Debt Ceiling, Shutdown Deal: House Will Move Own Bill - Business ...

AP

House Republican leadership was scrambling Tuesday afternoon to put together a plan that could earn enough conservative support while reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling.

Earlier in the day, House conservatives signaled their disapproval of a possible Senate deal that would reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, providing expected complications just two days ahead of a Thursday deadline to raise the nation's borrowing limit.

Leadership went ahead with plans to move its own bill. It's not clear if Republican leadership has enough votes for its plan.

Meanwhile, Senate negotiations between Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have stalled while McConnell waits to see if the House can pass its bill. 

The details of the House plan have changed significantly since the morning. Originally, the plan was to fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. According to National Review's Robert Costa, the bill would now only fund the government through Dec. 15.

It also originally included three Affordable Care Act-related provisions — a two-year delay of the tax on medical devices, an income-verification process for people applying for subsidies, and a version of the "Vitter amendment" that would bar just lawmakers (not congressional and White House staff) from receiving subsidies for federal health insurance under Obamacare. 

One of those — the medical-device tax — has been stripped from the bill. Another — the Vitter amendment — has been altered back to its original version, which bars staffers from receiving subsidies.

House Speaker John Boehner said at a press conference Tuesday morning that "there have been no decisions about what exactly we will do."

"We are talking with our members on both sides of the aisle to try to find a way to move forward today," Boehner said. Later, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters in a press conference that Boehner doesn't have the votes for the plan.

The White House blasted the reported original plan in a statement late Tuesday morning, saying it was a "ransom" designed to "appease a small group of Tea Party Republicans who forced the government shutdown in the first place."

"The president has said repeatedly that members of Congress don't get to demand ransom for fulfilling their basic responsibilities to pass a budget and pay the nation's bills," White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage said in the statement. 

On the Senate floor Thursday morning, Majority Leader Harry Reid said that the new House proposal "blindsided" him and others in the Senate negotiations.

"I'm very disappointed with John Boehner, who would once again try to preserve his role at the expense of this country," Reid said.

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel responded to Reid's comments minutes later, saying that he is "so blinded by partisanship that he is willing to risk default on our debt to protect a 'pacemaker tax.'"

President Obama is meeting with House Democratic leaders on Tuesday afternoon, the White House said.

Before they walked into the 9 a.m. House Republican conference meeting Tuesday morning, House conservatives complained to Costa. One Tea Party congressman called the Senate plan a "mushy piece of s—." Another said that if House Speaker John Boehner backs the deal, "he's in trouble."

"That seems to be an oxymoron. 'Senate,' then 'plan,'" said Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

The opposition to the Senate plan is not really a surprise. House Republicans en masse won't be thrilled that the only thing they're "getting" out of this is an income-verification measure for people obtaining subsidies through the Affordable Care Act. It's not a policy victory with which they can go home to their constituents after a more than two-week shutdown. 

According to Roll Call, about 15-20 House conservatives met in secret with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) Monday night at the Capitol Hill watering hole Tortilla Coast, where they plotted how to respond to the Senate deal. Given the reactions from House conservatives Tuesday, it's likely that they discussed how to hold firm on their opposition to any deal that does not fundamentally alter Obamacare.

And it appears that House leadership is not yet ready to give in to the Senate plan. 

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/debt-ceiling-shutdown-deal-house-boehner-2013-10
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How To Build Trust From Mistrust

House Speaker John Boehner listens as President Obama delivers a statement on Syria during a meeting with members of Congress at the White House on Sept. 3.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

House Speaker John Boehner listens as President Obama delivers a statement on Syria during a meeting with members of Congress at the White House on Sept. 3.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Looking beyond the shutdown and debt ceiling stalemates, CNN's John King said on TV Monday night that distrust among all parties in Washington is "deep and multilayered."

He said, "Imagine this confrontation as a dinner party: The president doesn't trust the speaker. The president doesn't have a relationship with the Senate Republican leader. The senate majority leader, a Democrat, doesn't want the Democratic vice president involved. The Tea Party members don't trust their own speaker and are suspicious of their own leadership. Nobody here trusts each other. Nobody wants to get along."

Not sure about the dinner party metaphor, but King may be right about the overarching — and undermining — lack of trust in Washington these days. Regardless of the outcome of this standoff, how will the warring factions ever make peace? And then, how will they ever trust one another again?

How do you build trust from mistrust?

