No Funding for Green Jobs; Clean Energy Works coalition; Financial Transaction Tax; Build Mosque at Ground Zero or Else; Offshore Drilling; and Bush Era Tax Cuts

The Washington Times reports on a little-noticed aspect of the administration’s latest — and likely fruitless — effort at stimulus: It doesn’t include funding for green jobs. The long delays typical with environmentally friendly projects — combined with reports of green stimulus funds being used to create jobs in China and other countries, rather than in the U.S. — appear to have killed the administration’s appetite for pushing green projects http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/2043-even-obama-no-longer-pushing-green-jobs
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The UK Guardian reveals: America's environmental groups have given up on getting climate change legislation through Congress at a time of Republican ascendancy, and have downsized to a series of more modest goals like fuel economy. In a sign of that strategy reshift, 20 environmental groups launched a new campaign yesterday to press Barack Obama to propose far more ambitious fuel efficiency and pollution standards for cars of 60mpg by 2025. Meanwhile, Clean Energy Works, a coalition of 80 grassroots groups that had 45 paid staff in Washington to lobby to get a climate change law through Congress, is shutting up shop. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/sep/10/barack-obama-us-cars-fuel-efficiency
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Newsmax: A proposed tax on financial transactions "has a great deal of merit" and would help Congress raise needed revenue, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

"I believe that the transaction tax still has a great deal of merit," Pelosi said at a news conference.

The tax would have a "really minimal impact on the transaction, but a tremendous impact on helping us meet our needs," Pelosi said. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/12/03/pelosi_transaction_tax_has_great_deal_of_merit.html 
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[I am sure we are not supposed to consider this a threat, of course, but] CNN reports:  -- The religious leader behind plans to build an Islamic center and mosque a few blocks from New York's ground zero said Wednesday night that America's national security depends on how it handles the controversy.
"If we move from that location, the story will be the radicals have taken over the discourse," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told CNN's Soledad O'Brien on "Larry King Live."
"The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack."
But some critics decried his assessment.
"The whole national security thing: that's a veiled threat," Andy Sullivan, a union construction worker who wants all New York construction workers to boycott the proposed Islamic center, said on CNN's "AC 360" Wednesday night. "He's saying 'you make me move' and, guess what, the whole radical Muslim world is coming after us.  The imam, who repeatedly said his mission was to promote peace and build a bridge among faiths  [It seems to me that it is in the hands of this "peaceful" Imam to prove that he was trying to, as he said, "establish a space that embodies the fundamental beliefs that we have as Jews, Christians and Muslims, which is to love our God and to love our neighbor -- to build a space where we have a culture of worship." He can do this by moving the site while making Islam see that it is the right thing to do.  It's time for some "love" from the Islamics, isn't it?] shttp://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/09/new.york.islamic.center.imam/index.html?hpt=Sbin
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Despite President Obama's moratorium on U.S. deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Export-Import Bank intends to guarantee $1 billion in loans to PEMEX, the Mexican state oil company, to bolster the company's oil drilling in the region. The bank, which is the official American export credit agency, loaned more than $1 billion to PEMEX in 2009 -- when the company was the bank's largest borrower -- in support of its drilling activities. That year, the bank also guaranteed two loans totaling $300 million made by a commercial lender. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/11/backs-b-loan-mexico-oil-drilling-despite-obama-moratorium/
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Red-district Democrats are pressuring Speaker Nancy Pelosi to extend Bush-era income tax rates for all brackets, revealing a high-stakes rift between the party's vulnerable moderates and its safe liberals as the issue increasingly dominates the national debate. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0910/42042.html
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