Boehner is apparently on an incentive scheme from Canadian Oil sands companies -- 'cause he doesn't give a dam about Americans or their Health

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner will make a new attempt to force approval of the stalled Keystone XL oil pipeline as part of legislation for another 90-day extension of federal road, bridge and transit construction funding, Republican aides said on Friday.

By seeking a second short-term funding extension, the plan aims to put the Canada-to-Texas pipeline and expanded drilling rights back at the top of the House agenda without the struggles that the House has endured in trying to pass a longer-term, more expensive transport bill.

people and corporations do respond to embarrassment. more to follow!!!

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) describes itself as a nonpartisan champion of free markets. But if you spend some time at an ALEC conference you will be hard-pressed to find many Democrats. 

And the council doesn’t really support free markets, either. It supports the companies that fund it. This is an important distinction, because the corporations that donate to ALEC aren’t doing so to protect markets. 

They’re protecting favored tax treatments and pushing regulations that lock in their market positions. As best as we were able to determine in reporting our piece last year, corporations propose bills at the state level and then push them up to ALEC, which has both corporate and legislative members. ALEC pushes the legislative members to the foreground, stamps the bills as “model legislation,” and then the corporations push them back out to other state legislatures. 

So ALEC is not what it says it is. If the American Legislative Exchange Council operated with complete openness, it couldn’t operate at all. ALEC has attracted a wide and wealthy range of supporters precisely because it does its real work in a black box. Membership lists are secret. The origins of the model bills are secret. Deliberations and votes on model bills are secret. The model bills themselves are secret. The council has designed its entire structure to disguise industry-backed legislation as grassroots work from state legislators. If this becomes clear to everyone, there’s no reason for corporations to use it. And that is exactly what has been happening.

Since last year, the National Urban League, Common Cause, and ColorOfChange have been pressuring companies to drop their membership in ALEC. The council’s library of model bills includes legislation that tightens voter identification requirements, making it harder for students, the elderly, and the poor to vote. Since the death of Trayvon Martin last month, minority advocacy groups have made another complaint against ALEC: In 2005, the council turned Florida’s Castle Doctrine bill into model legislation (PDF). The doctrine allows the use of deadly force in a public place if someone “believes it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm,” and removes the duty to flee a confrontation.

This week, ColorOfChange announced that Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and the personal financial software maker Intuit, among several other brand-name companies, have declined to renew their memberships with ALEC. McDonald’s confirmed for Bloomberg Businessweek that it left ALEC in March, and elaborated only that it was a “business decision.” Intuit confirmed as well, but explained that the decision had come out of its normal budgeting process in 2011. Coca-Cola has yet to respond to a request for comment.

In July 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive activist group, published ALEC’s full catalog of legislation. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s were then no longer just members of a nonpartisan organization that championed free markets; they ran the reputational risk of endorsing everything that ALEC does.

It’s hard to come up with a reason the council keeps its model legislation secret other than to avoid embarrassing incongruities for its corporate members. If the council’s model bills promote free markets, why not proudly display them? If private and public members working together produce better solutions, why not open up their deliberations to the public, or at least reveal their names? The simplest answer is the most likely: Some of what ALEC does looks bad for its members. McDonald’s, in its response to an e-mail about ALEC, wasn’t obfuscating. Dumping the council was, in fact, a “business decision.”

But people and corporations do respond to embarrassment. Embarrassment is impossible without disclosure. ALEC should be free to advocate for whatever it likes, and people should be free to support the candidate who pleases them. In ALEC’s case, it’s been interesting to watch embarrassment do its work once disclosure showed up. It might be a rule for campaign and super PAC contributions as well: You can do whatever you like, as long as you are honest about it through transparent disclosure.

What could Mitt not want us to see?

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today requested a six-month extension to file his 2011 federal income taxes, said Andrea Saul, his campaign spokeswoman. Saul said he would file his taxes and release the return before the Nov. 6 general election.

Financial Crisis Relief programs to break even & saved the Automakers!!!

U.S. government programs designed to stem the financial crisis starting in 2008 will break even in the long term.

Republicans in Congress have criticized the bailouts, which started under Bush in 2008 and continued under President Barack Obama starting in 2009. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney supported aid for banks while opposing help for automakers.

51% of the world is female; ok guys do the math ... you have less than a 50/50 shot at having a son!!!

Gender selection

Reshma Bano wails as she holds the body of her 3-month-old daughter Neha Afreen outside a hospital morgue in Bangalore, India, April 11. Afreen was admitted to the hospital on April 8 after being battered by her father for being born a girl. Police said the father confessed to the crime and was in custody, according to media reports.

Mitt Romney the doomsday presidential scenario

Mitt Romney has a different, and frighteningly familiar, view.

He thinks you grow our economy from the top down.

He'd take us back to an economy based on outsourcing, risky financial schemes, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy. He'd return to the policy of allowing Wall Street, Big Oil, and other special interests to write their own rules.

But that's not all. Below are five other things that should give Americans pause.

Forward this email -- and if you're ready for this fight, become the newest member of the Truth Team today and help get the facts out from now till Election Day.

1. Romney's positions are the most radically anti-women of any candidate in a generation: He supports banning all abortions, backed a so-called "personhood" amendment that could make certain forms of birth control illegal, and says he would "get rid of" federal funding for Planned Parenthood that provides preventive services like cancer screenings for millions of women.

2. Romney would repeal Obamacare. Insurance companies would once again be allowed to run up premiums, unjustifiably deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, drop patients when they get sick, discriminate against women by charging them more for coverage than men, and spend more of your premium dollars on CEO profits and bonuses instead of your actual health care.