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Practice, says Jeff Silverman, an instructor at Trapeze School New York. Practice and repetition.

"Over time, practice and repetition build predictability," Silverman says. "The catcher knows, to a high degree of certainty, the exact movements of the flyer. The flyer knows, to a high degree of certainty, the movements of the catcher."

So it might help if the president and the speaker spend some time together, practicing getting along.

'Verify And Verify'

The notion of trust that we carry with us through life, according to the late psychologist Erik Erikson, is developed at a tender age.

"The ratio and relation of basic trust to basic mistrust established during early infancy determines much of the individual's capacity for simple faith," Erikson wrote in Young Luther.

Much, but maybe not all. Politics apparently can challenge that notion of trust. Political pundits through the ages have pondered the powers — and pitfalls — of trust:

"Those who do not trust sufficiently, others have no trust in them," warned the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.

"The only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust," noted Henry L. Stimson, a Republican statesman of the 20th century.

"You can't trust anybody with power," observed then-Speaker of the House and now-TV commentator Newt Gingrich in 1995.

Gingrich may be onto something. Arguably, the acidic politics of today is eroding — if not erasing — trust among people.

"Trust, but verify," President Ronald Reagan famously said in the 1980s about America's attitude toward the Soviet Union, especially when it came to nuclear arms information. Just recently, Secretary of State John Kerry updated the adage to "verify and verify" regarding the U.S. attitude toward the conflict in Syria.

Gone is the idea of trust.

Rebuilding Trust

So how can political leaders regain that sense of trust, that childhood ideal of faith and confidence?

Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, says, "The best way to build trust is for leaders to make clear public commitments to deals that will be hard, if not impossible, to retract."

In other words, Zelizer suggests that the decision-makers "lock themselves into terms, as best as possible, that would create the path toward a deal in such a way that their opponent knows it is impossible to renege."

To boot, he says, "each leader has to show the other, in a genuine way, that they have reached a point that they are thinking more about the civic goals than the partisan goals. This is obviously elusive and difficult to do, but it is the turn in thinking that happens at great moments of political breakthroughs when leaders reach mutual agreement to move forward on the great issues of the day and to break through political gridlock."

But how to begin? How do you meld the thinking with the doing? How do you encourage politicians to share their ideas and practice trust and polity at the same time? How do you get political leaders to trust each other like trapeze artists?

Gifford Pinchot — the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, two-term governor of Pennsylvania and trusted adviser to Theodore Roosevelt — had an idea of how to get folks to trust each other. When he invited people to his summer home, Grey Towers — now a national historic landmark — on the Delaware River, he served them meals at a very strange and marvelous dining table called the Finger Bowl. The table is actually a circular, stone-enclosed pool of water, with an encompassing ledge wide enough for plates and glasses and room to accommodate up to 18 people.

Dinner guests — often politicians of differing stripes — passed large wooden bowls of meats and vegetables and desserts to and fro by floating them, trapeze-style, across the water. Over the course of a long, conversation-laced meal, the practice and repetition of launching bowls and receiving them built predictability, a Grey Towers tour guide once told us.

To keep the serving dishes from capsizing, everyone was forced to cooperate. And to practice the art of caution. And compromise.

And, perhaps against countervailing forces, even to trust.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/theprotojournalist/2013/10/15/234677031/how-to-build-trust-from-mistrust?ft=1&f=1014
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Researchers achieve 100 Gbps over sub-terahertz wireless, set world record

100 Gbps over fiber is old news, but those same speeds achieved wirelessly? That's a first. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology have managed to use sub-terahertz waves (237.5 GHz, in this case) to transmit data over 20 meters at 100 gigabits per second. Since the experiment used only a single-input and single-output setup, TG Daily notes multiple data streams could boost the bandwidth. This isn't the first time the group's dabbled in incredibly-fast wireless either, it recently managed to hit 40 Gbps over a distance of one kilometer. The tech is expected to get high-speed Internet to rural areas without having to install pricey fiber. There's no word on when this might find its way outside the lab, but the scientists note that it was predicted these speeds would be hit by 2015. Hey, at least we're early.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/15/100gbps-wireless-world-record/?ncid=rss_truncated
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Bomb found in Lebanon's Hezbollah stronghold on eve of Muslim holiday

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanese security forces defused a car bomb on Monday in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a stronghold of the Shi'ite Muslim militia group Hezbollah.

