You're surprised?

Senator Patrick Leahy, "the main sponsor of the bill" is the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

All but 4 members of that committee are co-sponsors of the bill.

One of those 4 is Al Franken who has close ties to the entertainment industry.

That leaves 3 others who might have voted against it but knew going in that it didn't matter either way so they probably offered to trade their rubber stamp vote for a vote on something they wanted.

This thing should have died in committee. But with the deck stacked like it was I can't say the results surprise me.

I've been keeping an eye on this bill for over a month now. Here is where it currently stands.

The bill has been referred to committee. For those not familiar with the process of a bill entering into law in the US, this is the second step (the first being the introduction of the bill). In this case it is the Senate Judiciary Committee to be precise. At this point, the only Senators who have any say about the bill are the members of the committee.

It is scheduled for consideration by the committee on 11/18/2010.

The committee's job is to discuss the bill, make modifications to it, and decide it it should be put before the entire senate for discussion and a vote.

Ideally, a bill such as this could be killed in committee, that is the committee does not agree to move it on the entire Senate. In this case that is unlikely to happen. All but 4 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee http://judiciary.senate.gov/about/members.cfm are co-sponsors http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804 of this bill. And the chairman of the committee is also the sponsor of the bill.

I grew up in Buffalo. I know first hand that electricity there is anything but cheap. Most of the electricity produced at Niagara Falls goes east to NYC and points in between. This is because those areas will pay a higher premium for that "cheap" electricity. If YAHOO is getting cheap electricity it's because they aren't paying the going market rate for the area.

I agree, the guy in the striped shirt is carrying what looks to be an AK. The guy walking next to him carrying the long object turns at about 3:44 and the end of what he's carrying looks to have the profile of an RPG warhead. Combine this with the two journalists who are carrying unidentified items that could possibly be weapons and you have what appears to be half the group armed. Add into this the fact that insurgents would often use unarmed members of their team in front to screen an ambush (seen in some of the the videos posted by the insurgents) and you now have a reasonable assumption of threat.

As for firing on the van, can you tell the difference from evacuation wounded and sanitizing the are of any evidence of insurgent presence? It's not like they can just go chasing after the van to find out their intentions and risk being led into an ambush.

Go Go Gadget Terrorist Detector!