Carolina Politics Online

The Senate as you are well aware by now passed a sweetened version of the bailout Tuesday evening.  The House voted again today and complied, as I suspected they would.  So the dirty deed is now done.  Bear in mind that this bill was rife with waist added by the Senate on Tuesday night that had nothing to do with the economical turmoil.

• $2 million tax benefit for makers of wooden arrows for children
• $100 million tax break to benefit auto racetrack owners
• $192 million in rebates on excise taxes for the Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum industry
• $148 million in tax relief for U.S. wool fabric producers
• $49 million tax benefit for fishermen and other plaintiffs who sued over the 1989 tanker Exxon Valdez spill.

People, are you not outraged?  If so, ask yourself why you might be going to the voting booth in November to return the same people to office who just voted for one of the largest Federal power grabs in American history and threw almost a trillion dollars of money we don’t have down the toilet.  Are those of you in South Carolina prepared to give Lindsey Graham another six years?  Think twice.  He’s one of the culprits.  Richard Burr also voted for it on behalf of North Carolina.  Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) opposed the measure.  Additionally, both Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama voted for the bailout as did VP candidate Joe Biden.

I can’t get the vote information from the House yet.  The Web site must be getting swamped with traffic because it’s timing out on me, but I’ll post it as soon as I have it available.

Update: I now have the House roll. Sue Myrick and Gresham Barrett flipped on this, voting for the bailout today, whereas they voted against it before.

Voting for the bill:

• Bob Etheridge (D-NC-02)
• David Price (D-NC-04)
• Howard Coble (R-NC-06)
• Sue Myrick (R-NC-09)
• Mel Watt (D-NC-12)
• Brad Miller (D-NC-13)
• Henry Brown (R-SC-01)
• Joe Wilson (R-SC-02)
• Gresham Barrett (R-SC-03)
• Bob Inglis (R-SC-04)
• John Spratt (D-SC-05)
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC-06)

Voting against the bill:

• G.K. Butterfield (D-NC-01)
• Walter Jones (R-NC-03)
• Virginia Foxx (R-NC-05)
• Mike McIntyre (D-NC-07)
• Robin Hayes (R-NC-08)
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC-10)
• Heath Shuler (D-NC-11)

As I’m sure you have heard by now, the $700 billion bailout failed to pass the House of Representatives today by a mere 13 votes.  I was opposed to this bailout, so I am rather pleased, for now.  They’ll try something again.  I just have a huge issue with this theory that corporations can privatize all of their gains but socialize their losses.  That just doesn’t seem quite right to me.

This video pretty much sums up my thoughts.

So how did your representative vote?  Did they vote to use your tax dollars to bail out Wall Street fat cats or did they vote to save your tax dollars?

Voting for the bailout were:

• Bob Etheridge (D-NC-02)
• David Price (D-NC-04)
• Mel Watt (D-NC-12)
• Brad Miller (D-NC-13)
• Henry Brown (R-SC-01)
• Joe Wilson (R-SC-02)
• Bob Inglis (R-SC-04)
• John Spratt (D-SC-05)
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC-06)

Voting against the heinous bailout were:

• G.K. Butterfield (D-NC-01)
• Walter Jones (R-NC-03)
• Virginia Foxx (R-NC-05)
• Howard Coble (R-NC-06)
• Mike McIntyre (D-NC-07)
• Robin Hayes (R-NC-08)
• Sue Myrick (R-NC-09)
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC-10)
• Heath Shuler (D-NC-11)
• Gresham Barrett (R-SC-03)

Boy, the South Carolina delegation sure sucks a nut.  David Price is no surprise.  He loves using your money to give special favors to all of his corporate friends.  Same with Henry Brown.  I expected Watt to be on the yea list as well because he is a Socialist.  Overall it looks to be just about split down the middle.  Now you know who is on your side and who is pining for the Rockefellers.

The U.S. Senate today overwhelmingly sent President Bush a spending bill of $634 billion to keep the government “operating beyond the current budget year.”  If only that were the case.  This budget passage, as every other, consisted of a hogfest of a Congressional pen of pigs in starched white shirts feeding from the trough that you and I provided.  This thing is stuffed with thousands of earmarks in addition to $25 billion of taxpayer funded loans to help bailout the automakers.  The bill was presented in its final form from the House to the Senate as H.R. 2638, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2008, sponsored by none other than our very own Representative David Price (D-NC-04).

How did our representatives vote?  As usual, in the Senate Jim DeMint stood up and vocally opposed the legislation.  Lindsey Graham joined him in voting against it.  Richard Burr made a rare and unusual move, voting Present, Giving Live Pair.  What this means is that somebody else who not present at the vote and knew they wouldn’t be who planned on voting the opposite way Burr was made a deal with him to vote present so that the outcome wouldn’t be altered by their absence.  In other words, for the sake of argument, let’s say Burr was hypothetically going to vote No, but John McCain was absent and was planning to vote Yes which would cancel out Burr’s vote anyway.  McCain would ask Burr to vote Present then so that the same result is produced.  As I said, this is just a hypothetical.  Burr may have intended to vote Yes and made a deal with an absent Senator who wanted to vote against it.  And we can’t forget Liddy Dole who as usual voted for her pork.

