With the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, it’s even less likely that the Stop Outsourcing Security Act will be passed and signed into law. However, the need is even greater than it was last year. Last year, there were 22,000 mercenaries hired by the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year, there are more than 28,000.

H.R. 1981 would require the linkage of all our online activities to our names and other personal information. This, in turn, would enable government intelligence agents to search through its massive databases of online activities, collected under the FISA Amendments Act, by citizen name, address or telephone number.

H.R. 1938, the North American-Made Energy Security Act, would enable a pipeline to snake down from Canada into the United States, threatening a huge range of America’s sensitive ecosystems along the way. The pipeline would run through the Ogllala Aquifer, endangering a huge supply of clean water. What’s more, the oil would come from Alberta’s tar sands, which yield commercially usable oil only through an extremely expensive and inefficient process that creates a massive amount of pollution.

Not one Republican voted in favor of Kathy Hochul’s spending cuts to bring accountability to the Bureau of Land Management. As much as the House Republicans talk about bringing spending under control, they chose to block action on Hochul’s spending reduction amendment.

As J. Clifford notes at Irregular Times, in April of 2011 President Barack Obama wrote a draft of an executive order (which you can read here) requiring all corporations contracting with the federal government to publicly disclose expenditures they make to political campaigns. You might be wondering what the big deal is about this draft [...]

“I am committed to working with my colleagues to restrain spending,” says U.S. Representative Michael Conaway, from the 11th congressional district of Texas. What kind of spending does Conaway want to restrain? Michael Conaway wants to restrain spending on Medicare, the program that provides medicine to America’s senior citizens. In fact, Conaway voted to eliminate [...]

Representative Barbara Lee and the Out of Poverty Caucus sent a letter to Barack Obama yesterday, warning him not to go ahead with his plan to cut Medicaid and Medicare.

The REALTORS Political Action Committee, the Real Estate Investment Trusts PAC, the International Council of Shopping Centers, the National Multi Housing Council Mortgage Bankers Association PAC, and the Associated General Contractors PAC will each be bringing $2,500 to hand to Senator Corker.

Representative Duncan is arguing that taxes for millionaires and billionaires must not be increased, and that Medicare services to Americans must be cut instead. When Duncan calls the federal government wasteful, he’s saying that Medicare is wasteful. Actually, Medicare operates much more efficiently than private medical insurance does.

Mike Crapo, Ron Wyden, James Risch, and Mark Begich have introduced S. 1369, the Silviculture Regulatory Consistency Act, intended to evade the protections that are so clearly necessary. The legislation would exempt logging operations from anti-pollution regulations, allowing loggers to continue to create problems downstream without any consequences.