So...how's "cap & trade" like the House just passed

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The bottom line is that the GOP estimates are way off, and they don't account for relief programs.

Once this is voted on and if it passes....we will all pay. Gas prices will go up. Obama himself said utility prices would skyrocket....not including all the prices of goods and services will go up. Will that not be a tax to everyone....not just the rich. It will also hurt an already hurting economy.

Common sense....you cannot tax just the rich for all the spending our governemt has done, is doing currently, and wants to do in the future. There aren't enough rich people to fund all of that. He campaigned on people making less than 250K would see no raise in taxes and yet dropped that number to 235K. Yet no one seems to be holding him accountable for that either. It isn't fearmongering to look at all the money that our government has spent during Bush's administration and now Obama's. It isn't fearmongering that our deficit keeps going up and will go higher. That is fact......not fearmongering.

I'm looking for a site where the administrator is neutral and ethical and doesn't threaten people with their ISP numbers.

As far as your posting here, that's your decision. I couldn't care less because I'm only staying on this board long enough to see if anyone else it appalling that an administrator would track ISP numbers of posters for telling the truth about their employer. Then I won't be coming back any more, to any of the boards here.

And thanks for finally being honest and saying it's your preference, instead of the disingenuous I'll leave. Are you happy now? type comments that I doubt anyone believed, anyway.

When are they ever going to start building the new World Trade Center?

Yesterday.

Thirty-nine years after the first concrete was poured into the first trench for the first telephone vault for the first trade center, carpenters built a 168-foot-long wooden trough in a gentle S curve through the south tower footprint at ground zero. From this sinuous sprout, Santiago Calatrava's PATH terminal and transportation hub will emerge.

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src=http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/11/04/nyregion/04rebuild184.1.jpg

Fidel Oliver/Port Authority

Carpenters prepared a wooden trough at the World Trade Center site Thursday.

Don't laugh; it's a milestone day, said Charles A. Gargano, vice chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site and is building the $2.21 billion terminal over the next four years.

Until now, milestones at ground zero have tended to be ceremonial.

There was not a hint of ceremony yesterday. Prince Charles and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, were nowhere to be seen in the 70-foot-deep pit. The Freedom Tower cornerstone of July 4, 2004, sat hidden under a blue plywood box.

But anyone looking out from a PATH train screeching around the corner into the temporary World Trade Center station would have seen a crew from the Beaver Concrete Construction Company of Brooklyn.

They're finally doing something with this big hole, said Anthony Martelli, one of the workers, standing inside the newly completed trough. It's about time.

It was Mr. Martelli's first day back at ground zero since early 2002, after a six-month tour cleaning up debris and pulling out pieces of steel. Yesterday, he was building again - he and Paul Klein and Frank De Guida and Robert Manella and Tonino Sacino.

Starting at 7 a.m., they built a trough 18 inches high and 6 feet 3 inches wide out of thick wood planks. Cagelike frames of steel reinforcing bars, or rebar, will be set into the trough beginning today. Then concrete will be poured over the rebar.

That will form the footing of a seven-foot-high concrete retaining wall. The wall will hold about four feet of fill, on top of which ballast will be laid for a temporary PATH track, No. 6, alongside the future Platform D, the fourth and westernmost platform.

Currently, there are five tracks among three platforms, two of which occupy a corner of the south tower footprint, as they did in the original station. Platform D would take up more space in the south footprint and a tiny bit of the north footprint.

Once Platform D and Track No. 6 are usable, in early 2007, other tracks can be taken out of service temporarily to allow construction of the permanent terminal while commuters are traveling through the tubes to and from New Jersey.

The construction manager is a joint venture of Parsons Brinckerhoff, which counts the first New York City subway line among its earliest achievements, and the URS Corporation. A general contractor is to be chosen in the next few months.

Icanda was the contractor in 1966 when the first concrete was poured, at West and Cortlandt Streets. John M. Kyle, the chief engineer of the Port Authority, threw in a silver dollar, a 100-lire coin from Italy, a 5-franc coin from France and a British penny.

Asked about the absence of fanfare yesterday, Anthony R. Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority, said: I think people have become so jaded by the inordinate amount of ceremonies that have occurred at that site - disproportionate to what's actually happened - that I didn't want to add to that. This is about actually building.

There is a potential snag, however. A lawsuit filed last month by the Coalition of 9/11 Families seeks to halt the project on the ground that it violates a federal law requiring that historic sites not be used for transportation projects unless there are no feasible or prudent alternatives.

Anthony Gardner, one of the plaintiffs, whose brother was killed on 9/11, said the authority had never justified the need for Platform D.

Our focus has always been to ensure the maximum preservation and access to the remains of the footprints for the American people and future visitors to the site, Mr. Gardner said yesterday.

The Port Authority and the Federal Transit Administration have yet to answer the complaint, he said. A spokesman for the authority said it would not discuss pending litigation.

But Steven Plate, deputy director of the priority capital programs department, did talk about the authority's sense of stewardship as he inspected the site, pointing out that the tower footprints had been covered by polyethylene liners and 12 inches of stone fill to protect them during construction. We're very committed, personally and professionally, to preserving the site, he said. Eighty-four of our own perished here.

