Tag Archives: Congress

Videos: Candidate Forum, AAUW 2017-09-21

Valdosta State University gave the
American Association of University Women
Powell Hall for this candidate forum last Thursday, September 21, 2017.
Why they held it in a dark room with bad acoustics, I don’t know,
but at least you can see the candidates and other speakers.

Here are links to each LAKE video, followed by a LAKE video playlist.
Yes, you may use one of these videos or clips in your political ad,
provided you cite the source: Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE). See also the

announcement in the VDT.

Video.

Continue reading →

U.S. House rules privatize records of sitting Congress members

I don’t think those words mean what they think they mean.
“Official duty” and “personal property” generally are opposites,
but the U.S. House this month defined them to be the same.



Proposed by

Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy [R-CA-23],
and
passed 4:02 PM 3 January 2017
by

a straight party-line vote,
it’s

H.Res.5 – Adopting rules for the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress.

“(b) Records created, generated, or received by the
congressional office of a Member, Delegate, or the Resident
Commissioner in the performance of official duties are exclusively
the personal property of the individual Member, Delegate, or the
Resident Commissioner and such Member, Delegate, or Resident
Commissioner has control over such records.”.

Privatizing official records of Congress; what will they think of next?
This is Continue reading →

Yoho hikes Sabal Trail pipeline route

Calling on Austin Scott GA-08 and Sanford Bishop GA-02 and other members of Congerss
to also ask the Corps
for a Supplementary Environmental Impact Study (SEIS) about Sabal Trail discrepancies.
Same story appeared in the Suwannee Democrat yesterday.


Page 5A
Thomas Lynn, Valdosta Daily Times, 17 May 2016,
Yoho hikes Sabal Trail pipeline route,

LIVE OAK. Fin. — US. Rep. Ted Yoho hiked with around 30 opponents
to the Sabal Trail pipeline through Suwannee River State Park’s Big
Oak Trail in north Florida to look at sinkholes near the proposed
route.

The morning hike was a result of Continue reading →

Ask your Congress members to oppose TPP today

Here’s

a handy form by EFF
to oppose the secretly-negotiated privacy-deleting corporate-greed-defending
natural gas export pipeline-enabling Trans-Pacific Parternship treaty.

Parker Higgins and Maira Sutton
wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation
28 December 2013,

2013 in Review: The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,


Stop Secret Copyright Treaties

The biggest TPP story this year was the publication by WikiLeaks
in November of the chapter titled “Intellectual Property.” Unfortunately,
its contents confirmed many of our worst fears: from
ratcheting up copyright term lengths
around the world, to
boxing in fair use, to mandating a draconian legal regime around DRM software, section
after section contained clauses plucked from corporate wishlists and
snubbed the public interest altogether.

And then there’s

Ted Poe’s House Subcommittee pushing TPP for LNG exports that would propel
“natural” fracked gas pipelines
such as Spectra Energy’s Sabal Transmission gas pipe
through private property and

public rivers and watersheds and

aquifers.

Here’s what’s up next: Continue reading →

Videos of Candidates and Mayor Gayle about SPLOST @ LCDP 2013-09-09



In which we discover one candidate works for the City of Valdosta
and opposes SPLOST.
Candidates took questions directly from the
audience and answered them, unlike at later candidate forums.
Candidates from the smaller cities started their tradition of
not showing up for forums outside their cities.
Here’s the list of
qualified candidates.
See also the videos of the

30 Club forum 2013-10-21
and the videos of the

AAUW forum 2013-10-15.

Opening


Call to Order,

Moment of Silence for Congress,

Pledge,

Approval of Minutes,

Treasurer’s Report.



SPLOST VII

Many safety violations at Georgia nukes, and NRC is shut down



Georgia’s two nuclear sites got more than a safety violation a month
over a dozen years, and now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
is shut down.
Maybe we need power sources that don’t need so much safety inspection,
like solar and wind and efficiency and conservation.

AP wrote yesterday,

166 violations issued at Ga. nuclear power plants,

A congressional study expected to be released later this month shows
that two nuclear power plants in Georgia were issued 166 safety
violations between 2000 and 2012.



The unreleased Government Accountability Office report obtained by
the Associated Press shows that Plant Hatch in Baxley was issued 90
safety violations during the time period. According to the report,
three of the violations were higher-level offenses.

According to the report, Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro was also issued
75 safety violations between 2000 and 2012.

Allison Macfarlane wrote on the NRC blog 9 October 2013,

From the Chairman: An Update on the NRC Shutdown, Continue reading →

Bloomberg discovers mandated prison beds for CCA profit

The feds also fell for CCA’s prison snakeoil; it’s not just for states like Georgia.

William Selway & Margaret Newkirk wrote for Bloomberg 24 September 2013,

Congress Mandates Jail Beds for 34,000 Immigrants as Private Prisons Profit,



Noemi Romero, who came to the U.S. illegally at age 3, was arrested
in January working at a Phoenix grocery store, where she used
someone else’s name to get the job.

Romero, a 21-year-old who likes to draw and dance, spent the next
four months behind bars, almost half of it in a cramped cell at a
1,596-bed detention center in Eloy, Arizona, run by Corrections
Corp. of America. The company, with Geo Group Inc. (GEO) and other
for-profit prison operators, holds almost two-thirds of all
immigrants detained each day in federally funded prisons as they
face deportation, U.S. data show.

Under law, taxpayers must pay Continue reading →

Senate Farm Bill adds Rural Gigabit Amendment

The U.S. Senate just adopted an amendment to invest in gigabit
(1,000 megabit per second) rural broadband networks.


Our local leaders need to lobby for the House to pass this,
if they are serious about fast affordable Internet service for everyone here.
Senator Leahy’s tiny Vermont, with the population of a single Congressional district,

is already well along towards gigabit Internet.
Our three House members can help get south Georgia on the road to better
jobs, education, and health care through better Internet service.

Jennifer Reading wrote today for WCAX,
Leahy’s high-speed internet amendment passes,

What I want to make sure is that a rural area can compete the same
way an urban area can. It’s actually the argument, the debate that
went on before I was even born about whether you had rural
electricity, rural telephone or not and if we hadn’t done that much
of this country would be a wasteland,” said Sen. Leahy.

Don’t we want that, too?

Continue reading →

Free the Internet: stop SOPA and PIPA

If you don’t know what SOPA and PIPA are,

Google, Wikipedia, reddit, and many other websites will tell you today


that those are bills in Congress to censor the Internet.

If you like blogs, YouTube, facebook, and other social media,
you won’t like SOPA and PIPA if they become law, because they
will enable big copyright holders such as movie studios to
force websites to remove links to entire domains on suspicion
of copyright violation.

What you can do:
contact your members of Congress today.
You can do that through

one of the many online tools
Or

call, email, or send a paper letter directly.
Free the Internet!

-jsq

Redistricting meeting tonight, and videos so far

Remember

the redistricing meeting tonight,
5-7PM Tuesday 24 May 2011 in the Brooks Hall Conference Center of Wiregrass Georgia Technical College.



Videos of all the redistricting meetings are going up

on legis.ga.gov
shortly after they are taken.
The one from

Savannah
is up now.

Those are the videos taken by

the reapportionment committee itself.
Any videos LAKE takes will go on YouTube as usual.

-jsq

PS: Location of the videos so far owed to RJ Hadley.