The discovery of a bomb happened on the first night of the Islamic holiday of Eid al-Adha and two months after a car bomb killed 20 people in the area, and looked like the latest sign of growing sectarian tensions in Lebanon exacerbated by the war in neighboring Syria.

The bomb was found in a Jeep Cherokee parked in the Mamora area, a Lebanese army statement said. Specialists were brought in to defuse the bomb and take the car away.

Car bombs are becoming increasingly common in Lebanon. In September, twin bombs killed 42 people at Sunni mosques in Tripoli, in the deadliest attack in the coastal city since the end of Lebanon's civil war.

Fighters from Hezbollah have joined Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces in their battle to crush a majority Sunni armed uprising, causing resentment among Lebanese Sunnis.

(Reporting by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bomb-found-lebanons-hezbollah-stronghold-eve-muslim-holiday-201302105.html
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Florida to execute man using untried drug for lethal injection

By Bill Cotterell

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - An execution scheduled in Florida on Tuesday will be the first using the drug midazolam hydrochloride despite concerns it might not work as promised and could inflict cruel and unusual punishment on a death row inmate.

Midazolam, typically used by doctors for sedation, will be the first of three drugs pumped into William Happ as part of a lethal injection cocktail designed to induce unconsciousness, paralysis and death by cardiac arrest.

The first of the drugs administered as part of the lethal injection "protocol" in Florida has long been the barbiturate pentobarbital. But Florida, and other death penalty states that use a trio of drugs as part of their injection procedures, have been running out of pentobarbital since its manufacturer clamped a ban on its use in future executions.

The 51-year-old Happ, who has abandoned his appeals and said he is ready to die, was condemned for the 1986 abduction, rape and murder of Angie Crowley, whose body was found on a canal bank near Crystal River in central Florida.

"This is somewhat of an experiment on a living human being," Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said Monday.

"The three-drug process depends on the first drug rendering the inmate unconscious and, if he is only partially unconscious, the inmate could be experiencing extreme pain," he added. "Because the second drug paralyzes him, he would be unable to cry out or show that he's in pain."

Just last week, Missouri postponed an execution set for October 23 due to uncertainty about using a different drug, propofol, as a substitute for pentobarbital.

Misty Cash, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, declined to comment on how the state could rest assured that midazolam would avoid inflicting pain and suffering on Happ.

But she said the prison system "did research and determined that this is the most humane and dignified way to do the procedure."

She refused to identify a research laboratory or other source of the department's scientific data, citing an exemption in state public record laws that also meant that the supplier of midazolam hydrochloride for executions could remain anonymous.

"We're not talking about details," she said. "That could impact the safety and security of the process."

Happ's lawyer, Eric Pinkard of St. Petersburg, said there are no late motions to stay the execution. Happ told a circuit judge in Inverness, Florida last month that he did not want to continue the court appeals that have kept him on Florida's Death Row for nearly a quarter-century.

Happ's execution is scheduled for 6 p.m. EDT on Tuesday at the Florida State Prison in Starke.

Another condemned Florida prisoner, Etheria Jackson, has a hearing set for a November 6 in Jacksonville's federal court, challenging the use of midazolam.

Jackson's appeal contends that there is "substantial risk" of midazolam not working completely, violating the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" by subjecting the condemned to a painful paralysis and fatal heart seizure over several minutes.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Leslie Gevirtz)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/florida-execute-man-using-untried-drug-lethal-injection-222437590.html
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'Walking Dead' Season Four Primer: Relive The Dead

Before AMC's zombie apocalypse returns on Sunday, here's your refresher on all the good and bad times of the past three seasons.


By Josh Wigler

Source:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1715509/walking-dead-season-four-preview.jhtml

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Gay marriage: In states, a hodgepodge lies ahead

Across the country, this week's landmark Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage have energized activists and politicians on both sides of the debate.

Efforts to impose bans ? and to repeal them ? have taken on new intensity. Likewise a spate of lawsuits by gays demanding the right to marry.

The high court, in two 5-4 decisions Wednesday, opened the way for California to become the 13th state to legalize gay marriage. It directed the federal government to recognize legally married same-sex couples.

But the rulings did not impose a nationwide right for gays to marry. They set the stage for state-by-state battles over one of America's most contentious social issues. Already, some of those battles are heating up.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gay-marriage-states-hodgepodge-lies-ahead-201327666.html

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