogen was “highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of U.S. soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies.”

Watch Dr. Huber explain the science and find out why he was so concerned about the approval of Genetically-Modified Organisim (GMO) alfalfa at the link above.

Regards,

Jim