I don't want to sound melodramatic, but there is no monopoly on caring for the site. This is the Port Authority's home.

The only problem is...they are raising the cigarette tax to $.61 a pack. According to Glenn Beck, we will need 21,000,000 NEW smokers to cover the program. Kinda ironic....use something that is unhealthy to give coverage to keep the kids healthy.

I don't know what they are thinking. I think the government has their heads in the sand. Every time they tie a new program to smokers, more smokers quit. How are they ever going to cover all these children if another couple thousand people quit smoking?

I absolutely think this program will not work like they think and in a couple years, if not next year, they will be raising taxes on everyone because of the shortfall in the planned coverage.

Now it's on to the House-Senate negotioations. I just hope we can stand this as a nation.

The budget funds Volunteer America, and includes a provision to set up a commission to STUDY whether or not "mandatory volunteerism" should be established. My prediction is that it won't happen.

Democrats have apparently reached an agreement to move forward with a House vote on the huge cap-and-trade energy tax known as Waxman-Markey this week.

The monstrous bill has already grown from the 946-page version passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee to an even-heftier 1201-page version released by House Democratic leadership last night.

And they aren't done yet. Negotiations continue between Pelosi and her ally, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (both D-Calif.) on one side and House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) on the other.

The apparent breakthrough, which paves the way for a floor vote on Friday or Saturday, is a big giveaway for rural electric co-ops -- a big Peterson priority. Peterson may also extract other big-ticket concessions before a vote happens on the House floor. And why not? What's a few billion dollars between friends when you have a multi-trillion-dollar energy tax hike to divvy up?

That's what's so outrageous about this whole process. Cap-and-trade imposes massive new hidden energy taxes on American consumers. The taxes are hidden in higher prices for gasoline, electricity, and every product in the economy that's grown, shipped, or manufactured. All the revenue, the last estimate from the Congressional Budget Office has the pot at $846 billion over just the first 8 years, so it will clearly be many trillions over the 38-year duration of the program goes into a big pot that politicians can use to buy off opposition and advance other big-government objectives.

Senator Barbara Boxer, the biggest Senate proponent of cap-and-trade and the one who will dole out the billions of dollars on the Senate side if the bill makes it through the House, candidly explained how this works a couple of weeks ago:

There's so much revenue that comes in from a cap-and-trade system that you can really go to a person in a congressional district and get enough votes there by saying, "What do you need? What do you want? You can really help them."

This disastrous bill, which will send energy prices skyrocketing while having no discernible impact on global average temperature will only get worse as even more special interests are bought off at the expense of taxpayers. It's a scam, an enormous tax-and-spend bill concealed in a cloak of green political correctness. The real purpose of the plan is to dramatically enhance the power of Washington politicians by giving them control over vast swaths of the U.S. economy.

Think of this as the death blow for our already teetering rule of law and free market economy. Just as we've seen politicians make arbitrary decisions in banking and the automobile industry, this new central planning of energy will let them exercise similar control over all aspects of the U.S. economy. This type of control, while perhaps well-intentioned, we saw in the 20th century inevitably fails and often leads to despotism.

The outcome in the House is still in doubt. House Blue Dog chairwoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.) said in an interview with Energy and Environment Daily last week that Blue Dogs will not vote for the bill if it's brought up this week. She said:

"Many will insist that we have a number of days to review the language ourselves, to have back and forth with our constituencies and stakeholder groups, to understand how the system with a significant manager's amendment will work. Yes, absolutely, we need to chew on this awhile."

Obviously, Nancy Pelosi is ignoring the concerns of the Blue Dogs, and of all the Democrats from Middle America whose constituents will be slammed with vastly higher energy prices under the plan. Constituents who don't share the smug self-satisfaction that coastal elites will enjoy, that warm, green feeling that's supposed to make it all worthwhile.

If these so-called moderate Democrats fall in line behind the radical leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman, if they vote for a cap-and-trade tax that President Obama famously said will cause energy prices to necessarily skyrocket, they will expose themselves as radical leftists and out of touch with their districts.

Every American who cares about affordable energy and economic freedom needs to contact his or her member of Congress before this vote and demand a no vote on cap-and-trade. The House switchboard is 202-225-3121 or you can use this form on the AFP web site. If they vote for this, they deserve the full political consequences.

They had the votes before they started. They hoped to use the Rs to help this disaster, who got shut out at the end of this thanks to Pelosi, who has no control over her caucus, anyway. The drivebys won't report this.

Second, many Dems are scared ** about not getting elected again. Other Dems waited until the very end of voting to cast their vote to play the game to win both ways. Mine, for ex., is all for this mess, but has been saying how he'll vote it down. That's b/c he's got a strong opponent and he can't afford something this risky.

Think of it this way. You have surgery to repair your left leg and the doc cuts off your right one instead. So you go back to the same doc who screwed it up to fix it. That's exactly what you have here. You wouldn't do this in your private life, so why would it be okay for those on The Hill to behave in the same way?