3. Romney is a risk when it comes to foreign policy and national security. On many of these questions, he has shifted his position for political reasons, even within the same campaign. His only clear commitment is to endless wars: He has no plan to end the war in Afghanistan and would leave our troops there indefinitely. He called the President's decision to bring our troops home from Iraq by last Christmas "tragic."

4. Despite the lessons of recent history, Romney would double down on the disastrous tax policies that handed windfalls to the wealthy, but stacked the deck against the middle class. Under Romney, millionaires and billionaires would get a $250,000 tax cut, while families with kids making less than $40,000 a year would, on average, actually see their taxes go up. To the surprise of no one, Romney also opposes the Buffett Rule. He would allow millionaires to continue to take advantage of loopholes and special deals that often allow them to pay a lower tax rate than the middle class. And he supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

5. Romney would end Medicare as we know it -- replacing it with a voucher scheme that would drive profits for insurance companies by forcing seniors to purchase private insurance, paying whatever costs a voucher wouldn't cover out of their own limited budgets.

Romney and his special-interest allies are going to spend the next seven months trying to deny, downplay, or hide these facts from voters. It's on us to speak the truth.

South China Sea contains oil reserves that may total as much as 213 billion barrels

A Philippine warship is in a standoff in the South China Sea with Chinese vessels after they blocked the arrest of Chinese fishermen in the disputed waters.

Philippine personnel attempting to arrest fishermen aboard eight boats on the Scarborough Shoal were blocked by two Chinese surveillance ships, the foreign affairs department in Manila said in an e-mailed statement today. The Philippines summoned the Chinese envoy in Manila to seek a “diplomatic solution,” it said.

The latest tension follows a push by the Philippines for Southeast Asian nations to take a common position regarding territorial disputes in the South China Sea. China used patrol boats last year to disrupt hydrocarbon survey activities in waters it claims, chasing away a ship working for Forum Energy Plc (FEP) off the Philippines and slicing cables of a survey vessel doing work for Vietnam.

The Chinese fishermen were first spotted in the area on April 8, according to the Philippine statement, which referred to the waters as “an integral part of Philippine territory.” Philippine Foreign Affairs SecretaryAlbert del Rosario asked China’s ambassador in Manila, Ma Keqing, to discuss the issue this morning, the statement said.

The South China Sea contains oil reserves that may total as much as 213 billion barrels, according to Chinese studies cited in 2008 by the U.S. Energy Information Agency. The Philippines said in January it’s ready to host a summit to help resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

The Scarborough Shoal is within the Philippines’ 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, today’s statement said.

There are about 48 million cases of food poisoning in the U.S. each year

Eating a spicy tuna roll shouldn’t make you sick. Nor should eating cantaloupe, cold cuts, peanut butter or onions, all of which were linked to food poisoning that sickened and killed people in the U.S. within the past five years.

Reports last week of a salmonella outbreak, possibly related to sushi, serve as a timely reminder of why the Obama administration must expedite a plan to modernize the country’s food-safety regulations, which haven’t been updated since the Great Depression.

So far, more than 100 people in 19 states have been stricken, all by an unusual strain of the bacteria known as salmonella Barielly. No deaths have been reported. Many of those who fell ill told health officials they had eaten sushi in recent days, though tracing the source of food poisoning is often difficult.

There’s a chance that if sushi were the culprit, the Food Safety and Modernization Act would have prevented it. Passed two years ago with wide bipartisan support, the law is designed to stop food contamination at the source, not simply react to incidences of food-borne illness. The deadline for issuing the rules to implement the law was Jan. 4, pending a review of the regulations by the Office of Management and Budget.

There are about 48 million cases of food poisoning in the U.S. each year and as many as 3,000 deaths. Although the incidence of food poisoning hasn’t increased much, the virulence of individual episodes is on the rise, particularly from fresh produce, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Last year, cantaloupe tainted by Listeria was responsible for 30 deaths, the most lethal case of food poisoning in U.S. history.

Because the country’s food supply is increasingly concentrated among a handful of large producers and distributors, the potential for mass poisonings is growing. Some of the 50,000 food-processing plants in the U.S. go as long as a decade without being inspected.

Food-borne illness costs the U.S. as much as $77 billion a year in medical treatment, lost productivity and reduced sales of products implicated in contamination episodes, according to an analysis by a former FDA economist. The expense of the tainted peanut butter recall and subsequent decline in demand alone cost the industry an estimated $1 billion.

The food industry would prefer that the costs of more vigilant regulation fall to the American taxpayer. But in light of the harm that food poisoning causes to victims, the economy and the industry itself, the Obama administration should press forward with building support for user fees. The food industry should relent and back them. After all, many manufacturers supported the legislation before anyone thought of asking them to pay for making it work.

Occupy Wall Street unifies around the evicted

Mercedes Robinson-Duvallon turned 83 in February, but there was little time for celebration.

On her birthday, as she sat in a wheelchair recovering from surgery, sheriffs' deputies arrived to evict her from the Miami home where she has lived since 1966. A year earlier her property had moved into foreclosure after she defaulted on a refinanced loan.

Robinson-Duvallon says she would be homeless now but for the intervention of about 40 members of Occupy Fort Lauderdale, a Florida branch of the national movement that is protesting income inequality and corporate greed. The group took over her lawn and house and even baked her a birthday cake.

The deputies decided to let her stay.

"I owe the Occupy people," said Robinson-Duvallon, who is now challenging the eviction in court. "This has all been so horrible, I can't tell you how many times I've cried and cried."

What happened in Miami is also occurring in Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, as local Occupy groups pursue an issue they believe has emotional resonance among America's struggling lower and middle classes.

Fighting foreclosures and evictions, activists say, gives the disparate movement a unifying focus and embodies its anti-Wall Street message. It also has offered a way for Occupy - up till now a largely white, middle-class movement - to broaden its reach to minorities.