Maine: American

AUGUSTA, Maine — A bill opening the door to immigrants and other noncitizens to vote in municipal elections is getting a frosty reception in some quarters.

Blasting the proposal, Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster didn’t mince words in calling on Mainers to urge their lawmakers to toss the bill and move forward with more pressing needs: solving the state’s budget and health care problems.

“This lamebrained proposal is an affront not only to any person who has gone through the process of attaining American citizenship so that they could have the right to vote, but to anyone who voted for legislators that pledged to act with their constituents’ best interests at heart,” he declared after a newspaper reported on the bill.

I had not heard of Van Jones until I read this piece on him in the 12 January issue of the New Yorker:
The modern environmental movement is sometimes said to have begun in the eighteen-nineties, when John Muir founded the Sierra Club, and sometimes in the nineteen-sixties, when Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring." Muir and Carson saw themselves fighting narrow, private interests on behalf of the public in the broadest possible sense-all people, including those who had not been born. But stop by a meeting of any of the major environmental groups, and you will see that the broad American public has yet to join up.

Good morning. I'm on the road much of the day.

The bank bailout continues apace in the UK too, but with a difference; from the Guardian:

The government today confirmed it will take majority control of Lloyds Banking Group, with the taxpayer owning 65% of the voting shares in return for insuring ?260bn of the group's toxic assets.

After days of detailed negotiations the terms of the takeover were announced by the Treasury, with Lloyds making a commitment to lend at least ?28bn over the next few years.

The government is to insure the bank's riskiest loans and in return the taxpayer will up its ownership of the bank from 43% to 65% - rising to 77% when non-voting shares are included.

Sorry, but after a little more than two years of this shit, I'm just growing tired of it. I didn't work my ass off helping to elect a Democratic majority in Congress so that I could read this kind of crap every day:
Democrats may be running the House, but the National Rifle Association (NRA) can still stop a bill in its tracks.

House Democratic leaders on Tuesday pulled legislation from the floor that seemingly had nothing to do with guns because the NRA disliked it.

The bill in question would give the District of Columbia a voting member of Congress. The gun-rights lobby prefers a Senate version, which includes language amending the District's gun policies, and some suggest the NRA could make life difficult for conservative Democrats if that language is not included in the House version.