In the House we had the following voting for the waste:

• G.K. Butterfield (D-NC-01)
• Bob Etheridge (D-NC-01)
• David Price (D-NC-04)
• Howard Coble (R-NC-06)
• Mike McIntyre (D-NC-07)
• Robin Hayes (R-NC-08)
• Sue Myrick (R-NC-09)
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC-10)
• Mel Watt (D-NC-12)
• Brad Miller (D-NC-13)
• Henry Brown (R-SC-01)
• Joe Wilson (R-SC-02)
• John Spratt (D-SC-05)
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC-06)

Voting against the waste were:

• Walter Jones (R-NC-03)
• Virginia Foxx (R-NC-05)
• Gresham Barrett (R-SC-03)
• Bob Inglis (R-SC-04)

Heath Shuler did not vote.

Rush Limbaugh in the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Obama’s campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.

People were outraged and the local media in some cases did not air the NCGOP ad that tied Moore and Perdue to Obama and called them too extreme for North Carolina. Yet the ad that is being broadcast in Spanish to communities in four states is being allowed to be aired unimpeded. Barack Obama and his surrogates are constantly playing the race card, and in this case using bigoted and racists attacks and tactics.

Every candidate that has ties or has openly endorsed the Obama campaign bears responsibility in this. Perdue, Hagan, Blue, and Butterfield are four that I can name off of the top of my head.

There is no place for this in modern campaigns and Barack Obama should withdraw the ads and apologize to the American people. 

The House passed H.R. 6899 last night, otherwise known as the Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act.  As I touched on yesterday, this is the House version of Lindsey Graham’s “Gang of 10″ bill that will do absolutely nothing to open up oil reserves off of our shores and lower gas prices.  This bill is nothing more than political cover so that politicians can go into the November election lying to their constituents that they voted for offshore drilling, when they didn’t.  Most of the coastal oil reserves will remain untapped under this bill and will have no effect.  Furthermore, the states will get no royalties from the drilling, so which state is going to okay this and take the slight risk of an oil spill without any revenue from it?  None of them will and Nancy Pelosi knows that.  Let’s not forget the tax increase the oil companies will receive as well which will get passed on to you and me when we’re buying our gas.

So who in the Carolinas voted for this hoax?  Who will lie to you between now and Election Day and claim they voted to lower your prices at the pump?  A lot of them.

Voting aye were:

• G.K. Butterfield (D-NC-01)
• Bob Etheridge (D-NC-02)
• Walter Jones (R-NC-03)
• David Price (D-NC-04)
• Mike McIntyre (D-NC-07)
• Robin Hayes (R-NC-08)
• Heath Shuler (D-NC-11)
• Mel Watt (D-NC-12)
• Brad Miller (D-NC-13)
• Bob Inglis (R-SC-04)
• John Spratt (D-SC-05)
• Jim Clyburn (D-SC-06)

Democracy Corps is James Carville’s organization. This poll was taken from August 20th through August 26th.

Now you should bear in mind that the samples were very small, less than 100 people in each Congressional district, so there is going to be a larger margin of error than in most polls. However, most of these percentages seem fairly accurate to me. The only two I question is NC-05 and NC-08. I don’t think that Virginia Foxx is in a statistical tie with Roy Carter, though I don’t doubt he isn’t close to her. I also think the gap between Robin Hayes and Larry Kissell is smaller than the eight point spread shown in this poll. Shuler is crushing Mumpower which I have been saying since the birth of this blog would be the case no matter which Republican Heath runs against. Plus, the fact that Mumpower’s race has been akin to a Barnum & Bailey juggling act only makes it more so. I don’t know why NC-12 and NC-13 were not included on this poll, but I think the conventional wisdom is that neither Mel Watt nor Brad Miller have much to worry about this year.

All and all, I don’t see any of the Congressional districts in North Carolina switching parties this year. I think all of the incumbents are going to be retained. If Kissell loses, I’m afraid my friends at BlueNC will become suicidal.

Update: I mistakenly had the Fifth District Democratic candidate listed as Roy Cooper instead of Roy Carter. That has been corrected.

Voting 268 for and 155 against, the House on Thursday approved an amendment to HR 2642 that would appropriate $162.5 billion to pay for Iraq-Afghanistan war costs well into 2009.

Why did these Democrats vote against funding the troops? Their earlier attempts at passing a law to force a removal of troops from those two countries failed. I guess we know who supports the military and who doesn’t in North Carolina.

Congressman G. K. Butterfield (D-NC-01) has sponsored House Bill 6068 affectionately known as the “Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008″ intended to use Federal dollars to combat the resurgence of bedbugs in hotels throughout the United States. According to the text of the legislation:

Congress finds that–

• (1) on February 12, 2008, a thorough inspection of a hotel in Nashua, New Hampshire, found that 16 of 117 rooms were infested with bedbugs;

• (2) cimex lectularius, commonly known as bed bugs, travel through the ventilation systems in multi-unit establishments causing exponential infestations;

• (3) female bedbugs can lay up to 5 eggs in a day and 500 during a lifetime;

• (4) bedbug populations in the United States have increased by 500 percent in the past few years;

• (5) in 2004, New York City had 377 bedbug violations and from July to November of 2005, a 5-month span, there were 449 violations reported in the city, an alarming increase in infestations over a short period of time;

• (6) in a study of 700 hotel rooms between 2002 and 2006, 25 percent of hotels were found to be in need of bedbug treatment; and

• (7) bed bugs possess all of the necessary prerequisites for being capable of passing diseases from one host to another.

I bet you’ll sleep well the next night you spend in a hotel.